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Erased Narrative of Nashville Shooting
00:14:43
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| Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. | |
| Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. | |
| Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, and happy Monday. | |
| Hope you all had a great Easter weekend. | |
| Enjoyed Passover, etc. | |
| We did. | |
| We had a great Easter weekend. | |
| We did the baskets. | |
| We did the 10 Commandments. | |
| We did church where it was standing room only. | |
| And there is something so good about seeing that, isn't there? | |
| Our priest was saying how happy it made him to see the number of people who were there for Sunday Mass. | |
| And I felt the same. | |
| You know, it's just like a good message for your kids that you're part of something larger than yourself. | |
| There are others in your community who share these same beliefs. | |
| This is not just something being forced on you by mom and dad. | |
| See, there are your friends. | |
| There are your buddies. | |
| There are your teachers, our neighbors. | |
| The whole exercise, so worthwhile, and just a great time to reflect as a family on what it means, what Easter means, what your religion means to you, how it bonds you with your community and your family, and so on. | |
| So, thumbs up to ceremony, to religious holidays, and to Jesus on his big comeback. | |
| Later, we're going to be joined in the show by Dr. Peter Attia. | |
| Oh, love him. | |
| I have thought so many times about our last interview with Peter happened around this time last year, and now he's got a new book out, which you must buy. | |
| It's so good. | |
| It's number one right now on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction, and for a reason. | |
| I love audio. | |
| He sent me the hard copy. | |
| I love audio. | |
| I put it on two times two. | |
| I burned through that thing in like a morning plus a little bit of the afternoon. | |
| Great, great info, good stuff. | |
| We're going to help extend your lifespan. | |
| Second hour of the show. | |
| I want to tell you that right now, it's noon Eastern, and we are keeping an eye on some news this morning regarding a shooting in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, at a bank. | |
| It sounds like from the initial reports, this is a case of workplace violence. | |
| Reports are that there are five dead, including the shooter, who appears to have been an employee of the bank. | |
| Meanwhile, over in Tennessee, the so-called Tennessee Three, as they want to be called, continue to dominate the headlines. | |
| I mean, the absurdity with which the mainstream is reacting to what happened in Tennessee, it's outrageous. | |
| They're making heroes into these guys who disrupted the proceedings, broke protocol, were absolutely rude and disruptive, and disrespectful to their fellow colleagues, many of whom were voicing the opinions of families aligned with the victims of that Tennessee shooting. | |
| The media wants to make it sound like, oh, all the victims of that Nashville, Tennessee shooting were on our side, and then they threw our two guys out. | |
| And it was all about race, too, because the black guys got thrown up without the white woman. | |
| We attacked that on Friday. | |
| That's absurd. | |
| The 7 million people in Tennessee, many of whom did not agree with what those two were asking for, those three. | |
| And they were rude in trying to silence the debate when they didn't get their way. | |
| That's what happened there. | |
| Of course, Vice President Kamala Harris making a surprise visit to Nashville on Friday, not to support the victims of the Christian school shooting over which the lawmakers were arguing in the first place, but in support of the ousted lawmakers. | |
| She did not even deign to visit with the families of the three nine-year-olds old who were murdered at that Christian school. | |
| She didn't even try to do the fig leaf of saying she wanted to. | |
| Joining us now to discuss this unbelievable news and news cycle, Glenn Greenwald. | |
| Glenn is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of System Update on Rumble. | |
| Glenn, great to have you back. | |
| How are you doing? | |
| Hey, Megan, great to be with you. | |
| The Tennessee C thing is so annoying to me. | |
| The fact that she would deign to go down there and not even make a showing of saying, I would love to meet with the victims of the six who were killed, especially the victims of the three nine-year-olds who were killed there. | |
| But I'm going to meet with these three posers who are looking for their moment in the sun, who disrupted the proceedings, were disrespectful and rude to everybody, but are now being lionized. | |
| Did you see them on the Sunday shows by the media as, you know, critical to democracy? | |
| And by the way, they're going to get right back in too, because they were expelled. | |
| Two out of three were expelled. | |
| They're going to get put right back in there by the voters like this week. | |
