The Megyn Kelly Show - Luigi Mangione, NXIVM Cult, and Megyn's Own Family Fraud Story - Megyn's "True Crime" Mega-Episode

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

Megyn goes into the archives for her next true crime mega episode, looking at the Luigi Mangione healthcare CEO murder, a deep dive into the NXIVM cult, and Megyn shares her own family's fraud story.     Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShow Facebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow  Find out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and today's true crime mega episode. Today we have our psychological deep dive from various perspectives after the shocking Luigi Mangione murder of the healthcare CEO. And then two episodes from our fraud week with a focus on the nexium cult from my hometown up in Albany, New York, and my family's own fraud experience, including the undercover tape I got between me and my fraudster. Unbelievable stuff. Enjoy, and we'll see you Monday. We are learning new and disturbing details about the accused healthcare CEO killer,

as his manifesto and other chilling writings become public. This comes amid more bizarre displays of praise for this guy, Luigi Mangione, from those who are positioning him as some kind of Robin Hood figure. I'm over it. I'm really over that psychosis by some faction of the American populace. Just, you know what? Like, Dr. Leonard Sachs is here in just a few minutes. I mean, this is the parenting expert. He's an MD. He's a PhD. He has spent his life studying longitudinal, long-term studies of children and actually practicing with children. And he actually knows a thing or two about psychology. And one of his main takeaways is have dinner with your children.

Have family dinners. In a perfect world, seven nights a week. But as many nights as you can, even if it's short of seven. Someone needed to do that in the families of the people who are now praising this guy as a Robinhead figure. You're an idiot. By the way, heard this from our pals over on the editors. The guy, the Brian Thompson, who was murdered, the CEO who was murdered, comes from no privilege. His dad was totally self-made.

I think he was a farmer. And this guy, Brian Thompson, was totally self-made, pulled himself up, got himself to the top of the insurance world. The killer, accused, is from enormous privilege. Tons of dough. The family owned country clubs, radio stations, health facilities, went to some Tony Boyd, school for 40 grand a year, valedictorian, UPenn, Ivy League, all the advantages, all the breaks. And yet he's supposed to be the Robin Hood? He's the one we're supposed to be rooting for? Screw you. Don't have the time. My mom always used to say, I cannot respond to irrational behavior

rationally. And that is how I feel when I look at these morons trying to talk about this guy like he's some sort of our hero, this Luigi dude. All right. So Dr. Leonard Sachs, is going to be on in one second. But first, we want to get into some of the psychology of this guy and how on earth this could possibly happen. Like, how could this have gone down by a guy with that kind of pedigree who turns into a killer, if what the police say is correct? And for that, we bring on Candace DeLong. She's a former FBI criminal profiler. She worked on cases like the Unabomber, the Tylenol murders. We spoke to her on Episdalenol. We spoke to her on episode 466 about the Idaho murders. So you may be familiar with Candace's work. When she,

they first recruited her over at the FBI. She was a head nurse over at Northwestern University. And then she went on to work, as I said, on some of the most prominent cases in America. She's hosted the award-winning podcast, Killer Psychie with Candace DeLong. How does a guy with that kind of a background with all the advantages who was a valedictorian of his high school class just 10 years ago, in 16, not even 10 years ago in 16, who goes on to complete a bachelor's and a master's at the University of Pennsylvania, not exactly an easy school, wind up becoming this much of what looks like a psycho killer in just a few years. Mental disorders, mental illnesses emerge in the late teens, early to mid-20s. Now, I'm not diagnosing him. I'm simply saying that is a fact about mental illnesses.

And it's certainly a good question. Looking at this young man's meteoric rise to success athletically, culturally, socially, academically, and then to throw it all away and a pure behavior that is a head scratcher became a murderer. I think we probably will find something. What does it look like to you? Like schizophrenia? Because you tell me, if you're having a psychotic break, and I know, I mean, we've seen this with young men in particular

who are guilty of mass shootings, seems to happen between 19 years old and the mid-20s. But like, are those people generally like this guy, Luigi, where you're fine for all the years prior to that? You know, there's no hint that this is, going to happen to you? Yes, that can happen. Now, I'm not saying this guy is psychotic. Clinical term means out of touch with reality, doesn't perceive things as they are possibly hearing voices. We don't know that about him, but the answer to your question is, yes, I'm aware of a number of

cases, both in my life growing up and then as a psychiatric nurse, caring for people, young people who went away to college and the expression is came home in a basket. And what happened was mental illness, serious, usually schizophrenia or sometimes bipolar disorder, emerged where there's that bridge from puberty to adulthood. That's dark. I mean, could that happen to anybody? Because what I'm looking at with this guy is, well, we don't know much about his family. But there's a lot of references to like mushrooms or drugs on his social media. And we did have on Dr. Roland Griffith, who was the guy who really founded, who not really,

who did find, found the clinic for psilocybin and for, you know, these sort of MDNA treatments for people who are depressed at Johns Hopkins. But one of the main things he said, Candace, was, you don't do. those drugs recreationally or outside of a setting in which a prior family history of psychosis or schizophrenia can be detected. He said because if we see anything like that

in the questionnaire we give our potential participants, they're bounced because it can trigger a psychotic break from which you may not return. I have seen that. As a psychiatric nurse, I saw it. And when my son was in high school, Decades ago, a friend of his did some kind of designer drug, psychedelic drug, became a schizophrenic thought disorder, and it did not have a happy end.

These are very serious drugs. And if somebody has a history, they may not even know they have history of mental illness of some kind, it can open the floodgates. Are you surprised to hear all these friends coming out? and saying, totally nice guy. Absolutely didn't see any. Recently, the college friends saying, absolutely no hint of this. And the most they seem to be able to come up with is,

well, he had this terrible back injury. Though so far no one is claiming he was denied insurance or anything like that, but like he had some terrible back injury. Right, exactly. I'm not surprised that his friends from college, which was a while ago, or saying, gee, we didn't see this coming. I mean, he's totally normal because when these, when many of these mental illnesses were talking about emerge, it happens in a matter of weeks. And I haven't seen anyone being interviewed that said they had interacted with him in the last six months.

Nope, nope. And would it be typical, do you think? Are you surprised to learn he went kind of underground or went radio silent with respect to family and friends over these past? months to the point where his mother filed a missing person's report for him in San Francisco in November, believing that that's where he was, though we don't know where he was at the time. The most recent report was he was in Hawaii for a period. Well, no, I'm not surprised. A couple of things came to my mind about that radio silence with family and friends.

One is that, yes, possibly a mental illness was emerging. but moreover now that we know what he did last week he had decided to do it to kill someone to kill this person and he did not want to interact with anyone for like who could be right of it yeah what do you make of i mean you're as about as expert as they come in the Unabomber. He seemed to admire him quite a bit. And they had some group, like a book club that they were forming. And it was this guy and two others. And this is the first book he wanted them to read. And apparently they all found it so disturbing, like his manifesto, that the book club disjoined. It fell apart before they made it through the end of Ted Kaczynski's writings. But this Luigi fellow really found him

inspiring. I almost lost my mind reading Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. It's rambling. It is at times almost incoherent. So that doesn't surprise me that his colleagues who probably were of sound line with what the heck is this? But it also doesn't surprise me that this young man that we are talking about became an admirer of Kaczynski. What did Kaczynski do? He killed people that he thought were harming society, or at least he attempted to. The truth is, when Kaczynski put a bomb down and locked away or mailed a bomb, he had no idea who was going to be hurt or killed by it. And he didn't really care. That is different than what we are sitting here with Mangione. He was being led into the courthouse yesterday to be charged in connection with this alleged crime and seemed to be trying to wriggle out of the physical control of the police officers to be heard.

It's kind of difficult to understand what he's saying, but my read of it is and we'll play it. I'll just give it to you in advance. It's completely, we don't know what, it's completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence. of the American people, its lived experience. Listen here. And it's totally out of touch and insults the intelligence of the American people. Okay, so that was for his extradition hearing. They're trying to bring him back to New York or his lawyer is fighting it to keep him in Pennsylvania for a few more weeks.

I mean, I think the game is delayed, delay, delay when you have a criminal defendant with this much evidence against him. What do you make of that? When I saw that, of course, I watched it. very carefully. And one of the things that I noticed was when he was in the police vehicle, there is no indication. I couldn't see that he was causing a stir, that he was combative, yelling, screaming, kicking, anything like that in the vehicle. He gets out, he looks around, he spots the camera, and then he goes on his rant. Now, there was a time I worked, at a county emergency psychiatric facility.

And most patients that were brought in were in the back of a police car, and they were screaming and yelling. There's actually a cage wall to protect, it looks like a cage, to protect the police officers in front. He wasn't doing that. He was cool, calm, and collected until he knew the cameras were rolling. Okay, so it's performative to some extent. I think we've got, I mean, his lawyer says I've seen no evidence that he's the killer.

Okay, we've all seen overwhelming evidence if one-tenth of what the news is reporting that it was all over this guy. He, other than, I mean, he basically had a T-shirt that read, I'm the killer of CEO Brian Thompson. He had his manifesto on him. He had the gun on him. He had the bullets on him. He now the latest reporting is that his fingerprints, they do match. Fingervprints found at the scene of the murder. And in the notebook that's on him, this is how one of the ways in which we know, other than his book club, that he had a fondness for the Unabomber because they are reporting at CNN, that his notebook included a list of to-does and tasks that he needed to complete to facilitate a killing, as well as notes justifying those plans. And in one passage in the notebook, he concludes that using a bomb against his intended victim,

could kill innocence, but that shooting would be much more targeted, musing what could be better than, quote, to kill the CEO at his own bean counting conference, which indeed is what happened. Try to help us understand here, Candace, because if you read his alleged manifesto, and the police haven't yet released it, but there is a report online, CBS claims that they've seen it, Ken Klippenstein claiming he's seen it and has posted it. It goes on to say some of what we already read to our audience yesterday. To the feds, I'll keep it short because I respect what you do for the country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly I wasn't working with anyone.

This is fairly trivial, some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, I don't know what that means, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook if present has some straggling notes and to-do lists that allure illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering, so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife or traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. He rips on the health care system and how large United was and how life expectancy in America is not what he hoped it would be. And then he goes on to say something interesting. Obviously, the problem's more complex, but I don't have the space. And frankly, I don't pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.

He says, many people have illuminated the corruption, the greed. And then he writes, evidently, I am the first to face this with such brutal honesty. So as somebody who does this kind of profiling, Candace, what he's saying, I don't really understand it that well. There are a lot of people who get it better than I do. but I understand I'm the one, the first one to sort of be brave enough, he's saying, to do what needs to be done here, to face it with brutal honesty. And he's confessing to the feds. Let me save you the time, I did it and I did it alone.

What is all of that if it proves to be real, and so far it looks like it may be, tell you? He wants attention for what he did. He's certainly getting it. This is the biggest story I've seen in a long time. this way eclipses the Idaho murders. He, to me, what you just read seems a bit disjointed, but what he's saying is parasites, it needed to be done, sorry if anyone was hurt, and he takes it upon himself.

He is the avenging angel as he sees it. yet in his notes i see fragment fragmentation wondering thoughts uh which all would support that he is this whole thing has to do with the mental decompensation i mean going on and last question quickly does that mean insane as a legal matter? Well, as insane, of course, legally means the individual did not understand, did not know at the time they committed an act that it was wrong. And that's hard for people to understand. But if an individual has voices in their head telling them to kill someone in order to save

the rest of America, that is a very serious mental. They really thought what they were doing was right. And they belong in a mental facility, not a prison. So. Like John Hinkley. Exactly. Exactly. Well, we may say that defense offered, depending on where the facts go.

Candace Dallan, always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Megan. Happy. So interesting, right? It's so interesting. I mean, this guy was methodical.

He used a lot of planning. you know, the escape plan and so on. It was far from perfect. So all of that will be used by the prosecution to say he knew exactly what he was doing. But legally insane is a different standard. And, you know, John Hinkley went to a mental facility instead of a jail because he did it for Jody Foster. He didn't realize what he was doing was wrong. I mean, this can work, depending on what the facts are. And we'll see. So far, his lawyer isn't saying. we're going to cop to an insanity plea or anything like that. He's suggesting we have the wrong guy, which is laughable. Okay, now we're joined by Dr. Leonard Sachs. Dr. Sachs is a psychologist. He's a

family physician, an MD, and a New York Times best-selling author. He, by the way, is one of the few people in the world, I think, to have completed his education at MIT at age 19. That's the level of brilliance we're talking about here. We had Dr. Sachs on in January of last year for a wide-ranging discussion on parenting, the transcontagion, and more. It's a must listen. It was episode 474. He recently revised and updated his incredible bestselling book, The Collapse of Parenting, how we hurt our kids when we treat them like grownups. And it is even more necessary today. Dr. Sachs, welcome back to the show. I want to get into all things about the update. But can I get your thoughts to kick it off on this accused killer in connection with the murder of Brian

Thompson and what you glean from the facts that we just outlaid with Candace. Yes, absolutely. I think it's such an illuminating, illuminating story. And I've seen this so much in my own practice as a family doctor now for more than 30 years. So many boys want to be heroes. They want to be seen as heroes. They want to see themselves as heroes in their own eyes. You know, I spoke some years ago at a conference on juvenile justice, statewide conference in New Mexico. And the topic was Boys Adrift, the title of one of my books. And after my presentation, they had a panel of four experts from across the state. And what was Judge John Romero, who's the chief of the juvenile judges in Albuquerque.

And he said when he first began doing this work as a juvenile judge in Albuquerque, He was puzzled because all these teenage boys, you know, good men with great potential being accused of these horrible violent crimes. And he would take them into his chambers and say, why are you doing this? Don't you understand? You're going to go to jail for decades. Why are you throwing your life away? And he told us it took him a long time to understand these boys want to be heroes. and the school doesn't understand that.

But the gang understands it. The gang says, here's a gun. Go and shoot the rival gang leader. And if you succeed, you're a hero. If you get killed, trying, you're a hero. If you get thrown in jail, you're a hero. If you chicken out, you're a wuss. And then he looked right at us.

And he said, most of you, you're not from the barrio. And you're thinking, oh, I'm doing great. My son's not going to be in the juvenile justice system. He said, but your son is no different. The difference between your son and the boys I see, your son is staying at home in his bedroom playing his video games. The difference between your son and the boys in my chambers is your son is playing with pretend guns in his video game,

but it's the same dynamic playing with pretend guns being a pretend hero in his call of duty and his grand theft auto. In both cases, though, your son, has left the real world in his fantasy world, wanting to be a hero in his own mind. And that's the same thing that's going on here. We have failed as a society to capture these boys to give them better models, better ways to become a hero, to be a hero in the right way. And again, that's going back to my book, Boys Adrift,

where I talk about good romance, men like Dietrich Bonhofer, who gave his life for the right cause. Dietrich vonhofer was a pastor, had a comfortable job preaching in New Jersey in 1938 and left that job and went back to Nazi Germany, put his life in jeopardy and joined the conspiracy to take the life of Adolf Hitler and was caught and was executed in concentration camp.

That's a good man. That's a role model. We're failing at the job. of inspiring boys to be the right kind of hero. So how do you figure out whether it's that kind of a problem where he is sane and has not suffered a psychotic break, but just is under this delusion that he needs to be a hero somehow and he's got to do it. He's the only one brave enough to do it versus, oh, no, it's basically a school shooter

with a different purpose. He's had a break. it happens often around this age. And, you know, he's lost it. He's no longer of sane mind. Okay. I've written about school shooters, and that's a different process in place. There's always been a small minority of boys who take pleasure in killing, take pleasure

in inflicting pain. And I wrote an article about this for magazine called First Things. I called it the unspeakable pleasure. And that's a minority of boys. That's rare, but it has. happens. And again, that's not insanity. That's a variation on human nature. It's always been with us. But again, we need to know how to capture these boys. We have the game of football. Hey, there's always been boys who enjoy inflicting playing in pain, have them play the line. And I was doing this talk at

University of Wisconsin-Madison. And it happened that my host used to play the line for University Wisconsin-Madison and I called out to him and I said do you have any comments about that and he said a good hit is better than sex. Healthy cultures know how to capture boys and channel those instincts into healthy channels. It's not insanity. The insanity plea in that case is a cop-out. Okay, there are people who truly have psychotic disorders and they hear voices telling them that this person is a lion who's going to eat them and they have to shoot them. That's not what's going on here. That's not what's going on with Luigi Mangione. And that's not what's going on with school shooters. Some invented lawyers try to make that case. It's unpersuasive. We're not talking here about

psychotic disorders and schizophrenics. We're talking about here about boys who have evil impulses. There's nothing new about this. This is as old as Genesis chapter 4. Sin is crouching at the door. its desire is for you, but you must master at Genesis chapter four. What would you guess, and this is a total guess because we don't know much about his family, but you are a parent expert and an actual MD, and you've been doing this kind of work for decades now. I'm just going to guess, Dr. Sacks, the Mangioni family probably didn't have the dinners around the table together seven nights a week. That's just a stab in the dark. You know, I have learned the hard way. It's very hard.

to speculate about what went on under the roof at home. We do know, we all know, that he graduated from a secular high school, a school with no religious affiliation. And the culture has changed. You know, 30 years ago, American popular culture taught right and wrong. We know this. This is not a guess. We have scholars who have looked at American popular culture.

The most popular TV shows, 1967, 1967, 87, 87 were shows like the Andy Griffith show. Family ties, happy days, Buffy the Vampires Thayer, researchers have looked at these shows, and they found that they consistently taught that the most important thing is to do the right thing to tell the truth, right through 1997. But by 2007, they found American culture had flipped upside down. And the most important thing in the shows that teenagers were watching in 2007 was not to do the right thing. It was to win in shows like American Idol. survivor.

I was just going to say survivor. It is to win. Doing the right thing, that's going to get you voted off the island. So American popular culture, beginning in the early 2000s, was no longer about doing the right thing. It's about winning and becoming famous. So American culture is now a post-Christian culture. It's no longer a culture in which doing the right thing is taught.

And so, you know, 30 years ago, it wasn't so important to go to a school that taught. Judaism or Christianity. Now it is. I attended public schools in Ohio K through 12. But today, I think it's more important that you enroll your kid in a school that has a firm moral foundation. And I can tell you many horror stories about public schools that don't and independent schools that don't. And what we do know about Luigi Mangione is that he went to a secular independent school, the Gilman School, which has no religious affiliation. And now I am speculating, but you go to a secular independent school. They're not teaching the Ten Commandments. They're not teaching do unto others as you have them do unto you. And boys are

adrift. If you don't have that firm foundation, where do you find? You will write and right and wrong. which is so adrift that its president was forced out last year for not being able to say that it's wrong to chant things like, well, basically, death to Israel, death to the Jews. She's going to have to really think it over to figure out whether that's allowed on campus. Boys are adrift and they're looking for what does it mean to be a man? And you go online and what do you find? You find Andrew Tate and that's really scary. Yes, very scary.

So this, okay, there's so much to go over. But I asked my followers on X today, knowing that you were going to come on, whether they had anything they wanted me to ask you. And I'll get to some of those questions throughout the course of the two hours. But one of the questions was, and it came up over and over, and I thought this is actually a really good one. Let me see if I can find the way they put it. But how do we help our children in today's day and age with AI, with tech everywhere, with video games, iPhones, how to find purpose, how to find their purpose. I was like, oh my gosh, that's a big one. It's sorry to dump that big one on you so soon in our interview, but, you know, to your point,

how do you? So you have to prioritize the family. And you cannot find your child's meaning of life, but you can prioritize that connection. And one of the challenge is. One of the challenge is, for kids is that they are looking for life meaning in all the wrong places. They're looking at Instagram and TikTok and Charlie DiMilio, who is this hugely popular person on TikTok. And, you know, one in three 12-year-olds now says that their goal in life is to be the next Charlie, to be TikTok influencer. And that's not a good goal.

It's not a good goal because it's not going to happen. And I have met with so many girls who are frustrated because they put all this effort into a TikTok video and it fizzles. They don't understand the numbers. They don't understand that there's 10 million other girls out there who are posting videos. And it's not going to happen. And if your meaning of life is on how many clicks you get on your video, you're going to be frustrated. You're going to be disappointed. You need to find your meaning of life in who you are.

and how many likes you get or how many views or how many followers you have. And so that begins with the family. So you prioritize the family. You have family dinners. You fight for dinners at home. And again, many parents are confused and they're driving their kids around to play dates or they're driving their kids to travel team soccer or computer coding class. Cancel the computer coding class.

Prioritize family time at home. Prioritize the parent-child relationship. and then the rest will follow once you have the strong family relationship. That's so key that I think in today's day and age, many parents are very worried about is junior getting asked on enough playdates or to go hang with his or her friends enough? Is my kid the kid that's sitting at home with me and my spouse too much? Are they popular? Are they out there with friends, which is what is considered, quote, normal?

and to those parents you say? I would say I would come back to the central key point that I try to make in the new edition of my book, The Collapse of Parenting, which is that central paradox of American parenting right now, which is that parents are spending more time and more money on their kids than parents have ever done before. But the results are worse than they have ever been. American kids are more likely to be anxious and depressed than they have ever been. They are in worse shape physically than they have ever been. They are less fit than they have ever been.

heavier than they have ever been. So bluntly, American parents are doing it all wrong because American parents are really confused. They've got the priorities all mixed up. They think that it's really important for kids to have friends who are their own age. It's not that important. It is not that important. We know this. Whether or not your five-year-old or your 10-year-old has a lot of other friends, their own age, is not important. It's not. It's not a predictor of good health. It's not a predictor of happiness. What predicts health and happiness for your five-year-old, for your 10-year-old? The parent-child relationship is the most important thing. It is. We know this. The data is there. So your first priority should not be driving your kid around to play dates. Your first priority

should be building the parent-child relationship. So one of my presentations for parents of young kids is titled, cancel the play date. Make a family date instead. On that Saturday, those precious hours on a Saturday when you actually have some time, don't drive your kid to a play date. Do something fun with your kid. Go somewhere with your kid. Just you and your kid, not driving them to a play date, but doing something fun with your kid because the quality of the parent-child relationship is the most important predictor of your kid's health and happiness. So focus on that. Don't drive your kid to a play date. What does it change when they get to be teenagers? Okay. This is where, again, a lot of parents are confused. They expect their teenager to push them away and they think that's fine and they they assume

that the parent-child relationship is less important for teenagers and it's not. It's more important. And again, parents are like, oh, you know, well, I really believe in privacy. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to monitor what my kid is doing online. Huge mistake, huge mistake. We've got girls who are sending selfies to boys that they don't even know and the parent is not aware of this and it has life-changing bad consequences for girls, you've got to put parental monitoring software on your teenager's phone and say, look, this app is going to see every photograph you take before you even do anything with it. And if there's anything inappropriate, it's going to pop up on my phone. And if you do anything inappropriate, you're going to lose your device indefinitely. Girls don't understand.