| So what's your take on it? | |
| Yeah, I mean, first of all, I remember very well in the weeks and months after January 6th that the demands that a whole variety of members of Congress who had nothing to do, even arguably, with the January 6th riot, such as Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, anybody basically who wanted a congressional examination of that election be expelled. | |
| They were demanding expel Josh Hawley, just expel Ted Cruz, expel these dozens of House members, and now suddenly expelling elected members of Congress for disrupting congressional procedures, not for positions they've taken as some sort of fascist assault on democracy, exactly what people like AOC were demanding not all that long ago. | |
| I think the bigger and more important point, though, Megan, is this Nashville shooting has been erased from memory, even though it happened very recently, because it's such an inconvenient narrative, given that the shooter was not just someone who was trans, but very possibly acted on behalf of this radical ideology. | |
| And amazingly, they won't show us the manifesto, even though we always see the manifesto when they can link it to the right. | |
| And we're actually, we retained counsel in Nashville to try and obtain that, that manifesto, because of course it's journalistically in the public interest. | |
| So that's why Kamala Harris goes there and pretends there are no victims because they want to forget about that shooting completely, except to the extent they can exploit it for gun control issues. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| And now what we're seeing is this message that once again, it's Jim Crow 2.0. | |
| I mean, how many times have we heard? | |
| It's like they're excited on the left because they can turn what was the targeting of a Christian school and little nine-year-olds by a trans person into Black Lives Matter. | |
| You threw out the two black guys instead of the white woman. | |
| And by the way, her expulsion only failed by one vote and she did not grab a bullhorn and take it out into the well and she did not lead the protests of the people up in the balcony. | |
| So there was a distinction and she argued those distinctions on her own behalf and through her representatives in distinguishing her own behavior from that of the two black men, only to then be saved. | |
| And then when she was saved and the black men were kicked out, she turned around and said, racism. | |
| You're the one who distinguished your behavior. | |
| Okay, so, but the left is loving the shift to it's not about the dead Christian children. | |
| It's not about the trans person who committed the murders or the buried manifesto. | |
| It is about the expulsion of the two black people who were fighting for democracy. | |
| Yeah, you know, I, first of all, one of the main weapon of the Democratic Party, kind of the establishment that would the establishment wing that leads it, is to depict anyone and everyone who opposes them and their views of being bigoted in some way. | |
| It's an automatic reflex. | |
| It probably had its roots, or at least its kind of newer iteration back in the 2016 election, when I don't know if you recall, but the main tactic of Hillary Clinton's defenders against Bernie Sanders supporters who were trying to kind of challenge the establishment wing of the party was to claim they were all misogynists. | |
| That was the only possible reason you might be opposed to Hillary Clinton, somebody with a long line of ideological positions and all kinds of corrupt behavior in public life. | |
| It had to only be misogyny. | |
| And it worked. | |
| They did it through the general election where it didn't work, but that became their main tactic. | |
| So they're incapable of ever engaging in any kind of political debate without immediately insisting that anyone who's on the other side, by virtue of being on the other side of them, is automatically a racist or a misogynist or a homophobe or transphobia or whatever. | |
| That's why they're so eager to destroy Clarence Thomas because he's kind of a living, breathing testament to the lie of that narrative. | |
| But that's the only political debate and the only framework in which they're comfortable. | |
| And so somehow a shooting by what appeared to be somebody motivated by, at least in part, radical theories of gender ideology and killed Christian children in the name of that ideology, somehow that has been turned around so that whoever is concerned about that component of the story is now back to being a 1960s Jim Crow racist. | |
| And of course, it wouldn't work without the media's cooperation. | |
| That's how they frame everything in partnership with their partisan allies. | |
| Yes. | |
| You see, Kamala Harris goes there to meet with, again, the lawmakers, the ousted lawmakers, not the victims. | |
| And for the first time in her vice presidency, she was truly animated. | |
| You could tell this is what she actually cares about. | |
| The race narrative. | |
| Yes, something I can glom onto. | |