So one of the stories I share, 12-year-old girl had a 14-year-old boyfriend. He asked her to send him some photos, nothing obscene, just wanted to see her take off her school uniform, blouse, and kilt to reveal bra and panties. Of course, she knew her parents would not allow this. So she goes into her bedroom, close the door, locks the door, and does as he acts and sends the photographs using Snapchat. Now, Snapchat claims you can send a photo using a five-second self-destructing. recipient has seen the photo for five seconds, it will vanish. And if they try to save the photo, using a screenshot, you, the sender will be notified. Snapchat is lying.

They knows that there's dozens of free apps out there that will save the photo and the sender will not be notified. The boy, of course, had installed one of these apps, and he saved all the photos. School administrators later determined that he didn't intend for anyone else to see the photos, but he was at a party, and he set his phone down to grab some chips and talk to some friends. another boy came along that locked screen had not engaged, found the phone, went to the gallery, found the photos, forwarded each of the girls' photos to his own phone, posted each of the photos on his own Instagram, within three days everybody at the school had seen them. Boys, this girl didn't even know we're coming up to her and say, hey, Emily, how about you do a

strip tease for us? This girl had a total meltdown. She'd never had any problems before. She'd been invited to a three-day ski weekend. The girl, the birthday girl whose parents were hosting the ski weekend, the birthday girl called with this girl and said, you know, I hate to make this phone call, but my mom is totally freaking out because all the other moms are freaking out. And they're all saying that they won't let their daughter come if you're going to be there because they all think you're now some kind of bad influence. So I have to un-invite you. I'm really sorry.

I have to un-invite you. Girl totally melted down, refusing to go to school saying her life was over that the photos would always be out there, which is totally true, incidentally. The school administrators made this boy take them down. but by that time, 20 other boys had picked up the photos and reposted them. I'm told they're still out there. Started cutting herself with the razor blades saying she wanted to die. The parents took her to the doctor. Doctor diagnosed depression prescribed lexapro, 10 milligrams,

and arranged for urgent psychotherapy. That accomplished nothing. So you now have a 12-year-old girl with depression, not responding to medication or psychotherapy. Who's at fault? The girl, her boyfriend, the other boy? The parents are to blame. Look, this is a very grown-up device.

With this device, I can take a photo and send a photo, and once I send that photo, I have no control over what happens to it, over who sees it. If you're going to put a device like this in the hands of a child, then you are responsible for every photo they take and everyone who sees it. You must install parental monitoring software if you're going to give a device to a child under 18.

and explain to your kid. The app is going to see every photo you take as soon as you take it. If it's anything inappropriate, it's going to pop up on my photo. You're going to lose a device indefinitely. And parents will push back. Parents will say, look, I believe in privacy. I don't want to see my kid's photo. If she don't want to see my photo, if she don't want me to see her photos,

I'm fine with that. I don't want to see her photo if she don't want to see my photo. And I say that, parent, look, privacy is great. You want to share a photo privately. Here's what you do. You print it out on a piece of it. a photo paper and then you take it over your friend's house and show to them and then you shred it. That's privacy. There is no such thing as privacy when you share a photo with a phone.

And you know who didn't get the memo? Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest men, shared photos with his girlfriend and they were leaked. And you know who else didn't get the memo? General David Petraeus, same story a few years earlier, had all of his passwords and two-factor authentication, thought it could not be hacked. Anything can be hacked. The moral of the story of Jeff Bezos and David Petraeus, don't share any photo with a device unless you're prepared for grandma to see it in the newspaper. And you don't share that by preaching that. You communicate that by saying, I've installed an app on your phone. Do not share a photo.

Do not take a photo unless you're prepared for everybody to see it. And again, American parents will push back and they'll say, oh, come. come on, my daughter's just going to Google, how do I get around parental controls on NetNNNNi? Well, I've actually spoken with employees at NANI, and they told me that they have colleagues whose full-time job is to Google the phrase, how do I get around parental controls on NET Nanny? And if they find that some kid has found a hole, they patch it, usually within hours, and the app will update, you have to install parental monitoring. Software, you explain to your kids.

Is NetNNNNNi, the software that you're saying parents can use to monitor the kids? It's one of many apps. I'm not endorsing any one app. Ethics and Public Policy Center has a wonderful online guide to the different parental monitoring apps. That's Ryan Anderson's group, Ethics and Public Policy Center. They've got a good online resource that reviews all the different rental monitoring apps. But yeah, NANI is one, Bark, Circle. There's a bunch of them.

I don't endorse any one app. They're all very similar. They all give you a dashboard on your phone. They'll light up if they see anything inappropriate. But you've got to use one of these. You've got to install one of these on your kid's phone and explain. What about Dr. Sachs, the question of privacy? You know, you'll hear her parents say, well, I need my child to trust me.

And if she doesn't trust me, she's not going to tell me anything. So if she knows I'm sneaking around on her phone or I'm sneaking in her room to read her diary, it's going to blow up to the relationship to where I'm no longer a resource for her. Well, you know, there's good things and bad things about the American Academy of Pediatrics. But in this domain, of this question of how you balance that question of trust versus the dangers of social media and smartphones, I think the American Academy of Pediatrics in this domain has done some very useful work. They hired all the leading experts who spent two years reviewing all the research. And the experts said, look, this is a new world and a new development.

of immense risk in toxicity. And for girls, the risk is huge. And once those photos are out there, they will never go away. You Google this girl's name. You're still going to find those photos today. It will always be out there. And these girls don't understand the risks. And you have to balance those risks.

And the experts said in the official guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics, quote, there should be no expectation of child. of privacy when a child or teenager under 18 is online. No expectation of privacy. That's the official guideline of the American Academy Pediatrics. A device with Internet access should be in a public space like the kitchen or living room, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a very left of center organization, as we may get to later.

On the trans insanity in particular. Yes, trans insanity. But in this domain, they said a kid should not even have their. device in their bedroom. It should be in a kitchen or living room because there should be no expectation of privacy when a kid is online. There's so much bad stuff out there that they should expect to have the parent. And they know how you feel, they know how I feel about social media use and children. But like John Rich, a great singer, music superstar, he actually wrote in on my ex account. And his question was, I don't have the exact wording in front of me, hold on it.

It was what age is okay for social media, right? With understanding the reality that at some point, your child is going to figure out what Snapchat or TikTok or these apps are, at what point would you introduce it to them? Do you want it to happen while you're there and they're still in the home with you and you can talk about it or do you wait until they go off to college? What do you think? So my brand, if you like, is evidence-based.

When I make a recommendation, I'm always going to show you a study or a series of studies. Long-term. Longitudinal studies. Longitudinal cohort studies. You got it. So Gene Twenge is one of our nation's leading researchers. And back in 2019, she and her colleague Keith Campbell did a huge study, 220,000 adolescents.

And on the X axis is the time spent on social media. And on the Y axis is the likelihood of becoming anxious or depressed. And there is no rise in that trend line until you get past 30 minutes a day. So 2019, 2020, 2021, I was telling parents, Up to 30 minutes a day on social media is fine. But that study was published in 2019, based on research gathered in 2018. That's before TikTok. TikTok changed everything.

So researchers who study social media talk about basically three generations of social media. So Facebook is first generation. Facebook is about connecting you to people you know or you used to know. On Facebook, you can connect with your first grade classmate, whatever. Instagram is second generation. So you not only connect with people you know, you can connect with celebrities. TikTok is third generation. It's totally different.

So you go on TikTok and TikTok begins by saying, I'm not interested in who you know. I'm interested in what you like to watch. Tell me what kind of videos you like to watch. Okay. Let me show you some videos. And then the algorithm is watching you. And the algorithm is crazy good. and it starts customizing what it's showing you.

And after an hour, you're seeing things you didn't even know were out there. And it's so common to find teenagers to say, whoa, TikTok knew I was gay before I did. TikTok knew I was trans before I did. And then in 2021, researchers reached out to TikTok and said, you know, the algorithm is really dangerous. It's dragging kids, especially girls down in this rabbit hole that's valorizing anorexia and self-harm. You've got to change the algorithm. And TikTok responded said, okay, we'll change the algorithm. And then last year, the researcher said, you didn't make it better.

You made it worse. It's getting worse. And so I reached out to Gene Twengie, and I said, look at the more recent studies. There is no safe point anymore that it's shifted left. The danger doesn't begin at 30 minutes anymore. It begins at zero time. And Gene Twangy responded, and she sent me back in email saying the research now supports a total ban on social media for all teens, for all children, up below 18 years of age. And that is where I am now. The newer research

in the era of TikTok, no social media for any kids. We can argue about whether it's 16 or whether it's 18, but the research now strongly supports no social media for any kid in the English-speaking world under 16 or 18 years of age. And that's, I mentioned the English speaking world because there's an interesting factoid here. You know, everyone's been talking about this rise in anxiety and depression that has occurred in the last 15 years. And John Haid and Gene Twenge and others have talked about how, oh, it's all because of the smartphones and the social media. But one thing that John Haid and Gene Twenge haven't talked about much is that look at Greece, look at Russia. You have not seen that rise in anxiety and depression in Greece and in Russia, even though kids in Greece and Russia

are just as likely to have smartphones, just as likely to have social media. They're not showing the rise in anxiety and depression. Well, what's different? Okay, I've made the argument that American popular culture has become toxic in a way that that's not true in Greece and Russia. American popular culture has changed in a way that it didn't change in Greece and Russia. American popular culture has become post-Christian in a way that has not, I'm not crowding up Russia as a role model by any means. But American popular culture is a post-Christian culture. It's a toxic culture of envy and disrespect in a way that maybe is not true in Greece and Russia. And I think that's important because just locking down the smartphones is not enough.

We also have to offer our kids a healthier culture. Yes, this is so good to hear. I mean, I feel like we've all experienced this in our day-to-day lives with the weird competitive strain amongst some kids where they're not rooting for their friends. They, you know, if one friend gets a home run instead of cheering him on, the other teammate is like, put me in. I need to get a home run. You know, it's like, what? This is a weird strain that we're seeing in today's kids too often, and that makes perfect sense. And yeah, I mean, I think I've said this many time about the Russians.

I've been over there a few times. And they're actually a very loving people who think wonderful things about the American people. Our leaders have had obvious conflicts, and we know what's happened in Ukraine, but it's not to demonize the Russian people. If you went and spent time over there, it's still a Christian nation. They still have some fundamental beliefs that we could all get behind. it's our country that's lost its mind culturally. And whenever you say that, they think you're some sort of a rushophile, but that's not what I'm saying. It's not what Tucker has been saying.

Anyway, I know it's not what Dr. Sacks is saying. There's so much more to go over. There's tons of questions coming in. By the way, our audience can email me with questions for Dr. Sacks. You can still get on board. It's Megan at Megan Kelly.com. You can do it right now. And we'll pick back up with him in just two minutes.

Don't go away. With me today, Dr. Leonard Sacks. He is the author of the book, The Collaps, of parenting, how we hurt our kids when we treat them like grownups, which has just been updated this year. Get your copy now just in time for Christmas. Guys, great gift for the wives, wives, vice versa. Grandparents, great gift for the parents. Everybody can get this in time for the holidays, and I highly recommend this. Dr. Sacks is the expert. He doesn't suffer from the woke mind virus. He's a true expert, both the doctor and a psychologist.

who's been dealing with children and families for decades now and just has spoken sense for as long as I can remember. Okay, so explain the title in today's day and age what that means when we treat our children like grown-ups. Right. So in order for parenting to work, parents have to have authority. So I actually begin the new edition with something that happened in the office just as I was writing the new edition. So mom brings her daughter in, and she's sick. The six-year-old girl, mom explains her daughter has a fever and a sore throat. So after mom explains what's going on, I say, okay, time for me to take a look.

Would you please open your mouth and say, ah? And daughter shakes her head, no. And I say, okay, mom, looks like I'm going to need your help here. Would you please ask your daughter to open wide and say ah? And mom says, her body, her choice. Okay, my body, my choice, long time slogan, the abortion rights community, more recently adopted by activists opposed to COVID vaccines, mom is using that slogan to defend her daughter's refusal to allow me, the doctor, to look in her

daughter's throat. So that's an extreme example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting, parents who think it's actually virtuous to let kids decide. That's an extreme example, and that's, that's rare. Let me give you a much more common, much more common example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting. So boys not paying attention in school. 13-year-old boy, not paying attention in school, totally not paying attention. Off the chart on what's called the Connor scales, which is the teacher's rating, this kid's not paying attention in any class. Parents take him to the child psychiatrist.

Child psychiatrist as well at Dungeon deficit disorder. Let's try Bivance. Bivance, medication, tremendously helpful. Boy's now doing great. But he's jittery, totally lost appetite, palpitations. Parents see this article I wrote for Time magazine. about the dangers of these medications. They bring them to me for a second opinion.

And I do a more careful sleep study. I do a more careful sleep history. I asked a boy, do you have a video game console in your bedroom? He said, of course, doesn't everybody? I said, were you playing video games last night? He said, of course, wasn't everybody. When did you finish? Oh, like 132?

And mom's like, 130, you were playing video games? What were you playing? Oh, RDR2. Excellent, okay. All right. So I say to mom, you've got to get the video game console out of his bedroom. No video games. No video games.

And you got to limit how much time he's spending playing video games. You know, max 30 minutes a night on school nights and no video games after 9 o'clock at night and no video game console on the bedroom. And mom says, I couldn't take the video game console out of his bedroom. He totally freak out. This is a parent who is unwilling to limit how much time her son is spending playing playing playing video games. She is uncomfortable exercising her authority.

That is very common. And that is also what I mean by the collapse of parenting, parents who are uncomfortable exercising their authority. And as a result, this kid is not paying attention in class. He doesn't have attention deficit disorder. He's sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics attention deficit disorder of the inattentive variety. disorder of the inattentive variety. Vivance was immensely helpful. What's Vivance? What's

Adderall? They're amphetamines. Their speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not scheduled to amphetamines. And the psychiatrist failed to do a careful sleep history. And this is happening all the time. And I see this a lot as a family doctor. These kids who are being medicated, because the parents are not doing their job. That's happening a lot. How about the drive for good grades? I had one parent right in saying,

how hard should I push my teenager in today's day and age with kids suffering from anxiety? If my kid is like, I'm striving for bees, do I just say, good for you, honey, do what you think is right? Or do I say, well, why not it? You know, maybe, maybe you don't have to play two and a half hours of basketball. Maybe you could take one of those hours and go for an A.

But parents are almost afraid to do that now because, you know, our kids are all so stressed out. Well, when I speak to parents, I do a lot of presentations for parents. And this is okay. I don't want to come across the wrong way. The book is not a rant against bad parents. The objective of the book is to empower the parents to exercise their authority, to to encourage that parent to do the right thing, to do what you know you should do. That's what I'm trying to do there. So you asked about grades. So when I speak to parents, either individually or in

groups, I will often say, I'll mention the longitudinal cohort study, which is study where you follow kids from childhood through adolescence all the way to 32, 40, 50 years of age. What characteristic of a child best predicts good outcomes at 30, 40, 50 years of age? Is it The grades that they got? No, it's not. It's character. It's honesty. It's self-control.

So it follows from that, that our top priority as parents is not top grades. It's honesty and self-control. So good grades are great. There's nothing wrong with that. But character and self-control and self-control. and honesty are more important. And you know, as a family doctor, I've seen a big change. 20 years ago, parents were more likely to say,

I'd rather you get a C on the test honestly than cheat and get an A. And that's the right thing to say. Today, I hear parents who say, hey, you want to get into top university? You've got to have amazing grades. And there has been a rise in cheating over the last 20 years, which I document. So you've got to be very cautious about emphasizing good grades because a lot of kids are getting the wrong message. And there has been a rise in cheating among American kids over the last 20 years. That was one of the things that the Menendez parents allegedly told their kids before they killed them.

You've got to get straight A's. You have to win, period. It doesn't matter how you do it. You can cheat. You can steal. Fine. That what's important is to win, just don't get caught. And it was kind of a fascinating thing.

And it didn't end well. we're losing that moral compass. Being a good person and doing the right thing, even if it hurts, is more important than winning, more important than getting a good mark. Again, that was the lesson of the Andy Griffith Show in a long, long time ago. It was the lesson of happy days and family ties. It used to be the lesson that kids would get from American television. It's not the lesson they get anymore, but it's a lesson that you, the parent have to teach.

But how do you teach drive? Okay. How do you teach motivation? This is a real problem. And there's a lot more going on than cultural factors are part of it. And some of this is gender specific. So let's talk about boys. Testosterone levels have dropped.

a lot in the last 50 years and even in the last 20 years and that's a major focus of my book boys adrift and a lot of this is due to endocrine disruptors and turns out that boys depend on testosterone for drive girls don't and so yeah i think that is part of the story and you know when i first started looking into this years ago it sounded kind of weird and uh but but there's a lot of the story and but there's is actually very good research. And I actually wrote a paper for the National Institutes of Health published in their scholarly journal on this topic about how plastic bottles,

the kind that people drink bottled water out of, actually contain endocrine disruptors like diethythalhylite, that lower testosterone levels. So your son shouldn't be drinking water out of a plastic bottle. You should pour tap water into a steel canteen, and that's what you want to be drinking your water out of. Don't microwave in plastic. It doesn't cost anything to follow these guidelines.

And it fixes the testosterone levels. So, yeah, there's different factors that affect. That's why I wrote a book called Boys, called Boys of Dr. And a book for Girls called Girls on the Edge because the factors are different. And another book called Why Gender Matters. Yes. Whoa, you've really done your homework. I appreciate that.

I read that when it came out, Dr. Sacks. And I remember finding so fascinating. And when the trans insanity exploded, I was like, this is the one guy I want to talk to. Because he wrote before all this nonsense that there are two different sexes. They are very, very different, and it matters. And now we're told, no, it's completely interchangeable. Yeah, well, and there's been a lot of change there. The first edition of Why Gender Matters had half a paragraph on transgender.

And then the publisher, Penguin Random House, asked me to write a new edition, which I devote a lot of time to transgender because now it's a thing. Yeah, but I know you've been making the point, and you make the point here, too, that the male brain and the female brain are very, very different, and that parents must understand that. Yes, and even the trans activists should be honest about this. Like, if you want to parade around trying to look like a woman, that's your choice. But don't try to tell me that because you feel like a woman, even though you're a man,

you just are because all the studies show that your brain is different. You are, yes, your body's different, but your brain is different. And you make the point in this book that parents need to understand that too, because you look at your child, your boy child, and you interpret his behavior one way because you have an older sister to that boy who at this stage was doing things very, very differently, maybe at a rapid, you know, pace compared to the boy, and you're making no allowances for why gender matters. Yes. So absolutely. So in my book, Why Gender Matters, I remind parents that girls develop faster than boys. So if you have an older daughter, younger son, don't compare your son to your daughter. And again, from my own practice, a parent of an 18-month-old boy said, you know, when my daughter was 18-month-old,

I could bounce her on my knee, and I'd say, Google Gaga, and she'd say Google Gaga, and I'd say, I'd say, I-e-O-O-O, and she'd say EEO, and we could do that for like 20 minutes. We'd just crack each other up. We'd had so much fun, just making nonsense syllables. And I tried that with my son. And somebody who was riding there, bike past the front door, and he went and looked at that. And then the house made a noise, and he went and looked at that. He's very distractible. And I googled that. And it said it could be a sign of autism. It could be a sign of autism. What do you think? Could it be a sign of autism? I said, well, it could be, but it could also be a sign of boy. But I could not. But I could not. reassure her and she insisted on a formal

evaluation so I said all right treatment learning centers in Rockfield they're very good at play-based assessment for toddlers I shouldn't have done that there was a big mistake on my part she went to went there and she came back in tears she said they're very concerned they said his vocabulary

is below average compared to the average 18 month old the average 18 month old should have vocabulary of 65 words they estimate he only has a vocabulary of 40 words well actually research shows the average 90 average 8 to month of a girl has a vocabulary 90 words. Average 181 with a boy has a vocabulary of 40 words. So let's consider that statement. The average 181 little child has a vocabulary is 65 words.

Okay, 90 plus 40 is 130, 130 by 20 is 25. The average 181 with old child has a vocabulary of 65 words. That's a true statement, but it's completely meaningless because a child is either a boy or a girl. You've got to compare boys to boys and girls to girls. There's nothing wrong with this boy. And he's perfectly fine. And this was years ago. He's gone on to be totally fine. He does not have autism. He's not on the spectrum.

So, yeah, if you have an older daughter, younger son, don't compare your son to your daughter. Compare boys to boys and girls to girls. Let's talk about autism for a second because it's, of course, very much in the news. And with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., up for potential HS chief, he's been saying, you know, is it environmental? There's so many toxins around us from the microplastics, which you just mentioned, to the pollutants in our air, in our soil and so on, on our food. He thinks it's too much toxic overload. You have a different possibility that we should be considering for the explosion in

autism over the past decade or so. Yes. And there is an explosion. So the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, one of our nation's leading scholarly journals, just a few weeks ago, published a study, looked at the diagnosis of autism in this country in 2011, compared with 2022, and found in those 11 years between 2011 and 2012, the diagnosis of autism for children five to eight years of age tripled. Why? Well, the authors of the study didn't suggest why. But the mainstream, the official explanation, is improved awareness and screening. Okay. I'm not buying that. I'm not buying it because I'm a family doctor and I'm seeing firsthand what's going on and I can tell you, okay, there's autism is a spectrum. At one end we've got this severely impaired kid who is not

talking, not verbal, profoundly impaired and there has been a rise there and at that severe end, you know, I might actually agree with RFK Jr. that there's toxins in the environment and something bad is happening there. That's not the kid I'm talking about. What's going on at the other end, the kid who is functioning, the kid who is in school, but he's now being labeled as being on the spectrum. Okay, here's something that I actually know something about because I'm seeing this. Let's think about this eight-year-old boy who's defined, who's disrespectful, who spits, who bites. 20 years ago, the teacher would have said to the parents, look, this is totally unacceptable.