| I can really get behind. | |
| That's been injected. | |
| That actually fires me up. | |
| And listen to her messaging. | |
| Listen to this. | |
| This is SOT3. | |
| It wasn't about the three of these leaders. | |
| It was about who they were representing. | |
| It's about whose voices they were channeling. | |
| Understand that. | |
| And is that not what a democracy allows? | |
| A democracy says you don't silence the people. | |
| You do not stifle the people. | |
| You don't turn off their microphones when they are speaking about the importance of life and liberty. | |
| Okay, so she finally cares about something. | |
| She's finally managed to have an articulate moment because race and divisive insertion of it where it doesn't belong, that's what fires her up. | |
| But the irony, Glenn, the irony of her saying in a democracy, you don't silence people, you don't take away their microphones. | |
| Tell it to the disinformation dozen, right? | |
| Tell it to Trump, who you impeached twice because you didn't want the people to be able to vote for him a second time. | |
| Tell it to the Twitter files reporting on how many private citizens have been stifled and not been able to offer their opinions online. | |
| Tell it to Facebook that shut down discussions that went against the administration's narrative when it came to COVID and so on. | |
| Tell it to the people who were on the banned lists after January 6th, who suddenly couldn't get books published or hired or do business at banks because they were affiliated with Donald Trump. | |
| This is an absurd statement to come out of her mouth. | |
| What a lie that she believes that. | |
| She didn't believe any of that. | |
| Let's remember the only good moment of her ill-fated presidential campaign. | |
| Remember, she dropped out before the first vote was cast. | |
| That's what a complete object failure it was, was when she accused Joe Biden of being a racist because he had opposed busing and desegregation of schools. | |
| And she had that moment in that debate where she said, that little girl was me, Joe, really strongly implying that he was a racist. | |
| She shut up in the polls very temporarily. | |
| And then if she really believed that Joe Biden was animated by racist sentiments, depicting him as this Joe, Jim Crow supporter of segregation, which is what she said, it's amazing that, you know, then she turned around less than a year later and embraced him and heralded him as this man of great character when just a year earlier, she was claiming he hated black people. | |
| That shows you how cynical this game is. | |
| And on top of that, the bigger issue is exactly the one that you raised, which is suddenly now the Democratic Party is the party that safeguards the voices of dissent and the right to protest. | |
| Like when all those people were going to protest COVID lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and they were told they were, should be arrested and were criminals and were risking grandma's life because they wanted to go protest. | |
| And then suddenly when they had a protest they liked after George Floyd's death, they demanded everybody go protest. | |
| Or exactly, they've imposed a censorship regime on this country using not just their power over big tech, but also the law. | |
| Remember, they tried characterizing parents at school board meetings expressing concerns about the curriculum their children were being taught as people engaged in ERICO violations or terrorism. | |
| The Democratic Party is about nothing other than criminalizing dissent and protest. | |
| Everything she just said there is so cynical and so disingenuous, it's hard to know where to start. | |
| Honestly, and let's look what actually happened in Tennessee that she's that this is what's firing her up. | |
| This is what's so outrageous to throw out two guys who in the wake of all these protests in which people are now officially getting hurt as the mobs get out of control. | |
| And we'll get to Riley Gaines in a second. | |
| Finally, somebody stood up. | |
| It's the lawmakers of Tennessee and said, you will not do this. | |
| You, this is such a breach of decorum. | |
| You're thrown out. | |
| You're out of here. | |
| You're done. | |
| And that's a procedure available to us to expel lawmakers who go beyond, who actually lead the protest of the protesters up in the balcony, who actually breach decorum to the place where they take out the bullhorn and start shouting over civil debate that we're trying to have on a public shooting because you didn't get your way. | |
| Do you remember how the Democrats freaked out at Marjorie Taylor Greene for heckling Joe Biden at the State of the Union? | |
| How disgusted they were at the breach of decorum? | |
| Oh my God. | |
| But this with the bullhorn underneath the jacket, that's fine. | |
| Just because you're losing the debate, that's totally fine. | |
| What does it depend on skin color? | |
| Does it depend on ideology? | |
| Does it depend on whether you're talking about shootings of little Christian children? | |
| What is it? | |
| Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things that have, you know, increasingly sickened me about the Democratic Party, its kind of new hegemonic coalition with people who had spent their lives as Republicans and who became disaffected Republicans. | |
| One of the things, maybe the thing that principally revolts me the most is the utter lack of principle. | |
| They just have no principles of any kind. | |
| They feign outrage at one thing and then turn around the next day and do exactly that. | |
| And they demand that nobody notice. | |
| And the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing is a perfect example. | |
| Nancy Pelosi melodramatically tore up President Trump's State of the Union speech in front of him and in front of the cameras to express her disgust. | |
| And that was a potted that became a very popular meme among liberals. | |
| And now suddenly they're worried about decorum because Marjorie Taylor Greene yells something during his speech, but then expelling people who actually disrupt the procedures, not just speak out of turn is this grave assault on democracy. | |
| It's just from one day to the next, what they condemn becomes what they do. | |
| And then the next day it goes back to what they condemn again, entirely based on their own power, whatever they need in the convenience of the moment. | |
| And there are a few people more repellent than that because they sanctimoniously pretend to defend things that are righteous. | |
|
Ignoring Court Rulings on Women
00:15:54
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| And in reality, it's all just about their own power. | |
| And, you know, it's just a repellent character trait. | |
| And I just want to add one more thing, which is, you know, Megan, just as a human being, like if you want to go to Nashville and exploit that situation for political gain, you know, have at it. | |
| That's what politicians do. | |
| But isn't there like any kind of human, you know, sentiment that would say, oh, I'm the vice president. | |
| I can go and like give the power of my office to console these families who just lost their three children, as well as the other three families that lost adults because they were blown away and had their lives snuffed out by some crazy unhinged person acting in the name of a radical ideology. | |
| You would think just like on a human level, there'd be some desire to do this, but these people are vacant of that. | |
| They're just so craven that they see the world entirely as a function of their own agenda. | |
| On this same front, you have a week at least of the Democrats telling us no one is above the law. | |
| No one is above the law on the week that Trump sits and gets arraigned on this indictment, this paper-thin indictment that Alvin Bragg, the DA in Manhattan, has brought against him. | |
| No one's above the law. | |
| Totally ignoring that there is prosecutorial discretion and that prosecutors make decisions all the time on whether this case is worth it or can be proven and is worth the time and heartache it's going to bring to any given community. | |
| Never mind the defendant. | |
| That was the messaging. | |
| Then we get a ruling out of a Texas federal district court that this abortion drug approved by the FDA in 2000 may need to be stopped. | |
| That the FDA is going to have to stop distributing it in the wake of the collapse of Roe and the Texas law down there on abortion. | |
| There was a conflicting ruling in another jurisdiction. | |
| And you have AOC going on, it was CNN State of the Union, I think, to begin. | |
| First, it was Anderson Cooper. | |
| First, it was Anderson Cooper saying, do not comply. | |
| Okay, so we've gone from no one is above the law to F that federal court ruling. | |
| Just don't follow it. | |
| In the span of about two minutes, here she is sat one. | |
| Senator Ron Wyden has already issued statements, for example, advising what we should do in a situation like this, which I concur, which is that I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling. | |
| The interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement and it is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose whether or not to enforce such a ruling. | |
| Okay. | |
| So it's all, it's like your choice. | |
| I'll leave it up to you. | |
| And then to her credit, Dana Bash actually asked her about it on State of the Union on Sunday and listen to this. | |
| Listen to AOC dodge because here's the real question. | |
| You could make the argument that when there's dueling court rulings in two federal district courts, just proceed. | |
| If you're the Biden administration, just proceed with the status quo until the higher court resolves it. | |
| You could definitely make that argument. | |
| And Dana Bash zeroes in on this with her and listen to the dodge that follows. | |
| Which is just to simply ignore the court ruling. | |
| That's a pretty stunning position. | |
| When this case is resolved by the Supreme Court, should the administration follow that decision if that decision ends up banning this abortion drug? | |