Your son is rude. when the teacher says to the parents your son is rude the burden of responsibility is on the parents they have to step up they have to teach their son okay you need you need to behave differently or else but today same boy same behavior the teacher is much more likely to say something like your son seems to have a deficit in in social awareness skills have you thought of having him evaluated? And he goes and he gets evaluated and sure enough he gets labeled as being on the spectrum. Well, you know what?

He's not on the spectrum. He's a rude, disrespectful boy immersed in this culture of disrespect. Yes, he's because the culture has changed. And the first chapter, the new edition of my book, The Collapse of Parenting is titled The Culture of Disrespect in my own practice. A mom of an eight-year-old boy said, can you explain to me what's going on with our son? His father and I never talk this way. And he thinks it's funny to be disrespectful and talk back.

And I said to mom, I said, do you guys have the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.? and she said, of course. I said, lock it down. Turn off. Do not allow Disney, Disney Jr., Nickelodeon Nick Jr., don't allow it. And it stopped. Disney and Nickelodeon, they are teaching kids that it's cute, that it's funny to be disrespectful to talk back. And mom called me three weeks later and she said, it's stopped.

These shows are teaching kids that it's cute and funny to be disrespectful and to talk back. And the culture has become a culture of disrespect. And it's not just Disney and Disney Jr. You know, Linnaz Axe had this huge song, Old Town Road, 12 weeks, 12 weeks, 12. consecutive weeks, and number one, the most popular song in the United States,

and he sings, can't nobody tell me nothing? You can't tell me nothing. You know, Bill Maher earlier this year had a huge bestseller with his book, and he observes in his book,

young people are beautiful, but stupid. Old people are ugly, but more likely to be wise. So he continues, any successful culture will teach the young people to respect

the old people so that they can learn. So the beautiful young people can learn from the wise old people. You can't tell me nothing. Can nobody tell me nothing? This new culture of disrespect, where American popular culture from the Disney Channel to the most popular songs to TikTok and Instagram breaks bonds across generation. You can't tell me nothing. If you can't tell me nothing, why go to school? Why go to church? The new American culture of disrespect breaks bonds across generations. And the result is kids in their bedroom looking at screens who want nothing to do with their parents, nothing to do with church. And the result is kids who are adrift. And this is a major factor driving this growing

generation of kids who are adrift and looking for meaning. This is in our own family. It's a hard line. If the talk towards myself or my husband gets disrespectful, they will get punished and they know it. You know, we're not, they're usually very good kids. They don't, we don't have a ton of opportunity to punish them. But, you know, that's smart talk back to the parent that's extremely disrespectful. We will punish them for that. But for this very reason, there have to be like societal boundaries within which we play.

And if you're a child, you're speaking to an adult, all the more so. This reminded me, just asked my team to pull it over, of a bit James Carville did after the election, you know, the Bill Clinton aide, who has. help get him elected. And he's a Southerner. He's a Louisiana boy through and through. And he's not woke. He's a leftist Democrat, but he is not a woke guy. And he had, he went on a rant about young people within the campaign, the Democratic Party, who think they know everything because someone hasn't set those guardrails for them on understanding respect and respect for one's elders, and that one doesn't know everything, especially as a young person. It's a great bit. We haven't had

the chance to play it for the audience. Here it is. The vice president was thinking about going on Joe Rogan show, and a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit. Supposed, the campaign said that that wasn't a termed effect, but they did. When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people, what I would tell them. Not only am I not interested in your fucking opinion, I'm not even going to call you by your name. You're 23 years old. I don't really give a shit what you think.

If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying, I'm going to resign if you don't do this. Not only would I fire that motherfucker on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot. That's amazing. What do you make of it, Dr. Sacks? Well, he speaks very emphatically, but indeed I do think that we need young people to respect their elders. And the anthropologist would agree with Beaumar.

Every successful culture teaches young people to respect their elders. And we used to do that too. As recently as 20, 30 years ago, American culture was a culture of respect. respect and the most popular TV shows like the Andy Griffith show in the 1960s even Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s. Little House on the Prairie. Yes, we're shows that taught, that had those strong connections across generations. We have lost that.

And, you know, you and I cannot change Hollywood, but we can create a culture of respect in our own home. And again, that's what I'm trying to do in my book The Collabs of Parenting. We can't change Hollywood, but we can, I'm trying to encourage parents, and give parents some guidance. How do you do that in your own home? You've got to create that culture of respect within your own home. And you've got to be confident asserting authority in your own home.

It's not about discipline. It's about creating those bonds of love and respect across the generations. This is reminding me, too, of the way we speak to our children today or the way we're told we should speak to them today is just so vastly different from how my parents spoke to me. when I was growing up and just a couple generations ago the way it was. You know, you could make the case against the way parents like mine, my mom, Linda, who I adore, you know, lines like, stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about. Okay, that may have been a little far on the spectrum. But today, we've gone so far around the bend that we have lost our authority. And we're, I don't know what kind of

psycho babble these young parents are listening to, but it's encapsulated in this bit that was going around Instagram recently. This is like a prepared bit between what looks like a mom and daughter acting, but it captures it perfectly. Watch. Be careful. We don't say be careful anymore. Instead say, what's your plan here? I don't even know my plan. Do you know your plan? Don't stop. It's your sister. Don't say stop. Say gentle. Gentle. Gentle what? Gentle hands. Everything. Gentle everything. I am so proud of you. I'm not supposed to tell kids you're proud of them anymore. Why now? That's putting the focus on you.

What? I'm so proud. Don't say that. Should I say instead? You should be so proud. I am so proud. It's back on you again. Hurry up, we gotta go.

We're fine. Don't rush, fine. I thought we were in a hurry. If you rush children, it makes them anxious. Don't worry. You always rushed us and I'm anxious. Never rushed you. We were always late.

Exactly. And I was anxious because we were always late. Am I supposed to say then? Gentle? This way, good job. Good job. Good. choice. Thank you. No, say good choice. Watch out. Do you feel safe here? I don't feel safe about any of the shit.

Watch out. No, it's do you feel safe here? I'm sure you've seen a lot of this too. Yeah. So that's a riff on gentle, gentle parenting, which I talk about in the new edition, which really wasn't a thing 10 years ago, but it certainly is now. gentle parenting means letting kids decide. Gentle parenting means that good parenting means letting kids decide. And gentle parenting is profoundly harmful. And again, in the new edition, I present a lot of evidence that that is so. Because the kids often are mistaken. And, you know, what is childhood for?

I mean, literally, a four-year-old child has barely begun. a four-year-old horse is a mature adult, and a horse is a bigger animal than a human. So it can't just be about biological maturity because a horse, as I said, is a bigger animal and a horse is fully mature by four years of age. A human is developing, is immature for more years than most animals live. Why? Why does it take so long? We don't have to guess.

We have scholars like Dr. Melvin Connor at Emory who spent his entire career decades studying this question published this huge tome of 800 pages, Oxford University Press, titled The Evolution of Childhood, comparing development in our species with development in other species. And the answer he gives, the reason it takes so many years is that it takes many years for parents to teach the child right and wrong. And so I cite a column by a longtime columnist for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boyland, who wrote a column about enlightened parenting in which, which she asserts, and I'm quoting that, she says that enlightened parenting means, and I quote, setting your child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong. And if in so doing,

your child becomes a stranger to you, then so be it. That may seem enlightened to some, but it's not enlightened. It's a dereliction of duty. If you set your child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong, and they have a device with internet access, what they will discover is Drake and Bruno Mars and Megan the Stallion and Cardi B and Trans, and Transcendile, transgenderism and mainstream pornography, your job is to teach your child right and wrong, to inscribe your law on the hearts of your child. That's Deuteronomy 6. That's your job as a parent. Don't set your child loose to discover themselves their own right and wrong. That's a dereliction of duty. Don't listen to the New York Times. Don't listen to National Public Radio. Do your job as a parent.

That's the message I'm trying to communicate. in my book, The Glapsed Parenting. It's reminding me at our school, at our son's school, it's an all-boys school, they understand that students will make bad decisions and they'll do stupid things sometimes. But the thing that will really get you expelled quickly is if you get called in to the head of school's office and you lie about what you did. Like he's not calling you in there unless he's got you dead to rights. About half the time they've got cameras in the school.

so he's already seen what you've done. And if you lie, you're out. He's pretty hardcore about that. If you own up to it and confess you were a numskull, you know, you did something really stupid and you're sorry, you will live to fight another day. But to your point, it's about the value system. Like honesty is a, it's just a deal breaker. You can't, we can't have anything, can't have character if we don't have that fundamental basic honesty. Can I ask you something else when another audience member asked, how do I know at what age I can start talking to my kids more as adults, you know, being honest with them about my own thought process and why I'm not going to allow them to do this thing that they want to do

or about the problems as I see it in the family, outside, whatever, like how does one know what level of dialogue to have with one's kid? I think it really varies from one child to the next. and as a rule, girls mature faster than boys do. Girls reach full maturity in brain development by about 22 years of age. Boys don't reach maturity and brain development until 30 years of age. That explains a lot if you think about it. And when in doubt, wait.

I find a lot of parents that I think are confiding too early. And I know a boy who was very insecure because his mom was confide. A single mom was confiding in her son about how they were broke. And he took that literally, and he thought that they literally didn't have money for food. And he was very insecure until he graduated and went off to college and realized that they actually were not that broke. And again, parents and sometimes single parents, are a little bit more prone to this because they don't have an adult confidant. And they sometimes I've observed as a family doctor, they confide in their kids because they

don't have a partner to confide in. And they're confiding in their 12-year-old when maybe they shouldn't be. And as a result, that 12-year-old is insecure, more insecure than they have to be. So when in doubt, keep it to yourself is one general rule I've learned. I seem to remember you being a big proponent of chores and responsibilities for kids. Does that extend to, I had one audience member ask about, to what extent is it appropriate for me to ask the older kids to help me with the younger kids? Because older kids have responsibilities of their own and they have grades they have to keep up and they have sports they have to make. And like, is it a dereliction of your parental duty to sort of fold in the older ones to help with the younger ones or is that a good thing? no so there's a whole chapter in the new edition titled humility uh which i call the most un-american

of virtues uh you know jason beber had a big hit a few years back where he's saying i'm going to light up the sky like lightning and this world will belong to me being proud and uh standing tall and and this world will belong to me those are very american characteristics but we now have all these studies where kids where researchers find that the kid with the highest self-esteem at 15 years of age is that individual who's most likely to be resentful and frustrated 10 years down the road. Because if I'm so amazing at 15, how come I'm working for a low wage in a cubicle at 25 years of age? Actually, one of the best predictors of happiness and contentment at 15 years of age is humility. Being humble. And yes, absolutely. And you'll

find that for search in my book The Collapse Appearance. parenting, being humble, being grateful, powerfully and accurately predicts happiness and contentment. How do you teach humility? And again, again, parents are confused. They don't get this at all. When I speak to parents about the virtue of humility during question and answer, a mother said, I don't want to teach my daughter to be humble. That's ridiculous.

I don't want to have my daughter to have high self-esteem. So when that big job opportunity comes along, she'll go for it. I want to teach my daughter be humble. That's ridiculous. I said, Mom, with all due respect, you're confused. You're confusing being humble

with being timid. Those are not the same thing. They're very nearly opposites. And the virtue you want for your daughter in the situation you're describing when a big job opportunity comes along, the virtue you want for your daughter is not high self-esteem.

The virtue you want for your daughter in that situation is courage. Courage means you, know your inadequacies, your failures, your shortcomings, and you find the strength to move forward anyhow. There is no courage without fear. High self-esteem is not the virtue that you're looking for. High self-esteem leads to frustration and resentment. And I can tell you this firsthand. I had a girl in my own practice who at age 15 had very high self-esteem. She wrote a short story, and her English teacher wrote on it A++,

you have a spark of the divine fire. And she went on to write several novels, couldn't get an agent, couldn't get a publisher. And at 23 years of age, she is seething with resentment and frustration and envy. Why did that girl get her novel published? I can't even get an agent. I can't get a publisher. High self-esteem leads to frustration and envy.

So you want to teach humility. Yes, you do. How do you teach humility? the right kind of humility. It begins with chores. It begins with chores. And again, many parents don't get this. Many parents don't get this.

And they're like, okay, I want my daughter to get good grades, you know. And we have, we have, we have, you know, we have the resources. We can hire a housekeeper. My daughter's job is school. Her job is school. So we can hire a housekeeper to do the chores. Many parents have said this to me. And the unintended the message they're sending to their daughter is you're too important.

to make your bed. Don't do that. Don't send that message. Don't send that message. Chores is a great way to teach humility. And throughout the book, I follow the Phillips family. I've known now for 30 years. And it's an amazing story of an amazing family, Bill and Janet Phillips and their four sons. And I've been in touch with this family now for 30 years. And it's an affluent family, a big at home. in a mansion in Potomac, Maryland. And they had the money. They could have hired landscapers, but they didn't. They insisted that their four sons do all the chores.

And I asked Janet, why did you do that? And she said, yeah, we could have hired landscapers, but I wanted them to learn the meaning of work, the value of work. And I quoted from her words in the book that, yeah, even if you have the money, you need to teach your kid to do this. And her son, Andrew, really one of the most amazing athletes I ever knew, have ever known in my 30 years as a family doctor, was a recruited by Stanford played on the Stanford football team alongside Andrew Luck. But he was playing at the Maryland program after 10th grade in high school. and the coach there had just said what a great football player was

and how he wanted to recruit and play in Maryland. And his father said, oh, Andrew, I didn't tell you, you're going to be working on one of my boats this summer. He owned a fishing business, scraping guts off the deck. And Andrew was so upset he wanted to do all this fun stuff in the summer. And instead he's scraping dead fish off a salmon fishing boat next to this guy has just been released from prison, a convicted felon drug dealer, Mexican,

who's talking about coming to Jesus in the state penitentiary. But Andrew said, you know, I learned something. Working alongside this drug dealer has come to Jesus, something I would never have learned at, you know, the upscale camp,

learning about the value of hard work, learning humility, humility, the most un-American of virtues. You need to teach your kid. Humility. Humility leads to contentment and happiness. Use the kids. Use the holders to take care of the youngers and use them around the house and use them on everything. Sure. I think it feels very foreign to think of a parent. If your child is like, I really think I'm going to do something great in this world.

To be like, now my mother would have said, you might and you might not. We really haven't seen any side. that you'll do that yet. But, you know, good luck. That's truly, that's how my mom raised me. But I feel like I couldn't say that to my child. I don't know what I think I'd probably say, yes, you will, sweetheart. I don't, how would you handle expressions of, from a child of, you know, hope about their own future like that? Like, I see myself as destined for something wonderful. I don't, whatever you want to phrase it. I would encourage my child to have, their loves properly ordered. It was a phrase going back to St. Augustine.

To love God first, make sure you want the right things for the right reasons. So if my daughter, for example, wanted to be an actress, why do you want to be an actress? You want to be an actress because you're inspired by the challenge of trying to become someone else and to get inside that person's head and persuade the audience that you are that person, that's great.

That is great. And I totally support that and endorse that. If you want to be an actress because you want to be rich and famous, that's the wrong reason. Why do you want this? What are you in this for? Know yourself, know your motivation. Want the right things for the right reasons. You've got to dig down deeply.

Know who you are and be headed in the right direction for the right reason. Got to know yourself. So good. I've been thinking about my mom a lot lately. She just came for a visit. She's hilarious. And there was this meme going around on Instagram that read as follows. I'm going to botch it a little bit. It was something to the effect of the hardest thing about being a mom or a parent is you are raising the one thing you can't live without to be able to live without you. And of course, I was like, oh my God, it's true. This is heartbreaking. you know, instant lump in the throat and tears welling.

And I'm sentimental like that. And my mom actually was in for a visit and my daughter was in a play. So we went and I showed it to my mom, who's 83 now, and she laughed. Like, Linda, it's just, she's tough. And she raised me in a tough way, but it worked out, you know, and I think about all this stuff. Like I never was told I had to get straight A's. I didn't get straight A's. No one ever hassled me over it.

I was never told I was special. It was all the opposite stuff that now I've sort of been making fun of for the past 20 years. But you know what, Doc, maybe my mom was on to something. I don't know. Yeah, it reminds me of my own mom, the late Dr. Janet Sachs, pediatrician. And I was the youngest of three boys. And I remember when we were at a friend's house and one of the other moms said, oh, Jackie, your youngest is going to be, leaving soon to go to college. And she said, very coolly, she said, well, they do grow up, you know,

that this is what's supposed to happen. But again, a lot of parents are confused about this. And again, in my own practice, husband and wife were planning a ski vacation, and they wanted their 13-year-old to come with them. And she said, well, you know, I'm not that big on skiing. How about if I just stay at Arden's house, you and dad go away? And I, I'll stay at Arden's house. And mom was very proud of this. And she was boasting to me that her daughter did not go on the ski vacation. And I said, uh-uh, that's not good. You should have insisted that she come with you. At age 13, your daughter's primary attachment should be to you, the parents. And again, parents are confused. At age 13, the primary attachment should still be to the parents.

when that attachment breaks too soon, and her primary attachment is to her 13-year-old friend, that's too soon because her primary attachment at that age should still be to her parents. When it breaks too soon... What age is not too soon? 18. 18. At 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age, the primary attachment should still be to the parents. And we've got so much research now showing that when it breaks,

rates too soon. At 23 years of age, now that girl's still now going to be texting her parents and saying, I don't know what to do. What should I do, mom? And we've got so many of these stories now. And we're not just stories. We've got data. We've got this explosion of kids in their 20s and even 30s who are now living with their parents. There are more 30-year-olds living with their parents than has ever been the case in American history. It's a weird demographic reverses. of failure to launch, of young people who now are unable to live independently, because the acorn broke open too early, is the analogy I use in the new edition of the collapse of parenting. These kids broke out on their own at 12 years of age and went and hung out with their

primary attachment was their 12-year-old peers at 12, 13, 14, 16 years of age. and now at 25 years of age, they don't know how to live independently. They did not develop normally. Let me ask you this. So I've got to take a break, but I want to ask you this question when I come back. So how did any of us who were raised in the 70s or before survive? Because most of us had parents who totally ignored us, and they were not the primary person really in our lives.

We were kind of alone and independent latchkey. But we wound up okay. Oh, that's a tease. More with Dr. Sacks. right after this. So Doc, what do you make that? So those of us who grew up in the 70s, pretty much without parents, who turned out fine.

Absolutely. It was a much healthier culture. We're talking about the culture of the Andy Griffiths Show, happy days, family ties. And again, this is not a guess, this is not nostalgia. And I talk about this in the book. And I talk about how the culture has changed.

And the culture of the last 15 years has become a much more toxic culture, a culture of envy. and disrespect. And this is why the burden on parents now is much greater, because now they have to do much more. They have to do things that your parents never had to do. They have to provide a culture, which your parents didn't have to do. Your parents didn't have to be there for that. But now parents today have to do so much more. They have not only to provide a culture, they have to block out all the toxicity and harm of the bad toxic culture of the, of the Disney channel and TikTok and Instagram, and they have to provide a good healthy culture and and and they don't even know it.

Many parents are not even aware of all the bad things that the culture is doing. So again, the mission of the book, the objective of the book is to wake parents up to make them aware that, look, your TV is an agent of this really bad culture. And you don't have to turn off the TV, but block out the Disney channel. You know, Home and Garden television, that's okay. The history channel is okay, but not the Disney channel. And your laptop is fine. You can watch the Megan Kelly show, but not YouTube. YouTube is spreading a lot of really bad stuff.

If you're going to watch YouTube, make sure you're there. You can watch the Megan Kelly show, but not Andrew Tate, for goodness sake. Oh my gosh. I agree. So warning parents to block out the bad stuff to all the things that you've got to know now as a parent because American culture has changed. That's why it's so important. We have two minutes left with the series XM audience. We're going to continue this over on podcast and YouTube.com slash Megan and Kelly.

But in the two minutes we have left, one of our audience members wrote in, How do I deprogram a kid from the woke mind virus without losing them? In our family, we've done a pre-inoculation against it. But a lot of parents got swept, their kids got swept into this, you know, when they didn't even know to inoculate them. So what's the answer to that one? I've got a chapter in the book for that parent. And the chapter is titled in Joy. And actually, the new chapter is titled Joy, J-O-Y.

And basically, I would say, do a vacation. just you and your kid, you and your family together, go someplace fun and do something fun with your kid. And they may be kicking and screaming. And I describe a father and son where exactly that happened and the son didn't want to go and was kicking and screaming, didn't want to go. That has actually worked. That is the one thing that has actually worked. Just doing fun things together with your kid, not lecturing them, just doing fun things with your kid is the natural. God-given way to reconnect with your child.

Wow, that's excellent. It's back to your core message. More time with you, more time around the dinner table, more time with your values and bonding with you and reestablishing that close relationship. And I know we talked about last time, don't vacation with your children's friends. No, they cannot bring a friend on the vacay. Those are for families to reconnect with one another because those relationships are so critical to your child's wellness.

for reasons like this. So speaking of the woke mind virus, part of what it does is teaches children to prioritize identity over everything with skin color or some alleged weird sexual proclivity or some alleged gender spectrum nonsense. But it also leans in to any weakness, illness, alleged mental defect. You know, I was saying not long ago, in today's day and age, your kid cannot get into a good college by writing, I came from a loving family where I was raised with great values and two present loving parents who were there for me to set boundaries.

You've got to say, you've got some phobia, some issue, and there's a chapter in the book called what is, it's about normophobia, normophobia. So can you explain that? Yes, absolutely. So 15 years ago, I wrote a book called Girls on the Edge. And the girls I interviewed back then wanted to be effortlessly perfect. That was a thing back in 2009. And then more recently, the publisher asked me to write an updated version.

And I found that girls today don't want to be effortlessly perfect. That's boring. That's lame. That's basic white bitch. And who wants to be that? And the words that kids use on social media that they teach others to use, kind of reinforce that. Are you gender conforming or are you gender non-conforming? Well, who wants to be conforming?