| Well, you know, I want to take a step back and dig into the grounds around ignoring this preliminary ruling as well. | |
| There is an extraordinary amount of precedent for this for folks saying this is a first, that this is a precedent setting. | |
| It is not. | |
| The Trump administration also did this very thing, but also it has happened before. | |
| And we know that the executive branch has an enforcement discretion, especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out of Washington. | |
| But I do not believe that the courts have the authority to have the authority over the FDA that they just asserted. | |
| And I do believe that it creates a crisis. | |
| So Dana Bash asked, should that apply if the Supreme Court upholds the Texas judge's decision? | |
| If the Supreme Court of the United States, the land says the Texas judge was right and the FDA should not release this drug, should that hold? | |
| And she dodges because now she's out on a limb saying we can say F the Supreme Court and not. | |
| And this is where the Democrats are going, Glenn. | |
| This is where they're going. | |
| The mentality of the Democratic Party, the core animating principle, it was actually expressed in a very viral video by the philosopher Sam Harris when he was asked about the way the media lied and the CIA lied about the Hunter Biden laptop. | |
| And they made up the story that it was Russian disinformation, got the story censored and discredited before the election. | |
| And he said, I think Trump is such a singular evil. | |
| I think our cause, meaning Democrats or Trump opponents, is so just that anything and everything we do, even lying, censorship, disinformation, is justified in the name of this broader cause because the evil of Trump is so much greater than anything we might do to stop him. | |
| It's an ends justify the means argument. | |
| It's what's led to every historical evil when you completely are unmoored from any core principle, any fixed principle, which is exactly what they are. | |
| That is their mindset. | |
| Judicial review is the foundation of our entire republic. | |
| It was, you know, Andrew Jackson who notoriously said when the Supreme Court ruled against him, oh, well, the Supreme Court made the ruling. | |
| What army are they going to enforce it with? | |
| This is, you know, this was resolved 215 years ago with the idea that the courts do have the power to rule that executive branch conduct or executive branch policy is illegal or transgresses the constitution. | |
| When she first made those statements, it wasn't grounded in the fact that there was a conflicting district court ruling. | |
| It was grounded in the fact that when Democrats believe that a court ruling is sufficiently erroneous or baseless, that the executive branch, since they're the one with all the power, they're the ones with the people with the guns, can just go about and ignore the courts because the courts have no enforcement mechanism, just like the Congress doesn't. | |
| So this would work for the Congress as well. | |
| This is a recipe for presidential tyranny, the idea that the president is like this strongman figure. | |
| You know, that's what happens in Latin America and in Asia a lot where, you know, they get to the point where they say, we don't care about the courts anymore. | |
| We're going to strip the courts and the legislature of all its power so that we just have a strongman ruling with no barriers. | |
| That is what she and a lot of other Democrats were calling for here. | |
| And I think it reflects this kind of underlying mindset that's very dangerous. | |
| You get to the point where you're just completely ignoring Supreme Court rulings and we don't have a country anymore. | |
| I mean, that is the fundamental thing that binds us together is the rule of law. | |
| Well, there's no constitution. | |
| It's the Supreme Court. | |
| The Constitution is a list of things the government can't do. | |
| And if the government does one of those things anyway, it's the courts that come in and say, this is something that the Constitution doesn't allow you to do. | |
| And if the president can now ignore court rulings instead of appealing them, which of course they should do, but no, ignore them, pretend they don't exist, violate them. | |
| There's no constitution. | |
| There's no republic. | |
| It's just rule by tyranny. | |
| This same person was on the air last week saying that Clarence Thomas needs to be impeached for accepting perfectly acceptable gifts from a very rich Republican donor for the last 20 plus years. | |
| They changed the rules on March 14th to say, okay, if you go on somebody's private jet, you do have to report that publicly. | |
| Prior to that, you didn't have to. | |
| She wants to get him impeached for taking nice vacations with the guy and going on his private yacht before it was required that he disclose any of it. | |
| My point is, she's a congressional Kardashian. | |
| She's an idiot. | |
| She's there to make herself a star. | |
| And yet she's all over the Sunday shows. | |