Are you neurodivergent or are you neurotypical? You know, who wants to be typical? You know, that's boring. Divergent, you know? Who wants to be typical and conforming? You want to be divergent and non-conforming. And so Mary Harrington has coined this term. term, normophobia. Kids don't want to be normal. And this is a growing issue. It's not true of all

kids, but it's true of a growing number of kids. They don't want to be normal. It's not cool to be normal. And this is really something that has spread on American social media, on TikTok, on Instagram. You've got to talk about how you are anxious, how you're depressed, or how you're struggling with your gender identity or how you're wrestling with being trans or or or or or or or your non-binary or whatever you know 70 years ago c s lewis wrote this book for kids uh the magician's nephew and and he said that the the problem about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed and substitute stupider for anxious or depressed the trouble with trying to make yourself more anxious or more depressed than you really are is that you very often

succeed. The whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy is that a big part of being anxious and depressed is that you're making yourself anxious and depressed. And as a psychologist and a family doctor, I can tell you a lot of these kids are making themselves anxious and depressed. They're talking themselves into being anxious and depressed. And again, we mentioned earlier that why is this not being seen in Greece and Russia? Well, I don't speak Greek or Russian, but I talk with people who do. And I can tell you, this is not a thing in Greece and Russia. Greek and Russian kids don't see anything cool about talking themselves into being anxious and depressed. This is a uniquely American English-speaking world weirdness.

I just came from Canada where this is definitely a thing as well. And American parents need to understand how toxic and how weird this is. We need to teach our kids. There's nothing cool about being anxious or depressed. And we need to disconnect our kids from the toxic culture that has spread. this, which is very much part of this woke mind virus thing. There's nothing cool about being anxious or depressed or lesbian or gay or bisexual or non-binary or trans. It is good to be healthy. It is good to be straight. There's nothing wrong with that. And again, you need to create a culture

in your own home where it is fine to be normal. It's one of the, like a related offshoot of this problem is that, the nonstop desire to discuss one's problems in the school setting. Abigail Schreier wrote a book about this recently, bad therapy. But more and more, the schools, I will say, especially the girls' schools, want the kids to discuss trauma. Has anything bad ever happened to you? What did that feel like? Has anyone suffered a loss or a death in the family?

What did that feel like? And then they're supposed to go off and do math. What do you make of this leaning into discussing your trauma in the school setting by some school psychologist who may or may not have any sort of abilities to do that kind of thing with a kid? Yeah, so-called trauma-informed therapy. I think does not have a place in a public school setting. And I don't mean a, I mean in a setting where there's a bunch of kids around, the class should not be group therapy. The objective in the classroom, the first objective should be to

teach the content not to conduct informal group therapy with untrained therapists. So on that point, I agree with Abigail Schreier. Let's talk about, and we forget me, we covered this the last time, I don't remember, but you know, my kids are getting into their teens now. So this is not yet relevant, but I'm sure we'll be relevant in the next five, seven years. Drinking, right? I don't know. I'm sure you'd see signs on your child if you're an attentive parent. At some point, you would see signs once your child starts drinking socially, if they start drinking socially, especially when they get more up into like senior year.

College, you're not going to be able to control what happens to college. But how do you see that? Because let me tell you, in my mom circles, there are all sorts of opinions on like, you're not going to stop it, like walk them through, like don't have more than one. don't have a mixed drink, you know, set some guardrails for them. Or there's moms who are like, absolutely not. Don't, you know, it should be shamed. Talk to them about the dangers of it, slippery slope, all that.

Or moms who are like, eh, you know, we host parties and we actually let them have a couple of drinks. We just make sure nobody's driving. So your thoughts on that issue. Well, I don't think that kids should be drinking. I think the dangers are clear. I'm actually more concerned as a family doctor with vaping. I see vaping is more popular than drinking right now, and it is spreading. I think kids need to be aware of the dangers.

But it's really more of a issue of what's popular. And if all the other kids are doing it, it's really hard for kids not to, if everyone else in their group is doing it. So you need to be aware of what all the kids are doing. Again, I talk about in my book The Collapse of Parenting, the Phillips family, Mr. Phillips had a breathalyzer. And he would insist on if the boys were popular. And so kids would come to their home from other parties. And if a kid was appeared intoxicated, he would insist that they would, the kid blow into the breathalyzer.

And if the kid was drunk, he would insist that the parents come and pick up the kid and drive them home. And that very quickly became known. And everyone would say, well, you know, the crazy Phillips dad, he's got the breathalyzer. And that had, yeah, and that had interesting consequences because people would say, well, you know that crazy Phillips dad, he's got the breathalyzer. And that would give other kids an excuse not to drink because they would. say, well, I'm going to the Phillips place, so I can't drink. You want to give kids an excuse

not to drink. So by all means, buy a breathalyzer and have it at the home. And that will give your kid an excuse not to drink. So your kid can say, well, I cannot drink because my dad's got a breathalyzer. He's going to be, he's going to insist on testing me when I get home. Think about excuses you can give your kid. You want to be the evil parent. You want your kid to be able to say, I can't do that because my evil parents will do X. My dad will make me blow in the breathalyzer. Breathalizers are cheap. Give your kid an opportunity to blame you for doing the right thing.

All right. And how about sexual activity? So I believe that sexual activity is intended for a married couple. and I believe that we want to teach that to our kids. And I again describe Marlo Phillips, a true story using her real name in the book. Her parents had that same belief, and they were strict.

They would not allow her to be alone with a boy throughout her high school years. And she was like, that is so ridiculous. My best friend, she was a little. with her boyfriend the entire weekend. Her parents were away. She was alone with her boyfriend the entire weekend. And I'm not allowed to be with a boyfriend for, this is child abuse. I'm going to call child protective services. And her mom said, all right, here's the phone. She said, I'm going to have to be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the way you guys are abusing me. And then she went

away to college. She went to the University of Virginia Charlottesville. And she told me at the beginning of her second year she had an epiphany, she suddenly realized, I'm the only girl here who's not going to have to be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the way my parents treated me. She said, all these other girls here, they're coming to me, they're saying, do you think this picture I'm putting on Instagram, do you think it's too skanky or maybe not skanky enough? Do you think I'm giving oral sex to too many guys or maybe not enough guys? And she wants to grab these girls and say, have you no dignity? have you no self-concept that all you care about is what the other guys think?

And she realized, my parents may raise me right, that I have dignity, that I have self-concept, that my self-concept does not depend on what the boys think of me. And yeah, it's a toxic culture for girls out there that's all about what the boys think of how you look. and getting down on your knees and giving oral sex to other guys. And yes, the best parent is both strict and loving. And the mainstream culture right now is about girls getting down there on their knees

and giving oral sex to boys they barely know. You don't want that for your daughter. And you have to make that very clear. So you talk about it explicitly and encourage her to make these different. You insist on it, yeah. You have to, the best parent is both strict and loving. And American parents are confused. They think you have to choose between being strict or loving,

but the best parent is both strict and loving. A follow up on the normophobia discussion a minute ago because we talked on our last episode about the trans stuff and children and so much has happened. I mean, a week is like a year on that front these days, the Supreme Court just heard a big case on it and so on. But we've seen a few things in the news lately that have been pretty disturbing, and I'd love to get your take.

In the wake of that Supreme Court case, CNN decided to bring on a bunch of children who CNN says are allegedly trans, you know, believing that they're, in quote, the wrong body and are actually the opposite sex of the one they are, in some cases with their parents, to talk about just how awful the fact that they're necessary, medication is being debated by the U.S. Supreme Court. What was that issue in that case for those not aware is the some odd half of the United States have passed laws banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children, for chill for minors. And because it's been found by objective studies in places like the UK and elsewhere that they actually are potentially very dangerous

for children. And they can sterilize you and remove all sexual function and pleasure for the rest of your life and how can a 10 year old consent to any of that so CNN puts on this panel and they have this 10 year old child who I believe is a boy who's posing as a girl uh named I don't know the kid's name but the the boy posing as the girl is trying to express their fear over this country and what's happening now and you I'd love to get your thoughts on this clip it's uh it's uh it's a Is it SOT 5? Kelly, let's play it. What concerns have you had about speaking out? That I'm going to be, like, murdered.

Like, one day, I'm going to be walking down the street and somebody's going to come up and, like, shoot me or something. That's a really scary thing to be worrying about it 10 years old. Yeah, that should not be a worry. Michelle, what's going through your mind as you hear your daughter say this? It's hard to hear. would say that. And she asked me three questions after she heard who won the election.

Are we going to have to move? Are they going to take me away from you? And am I not going to be able to get my medicine? It's just, it's frightening. Your thoughts? Well, I'm very troubled because so much of this is an artifact of me. modern medicine. Recall that synthetic hormones were not a thing until really 80 years ago. This entire transgender movement is a creation of modern medicine. It was not with us before the 20th century.

Let's be straight. Lesbian gay has always been with us. It's mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Transgender is not a thing, despite claims made by the transgender movement, the notion that there have always been boys who insist their girls and girls who insist their boys is really a very modern development. It's a creation of modern medicine. Those medicines that that child talked about didn't exist a century ago, didn't exist a thousand years ago, could not have been obtained a hundred years ago. And is this, to what extent is this a real biological phenomenon? To what extent is this transgender movement created by the cultural movement and the politics?

You know what? We don't actually have to guess. Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Stanford Medical School did a study of 1,500 young adults. 20 to 35 years of age and looked at their brain activity. These are young people, men and women, 20 to 35 years of age, and they are awake and they're in an MRI skin. And you're looking at their brain activity. Now, all human brains have a fingerprint, a neural fingerprint

that is more unique to you than your own fingerprint on your finger. That's been known for many years. And the researchers wanted to know how does a man, does a man's fingerprint differ from a woman's fingerprint? And the image that they obtained, that the graph that they showed is really astonishing. And there it is. So the women are- For the listening audience, it shows in the top left quadrant, a bunch of red dots in the bottom right quadrant, a bunch of blue dots, and there's zero overlap. the blue is male.

Yes, there's no overlap. So the women are up in one corner and the men are all down in the other corner and there's no overlap. And the difference between the men and the women is larger than the variation among the men and the women. And what this graph is showing very clearly is that whatever is going on in the brain in a man's brain at rest is different from what's going on in a woman's brain address. There were 1,0005. individuals. Now, in a survey conducted earlier this year, more than 3% of American high school kids said that they were trans. Well, 3% of 1,500 would be 45. We ought to find 45 people in the middle or on the other, or crossing over, but we found zero.

zero and more from this study okay so the researchers found so what does that tell us what does that tell us it is telling us that these kids are confused an x x an x y male that child in that video we just saw as an x y male every cell in that individual's body is x y male they may take female hormones They may be castrated, but they are still an X, Y, male. And in my book, Why Gender Matters, I show that boys see differently, they hear differently, they smell differently than girls do. And that will not change. Now, that doesn't mean that all boys are one way and all girls are another way. There's great variation among boys and there's great variation among girls.

and we should celebrate and acknowledge those variations. But male and female are biological realities. They are not social constructs. And pretending that that is not so. And castrating boys and giving them female hormones is not going to be in that boy's best interest. That is what this research is showing us. possibly there may be rare exceptions. We can debate that case.

But the comprehensive review coming out of the United Kingdom by Dr. Cass and her colleagues strongly suggests that in the great majority of cases, in the great majority of cases, pre-puberital kids should not be transitioning to, the other sex. But I want to finish that Stanford study because they also found with these very high resolution functional MRI scans and the sophisticated analysis that they were doing, they found that they could analyze the brains of the men and they could predict with high accuracy cognitive function, including intelligence for the men.

But those rules that they came up with to predict intelligence. and men were of zero value in predicting intelligence and women. Conversely, they came up with rules that could predict with high accuracy, cognitive function, including intelligence in women. But those rules had predicted intelligence and women were of zero value in predicting intelligence and men. These findings tell us that whatever it is that determines intelligence in the brain of a man does not predict intelligence in brains of women.

Whatever it is that determines intelligence in the brain of a woman does not predict intelligence in the brain of a man. Now, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, if you subscribe to the New York Times, if you listen to every program on national public radio, you heard no mention of this study conducted by the Stanford Medical School and published in one of our most prestigious scholarly journals. If you subscribe to my free newsletter, you would have heard about it. But our mainstream media, our mainstream media, never mentioned it. So go to my website. You know what's interesting, though. I do find it interesting how these parents, these parents lean in. And in that clip for the listening audience, the young boy posing as a girl,

is listening to the mother who's crying over the child's potential loss of access to these pills. And the child reaches up to comfort the mother. The child, like, touches the mother from, down below, which is a reversal, right, of the way this is a 10-year-old kid, it's supposed to be. And I, you know, all I can think of is this, this meme. Charlie Kirk sent it out. I'm sure he may not have been the first, but it was if your child, if you think you're trans, you have a mental illness. If your child thinks he or she is trans, it's the mother who has the mental illness. It's the parents who had, like, and I cannot help but notice over and over and over,

you see parents who are weirdly almost needy of this thing. Like they won't, you write about this in the book. They won't say that they're having a boy when the ultrasound shows the kid has X, Y, chromosomes. You know, the baby, they're going to wait for the kid to tell them what they are. And then that leads me to one other video I wanted to show you because we showed it on the show. Or we haven't yet, but it's disturbing. I can't remember whether we did or not, frankly. But anyway, it's a dad.

normally wouldn't, I don't bring parents and children, you know, onto the show or show their videos ever if they haven't, you know, put something out intentionally. If they want us to be talking about it, then I think it's fair game. And that's what this dad wants. He's in the UK. His name is Jonathan Jolie, J-O-L-Y, and he has a boy who he's now raising as a girl named Eadie. They have almost four million followers on TikTok. And all this dad, dad does is update us with his boy looking more and more like a girl at a very young age. And it's a very almost sexualized looking exchange. And what they're doing to, quote, Edy is very reminiscent to me of what like John Bonae Ramsey looked like, a sexualized child

with the hair and the makeup. But I'm not an expert. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Hey guys, so Edy wants to do a summer holiday morning routine and get ready with me and show you guys what her skin care is and her room is and as she picks her outfit and all that cool. So that is the skincare element of the video complete. What's next, Edy? I think I'm going to do my hair next. How do you get your hair so wonderful? Maybe not in the morning because it doesn't look that wonderful. And there are other videos of the parents putting a lot of makeup on Edy, very sort of sexy makeup, heavy eyeliner, wet lip gloss.

I find it very disturbing, Doc. What do you make of this? Okay, that's just creepy. That's really creepy. And that's extremely creepy. and, you know, we could speculate regarding that father's psychopathology and why he is doing that. And I don't want to speculate. But I think we need to focus on the child.

You made reference to the new chapter in the new edition of the collapse of parenting. I was talking with a parent in Orange County, California, and she's been trying to get pregnant for three years. and she and her husband finally did get pregnant. She was very excited. She was telling everyone at the school, including people she barely knew. And she told a fellow teacher at the school, she said, guess what? We're having a boy. And her colleague said, don't you think you should let the baby decide?

And that is indeed a thing that her colleague reprimanded her, that the colleague thought you should wait and not assign a sex because there are indeed many Americans now. who think that sex is assigned at birth and you should wait until the child is three or four years of age and then let the child decide, give the child a gendered neutral name at birth and then that the child choose. And if the child was assigned male at birth, but they decide that they are female, then you should raise the child as a girl, which leads them the road to castration and opposite at sex hormones, et cetera. And I felt this was necessary to introduce a new chapter

that wasn't in the original version 10 years ago, the new chapter titled babies, because this is really harmful and it is psychotic. It is utterly detached from reality. And sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is recognized at birth because, indeed, you are born male or female. And those differences that the Stanford University group recognized

in adults are present in the baby prior to birth. We have other studies of women in the third trimester where they've done high-resolution MRI scans of the baby still in its mother's womb. And they find the same differences in the cognitiveity of the male brain compared with the female brain. Because Genesis 127 in the image of God, he created him male and female. He created them. It doesn't say black and white he created them. It doesn't say, Asian and Hispanic, he created them. Black, white, Asian, and Hispanic are indeed man-made categories. But male and female are of God. You are, in fact, born male or female. There is a rare category called Intersex, about 2,000 and 10,000 individuals are indeed born, both male and female. That's a rare

pathology on the same order of magnitude as Siamese twins. But for 99.98% of individuals, you are either male or female. And that's the way we are born and made. Hopefully, the U.S. Supreme Court will see it that way as well and will issue a sensible ruling from what we saw. I predict they will. Dr. Sacks, so great talking to you. Love, love, love when you come on. Please come back soon. Thanks again for inviting me. And don't forget, the name of the book is The Collapse of Parenting, the revised edition. You can get it right now. do so, don't let it sell out from all the listeners who are now rushing to read more about Dr.

Sachs's longitudinal cohort studies that are, that separate fact from fiction and feelings. And this is an area that's sorely in need of that. I hope it was helpful to you, to you. It certainly was to me. My guests today were searching for self-improvement and a way to contribute to the good of society when they joined an organization called Nexium. They found each other and got married, but they also found utter darkness and depravity in one man's desire for ultimate power and control over women. Sarah Edmondson and her husband, Anthony Nippy Ames, are former members now of the cult called Nexium and the hosts of the podcast, A Little Bit Culty. And they join me now.

It's so nice to meet you, Sarah. Thank you for being here. You as well, Nippy. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. And thank you also for being such a proponent of anti-nexium from the beginning. We appreciate that. Of course. I remember so clearly where I was when that New York Times article hit featuring you

and a lengthy article of you coming forward about what you'd been through. And I had chills. I just couldn't believe it. You were so beautiful. You were accomplished. you were so raw about how you'd been sucked into this thing. And not for nothing, but it happened in my hometown of Albany, New York, which was just so strange to me.

Like Albany, you don't think of Albany as like, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't feel culty, right, to use your word. It's like hardworking people. It's kind of like the Midwest. You know, I would think something like this would happen more in California. But it happened in Albany, and you were in it too, Nippy. And I know, you know, on the bright side it brought you together. not without a hell of a lot of trauma. So thank you for telling the story. I guess let's start at the

beginning for the audience members who've never heard of, you know, this, or at least if they've heard of it, they don't really know what it is. Because I do think, much like some other cults, many other cults, it had some pluses, which is why smart, vibrant people like you got drawn in. So talk about how you first heard about it and what was attractive about it to you. Sure. It was 2005. I was in a aspiring actress and I was looking for more meaning and purpose community in my life. I met a really talented filmmaker who I admired. I'd just seen his film. What the bleep do we know? And the long and short of it is he said, well, if you like my film, then you'll probably like this course I just took. And as somebody who is into self-improvement and workshops, my parents are both in the therapy field.

It seemed like a no-brainer. I did not do any research, unfortunately. I've learned from that mistake now. but I jumped in. I really wanted to develop myself and work through limiting beliefs. And that was the, that was the beginning. And it was wonderful at first. Yeah. How about you, Nippy? My story is less glamorous. I had an old high school girlfriend who I went to boarding school with and she's from the area. And she had taken the training and I'd run into her in New York and she kind of hounded me for about a year and a half. So I kind of went kicking and screaming to the training, in part because of what she was saying and in part because she knew me when we dated, she knew I was into the leadership stuff and all that stuff. And it was aligned with me and,

you know, my principles. And finally, after kind of being counted about it, I said, fine, I'll do your cult. So I called it a cult from the get jokingly. You did. But did you have any hint or that was just purely a joke? It was purely a joke. Well, it sounded like a cult. And I didn't really have a strong understanding of what a cult is. It just sounded weird and it sounded like you're following this guy and I was like, yeah, I'll do your cult. And I kind of jokingly went up and did it. And it didn't seem, I mean, it was weird. I mean, it was, it was, it was weird. It was the whole time. But I kind of took it, you know, in stride and was like, well, you know, what's the worst thing that could happen? Well, cut too. Right. Right. It's so it is through,

this is kind of the study in how how people can be manipulated, you know, how, how, very bright, intelligent, accomplished people can be manipulated beyond what they ever thought possible, manipulated into doing things like self-harm against their better instincts and so on. It's like they separate you from yourself. They don't they not only separate you from your family and your friends, they separate you from yourself, which is really one of the, probably the worst things that they can do. But all right, again, I'm getting ahead of myself because before we get to that, chapter. There's the, there's the wonderful chapter. You know, I talked to Catherine Oxenberg about this,

princess and famed Hollywood actress. And she was saying the reason she got into it with her daughter, India, was they were just looking for female empowerment and to do better in business. They were both aspiring business women. And they offered a lot of classes along these lines. So it's kind of, where do you go? Where do you go for female improvement or better business acumen if you're not going to take a full MBA program, Sarah, right? I mean, was there any of that sold to you? Oh, absolutely. In fact, they even sold it as a more practical and useful MBA.

That's what I thought I was getting. And I remember when Catherine and India came and did the program. I'm so happy because I loved them both and wonderful, bright, beautiful energy. And that was such a big part of it as well. It wasn't just learn how to do business, learn how, what success is from the inside out, how to map out your goals and work through things that you're, you know, you're limiting blocks, your beliefs about yourself and the world, but also as a community of like-minded people and people who were going to achieve big things and wanted to do it with

people that were in a similar mindset and do it together. So I have very fond memories of that time period. Right. It always starts well. That's why people stay. So explain what happened with the money because I think this story is very telling. And I am also attracted by, this woman's message. Like, I can already see why you were like, oh, okay, because you tried to complain or object a little to the expense of it when you were first being recruited, and they had an answer for everything. Oh, yes. I was recruited by the best. I actually put a deposit down because I wanted to take advantage of the 48-hour discount, which is a red flag. I've worn people about with sales, pressures, tactics. I didn't know that at the time. And then

I tried to get my money back because I was, you know, an actress living in a basement suite. I didn't have $2,000 to pay for a five-day training. And they said, well, you're in your 20s and you don't have $2,000. What's up with that? And basically was questioning why I didn't have money, why I had money issues and wanted to know if I was ready to change that. And do I want to be the master of my own ship? Of course I did. And then you said something like, well, what if I'm in there and my agent calls with a role for me? Yes. Well, I'm in this training. And they had. an instant answer for that too. Yeah. You're going to be waiting by your phone your whole life or you want to create your own, create your own life, be the master of your own destiny, the captain of your ship or something like that. It's your first experience with gaslighting. My first experience of gaslighting did not know what that was. And high sales pressure tactics. But your instincts are telling you one thing and they're trying to tell you you're basically a fool not to listen to your instincts. Those are the things that are holding you back. Exactly. And what you said earlier about separating you from yourself, that was the beginning. That was the beginning right there when my internal gut was saying, something's not right here. But I also have the belief, and this was fortified further on in the curriculum, that when you're uncomfortable, it's something to look at. It's a, you know, you're hitting up against a limitation, no pain, no gain, which is true, but that doesn't give any room for gut instinct. And when you're separated from yourself and separated from your moral compass, that's when you're

things can go awry. And that was a very slow process. That was from day one, dripped out until, you know, 12 years later. This is why it's so important to keep away from these people to begin with, you know, to like, the secret is almost just don't get near them, because they're so effective. And we're all vulnerable to messages like this. Same, honestly, weirdly, when it comes to news. Like I'm very careful about my news sources, because before you know it, I mean, you can be a little crazy if you take in too many news sources from the wrong people. It can really drive you a little nuts. So the whole answer to it is the screening up front before you would let people access your brain and your heart.

Great advice. Yeah, I would add, you know, all these things are case by case and people are susceptible in different ways. And the predators like Keith Renner, who are very good at it are very good at spotting that and they're proactive in doing it. What they have going for them a lot of the times is they know what it's like to be you with your vulnerabilities and they know how to spot them and exploit them. People who are more susceptible, they can probably spot and they spend more time with. And with people like Keith, you know, for me, I wasn't targeted in the same way. He was targeting women.

So I was more peripheral to some of his abuse, but the people that were susceptible to what he was looking for the people that he spent more time with. And he was, you know, if you could turn pro and abusing people, he was a professional at doing it. And that's ultimately what came out, you know, when everything came out about what he was doing and how he was doing. Well, people talk so much about how he was this gifted, brilliant man. And it's true that in this one lane, he was quite gifted. Yes. Not the lane. Look at him now. I mean, this is like, this looks like somebody who's trying to be a cult leader. He's got the Jesus hair, the beard. You know, it's like, in retrospect, you're like, oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, that picture doesn't do him any justice. No, he did get a makeover,

by the way, and I want to say 2010 or 11, where he was a little more clean cut and would wear, like, poloed shirts and nice jeans. Yeah, because the people around him were like, you got to clean up a bit because you're not. But he would spend that, you know, he would spend that in the same way that say, you know, Einstein was quirky and he didn't care about that stuff. You know, that's Keith. He's just Keith. He's being him. He doesn't put value on the charitable things. He's too spiritual. He's himself and all that stuff. But it's a total affectation. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys, you've talked on your podcast about the steps to realize you're in a cult or getting recruited by a cult. And people do need to be aware. There are tons of cults. It is not just this one.

They're all over the United States. And you get, usually you get roped in the way you two did, unknowingly. So one of the first red flags is what we just talked about, which is a lot of money. They want you to pay, and it tends to be escalatory, like a pyramid scheme, like more and more and more for the next level. Because ideally what they want you to feel at the end of the five day is it was super valuable, but also there's something in you that needs to be fixed. And of course, they're providing the answers to fix you. And that's the only way, or that's another red flag. This is the path. forward. This is the way to evolve whatever it was that you've just realized about yourself is broken. And that's, by the way, like, very commonplace. Nexium is, I don't know if you are afraid of Scientology or not, we're not anymore, but Scientology, landmark, like all of these programs

are all based on the same premise. You know, if you want to transform your life, you have to pay money. You have to pay to play, and this is the path. And to justify the buy-in, too. You know, you're there working for five days. You want to make sure that you feel that your investment was worth it. And so they'll say stuff like, well, was having that awareness about yourself worth the price of admission? And you're kind of going, maybe. I could have gotten that from a book, but I did spend two grand to be here. We have confirmation bias.

Yeah. So here's a question for you. Now in retrospect, knowing what you know, do you feel like, take Keith out of it? Do you feel like the emissaries around Keith were all along, like knowingly pushing a pyramid scheme or whether everyone was brainwashed by this guy, you know? I believe he was at the top actively manipulating. But how about everybody around? Allow me to feel that one.

Nipi loves it answering this question. So here's my delineation. And you can take it for what it's worth. I think there's a lot of people there. I'd say 98% of them, 99%. of them who were there because we thought we were doing something good. And the closer to Keith Rainier you got, the more abuse you experienced. And in cases of the worst case scenario, he was sexually abusing them, and they didn't think they were doing it being sexually abused, they thought

they were going on a spiritual path with someone sexually. And they were told to keep that secret. So 99% of the people stayed in the organization based on the capacity of the people around him to lie. And we underestimated the people around him, their capacity to lie to us and keep us loyal to someone that they knew who wasn't, they knew he wasn't who they were pretending he was, meaning he presented himself as celibate, he presented himself as these things, and the people around him knew that he wasn't that, and they were propagating the lie. And they were propagating the lie because if they didn't believe in the lie, they had to admit to themselves they were being abused. So the buy-in for them was my entire life is a fraud, and I'm and I'm propagating this myth

knowingly, but if I let other people know, that means I have to admit I'm abused. So it's like knowing and not knowing at the same time, right? But a lot of people made major life decisions based on their capacity to lie, because if I had known that's what he was doing, and I found out afterwards that some of my friends that, you know, someone I knew was sexually abused by him and all that. If I had known that stuff when I had first done it, I'd have been in there raising hell from the get. But because I didn't know that stuff when I was peripheral, I didn't think this stuff was going on because I didn't think the people that I knew and were friends with were being abused because I thought they would have said something. So, you know, and I didn't know what I was looking at. So, and I would have protected them.

I would have been the first one in there. And I think they knew that. So I think that that's why they didn't want to tell me that. So there's a lot of things keeping this thing propped up. And once the truth came out, you know, everything fell apart. And so that's my delineation. Like, it's hard for me to, I never knowingly lied about Keith Renere and who he was. I was unwittingly aligned with someone abusing people.

And that was, you know, I had to go fix that. You know, and Sarah and I, you know, have done everything we can to fix that. But the people that were close to him have to reconcile being abused by him and then lying about who he was to keep people loyal to. Can I tell you guys something? It's kind of a double way in me. Yeah. I've said this before.

In fact, whenever I talk about nexium, this comes up for me. Because in many ways it reminds me of Fox News, my time at Fox News, when Roger Ailes was running it. He was like a cult leader. And Fox News, when I was there, was in many ways like a cult. It was definitely, quote, culty. He was the leader whose judgment was not to be questioned. You were to defend him at all cost and not question his genius. Anybody who left was otherized and demonized immediately.

You know, even just a correspondent who, like, got fired. You know, it didn't want to go. Doesn't matter. You're on the outs. It's us versus them. And I, as I got higher in the organization, you know, closer to the son and got to know him better and better, all I could think of was that Carly Simon song, sometimes I wish, often I wish that I never knew all those secrets of yours.

I was getting exposed to the reality. And I had a real wrestling session with myself on an ongoing basis about who is he? Who is this man? Is he this all-knowing television genius? Or is he this frail, conspiratorial, paranoia, guy who's a genius at messaging and I've been sucked into it to be a cog in this massive wheel. And honestly, I don't know if I have a clear answer on that even right now, but I totally get what you went through. Well, the questions you're asking are valuable. And that's why our podcast is called A Little Bit Coulty, because the abuses of power that went on in cults or go on in cults aren't proprietary to cults. They go on a lot of places.

and putting language to it and shining a light on it is kind of in our lane. And the fact that you can make those connections is great, I think, valuable for a lot of people. Absolutely. And it's so important right now because I think even if you use the word cult, people get a little defensive. I think it's not a cult traditionally doesn't have all of the markers. But another way of saying it is this a healthy place for me to be. I remember when you were dealing with that publicly, I got goosebumps just now as you were talking, that I started to make those correlations without obviously knowing everything that you just said.

But anytime that there is someone who you can't question without getting in trouble and there's this air of fear in an workplace environment, don't have to call it a call. It's just not good for you. You can't express your true opinions. You don't want to say what's really on your mind. And like you said, you're separated from yourself because you know, you want to keep your job. That's not, it's not healthy. Never mind healthy, whatever. Does that make sense? And at Fox, similar to nexium, it came out in the whole Me Too scandal that he had this secret floor at Fox with these private detectives and others who would be digging up dirt on his

enemies, anybody who turned on him. It was a very risky thing to do to challenge him in any way, which is why his Me Too scandal went on for so long without anybody speaking up about it. People understood you didn't cross him. and these leaders, they have that ability of scaring you through their emissaries, through their messaging, you know, they have ways of letting you know that you'll pay if you cross them or the group. And it's amazing how, again, you can be pulled into this even though you don't think you're one of them. At Nexium, it was a step further where you guys actually called him Vanguard.

You know, he had like the name. Was that, at first did that feel silly? Were you like, what? Oh, God. At first and at last, Megan. The whole time it was that, you know, it was just. But also it became normalized. Like, you know, people would say,

Vanguard means it's the leader of a philosophical movement, and that's what he's done. So, you know, you call him Vanguard. Some people called him V. Out of school. I know, out of the center, we called him Keith. But it just became normal. like all the things that were weird at first, the sashes, the bowing.

And that was introduced on day one as these are the things we do, as in, you know, if you go to someone's house and they take off their shoes, you take off your shoes, because that's the polite thing to do. So you go to their center, you wear the sash, you call them Vanguard. You kind of just like, I'm just doing it because you're asking me to, and I'm taking off my shoes. And then it becomes, it's a courtesy. Yeah, it's a courtesy. Yeah.

And then it's a dojo. So this is like a martial art system. We wear these sashes. It denotes what level of rank you are, just like in a dojo. You don't want to wear one? Well, let's look at that. What area in your life do you feel like you might have an issue with authority? And then, again, you don't know that you're being gaslit because they're saying it nicely.

They're there to help you with your authority issues, which, by the way, some of us may also have. So there's, like, truth mixed in with the gaslighting. And then you're questioning yourself and you're like, whatever, it's a piece of fabric. I'm just going to wear the stupid sash. It was done effectively. I mean, Lauren Salsman was a really good head trainer, and she would teach it in a way to normalize it pretty quickly. She was the daughter of one of the co-founders, Nancy Salsman, and would go on to become Sarah's best friend. Keep going. Yes. And she would do it in a way. It's like, look, we do these things at work. We do these things, you know, we have titles like Your Honor and justice systems. And so she was drawing parallels in the curriculum drew parallels in society of like where you could go as a student.

Okay, I'll wear it for this training. Right. And so slowly you're starting to become acclimated and indoctrinated into a culture that you haven't seen anything bad about yet. You just think it's weird. And some people would be okay with it. I was never really comfortable with it. But we always, I mean, for the most part, we all thought it was weird. And all of us were like, look, we got to lose the sashes. We're losing students. So it was kind of like one of those things. We all knew the optics of it. At Fox News, it was polyester bright colored dresses. Everyone has their uniform. There you go. There you go. Could have been worse. I was going to say, which is worse. They said all these wonderful things about Keith. He's this, he's at the other thing.

And I remember talking to Catherine Oxenberg about when she got her first look at him. And of course, she comes from Hollywood. She's like, you know, she knows what an attractive person looks like, you know, in a way Californians know acutely. And I remember her being like, she was like, that's it? That's him. Did you, like that's Vanguard? Do you, did you have a moment like that when you first got eyes on him? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he just looked like a schlubby, you know, volleyball playing.

I think he actually had any pads on when I first met him. I'll take it to him. I mean, look, I played sports my whole life. I was a college athlete and they were trying to sell this guy as an athlete. And I went and showed up to one of the volleyball things, you know, my friend took me one night. It was late, and I was kicking and screaming and going to that because in my mind, I was going to take a training and peace out. And I saw him moving around. I was like, do you guys really think this guy's an athlete? Like, look at them.

They were all marveling at how he played volleyball. And I'm over there just kind of going, oh, my God. Like, what is going on here? Wait, standby because we have a little video of this. I'll show the audience and pick it back up. Oh, great. Yeah. Don't take my word for it.

Yeah, we can practice. generating an extreme feeling of joy over anything. There's Allison Mack of Smallville. Our methods that we have, especially in 2C. Meeting for the first time. It's one of our intensions. Thank you. That was true.

I really want to. Do I hug? And I kiss. Oh, too much. Good voice. Thank you. Me too. Oh, my gosh.

It was a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Not a strong selling point. And he had, you know, I always, joke about this. And I always gave the people that, a person that enrolled me a lot of crap for this because I was like, why is he putting the fact that he's a judo champion in sixth grade on his resume? Like, why is that a selling point? I was like, you know, there's a lot of things that I did in

sixth grade that were as successful that I've forgotten about. Like I don't, like, it's just, he's a judo champion. I was like, well, get over it. Why didn't he continue? Why didn't he go into like, you know, mixed martial arts in his 20? That would be more impressive. But the sixth grade achievements on his resume. I was runner up for a class president in the fifth grade. I'm really proud of you, Megan. Thank you. Thank you.

I feel really good about it. When all was sudden done, I don't think, he hadn't yet been tried. So it wasn't all sudden done. But after we get to, you know, and we'll get to this, but he got arrested. I had an interview with his lawyer, Mark Agnifalo. It was contentious. Yes, we saw that. I forgot about that.

Yeah. Remember that? Can we cuss? And I don't think he was. Yeah, you can. B-S. That was bullshit. I was pissed after that.

I was so grateful for you, though, for asking the tough questions. Yeah, that was great. You were like, seriously, Mark? He was like, this is New York. We don't do slavery here. What do you mean? We pick ourselves up. We're strong.

New Yorkers are, I'm like, okay, you can be strong and be sexually manipulated as the women are alleging here. He was like, what do you mean? New York jury's not going to buy that. Well, okay. So here's a little clip where I got into it. with him about what an amazing accomplished man, Keith Reneery supposedly was. Check it out. About Keith Reneery and his tenuous relationship with the truth. He claimed he graduated from high school and started RPI at age 16. That's not true. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know when he started

He claimed he could make full sentences by the age of one. If exaggerating about one's resume is a crime, I think we're all in trouble. No, I'm not. I'm probably not either, but other than the two of us? This guy is a liar. He has a long history of lying about himself and his achievements, including his time at RPI, where he was a 2.2 GPA and not a triple major who set records at the school. That doesn't worry me in the least. No? No.

My God. Well, my hero. My favorite line is, no, I'm not. He's like, yeah, me neither. I know. Actually, none of us really do that. That was like 19-year-old stuff. Oh, that was so great, Megan.

You made him. he's not the brightest bulb. Even you have like, we're kind of like, I don't get it. Is this the genius? But okay, you know, but the women around him seem to have been really on, and men too, but like on and kind and warm and offering something. So it wasn't all about him, Sarah. Is that correct?

Well, I want to add one caveat here. Just it's important. Like, it's easy to sit back in hindsight and make fun of it and kind of distance ourselves from what we had fallen for, I will say for me personally, I was all in on the curriculum. I was all in what I thought we were doing. So one of the things that I don't like is when people don't own what they fell for and try to distance themselves from like, you know, I fell for this.

And it kind of minimizes the story and the magnitude of what can happen. You know, for me, I was somewhat evangelical about like, hey, these are ethics, these are changing the world. Yes, I thought Keith was weird. I was hook line and sinker bought into what we were doing. And not totally sold on Keith, but didn't think there was bad things going on there in the way that they were. So I think it's important to own that that's how I got myself in the situation and not minimize the fact that I did fall for this thing. It's easy to laugh at now.

So anyway, I just think it's important. I don't want to punch down on people that are in that situation because I do think you have to go. take the bite out of that and really lean into it to understand what happened to you. So it's fun and kidding, but just putting that out there. Yeah. And it's therapeutic to laugh after the fact, too. It is. It is.

I have plenty of laugh for that guys. I would not be through this trauma if it wasn't for the way that Nippy and I can laugh about it and continue to. But to answer your question, I think for me it's a little different. I, even though he was a slub and it wasn't attracted to him, I was greatly respectful of what I thought that he built. I thought his mind created this tech, which is another red flag by the way, the curriculum. It's not a technology, but we had been so changed by it. And I thought that came from him. And I obviously now know that he stole that from a number of other modalities that already

exist and packaged it as his own. But then he was also propped up by these women that seem to have their lives together and people that I really liked and respected. So I was getting so many of my social and emotional and spiritual. spiritual needs met very, very quickly. Community, meaning I was helping myself. I was growing, but I got to help others. I got to give people the transformational experience that I was getting, which totally filled my cup. I felt special. I got taken under the wing of women that I really looked up to, and they were going to help me grow. And also it was measurable. The strife path,

the martial art system of growth was so different than acting, which had what I'd been doing before, which is, you know, you never know if you're going to bookwork or not bookwork. And now I knew I could just do boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I would evolve. Like, that's what a great promise. I didn't, again, like Nipi said, I underestimated that, you know, how much bullshit that actually was. But if it was what it said it was, it would have been amazing.

I know. I'm ready to sign up right now. I hear you. And I'm like, yeah, I want it all. And so he, you and he interacted quite a bit in the show, the VAT, you. which was on HBO, which is an excellent documentary about all of this and how he went down, has the scene of you and Keith, Sarah, you and Keith interacting as part of like your training. We've cut a little bit of it just to give the audience a flavor.

It's top two. I'm drawing a blank. That's okay. And I know I'm giving you an unbearable grief. It's okay. But if you could do it here, you can do it in New York. I know. I should know us.

All right. He's ready to have fun. Yeah? All right, okay. So, in order to have fun, we don't want anyone to get hurt. Right? No, not fun enough. Who here is here to have fun?

Fun? Woo! Come on. Fun? Yeah. Okay. You should be trying to turn up their energy level. Okay.

When the audience gives you the signal that they got it, you move, you move, you move. This is actually good. I mean, I'm listening to them like, that's all good. advice, I think. He was teaching basic rapport skills of how to lead a group in the room. But I haven't actually seen that since the vow came out. I forgot how painful that was, A, to watch and B, in the moment. And that was actually one of the only times that was ever trained by Keith, personally, in sales. And all I could think of was how beautiful you are. You're so beautiful. Like the angles of your face and the earnestness of you standing up there actually trying to learn it.

And I see it, though, like he's charming. And what he's saying. to you make sense of how to relate to a crowd. He's actually trying to improve you. He's trying to improve you, I think, to sell his products and get more buyers into his cult, no? Yes, but also he was humiliating me. I don't remember if you see it in the whole clip, but like he pushed me and pushed me and pushed me and pushed me, trying to get me to break down. And I refused to cry. And at the end, he gave me a little crumb and said, good job.

And that's when I remember, like, looking back that that's how he controlled so many of the women. He was always humiliating them subtly under the gun. eyes of trying to develop them and then would give them these little crumbs of attention and affirmation that they were on track. And he didn't really mess with me much, mostly because I think I was out in Vancouver, just bringing new fresh students to him. So he didn't do that a lot with me. But that was a particular painful moment that I'd actually completely forgot about until I saw the vow and was horrified. I also don't think you're susceptible in the same ways.

I was not susceptible in the same ways. Well, we've since learned mostly through our podcast and interviewing other, you know, survivors and experts, especially experts on gaslighting and narcissism and cults, that a lot of these guys really look for, it's such a, I hate to use the word, but like daddy issues, but like a bad attachment with their father in some case or a bad, not good attachment with the parents. So then Keith would step in and be that father figure. to a lot of these women, you know, to grow them, to coach them similar to how he was doing with

Allison in that clip. He never reached me in that way. Partly, I think, because I have a great relationship with my dad and strong attachment, if you believe in those theories with my parents. So, you mean, it got me in other ways, but not that way. Thank goodness. And also, you know, being with Nippy long-term protected me, and which I think also infuriated him, knowing what we know now. Yes. Yes. Oh, God, I can relate to all of this too. I was just thinking, like when Roger L started to feel like I was getting out from under his thumb and I was not, you know, just going to do whatever he wanted me to do or say whatever he wanted me to say, he started to insult me, like a fair amount behind the scenes to try to, you know, cut down my

confidence. And I just, I don't know if I'd identified that. I was just sort of attributed it to anger but you're giving me a new way to think of it almost. You know, like, it's a manipulation almost, like, to change you so that you'll go back to the way you were. There's a term negging. I don't know if you've heard it. I don't know the book. It's called the game. Yeah, it's from the game.

And the idea is, as I understand it, is I'll give you a little bit of approval so it feels good. And then you'll always be chasing that approval. And then also you would start and sell. person. It's actually a dating training for men to try to get women like men who can't just like date women normally would learn this way of like, yeah, it's basically dropping these little breadcrumbs of approval, but then also the negging is sort of like an insult. It's insults. It's like established interest and then take it away so that you'll want it more. It's why you see sometimes women with these men, you're like, what is going on there? Because they're like giving, it's almost like a

microcosm of sex trafficking and grooming. It's love bombing. Yeah, we've had a couple episodes where women have described this, you know, the cult of one. You know, we've had some episodes where people have described this strategy where men target women find their vulnerabilities and exploit it in that way. And depending on, I'm giving, I'm kind of out of my lane here. But depending on your attachment, say, with, you know, a loved one or previous loved one or something like that, they recognize now that you might be vulnerable to that strategy. And if not, you might be vulnerable to another one.

And this is how they operate. This is how they work. And this is how they filter a room. I think they can walk into a room, according to some interviews we've had, and spot the person just by the way they look by the carry themselves. I'm sure. That's true. So much intel and such a body of work on people that they can kind of scan a room

and go, this person probably is susceptible to this, this, this, and this. Yeah, right. And they do find out what your issues were. I mean, I was more like you, Sarah, where I didn't really have that many. I mean, thankfully, I come from a great family, though my dad died when I was young, but a very loving family and I was a strong person, but you can still get sucked in. It doesn't just happen to weak people. It happens to strong, weak, people with issues, people who have almost no issues. That's one of the things I hope people take away from your story is like absolutely yeah a lot of these women were very strong very smart accomplished and before they knew it you know they were on the table without their clothes on

saying it would be my honor if you would do this thing to me um so let's let's push it forward a little can we just talk one minute about the seagram's heirs because he he had strong and powerful and very wealthy backers, too. You wonder, like, nexium wasn't just in Albany. It was in quite a few places. You're Canadian. He branched out quite a bit, and he had some important financial backers. So can you talk about this pair of sisters, the Bronfman's?

I feel that one? I mean, you can chime in as I understand it, because, again, Sarah and I weren't the inner circle, right? So you have to understand we are observing it from the outside, but what we've gathered and what core documents have gathered is that I think, and this is what we've kind of ascertained, is once they came in, the powers that be made them special and promoted them very quickly. Sure.