| We have to listen to this. | |
| I object to being surrounded by this stupidity. | |
| Yeah, you know, I was defending 60 Minutes for interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene because the reality is whether you like her or not or things about her or not, Marjorie Taylor Greene is somebody who does represent the views of millions of people. | |
| And I don't think it's the job of journalists to just wish people away. | |
| And I know you're not suggesting that it is annoying how ubiquitous she is because she is extremely ignorant. | |
| I don't know if you ever watched her get interviewed about foreign policy, but she can barely place countries on a map, including ones about what she has very didactic views. | |
| She was on with Margaret Hoover once on Firing Line. | |
| She had made this like very melodramatic statement about Israel and Palestine. | |
| It turns out she had no idea what she was talking about. | |
| She didn't know what the occupation was that she was condemning. | |
| She's a person of complete ignorance. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Her talent is a social media star, but I don't think that that her ignorance should distract us from the fact that she is a talented demagogue and is channeling not just sentiments on the kind of conservative or mainstream Democratic party wing, but also their allies now on the left. | |
| There used to be kind of a tension between establishment liberals and the left from the Hillary campaign against Bernie, but that has disappeared. | |
| And this sentiment is now united. | |
| And there's a lot of neocons and Bush era Republicans with them that our country faces such a grave threat in the name of Trump's movement or conservatives in general that we can't even allow people basic freedoms anymore. | |
| They can't vote for themselves. | |
| They can't decide things for themselves because when they do, the outcome is too dangerous. | |
| And all we should do, this is the AOC view, and a lot of people are cheering is just seize power in whatever way we have to, including by ignoring court orders. | |
| That really is what's animating everything they're doing from the censorship regime to criminalizing dissent. | |
| One of the things that's bothering me about AOC and others like her is I watched them absolutely ruin the Me Too movement. | |
| You know, that was rooted in something good, which was we shouldn't force women to be sexually harassed in order to advance their careers at the office. | |
| Who would disagree with that? | |
| Really? | |
| I mean, what normal person would say, oh, I disagree. | |
| And it's complex. | |
| I get it. | |
| And, you know, whatever. | |
| But they're the ones who turned it into a witch hunt. | |
| They're the ones who just wanted scalps. | |
| They wanted male scalps. | |
| Brett Kavanaugh believe all women, all women. | |
| Okay. | |
| Unless the target happens to be a Democrat like Andrew Cuomo, in which case it's complicated. | |
| We're all going to switch secretly and help the man accused and not the women or Joe Biden in the case of Tara Reed. | |
| Let's secretly work against Tara Reed to ruin her life and smear her as a human because the target is Joe Biden. | |
| So they ruined it. | |
| And it was people like AOC. | |
| And they're the same ones who told us they were all about women. | |
| They're about women, women, women, women. | |
| And now that leads us to Riley Gaines, an actual woman and a fierce competitor, somebody they would normally be celebrating out there in the pool with the best of the best, NCAA tournaments, winning medals and so on, who didn't win in the NCAA final on, I can't remember whether it was the 100 or what heat it was, because she tied instead with Leah Thomas. | |
| And instead of giving the trophy to Riley to hold, they gave it to Leah Thomas, saying, we want Leah to hold the trophy, not you. | |
| Why? | |
| Oh, why would that be? | |
| The one who was on the guys team this time last year, placing 500th or Riley Gaines. | |
| Okay, so Riley has a thing to say about trans people in sports, trans women in particular, in women's sports. | |
| And she goes, as we discussed on Friday, to this San Francisco State University and gets absolutely attacked. | |
| She did speak, so that was a plus, but then get absolutely attacked. | |
| The video is horrific. | |
| She says she was assaulted twice by a trans woman, some guy wearing a dress, punched in the shoulder, and then again, grazed her face. | |
| They were screaming terrible things at her. | |
| She was forced to hide in a room for three hours as the cops on campus did virtually nothing. | |
| They were yelling ransom demands to let her out. | |
| And I mean, not a peep, not a peep from the AOCs of the world on women's rights and the assault of a woman who was not saying trans people don't exist, who is not saying I refuse to use pronouns, who is simply saying it's not okay to have trans women compete against biological women in sports like mine where they have an unfair advantage. | |
| That's it. | |
| So I can't listen to them paint themselves as our advocates. | |