As I understand it. It's like getting a Bezos or a Gates who wants to join your organization and help fund it. They were VIPs. And they were talking about. targeted, and I think Claire from my assessment was a little bit more susceptible when she was put in a position of authority and power and kind of ushered to the top where she was making decisions, but really it was Keith making decisions. Sara less so because I think Sara, you know, wanted other things. I worked with Sarah a little bit in New York City because we ran the center

there for a little bit, and I think she constantly struggled with her commitment to the organization. I think she wanted a husband, a family, and that's ultimate. what she ended up doing. So she ended up being peripheral ultimately. But her sister was in. So was Claire. Claire was the one who held on to the bitter end. I mean, she was like, the cops were taking him away.

She still like, no. Still till now. Yeah. Yeah. Still now. Wow. She's in jail. And she got the maximum sentence for her crimes.

She got triple the suggested amount. Because she refused to disavow Keith in court. Incredible. This is, I think I said, but this is the, this is, the air to the Seagram's liquor fortune and beverage fortune. Yeah. Okay. So you guys were, things were kind of rolling along.

And then something critical happened to you, Sarah, where your best friend, who we mentioned, who was the daughter of the co-founder, Lauren, came to you and wanted you to do something that would make you extra special, like sort of an exclusive thing. She wanted to share with you as your best friend and in this lane, if you. female empowerment. Can you explain what happened? Sure. And there's a lot of steps that led to this point. And this is often where people stop and go, sorry, what happened? And I need to give a little backstory, which is this is, you know, 12 years into the organization. We've had our first child. I'm starting to pull back. I'm starting to recognize I want other things and being a mom is more

important to me than growing this company. And I get invited to a secret sorority. I've never been in a sorority, a secret club. for women by women, a badass, sounds so dumb now, badass bitch boot camp, where we're going to work on ourselves and take the tools to a whole new level, although it's got nothing to do with nexium. And I sign up thinking this is going to take everything I've been working on to the next level. Also, Lauren invited me and I trust her implicitly. She was also, you know, she's our son's godmother married us at our wedding.

So, you know, I say, why not? And it's, it was many, many, many steps that occurred from saying yes to that and then being fully committed to this organization called DOS, which I didn't know what it meant until after the fact. Yeah, I can feel my body, I haven't talked about this in a while. My body started to go into like a little bit of a trauma response. Yeah, I can see it. I aware that I have to be careful. But tell me, what can I tell you about it? Oh, I'm sorry. I can see it. And I know people who have been through like really traumatic things, this can happen. It can have a physical effect just to speak about it. So I can help fill in some of the blanks. Oh, I can see you're getting upset. I'm sorry. I know what you've been through. It's okay. I thought it was, it's been seven years. I thought I was past it. But it's just been a while to revisit it. Well, it's deeply traumatizing because it's this organization. to which you've devoted your life, your best friend, a person you trusted, a person you thought loved you who asked you to do this extraordinary thing and manipulated you into doing it. So why don't we run a clip from The Vow, from HBO's The Vows, in which this explains, she came to you with a proposal

that you be her slave, quote, slave, she would be your master. And here's a little detail on how that was supposed to work. It's like a heightened level of a coaching relationship, which makes sense that she goes into, and we call it master slave. So what I knew at this point is that Lauren had sisters. She was part of a pod. I knew there were other sisters under Lauren.

She said, one day you'll have slaves, and you'll have six slaves, and then you'll be a grandmaster. And I'm like, now keep in mind, every step along the way is totally weird. just like sashes are weird, but then Lauren explains it, and it's like a little less weird. And I think we should tell the audience about collateral before we talk about what happened next, because this was an important piece of the story. Can you explain what collateral meant within X-EM or within DOS?

Sure. So even before DOS was introduced, there was this term called collateral. And brilliantly, Keith set this up for years. before this ever happened. I mean, think about if I joined in 2005 and they would have told me that 12 years later I would have the leader's initials on my body. I probably would have run for the hills, but didn't happen that that way. And I would say in around 2010, 11, when collateral got introduced, and it was earlier. It was much earlier than this. It was 2017 that I got branded. And collateral was basically a term that, well, it's a term in the English language, but nexium, it was something that you'd put down as a commitment against your word.

Is that same? Yeah. Yeah, like if you were going to do a goal around weight loss or writing a screenplay, you'd say, if I don't do X, Y, and Z, I'm putting this $500 down. It's consequence. Yeah, going to go to charity or something, or I'm going to donate it to the center, or I'm going to, whatever. And that was also mixed with penance, which I think if anyone's religious, I would not religious.

I didn't understand the term or have any background to it, but penance was a part of it as while people were doing penances and putting down collaterals against their word. And in nexium, your word, your commitment, your integrity, it was one of the highest values, which may not make sense to the average listener, but there's just certain components of the belief system that was slowly infiltrated into our belief system over time that was of the utmost value. And one of those things was commitment, your word. And so it was very normal to give collateral to back something up.

And then it went next level in DOS, as I understand it, where they didn't want you to just give $500. They wanted something much more personal and potentially damaging. Yeah. And every step along the way with DOS, there was more and more collateral. And then once I would finally fully committed, I found out that there was going to be collateral collected every month. So people were giving things like nude photos, like sexual videos, false testimonies, false accusations of like the worst possible thing you could say against your parents that your master would hold so that if you ever defected or left the group, that those things would be released, those letters would be released.

One person I think that wrote that their parents had molested them or that there was a lawyer involved who said that she had falsified evidence in a trial that would have gotten her. disbarred. Terrible, terrible, terrible things. But these things were meant, we were told, to help you keep your word, never to be released. Otherwise, that would be blackmail, which is what it was. That's the appropriate word. I mean, speaking of Scientology. Yeah, exactly. And just to jump to later, deprogramming and watching going clear and all the Scientology content, I was just blown away by the similarities there, the collection of all the secrets, which also happened in Xium even before DOS was introduced. When you came to do a training, you'd write down on the intake form, like what your goals were, why you were there. What was your worst moment ever in your life? What was your worst decision? I mean, depending on bad things you may or may not have done in your life, those things in the wrong hands, 100% be blackmail. So, oh, this is their strategy. Yeah, very scary. So your best friend, Lauren, asks you to engage

in this ceremony where you're going to take off your clothes. And first of all, that must have been, like, you know, women will change in front of each other or going out or whatever, like, you don't ask your friend to get naked in front of you. So was that, do you remember having a big reaction to that moment? Yeah, so when she invited me to Doss originally, what she told me was that I was going to be having a special, very special ceremony with my other sisters who hadn't met yet in the sorority, you know, initiation. She didn't say anything about being naked.

She said we were going to get a matching tattoo that was really pretty. And she showed me the location on her body and told me it was dime size. That's what she told me. On the night of is when she asked me to get naked and put a blindfold on. And it's just like, you know, even now to this day, it's difficult talking about it, obviously, but explaining why somebody would say yes to that. And ironically, recently just talking to somebody who was in a fraternity, heard my story and he's like oh i get it like when i was in a fraternity like we're sort of agreeing to

like this is a game and like you're you know you're above me and i'm gonna let you paddle me and like okay but it's part of the you know we're just in a fraternity you're not really my master you're not really I'm not really your slave and that's always how I felt about it so when she asked me to do that it was kind of like okay okay we're doing this all right like and I you know I knew Lauren well I had been um you know I changed in front of her and like laid down naked and forever like it's just it's It's crazy. I understand how crazy it is. And, you know, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to explain 12 years of indoctrination to lead one to this point to understand what could be going on in my psychology that I would say, okay, and not like, this is fucking weird and like, call Nipi

to come pick me up because he'd drop me off to have what he thought was soup and salad girls night or something, right? Oh boy. You guys, you guys are married at this point, right? You're married. You were married. You had your son at this point? Two-year-old. He was three. Yeah, almost three. He turned three, five days after we blew it up.

Yes, that's right. So you, I mean, this is just like you, you know, you did absolutely nothing wrong. Your decisions are completely understandable, given the context. And she was the villain here. And so now she reveals it's not a tattoo. It's a brand. And that, too, was misrepresented. Like, what am I getting branded on?

me. Like what, and she did not, what did she tell you it was? She told, so at this point, I'm with all my sisters. So there was four other women and Lauren and then the doctor, I say that loosely. Yeah, air quotes. Branding, yeah. And she showed all of us and she said it was a symbol for the elements and it was, I still can't remember if she said Greek or Latin or something, but it was another language symbolically and also looked like the elements, like a symbol for water and air and earth and So it was a symbol. But what we were told it meant overall is it was a commitment to our growth, which is where the indoctrination leading up to this moment kicks in because not only am I committed to this

group and I'm committed to Lauren and I'm committed to my growth, but I have also learned through the many, many years of programs and workshops that I've taken that no pain, no gain. And there's all these other correlations that I don't believe anymore that pain is love and love is pain. and you have to experience pain to grow and to love and all these other, you know, word salad bullshit meanings that were part of our belief system. And then in addition to that, we have the female male training that we'd been learning that women, and this is Keith's misogynist beliefs around women, is that, you know, we are always looking for the back door, we lack commitment,

we're two feelings driven and we don't have any honor or character. And this is my opportunity to prove that I'm not that way. So even when I'm like literally looking for the back door in this little complex, this duplex that I later found out belonged to Allison. I'm in my head. I'm gaslighting myself and saying, you know, this is what women do. You can't back out now. You said you were going to do it and you've got to do it. I can do it.

Just fucking do it. with a clatterizing iron in a ceremony that took somewhere up between 30 and 40 minutes without an aesthetic. And that is something that I was only able to do because I completely disassociated. I didn't know that at the time, but I was thinking about love of my family, the love of my son, getting through childbirth, knowing that I could do that, I could do it again. And I'd also seen what happened to the other women who went before me. It would look like torture. And I was determined to be strong and prove to everybody that I could do it because I'm strong. strong fucking woman and I'm a badass and I'm going to be part of this group and that's what

it take to be part of the group. Yeah. And so I did it. Why did it take 30 to 40 minutes? Because she would do a line and then stop and then Lauren would recite something and I would repeat it back. It may have been it may have been less. It's one of the reasons I was not a witness. So it was repeated branding. I thought it was just one brand. So it was repeated. So it was repeated branding, in other words, burning of your skin. I thought it was just one mark, you know, that one time. Pass me that pen. It was like, imagine a colorizing iron has a tip like a pen.

And every, it basically slices through your flesh in the lines. You should be like, like, so every line that you see in that diagram was done individually. And some of the lines took longer than others. And that's why I was determined to do it quickly because I wanted to be over with. So it may have been less for me, maybe 25 minutes or so. I know some of the women took almost an hour because they had to stop and, like, gather their wits to keep going. So you weren't the only one getting branded that night?

I was the third of the fourth parakeal. Wow. That's kind of worse in a way. You know, it's like, I'd rather be first, I guess, so you don't hear the shrieks before you. Yeah. I honestly don't remember that much about the night, but I remember looking at one of the women that I was branded with. At first, we were wearing surgical masks because of the smell. And I remember seeing her eyes like over the top of the mask and just pure terror in both of our eyes.

Like, what in the actual fuck? And then we just went for it. And, you know, I do remember like, you know, making light of it and trying to, you know, muscle through it with humor. and completely disassociated. Later I got to see the video because there was a trial against the doctor. And, I mean, that was horrific, also that that even still existed. And that was kept, which was also for the photo.

You saw the video of her branding you? I had to watch it for the trial. Whoa. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And I'm by the way was the only woman in DOS that would speak to that because they were still either too afraid to speak or still loyal to Keith and had believed that it was, you know, a good thing to do. Who was this lunatic, quote, doctor saying? How was she defending her branding of you?

There actually, there's some, there's some, she went on, was it, 2020 with Nikki? She went on Dateline to defend herself and is still loyal to Keith, even though she's had her doctor's license taken away. and would be, I'd let it go and forgive her and would have had a very different approach had she just been like, hey, that was a major fuck up on my part. But she, even to the end, until now says that we committed to this thing knowing that we wouldn't know the details. She branded me knowing that the symbol was not what we said it was.

And by the way, that evening itself is not what woke me up. It was finding out that it was Keith's initials in the monogram. And there's proof that she... Sorry? That's the big reveal about this, right? It's like it wasn't a symbol of the elements at all. It was the initials, K.R. for him. You'd been branded with another man's initials.

Yes. That's my body. That's like one or two days after the branding. that's us inside. I can see it so clearly now. Just for the listening audience, it's a K, capital K on its side. So the straight line is at the top, at the top. And then the R is in reverse inside the lower triangle.

You can see if you zoom out, it's clearly KR. So we actually have a bit from the vow of you confronting Lauren, your best friend, on the fact that this is not the elements. This is Keith Reneerie's initials. And here's that. It's not five. I didn't make the brands. Okay.

Yeah, I know you're going to make the brands, Lauren. And now I just looked at it from the side and it's the K.R. I have keys initials beside my vagina. Do you think if you'd ever going to want to go down there again? Wow. I mean, is Keith behind us? Is Keith the one who organized this? It's not something that we discuss, Sarah.

Yeah, Lauren. Lauren. It's a rel. Lauren. Lauren. Got started by a bunch of women. And they got permission. from Keith to use some of the tools.

He gave them permission to use collateral and penance. Okay, but he didn't know about the branding. He knew about it, but he didn't cause it. And he didn't create the brand. The girl did. Oh, my God. I haven't seen this in a while. It's so absurd.

What's that bringing up? I mean, so what's not in the vow that it's not super clear is that I knew more than I let Lauren know that I know, if that makes sense. So I was trying to figure out what she was in a... So like something had switched for you. Yes. Like I was more out than she knew. And so to hear it, to hear me to ask her straight up and to hear her pause and not answer me is just, I just like, my whole body is shaking, just remembering that time period, those two weeks where I, you know, we were out. We had figured out the keyst initials were my body.

We'd spoken to Mark Facente, the man who originally introduced me. we had shared what we knew. I knew about the branding. He had heard all this stuff about the sex. We're putting it all together and we were like, holy fuck. Like our worlds had just got flipped upside down, but we knew that we couldn't just, you know, go to them and be like, you're a cult and your sociopath and you're a sex trafficker.

We had to play our cards right because otherwise they were going to turn on us because we'd seen them turn on people who defected. So we had to kind of figure out a strategy where we were like, wait, what's going on? That's why when I'm hearing it, do you remember? It was like, we were kind of double agents. We were like, wait, his initials are on my body. And do we know about, like, does he know about this?

I knew he knew about the branding because I already figured that out for a number of other, like we'd put things together. So I had to pretend. Once you start talking. Yes. Yeah, we all started talking. So can we talk about the moment you came home from the branding and saw Nippy for the first time? and Nippy, you, like, describe that moment when you find out Sarah's been branded.

So I was actually asleep with her son when she got home. Well, that's the night that I came home. But six weeks later is when you found out. I found out, I was in New York City. She was in Vancouver and I got a phone call. And she told me about it and I was driving with a friend of mine. There's no longer a friend. and she told me

and my initial reaction was wait what didn't Mark tell you first Mark told me first that she'd been branded or that it was Keith's initials that she'd been branded with Keith's initials he hadn't seen it yet

I hadn't seen it yet and there was a part of me that was like there's got to be more to the story right and then I was like okay my wife potentially got physically hurt here like I'm piecing it all together and then it dawned on me we might be in the grips of something diabolical here and we need to get out and I need to get my family out as quickly as possible from this

and Mark wasn't sure if I was going to be all in or whatever because you know everyone had their doubts right and they didn't think Keith was going to be this and know and you have to admit to yourself but it didn't it was by the end of the conversation I was like okay how we're going to blow this up. And I was pissed, obviously. And I had to, you know, reconcile all the primordial reactions to having your wife physically hurt. I didn't know that me being around Keith would have been smart because I don't know really what I would have done had I had to confront him. And we made a lot of really good decisions in a short amount of time to blow this up. A lot of that is documented in the vow. It's very, it's very powerful to see you all working behind the scenes.

It was a gift to assault for you guys to start taping and filming. And Mark, Mark was a videographer, right? Wasn't he? Yeah, he was the one who filmed all this stuff that hung him. Yeah. Well, he was a filmmaker before he got into Nexium. And then he was kind of hired internally to document everything because Keith wanted a library of his genius to live on. And Mark was incredibly skilled DP and, and trained. a bunch of people in nexium to film every waking moment and sleeping moments sometimes of Keith and all the trainings and all his all his wisdom so as soon as shit went sideways we just continued to film so we didn't know this was going to be an HBO series we just knew right right if anything we were filming things to protect ourselves yeah I mean that's kind of how we thought about it at the time we thought okay look we didn't do anything wrong here the perpetrator is keith Reneery but we know that they're going to come after us, start making stuff up about us, start gaslighting us,

saying, victimize themselves to us. So we need to. Which they did. Which they did, which they tried. I mean. Claire came to Vancouver to try to get me arrested. She flew to Vancouver to speak to the Vancouver police, Trump Bronfman, and made up a bunch of things.

I stole from them. It was theft, mischief, and fraud. And all of those things, I had to hire a criminal defense lawyer. It was a very bad stressful time. Some of my friends that ultimately people saw the truth that were loyal at the time. They called me and they were like, yeah, she came to me. And she said, okay, give me the dirt on Nippy and Sarah that you have. I'm sure.

She's like, I don't have any. They accurately deduced that they were in an existential crisis. That, you know, nexium and its fate hung in the balance. Yeah, we created a lot of problems for them. Keith knew that it was his initials that were being used in the brand. There was evidence of that submitted during his 2019 trial. This clip we're going to play here is via USA Today, and it's Keith and the actress Alison Mack, who we've mentioned a couple times here.

She was one of the stars of the show Smallville and was a critical part of all this, including DOS and the branding and so on, and then a master of, quote, slaves, and his sort of right-hand person. and here's the two of them on tape discussing the brand. You think the person who's being branded should be completely nude and sort of held to the table like a sort of almost like a sacrifice? I don't know if that's a feeling of submission, you know, videoing it from different angles or whatever gives collateral. probably it should be a more vulnerable position type of the thing back leg slightly spurred like feet being held to the side of the table hands probably above the head being held almost like

tied down like a sacrificial whatever and the person should ask to be branded okay should say please brand me it would be an honor or something like that an honor I want to for the rest of my life. I don't know. And they did make the women say something like that, something along the lines of honor. Master, would you brand me, it would be an honor,

which is basically him proving in his mind that we asked for it, that it was a consensual thing. Oh, that must be so galling to listen to. Horrific. And also vindicating because... He's in jail. And to that point,

there were still people saying who were defending him, he had nothing to do with the branding. This is a bunch of women who made some bad decisions and they shouldn't have done it and Keith's nothing to do with the branding and now there's video or audio evidence

of not only that he knew about it, but he came up with the idea of how to do it and pass it off to Allison so that she would take the fall. So it's triply, there's no word, astonishing, horrific, All the things.

Infuriating. You get the inside of a guy who's just diabolical. But you know what? You know what we're missing? And like I want to address that portion of the audience that's like, well, that was not a great decision, but you made it. You know, you accepted this brand. It went well beyond. That's not why he's in jail right now.

It was a sex trafficking scheme. I mean, he was having young women who he was brainwashing into starving themselves nearly to death, entering this so-called sisterhood, which was really a sex cult meant to service him. You weren't one of those, Sarah, right? That was, but many other women were basically being groomed. I mean, not basically. They were being groomed to be Keith Reneerie's sex slave. Yep.

And that's the thing when people say you chose it, you could have laughed, whatever. It's really important to understand. In my mind, I've committed to this game, like in a fraternity or sorority where someone's telling me what to do and I'm saying yes, because that's the commitment. a vow of obedience is what I've done. I think this is an exercise and one of my exercises is to get this brand. So I do it.

Other women had other things. And so the collateral, this is a key point. It's like a gun to the head. If you don't do the things, your collateral is going to be released. So that's not really a choice. In the cult space, they call it a bound, a bounded choice, a bounded, sorry.

Bounded choice, a bounded choice where like there, there's actually no way out. You have to do the thing. Yeah. So the other women had assignments like, you know, go seduce Keith. India talked about that in her story, that that was her assignment and other women had to do other things with Keith. And that was their assignment. And that's what they committed to you. And they went along with it as well because what are you going to do? You're going to lose everything. And also admit, hey, I just made a really bad decision, which is one of the components of it that keeps people kind of, you know, doubling down. the India Oxenberg story, she's Catherine's daughter. They joined this again. Catherine has such guilt over this because she thought she was bringing her daughter to a self-help program to help her learn business skills and did not foresee what was going to happen. Shortly into it, Catherine recognized, this is not for me. I don't know. I'm out. But India was getting something

out of the lessons and stayed. And before Catherine knew it, India was completely untethered from her, was being intentionally separated from her, her loving mother. And Catherine knew she's gone. And now it's turned from, like, it's turned into a rescue operation and was doing everything within her power to try to get India back. But India at this point is brainwashed. And the mere threat of like, I'm going to take you out. You need to get out. Keith is a threat. Would otherwise Catherine even more. I mean, the person who's inside the cult is like, oh, hell no. And Catherine spoke to me in her first interview about this before India had got and, you know, pulled out before Keith had been arrested. And India, I mean, Catherine is a

very well-known Hollywood actor. And going to the media was truly her last resort. Here's a a little bit of that interview from early, or it was late 2017. Any program that seduces people to abandon their lives to serve their agenda rather than empowering your pre-existing life, there's something off about that. So I watched her get sucked in. The more I learned, because defectors came and told me about their experiences, the more concerned I became. And I realized that I did, well, I did an intervention with her at the end of May and I failed.

This is my last resort, going to the media. My daughter is very, very angry with me right now. And she is every right to be angry with me because I would hate my mom. If my mom came out and publicly exposed her in this way, exposed me. But I love her to the end of the world. And I'm only doing this to bring awareness because without awareness, there can be no outrage.

And unless there's outrage, the authorities are not going to step in and do what they should do, which is shut this down. What's your reaction I see in that, Sarah? I remember that interview. I was so grateful. I don't know if you remember, but your team had asked me to be there, and I wasn't emotionally strong enough to do live TV.

I just didn't think I could handle it. But I was so grateful that Catherine had the strength to speak when we couldn't and brings back a lot of memories at a time when, you know, we were all just throwing our punches. And that media punch and, you know, Catherine's role in the takedown was really important. We all had a very different role, me with showing the physical abuse and Mark Vesente and Bonnie and Catherine, like, and Nippy, like, there was, there wasn't many of us that were willing to talk. People before us, too. Yeah, and people before us who tried in 2009, like, it just, like, this was a fight that took so much of our life force, you know, our life force in it.

And resources. And resources. And then afterwards and watching it is just, just brings back a lot of memories of a very stressful time because we didn't know what was going to happen in the trial. We didn't know if Keith was going to be convicted or not. Even now to this day, he's still appealing to, you know, a couple, this week found out his third or fourth appeal was denied. He's still trying. Like, it's an ongoing stressor. And that seeing that video is, it's a reminder of what we've been through and also so happy. Let me tell you something petty about me. You just said that you didn't accept our invitation to come on because you were not ready for live,

which makes absolutely perfect sense. I remember at the time, because I really wanted you, your story was amazing, and we were really covering this case aggressively and honestly. I was so disappointed. And I remember thinking, she doesn't want to come on. because I was with Fox. Oh, no. You know, we make up these stories in our heads.

I mean, I'm just sitting here. Well, I mean, that's the time we're in too, right? Yeah. Yes. Oh, I'm so glad that we've cleared up this dynamic. No, it's stupid. I just tell it because I bet there's a million women out there and guys who tell themselves stories about, oh, it's something about me.

There's something wrong with me. Why I didn't get this thing or why I didn't get invited to this thing or this person didn't say yes to my invitation. We make up the worst stories about ourselves. Like, there's something wrong with me. I'm branded too, right? I'm branded in a way. And then you, you know, you talk to the person, you find out, I'm a fucking idiot. Why do I do this to myself? I love that you share that. And I love that I got to tell you because it's, you know, it's been a long time, long time coming. And I've been so grateful for your activism around it because it was such a, that interview was such a, um, an extra punch in an already, um, very, we, we just

didn't know what's going to happen. And that was, that really helped us. So, thank you. Because the authorities weren't doing anything. No. They weren't doing anything. No. No. I mean, they did. For the record, I show Sarah clips of, of Meg and Kelly on, off Twitter. I go, see, she gets it. Oh, yeah. You get it. We, we, we, we know you get it. Yeah. Oh, thank you. especially the coffee shit everywhere right now. Oh, I mean, it's terrifying. And the more vulnerable people are post-COVID and in our weird world

where we don't know who to trust and the media's falling apart, even more so. So finally, the police, the FBI, they do get involved. It took all of you, all the names you just mentioned, Catherine, all of you.

And by the way, I should mention before I forget, India, thank God, finally saw the light, got out and did her own documentary that she did on her own terms. And so I was very happy for her and for Catherine, too. I mean, that story individually is just about a mother's incredible love for her child and what a mother will do.

But she's in this, the vow to all of you are there working, as you say, your own pieces of it. Everybody had a different sort of gift and a risk to take. And ultimately, he does, he does get brought down. He gets arrested in Mexico. And still the top echelon of the women are like running after the country. car as they take him away, they just were completely brainwashed that he, he was some sort of Messiah. He was genuinely important to them. Yeah, it was nuts. And did you ever think that there actually would be a trial or that he'd kill himself or flee again or somehow find a way to

manipulate the system? Because he's very good manipulator to get the charges dropped. Well, narcissists don't kill themselves. That's a good point. That's a good point. I did think that he would, that he was a flight risk. You know, Claire owned this island in Fiji. And I did, I just really did think that he would get away with it somehow. Even with every appeal, I'm like, oh my goodness, are we going back to square one?

He is so manipulative. He's so conniving. He's such a sociopath. Will he get out of it? I mean, there was a point where I remember thinking, shit. This is going to be the next five to ten years of our life with Claire Bronfen, just filing suits against us, bankrupting us, you know, because that's what she did. That's what she did.

Very litigious on his behalf. Sorry, keep going, Nippy. Yeah, and I just remember thinking, shit, this is not good. And I remember thinking about my kids, you know, when my one son at the time was like, his childhood is going to have this going on until he's nine or ten. And I just remember thinking, and then once the New York Times article came out, I felt, I didn't feel entirely safe, but I felt safer because I knew they had other problems. And Sarah and Nippy weren't, you know, enemy number one.

We were, because they had to put out a lot more fires because a lot more people were speaking and a lot of other problems were happening. And they took their guns off us. I didn't know, I didn't know that we were in the clear. And the way the FBI and the way this thing happened and how quickly it happened, he was arrested in March of 18. and he was tried and convicted by June of 19. So in under two years, really, this whole thing happened. And he was sentenced to 120 years. And?

Oh, and five years probation. That's my favorite part of it. That's perfect. And what? Can you explain what for what was he convicted? What did the court find? There were seven counts. I don't know.

I think it was a wire fraud, sex trafficking. Conspiracy to commit. Oh, man. It's been a while since I've recited these. Labor, Rico, they were Rico-X. But the heart of the case was the manipulation of the young women into becoming, like, his sex cult. Yes. Yeah.

They didn't use those words. I think it's important to mention Moira Penza because she read the article, and it wasn't tried in the Northern District. It was tried in the Southern District, right? Eastern District. Would J.FK be Eastern District? where's the yes yes

JFK airport so that'll be the Eastern District because that's where the sex trafficking happened at a JFK airport technically

so that became their their jurisdiction so she was able to try the case because originally we went to the northern district

and they were like well you agree to it and then they were like cool story thanks and didn't there's a whole case there the corruption

in that district it's hard to tell it's hard for me to believe that he could have gotten away with the things that he'd gotten away with, with the complaints that have been going on up there without greasing

some wheels. I don't know how that works. Again, I'm out of my lane on that, but it just seems to me there was a lot of abuses of power that are going on up there. And if I were to pick somewhere to try and get away with it, I think upstate New York would be kind of a sleepy place where you could just kind of get away with it and no one would be suspecting. That's my guess. No, I know. We used to call it small. Because it's like, it's a small, I think people were shocked that anything like this could happen. And there may have been a measure of embarrassing. that it went on for so long right under everyone's nose. So you may not be wrong on that. So did you have to testify at the trial? I did not. I was one of the first people to speak with Moira and her team at the FBI and spent two and a half days with my lawyer and just gave them everything I knew. I set the scene like how the company worked with the stripe path, everything I knew about DOS, all my photos, all my text messages, everything. I think I actually gave them.

my phone on my computer to mirror and said have at it. And then that brought in other people and subpoenas and everything. I ended up not having to testify, I believe, because I would have been testifying against Lauren and Lauren in the end turned on Keith. So I didn't need to. I think also I would have been a bad witness because I had done a lot of press at that point. And you just said second child. And that would have been something that Mark Ignifalo would have gone in on. like, isn't it true, Sarah, that you've written a book? Yeah, I just want to be a stall. Yeah, I wrote a book.

So I wasn't a good witness at that point. And what had happened to me wasn't even so bad compared to what it happened to other women. So I didn't have to test if I think goodness, I also had a newborn infant and was breastfeeding. And I was, did not want to have to go to Brooklyn and testify and see that motherfucker. Did you ever get the chance to like have the come to Jesus moment with Lauren, like friend to friend? No, I wish I had. The closest we've had is she wrote a letter just before her conviction, a very heartfelt apology, which I totally believe she seems to have completely woken up, takes full responsibility for what she was going for, how she was able to maintain the cognitive dissonance and, you know, basically lied to me to bring me into this thing so she could be in Keith's good graces. Her testimony did put the nail in the coffin for teeth. Yeah, her testimony meant that I didn't have to testify and, yeah, it was the final straw.

What specifically? Do you remember, like, what was the crux of what she said that was so damning for him? Oof. I think she laid out his psychology pretty well. Yeah, and just how specifically, I'd have to go back and look at the transcripts. It's been a while, but I think specifically how he masterminded the whole thing and how it was like that from the beginning. not just with Doss, but this is the world that he created. And that's, I don't know legally what it was that, that Ford, like, why she was the

star witness exactly, but. She knew where all the bodies were very. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I remember when we did our NBC primetime special on this, a separate show.

We got into, he has this long history of being a pyramid scheme guy, a failed businessman. Like, this was not his first fraud or attempted fraud. He'd had actually a couple before this. He was a con man. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. He'd been caught.

And then, of course, when we heard about that story, he spun that that, you know, he was a threat to the government and they had to shut him down. And, of course, that's what happens when you teach ethics in the world. You know. He gets convicted. He gets convicted. He gets convicted. He gets convicted. So Lauren goes to jail, too.

Didn't she, or she got three years probation. Is that what happened? Probation, yeah. And just to wrap up. Yeah. Sorry, there's an overlap. That what you asked earlier, I've been begging my lawyers to be able to have, you know, heart to heart or Zoom or see her.

But until there's a civil case still, until that's wrapped up, we're not allowed to communicate. But I hope that one day we will. I don't know if we'll ever be best friends again, but I'd love to just close that chapter with her personally. Please give us a heads up when that's going to happen because we will listen to. and we'll definitely talk about it here on the show. So she gets probation. Allison Mack, the Smallville actress, actually got, I think she got three years in jail.

She served two. She's out now, if my math is correct. Yes. Claire Bronfman got sentenced to actual jail time. A year? Did she get a year or more? She got triple the maximum sentence. She's still in jail.

She's still in jail. She's still in jail. She'll be in jail, I think, until 2025. and she just got moved to a halfway house, I think, like two, three weeks ago in the Bronx or the queen or queens. It's a far, far way away from Fiji. So there's been actual accountability. There's been actual punishment for those involved in then Keith in jail for the rest of his life plus the probation, as you point out at the end. So where does that leave you guys, right? You tamed the tiger. Like you got it. It happened. Nexium is, done, it's been exposed, and he's in jail and all of his enablers are in jail. You've come out publicly. The world knows. So what happens to you after that? There's a lot of therapy, a lot of time in nature. COVID was actually a wonderful heat. It was a blessing. Blessing for us, actually,

to pause and just go for hikes and make pancakes and be with our family. Sorry. We have a beautiful family. and we had time to enjoy it. We'd been in the group for so long and then fighting to expose the group for so long we hadn't actually had a break. And that was much need to break. And then the HBO documentary came out in COVID

and then our lives blew up again in a very strange and also very meaningful way to be to have people reach out to us and say, holy shit, I didn't realize I was in a cult or in a, in a course of or abusive relationship until I saw the vow and like thousands of messages and letters. And because it was COVID and we'd stopped acting. We decided to start a little podcast to keep the conversations going.

Well, we had someone reach out to us whose birthday it is today. Actually, our associate producer, Jess Tarty wrote us an email and said, you guys should do a podcast and laid out a season for us. Call it a little bit culty, call it this. And I was in the inertia of no. I was done having my personal life becoming other people's entertainment. It was kind of my reluctance to be a part of a documentary in the first place. And Sarah was kind of like, well, maybe. And then we spoke to someone else about it.

Citizens of Sound were ex-Vangelical Christians. I've seen it and reached out to us. So those two people kind of came together and sort of laid out this path for a podcast. And we love talking about it. And it was a healing like another other people that we know needed to go not talk about it. And for us talking about it was very cathartic and helping others see the red flags and heal was our recovery. So that's that's been our recovery. And I wrote a memoir that encompasses my time in the book.

But now we're working on a more of a part two of everything we've learned since the podcast. I'm sure it'll change with all the experts who've helped us. I'm sure it's going to change. And surrogitously, a lot of the. I'm sorry. So is that again? I was just saying I'm sure it's going to change like what you've learned and you're going to change. You're still pretty close to it all.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the thing. When I look back at the memoir, I was like that I didn't not. I was still healing. I was only a year out when I decided to write that, which in many ways was a draft, a draft of an understanding. I know so much more about cults and coercion and narcissism and gaslighting and all of these things that have become such a huge part of the zeitgeist now. I mean, half of my female friends talk about this and their dating partners. I think this could be helpful even if you're not in a cult or getting recruited by one.

Go ahead, Nipi. I was going to say, you know, serendipitously, as we've educated ourselves on what goes on in cults, you know, a lot of the parallels that go on there are going on, you know, everywhere you look for, you know, whether it be in politics, whether it be, you know, with the vaccine, with all, you know, there's not any real field that's not immune to what is abusive. is a power look like and sound like. So putting language to it has been educational and it's also been, you know, a really important journey for us because we're running into it in our day-to-day lives. And, you know, I want my kids to know what this looks like and sounds like. And I want other people to know what it looks like and sounds like. And I think if people are armed with this education, armed with this language, they can walk into situations and point it out in real time. So when you're faced with something like in your situation or other people's situations,

they can go, oh, that's just like this, just like this. And they can at least attempt to have a civil discourse about it. And when the red flags come up, they'll know what they're looking at so they can make an informed decision. It's a way of inoculating yourself to be informed and to recognize these warning signs and just know when it comes to you, whether it's in a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a business, an employer, or a real live cult that you may have inadvertently fallen into. you. Thank you both so much for coming on and telling this story again. I know it wasn't easy, but I really hope you've done some good here, too. I know that you have, and I hope you feel okay about it. I got blessed to love. Thank you, Megan. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Megan. Maybe one day you'll come and tell us your full Fox News story on our podcast. Yeah, I'll come on a little bit

culty. Yeah, I've got a couple of those for you. Fox News a little bit culty. Oh, sure. I'd be happy to. The more I learn, the more I'm like, oh my God. There was no Kool-Aid, but we were one step away. Lots of love to you both. There's a water cooler. That's right. Good luck with it. I'm glad we got to clear up the misunderstanding from six years ago.

There wasn't even a misunderstanding. It's just my own deranged thinking. So thank you for helping me learn to be better. See, there you go, still empowering other women. I have a story that I need to share with you. It's one I've never told publicly before. And to do it right, it took virtually my entire family on my husband's side.

January 22, 2021. Much of the world is still shut down due to COVID. Our family still living in Manhattan and getting ready to travel south for the weekend for my nephew's wedding. As I pack up that Friday, my husband Doug calls, relaying that he has just heard from his then 84-year-old mother, Jackie, in Philadelphia.

She's received a disturbing phone. call from her daughter, Diane. Diane and her partner, Brad, are oyster fishermen on Cape Cod. She was hysterical, sobbing and couldn't complete a full sentence, but she said that she was in jail on a drunk driving charge and that she had, I needed to get, talk to somebody that, you She had a telephone number, and they were going to talk to me about getting bail. And this was on a Friday, which I don't know. Anyway, I didn't know much of anything, but I kept asking her if she was all right. And I just didn't know what to do.

She just said, I'm so scared. I'm terrified. And I asked her where Brad was. And she said, well, he's in jail too. But she said, I don't really have time. They're not giving me long to talk. You need to call this number. So what did you do next?

I called the number and he told me that the court was closed on Friday and it was COVID so they had limited times when you could get in and he told me to call this lawyer whose name I can't remember and he would walk me through getting the bail money. So this was the court that you were talking to saying, you need to talk to a lawyer, here's a number you can call. Yes.

And then did you call the lawyer? I did. I asked him, why is she there on a drunk driving charge when she doesn't, when she doesn't drink. And he said, well, she told me she didn't drink. And I believed her. So I've sent off a talk screen, or, you know, I've sent off for a blood test. I didn't know why Brad was in that once either the court told me or the lawyer told

that Brad was in because he assaulted a policeman at the scene of the. accident. The lawyer told Jackie the bail for both of them was $17,000. I said, well, I just don't have that kind of cash to get. I don't have that kind of money to give you. I said, I'm going to have, I'm going to call my son. And she did. And that's where her son, my husband, Doug Brunt, comes in. I was in the car and my mom called and she was distressed and agitated and frustrated saying that She had just gotten off the phone with Diane, and Diane had been in a car accident. She broke her nose, and she was hysterically bawling from basically the holding cell at the jail on Cape Cod. And that she had this one phone call to make, so she had called my mom, but she needed to be bailed out.

Both she and Brad had been arrested. So I'm asking my mom a bunch of questions, you know, what the heck happened? And she was telling me as best she could because it was a short phone call. And apparently Diane was, you know, sobbing through her broken nose. about what had happened. But in short, a car accident, she broke her nose in the car accident. They, the police came, they thought that she had been drinking and driving. The police got aggressive with Diane in response to that. Brad got aggressive with the police to defend Diane, and they arrested them both. And so they're now in jail in Cape Cod. Diane gave my mom this phone number to call,

who was her court-appointed lawyer. And my mom had already spoken with this lawyer. She gives me the number saying it's very confusing. You know, all of this was happening during COVID. And so he had these reasons why the court was about to close. It was a Friday afternoon. It closes early on Fridays now due to COVID. Nobody's even in there due to COVID. And we need to rush $17,000 over to the court or else Diane and Brad are going to spend

a full weekend in jail. And, you know, everything's going to shut down over the weekend. So they're in there unless we can somehow get the money to bail them out. And we had something like a two-hour time. frame. Right. So I remember you called me. You call me and you say, I'm like, honey, handle this. Basically. And I was like, where's Abby? Abby, we need you. So we were like, wait, this is impossible, first of all, because like the audience doesn't know Diane and Brad, but they are the nicest, kindest, most upstanding, cool people. Like, these are not even potentially drunk driving lunatics

who attack the cops. They're not true. I mean, I think if if someone got aggressive, with Diane, I could see Brad stepping in. That made some sense. But otherwise, none of it was in character. The only thing that gave us pause was it was COVID. Things were nuts. Everyone was behaving bizarrely. So there really was a piece that was like, did they have some sort of a meltdown?

Did something? Like, it was so bizarre. So mom gave me the phone number. I called the lawyer. He was explaining he needs $17,000 in cash. He reiterates much of what my mom told me. which is the window is closing. It's due to COVID protocols.

The whole thing shuts down at, you know, four o'clock on a Friday, and it goes dark for the weekend. So we have only this amount of time to get them out of, you know, the holding cell. So, you know, can you get $17,000 in cash to Cape Cod right now? And I'm thinking, I can't get myself to Cape Cod

in two hours, let alone $17,000 in cash. So you and I start scrambling for ideas to how to deal with this. Right. So we're like, we're, and it's not that easy to get 17,000. cash like that. So I'm trying to figure out how to get the money and you're talking to your mom, trying to call them your mom down, you're calling your brothers, letting them know what's happening

with Dye. Everybody's like, my God, this is a nightmare. And what was the next thing that happened? I'm trying to remember the next step in the chain. We were scrambling around to try to get money. We were talking to the lawyer. We'd ask him questions like, you know, what is a way we can do this? And we had the idea to call Dian Brad's friend in Cape Cod, who has sort of a whale watching business. He has a number of big charter boats where you can go out and watch the whales off Provincetown. Which we've done with him before. Which we've done with it. Yeah, so Steve. And so we call Steve, who thank God picks up the phone and we get him up to speed on the problem. Here's that friend, Steve from Cape Cod. Apparently this needed to be done locally. So Doug called

me because I'm a close friend of both Brad and Diane's. It was a pretty large, some and he said that I'd be reimbursed after we got them out. But because it was a weekend, things couldn't be done normally. So then we call back to Laura and say, we've got someone on the ground, on the Cape, with the cash, where do we go? See, he says, actually, I'm not there now. So there's no one to receive the cash. So he pivoted to saying you can use cryptocurrency. Because of, again, COVID, the courts will accept in these extreme circumstances, the courts will actually accept cryptocurrency. And he was saying he was going to give us a wire to send it directly to the court. There was a phone to the court. We could call the court. And they had, you know, they matched up

case numbers. And we did call the court. Yeah. We called the court. We dialed the number and that the lawyer had given us. We had an official person answer. We were put on hold. They asked us for the case number. We gave them the case number. They looked it up. They said, Diane and Brad, they had their names, and they verified everything that we had been told thus far. When we come back, what happened to Brad and Diane? Thankfully, Steve was on the case. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show. We are picking up my conversation with Doug about what happened as soon as we got the instructions on how to get the crypto delivered. So I remember you were in Manhattan at the time. So I guess he went online and found locations where they have crypto kiosks where you can basically insert cash and it comes out on the other end is cryptocurrency.

So that's our next plan. But at this point we're like, this is nuts. This can't be real. But I still thought, you know, going back to what we know, Diane's still in jail. It was like maybe there's a sketchy lawyer involved. But really we were like Diana Bratt are in trouble. And we've got to find a way of helping them. And thank God that. you enlisted Steve. Yeah. So when we call Steve, we say, it's got to be crypto now. So stand down on the brown bag of cash. And so Steve's thinking, this is nuts. So he, but he's now fully in it. You know, he thought Diane Brad needed rescuing, so he's still in rescue mode. Steve asks for the lawyer's number so he can arrange this payment directly. And here the lawyer gets something very wrong, as Jackie would later explain to me. The tan was Barnstable. And he's, and he, He said barn stable because it's spelled that way.

But up there they call it barnstable. No one local that would have known straight off. You know, he didn't speak like he was even here. So that was a dead giveaway. That's when Steve decided to drive by Diane and Brad's house and to call the house phone on the way there. Where were Diane and Brad? In our living room.

Having a great day. It was a regular perfect day in our lives. Not in jail. Not punching out cubs. Happy at home. And it had been a long time since we'd been in jail. I was in my recliner and I was very comfortable. In fact, it's a swivel recliner that goes back and forth.

It goes every direction in the house. I live in it. It's perfect. None of it was real. They had no idea any of this was going on. Right. And we'd been running around for hours this point. hysterical.

They were totally fine. There had been no incident whatsoever. Yeah. Yes, Doug and I, with all of our so-called higher education and city sophistication, had almost been had by some con man until Steve, the Cape Cod Whale Watch guy, shut the whole thing down. So I just stopped and took a breath and thought it out a little bit and it just didn't make any sense to me at all. He's just, he is so incredibly capable at every aspect of life. Like he just is just a can-do guy. There's nothing. Like he's unstoppable, especially in like his business. And,

you know, and dealing with stuff on the water, too, makes you that way. Because when you're out on on a boat or a ship, you can't walk home if there's a problem. So he has that mentality that wherever he's standing, he can fix the problem. Steve is also like a, a, cool customer. Like he's not, like, he told us after the fact. Yeah, he's like, yeah. I mean, when he, when I answered the phone and it was Steve, he said, oh, good, you're home. I have to call Doug. Like in that tone of voice. He wasn't like, oh my God, you're safe. You know, he doesn't overreact anything. He's great in a crisis. And he, when we asked him later, he said, I was going to call you. If you didn't answer, I was going to go to your house. If you weren't there, I was going to go to the

Wealthy police, our town. And if they didn't know anything about it, I was going to end there. If they did, I was going to go to Barnstable with the money. So he was never, he's unflappable. So Steve figured this whole thing out. And Doug and I began asking ourselves, how on earth did we almost fall for this nonsense? Well, it all boiled down to one thing in our defense. We believed that Doug's mom had actually spoken with Diane. That was the key to this whole thing running us out as long as it did because what we thought we had in the category of things we know wasn't right. That was a bad assumption.

Right. They had fooled your mom, which is absolutely amazing that they fooled her about her own daughter's voice, hence the importance of the broken nose. Yeah, right, right. They had so many tricks. And then, of course, COVID was just open the door to so many of these stupid things because we're all, everything was ridiculous then. Yeah. That's why they didn't, she didn't get it. Your mom heard a hysterical adult woman

claiming she had broken her nose, which would explain a differed voice. And she went with it. She believed it. I thought it was Diane and still, if I could hear it again, I would still think it was Diane. You believed it because why? sounded like her voice and the panic. I mean, I could take the, it just seemed like she was crying and scream and not screaming. She was just kind of hysterical, and it sounded like her. The whole situation did not sound like her, but I really couldn't, you know, at the time I couldn't really work my way through the car accident.

And I did realize that she would have been in a drunk driving accident, which is why I asked the lawyer that. Right, because Diane doesn't drink. No. Right. And that's why he said he believed her when she told him, that and that's why he sent off a blood test. When you found out that this was an attempted fraud, what did you think? What was your reaction?

I was wondering how I could have been so stupid, frankly. I mean, I just so thoroughly bought into that. And by that time, it was out of my hands. And I just watch all of you take over. and figure it out. We're loved. We're loved. We did come away from that feeling very loved. It was so sophisticated, you know? The woman calling, pretending to be Diane,

the lawyer, the court, multiple people involved, did you ever figure out how you were chosen for this? No. I really didn't know. I have no idea. But then again, with these scams, I can't tell you how many times I've gotten one of these phone calls that says, Grandma, I'm in trouble. I need help.

Oh, really? Yes. And it's more fun because now I just say, is your mother proud of what you're doing? and they always hang up on me. So for those out there, it's barnstable. If they try to do it again, and they thought barn stable. So, Dye and Brad are safe.

Few. No one has handed over any money. Thank God. And Steve has saved the day. Now, Doug and I decide to have a little fun with our con man, who does not yet know he's been busted. I called him up with, Doug taping the conversation.

And what happened next was six minutes of gold. That's next. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show. All right. I want to take you through my phone call with the scammer now. But to help me walk you through it, I brought in my pal Bill Stanton. He's former NYPD, a private investigator and a security expert

who helps us out sometimes on our own security from time to time. Watch this. So I'm going to just going to play the call, okay? that I did with this guy once we were finally on to this. And I would love if we could analyze it as we go. All right. And I can pause it if necessary. Beautiful. Here we go. Paul, hey, it's Megan Kelly. So I haven't received the Bitcoin verification yet. I was using my real name. He knew who I was. And I had mentioned that I was a public figure. Didn't stop him one bit. Didn't bat an eye. You're not surprised at that? Or are you?

Well, my guess is he's not from this country. He may be, out of the country. What? He sounds American. He does sound American, but I don't know that he fully knew the impact of Megan Kelly or what was coming. Yeah, he was about to be humiliated. Exactly. From porn source? Yeah, is that Bitcoin, whatever that

is, is that Bitcoin? Yes. It hasn't come through. No, is there another way of doing this? Because I'm worried about them sitting there all day. Is it still say a waiting review? Yep, there's nothing another one didn't come in. So that's the last I have.

At this point, he's walking me through exactly how to get him the Bitcoin. I mean, he's an expert. As I was listening to this on the way down here, what your listeners are listening to is a masterclass in three-level chess. It is a mind game that's going on. And you handle it phenomenally. Okay, let's go. I haven't gone down there yet because I don't have the verification.

Don't I need the verification before I can send anything? You're going to have to get on the chat. All right. I'm worried about them sitting there all day. Is there any other way of doing this? I did contact the court and explain it's on the Constitution. We've got enough time. Like, how, are they, is there any way of, like, lowering the bail or getting them out just, like, for now?

I love what you're doing here, because I call it doing the Colombo. You're playing, you're playing stupid, but you're doing it brilliantly. Because at this point, I know. Yeah, yes, yeah. And you're just. Slowly reeling him in and he doesn't realize he thinks he's the predator. Yeah. Meanwhile, you're putting your jaws around him.

That's exactly right. He still thinks he's gotten. Like, how serious are these charges? We probably, you know, be looking at some jail time. Did she take one already? Pretty sure it's going to come back below the levels because that's what she... No, there is zero chance that she was drinking. Zero. So this is one of the weird risks he took where he based this whole alleged crime on Diane, drunk driving.

And this is an area in which he didn't do his homework because she and Brad don't drink. They just don't drink. It's not their thing. And he, so he took a shot at it. And then everybody from Jackie to Doug to me, we were all like, they don't drink. Right. What do you mean? Like he kind of, but he was like, yeah, you know, I believe her.

That's why I'm going to mandate the blood test. Well, this character is a combination, fortune teller, con man. and he's reading everything, right? So he has maybe done dozens, if not hundreds of these calls before. So just like a fortune teller, he's feeling it out, and he needs to make some leaps in order to advance to get to endgame. And like a telemarketer, he has heard so many different responses, and he knows where the put, like cut and paste what type of answer.

Yes, yes. And that's what you are defeating here. And we'll listen as we go on, has he stumbles, like a mental, computer glitch, you'll hear it as you get him. He's so clever because he doesn't get thrown at all by she doesn't drink. He's like, I'm on your side. I agree. She wasn't drunk. That's why I'm mandated blood tests. I mean, that's smooth. Once we pay the bail,

how long until they can get out? Okay. And where, like, how do we get them? Coming down to pick them up? We're not, but we'll find somebody there. They have a friend there who we looped in and he was going to try to help, but I don't know. That didn't work. But he's there. so he can get them. Okay.

Well, he didn't answer. Right. Well, you see, the longer you're talking, the more it's giving him a chance to formulate some bullshit on what to say back to you. He doesn't know the address to the courthouse. And you are like a cat blocking him off, like a mouse trying to get away. And you keep putting a paw down. Then he runs the other way. Yeah.

And then you put a poor down here. He tried to get out of Dodge. And I'm like, I need the address of the jail so I can pay him. them up and he's wondering what to say. Let me give you the address. Let me write this down. Wait, and what's the city? Bedford.

Okay, and what's the city? Stanford, Connecticut? Paul, they're in Cape Cod. That was the mental glitch. And this guy is, as I said, dozens if not hundreds of calls before. And notice how he maintains his calm, right? But there's these big poses.

He doesn't hang up right there. doesn't hang up because he's invested in you. You are money on the hoof to him. Yeah. Right? Now, he may have 10 other calls in process lined up, but right now all his focus is to get the money out of you. And every second is a cost-benefit analysis.

You know, can I still reel this one into the moment? Yes, right. Uh-huh. And I think he was either confused because he had another potential fish in Stanford, Connecticut, or it was because Stanford, or it was because Doug was in Connecticut that day. That was a year that we were commuting our two boys to Connecticut and our daughter was still going to school in New York. So we would split up during the days. Right. And when he spoke with Doug, I think Doug said, I'm in Connecticut. So he got confused.

Right. There were too many cities, too many places to jogging too many balls. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So where are they? I gave you the address earlier. It's in Barnstead. Meanwhile, actual Cape Codders call it Barnstable. And he's claiming that's... He's from there. Yeah. Right. They don't say barn stable.

He's getting burned on multiple areas. He fell down a little on the job here. 3195. Main Street. Okay. Main Street. So what's that town? Barnstable.

Okay. And where are you? I'm in barn stable, but I'm not generally here. I'm in... So why he has to not be in... in Barnstable because he can't receive the money in cash by our friend who's ready to deliver cash to his face. Right.

He's got to be someplace else so that we have to wire it Bitcoin. Right. And he adds like family business to prey upon, you know, your goodwill and to humanize him, right? Like, oh, this guy's a regular guy. It's not a confidence, man. This is legit. You can hear him thinking. They can hear the wheels turn in.

Yes, you can hear it grinding, right? Right. You just keep throwing monkey wrench after monkey wrench. It's great to just ask questions. Uh-huh. Right? Like, that can be harder than even, like, confronting with facts. Exactly.

Are you sole practitioner or what are you? In Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, okay. Where'd you go to law school? I'm a lawyer, too. Oh, really? What years you graduate? You graduate law school in 73?

You don't sound that old. Literally, I graduate law school in 95. So he would be 22 years older than I. Yeah, I'm 87 and a half years old. Seriously. I mean, at that point, that would have made him, in his mid-70s. He does not sound like he's in a mid-70s. And he's a public

defender in his mid-70s. So why did he say that? Why did he say he was a 73-gras? Because in my opinion, you have his mind racing so much, right? That was the first number that flew out of his mind. So I think it's because he knew, like, he was worried I might have gone to

John Jay. And he was like, I can't pick a year anywhere. I don't know how old she is. Right, right. You know, because these are small law schools. Right. Right. I mean, 73, Jesus. Yeah, he went big. He had no idea, though.

He didn't know how old I was. That's what I think. So the other thing is, you know, $17,000 is a lot of money. And, like, what if I don't get it back once it's closed or dismissed? I mean, I don't, I got to be honest with you. Like, I'm not that close with Diane. I'm not sure. You know, it's a lot of money.

That was it. You know, on to the next call. On to the next victim. So you don't think I hurt his feelings? You think he was just like cut my losses by. I cut my loss is by. I kind of hoped I hurt him a little. You know, like, aha, I got you.

You didn't even, he didn't miss a step, right? You became too much of an impediment to him, and it's on to the easier fish. Think about a predator. Wolves go after the weakest sheep, the slowest, the oldest, the one's most vulnerable. And just to make a point, while we're laughing here,

this is done in various machinations every day. elderly women who are lonely, you know, the lonely hearts club. I've had, you know, through friends and family, I'd say about a baker's dozen cases where women in their 60s and 70s have sold their homes, have taken loans, sent that money knowing them only a week. Loneliness is a son of a bitch. Having an open heart is a son of a bitch in this case. So it's a combination of having street smart and cyber sense.

When these things come in, there's a sense of urgency and you want to take care of your loved one and they'll come up with a number and what they look at is your social media. We've all been guilty of it some more than others where we put everything on the effing internet. You know, and think about pictures in front of your house, I could spot your address.

I'm not saying you do that. You know, I never do that. I know that. But so many of us do, right? So many tells the type of car. So for the predator, the size, fiber predator, they're gathering, whether it's one person or a whole network of people, they'll gather that intel. And like, well, only my family would know that.

Well, let's talk about that in this case, because that's one of the weirdnesses. Jackie, Doug's 87-year-old mother, is not on social media. Right. Nor is Diane, nor is Brad, neither one of them. So this guy knew, clearly he was targeting an elderly woman. Right. And he at least knew her daughter's name because he had a woman call, pretending to be her and said, mom, it's die. Right. So, like, how, I don't even know how you figure that out. Could they have flipped it?

Could she have touted your sister-in-law, correct? Yeah. Could she have had her mother, you know, online through social media at mom's 85? She's not even out. She's not online at all. No, your sister-in-law isn't. No. Oh, well, you know what?

Then it may be closer to home than we know. You know, most crimes, like, God forbid, anything, whatever. happen to this home, like whether it be a burglary, vandalism. It's not from someone across the country. It's the landscaper's cousin. It's someone you know one or twice removed. Oh, are you? Those people you got...

What? I'll bet them. Don't worry. I'll bet them. Because that's what's really disturbing, right? They knew some facts about Jackie. Just enough. About Diane. To think it's legit.

They knew Diane was in Cape Cod. Right. So, I mean, that's another thing, right? that not online. Right. So it's actually, I have no idea, but you're right. Maybe it's somebody who somehow knew the family. Well, that's the only way.

It's either, you know, one or two people removed or the internet. It's been my experience or someone may have reached out. You know, we don't know what we don't know. We don't know if your sister-in-law had reached out on some service. Or if they called Jackie earlier under a different pretense to do info gathering. Yes. And they gather that. And then it's just in the conveyable.

belt when their time comes up, okay, we have all this information, they're good to go. They're in the hopper. Let's go. That's another good warning. Like, if somebody calls, and I think most younger people know this, but especially for our older listeners, if somebody calls looking for information, asking personal information about your family members, names, anything that, obviously people know, don't give your social security number. They'll ask everything, you know, these surveys. And so, like, I'll entertain some of these calls just to see, like, you know, where's just going to go. And they want everything.

I go, yeah, Nunya. Nanya effing business, you know. Called the wrong guy. Well, I guess that's true. He must have gotten it from her or, because you said maybe he's out of the country. I just feel like he was an American, but that doesn't mean he wasn't sitting there in India

making these calls. I don't know if he was close to them or not, but that I hadn't considered that he had already done research potentially on Jackie because she wasn't that savvy to this prior to this whole event. Yes. All right, let's speak about how elaborate this was. You know, there was an article, I think it was the Forbes business columnist recently who did this whole article about how she'd been defrauded out of $85,000 cash. She put it in a shoebox over just the course of eight hours. This guy convinced her to do it. And this is a financial columnist, so, you know, relatively sophisticated, but gave up the dough. And he too had multiple people working with him on the fraud. This guy, I think, had at least two others. He had a fake courthouse number. He had hold music that he told us.

Well, that tells me it's more than a one-man band. Like, let's just, like, as a sort of an example, is this show. You're at the top of the masthead, but there's a whole infrastructure behind that beautiful face, what's going on. You bring your game, but you have your people, your producers, your bookers, your everything. And to the viewer, it seems so seamless, but there's a lot to make it happen. Same things with these confidence people. They're gathering information instead of producers. They may have researchers gathering backstory. Instead of celebrities or politicians, they're gathering it on everyday people. They could do an easy, you know, journeyman's financial assessment. You know, is that house paid for? Do they how many, what's the type of cause do they have?

Do they have that discretionary cash? Or are they alone? Are they desperate enough? Do they have family? These are all the stress points, if you will, that these confidence men, that these teams will look at and they use psychology. Listen, it happened to me and I'm in the business. I was in a different form. I'm on my computer. My computer got hacked. And I was so desperate. I didn't want them getting my shit.

So I'm on it. And a little voice, I called up Andy, the guy we use, you know, that's helped you in the past. And Andy's like, discontinue right now. I'm like, but I'm going to lose my. He goes, I'm fucking telling you, dead off him. And I was that old granny right about to give away all my shit. Oh, it's terrifying. So there is no socioeconomic intelligence quotient that makes you immune.

It's been my experience. Sometimes the smarter you are, you know, you're so confident in who you are. Oh, this would never happen to me. I would be able to disseminate the BS. Yes. And they hit that pay button sooner. than someone from the street. Well, we love the piece of the story that ultimately it was the Cape Cod whaling guy who was like, I'm going by their house. I don't know what these people are saying.

And he figured it out. He's the hero of the story. Ten for that. Okay. So what about the targeting of the elderly? Because that does seem to be a theme in a lot of these. Yes. Yes. What they'll do, again, they go on people's nature or that they could lose their home. How do they find out Who's elderly and how to call them? Like, do they get a sponsorship from the AARP or one of those magazines, not to bash the AARP? But I'm just saying, like, is there a way of getting people's numbers who are old? Yeah, well, you can go on. There are services where you can get demographics of people.

So, like, my house was up for sale, like you, mass exodus out of New York. And I had all these people. Like, how the F do you know? How do you have my cell number, number one? Right? And how do you know my house is? for sale. Oh, we'll pay cash. Oh, can I show your house? Because there are services that you pay into and you get certain demographics. So for me, I'm selling my house. There are elderly groups.

If she ever signed on to any AARP or some type of association, those lots of, you know, the intelligence gathering of who you are, what you are, what demographic you are, the same way advertisers buy that. And voters, like the campaigns. Yes. The campaigns are getting all that information right now. The same way certain demographics want that information for sales, they get it for marks to mark you as a victim. It's amazing how much they can find out about us now. And it's scary. And it's the basic psychology.

You see, when we're in our home, you're an old elderly lady. You may be widowed. You're all alone. And your primary thing is to go to the market to get that sale and come home. That's Jackie. You're hit out of the blue with a member of your family that's in distress. and you could hit that button and you're going to be walked through it to get them out of trouble. That's what you live for.

And they know that. There are so many people who are in this exact position right now. And it's like I think my audience is in general. In general, they're a lot younger than 87. So I urge everybody speak to your parent. Speak to your great aunt. Speak to anybody who's in this age group and speak to your friends too because it's not just the elderly. And let them know that this is out there, this kind of thing.

Whether it's this particular one, whether it's they hack into your computer, whether you're on one of those dating sites, they go to the basic emotion and need and insecurity of people and just realize, take that breath, take a step back because nothing is, unless you're in a car crash where you have to hit that break, you know, hit the break in your mind, hit that cyber break, hit that telephone break and ask questions and say, give me a number, let me get back to you. it can wait 10 minutes. And that could save you a whole bunch of money, a whole bunch of... And I will say in that fraud that I mentioned that the business reporter wrote up about that happened to her, and in this attempted fraud of us, one of the things that she didn't do and that we didn't do and should have done was to do an independent Google search of the number of the courthouse or in her case, I don't remember that it was like that.

They said she was getting investigated by the federal government. but whoever they say is the third party. Right. Just hang up and do a Google search. Don't call their number. Call, you find out the number. Right. You make an independent call to see if this is real.

And get the fraudster's number so you can then call them back. And go one step further because there are apps, I can call you and it looks like it's coming from Doug's number. Mm-mm. Yeah, that technology exists out there. That's rudimentary. Yes. I can call you right now and it would ring Doug's number and you would. answer. Whoa. So there are different levels to this and, you know, shame. But if I'm dialing out,

I mean, like, that's, that's the empowerment is if you are dialed out on your phone to the Barnstable courthouse. Right, right. Like I had Amazon, I had an Amazon scam and it was online, it came over a text, right? You know, did you charge this on Amazon? Click here. Fuck that. I got on the phone with Amazon direct, you know, and I'm like, is this what you do? They go absolutely not. Oh. They go, is this a thing? They go, that's a thing. Don't you get, I get attempted frauds at me every day via email. Like on this. It's like, I usually just forward them to Abby and she deals with it. Right. Or like the scams and she puts these major lockers on my phone. Spam it. But it's amazing because most people don't have an Abby and most people haven't had this happen

to them and they're not living on guard. They're actually still trusting, loving people. Right. Unlike us cynical bastards. And even as cynical as we are, we always got taken in. Let me tell you, it's, listen, essentially we're good people, we care about people. But F that, like I had a lady. I was in Midtown, this was a number of years ago, middle-aged, well-dressed woman, and she hit me with the gasoline, oh, my car.

And I was fascinated that this woman was well-dressed, well-spressed, well-spressed, spoken and she's hitting me up. I said, I'll walk you to your car right now. Oh, I really get. And then she just walked away. So they pray, you know, upon your good nature. And again, you know, many people don't, haven't been raised from the streets, you know, but it's incumbent to have those street smarts.

Yeah. And bad guys don't necessarily dress up like in the old Batman, bad guy t-shirt. No. Now it's on the internet. And the cyber world is a whole other animal. And just remember, always press the brakes. and question, question, question. You're not surprised the cops weren't interested.

That's how they get away with it, though. It's low level. It's low on their priority list. You know, many police departments aren't sophisticated in tracking this down. It's more an FBI issue, actually. And this cross state lines. Right.

That's why it's more of an FBI issue. And we know, you know, they have their own problems. I had all my evidence. I had his number. I had the court number. Let me tell you something. You are turning out, this is, this was actually your first undercover. We've done another undercover.

We've done an undercover since then. You are proving to be quite, you know, I thought my initials were BS. You're getting very good at this, Megan Kelly. You're getting a little bit too good. I do love, I mean, like the elderly, I love my Matlock. I love my Jessica for murder she wrote. I aspire to great things. Bill Stanton, thank you.

10-4, thank you for having me. Thanks to my family. Doug, die and Brad, my mother-in-law, Jackie. thanks to Steve for helping us bring this story to you. I mean, can you believe this? Like, isn't that a nuts story? It's cray cray. And honestly, Doug and I have had so many conversations about it. I remember we had dinner with all these friends who still the COVID lockdowns and we sneaked a dinner, not sorry to tell you, at our apartment because crazy Andrew Cuomo was still trying to tell us we weren't allowed to do that kind of thing. And we told our friends this story

that night and everyone was riveted, right? Because no one could believe this crap. And I know, what you're thinking. As soon as you hear crypto, you're like, wait a minute. And we too were like, what? But it was just the COVID weirdness, the fact that we had spoken with the court, we thought, ourselves, and the fact that we hadn't yet even thought to question Jackie's telling us. She had spoken with Diane herself and that she was really in trouble. Like that didn't even enter our minds that that piece of the story might not be true. So anyway, words of caution in this story for everyone. And honestly, you need to know this, right? Because what if this happened to your mom or you? And now you'll know. Like, if we hadn't told this story, you might not know. Maybe you would be hoodwinked.

I don't know. It can happen. Trust me. So we decided to tell you the story, even though we knew you might mock us a little. because we want to help others, and we learned a lot to ourselves. I think all of us did. Hope all of you learn something from today's show and from fraud week all week. Because sadly, there are fraudsters out there working hard every day to steal your money or something precious. And most of these never see the light of day, right? They just happen privately because people are too embarrassed to talk about it or scared. Yeah, they're either humiliated. And I get it, but there's no reason to be humiliated. Like, if you get defrauded by one of these losers, or almost defrauded in our case, what does it say about you?

It says you believe in human nature. You believe in others. You probably have a kind heart. You're probably a trusting soul. Those are not bad things, right? But slightly jaded, trusting soul, but slightly jaded, I think that's what we're going for. So that's why we shared. And that's why we hope everybody listens and shares and talks about these kinds of things

more and more so we can help each other. All right. I love to hear from all of you. Do you have a fraud story? Have you been inspired or helped by our fraud week week? Email me at Megan, M-E-G-Y-N at Megan Kelly.com. I'll definitely be reading. We do read the emails. I see them every week and I love going through them. I read them on Mondays. We get them collected from the week before. And there's nothing quite like hearing from all of you. So, we'd love for you to email me. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show, no BS, no agenda, No fear.