| It's absurd and it's an obvious lie. | |
| I'm sure you've had this experience. | |
| I'd be willing to bet. | |
| But when you're somebody who's in a so-called marginalized group, if you're a woman, if you're black, if you're a person of color, if you're a gay man or a lesbian, whatever, this is something that Democrats and liberals supposedly honor and protect and constantly demand that you be respected to right up until the point that you become some kind of a dissident to their ideology, | |
| at which point the vitriol and use of these very bigoted tropes is just unleashed like nothing before. | |
| I mean, the most grotesque racism I see directed toward Clarence Thomas comes from liberals and Democrats who hate him. | |
| The most grotesque misogyny I bet you you've encountered probably came during moments when you confronted Donald Trump and people were angry at you for that, but then also from liberals who hate you. | |
| And that's definitely been my experience in terms of just like ugly homophobia has mostly come overwhelmingly from those moments in my career when I've been perceived as being a dissident to the Democratic Party or the American left. | |
| And so to watch this woman who, as you say, would ordinarily be celebrated be violently and physically threatened. | |
| It wasn't that they were just disagreeing with her or expressing dissent toward her speech, all of which is fine. | |
| They menaced her physically to the point that she needed 20 police officers in order to safely leave. | |
| She was trapped in that school for three hours. | |
| They were saying things like, let her pay us and we'll let her leave. | |
| This is criminal behavior that's obviously misogynistic in nature. | |
| It's exploiting this perceived vulnerability that women have under in those kinds of situations to defend themselves physically. | |
| That's the way in which she was menaced. | |
| And nobody has the slightest objection to it who ordinarily would be waving the misogyny flag because she's expressing dissent to their agenda. | |
| And it's, it's, you know, that gets back to the thing I was describing earlier. | |
| It is absolutely repulsive to watch. | |
| I mean, who would look at that video, no matter what your views are on trans women in sports and not be disgusted and horrified by that behavior? | |
| Absolutely right. | |
| There's, and there's a lot more to discuss on Riley and what the university is now saying. | |
| We'll pick it up right there after this quick break. | |
| More with Glenn after two minutes. | |
| Don't go away. | |
| What I experienced was peaceful. | |
| It wouldn't even be peaceful in an alternate universe. | |
| I mean, it was quite literally the exact opposite, barricaded in a room where I could not leave for three hours where they were yelling obscene, terrible, violent things towards both myself and these officers who were protecting me. | |
| What you have to do to make changes in regards to protecting those freedoms is to go where it hurts, which is the pockets. | |
| If I weren't to do something, there would be no repercussions for these people. | |
| Therefore, something needs to be done to hold these people accountable. | |
| Right on. | |
| That's Riley Gaines saying she's going to sue. | |
| She's going to sue the university over what was done to her. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
| My guest today, Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of Rumble's system update. | |
| She's right, Glenn. | |
| You hit him in the pocketbook. | |
| That's the only thing they'll listen to. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I mean, you know, I was just thinking first of all, I'm a little bit worked up still from those clips about how the Democrats should ignore court rulings. | |
| I forgot how angry I was about that. | |
| It was a few days ago, so I'm trying to put that to the side. | |
|
Ben Shapiro's Liberal Politics Coverage
00:15:24
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| On this Riley Gain thing, though, the one point I do want to make that I think is very important is, I don't know if you saw, you might, you might have. | |
| There was a viral clip where Ben Shapiro was interviewing Neil Tyson deGrasse and asked him about this kind of gender ideology. | |
| Can a trans woman be a woman? | |
| And he basically said, look, beyond the issue of what we teach kids in schools, which is always relevant, the only real issue that matters when it comes to the trans to trans people, otherwise we could just say adults live and live and they have the right to do what they want, is the issue of how we treat fairness in sports. | |
| Even people who are on the side of the trans movement acknowledge this is a very legitimate question. | |
| People like Martina Navaratlova and Chris Everett, who are pioneers in women's sports, who basically are the reason why there's so many opportunities along with Billie Jean King for female sports to exist on a professionalized level with a lot of corporate money involved and for female athletes to get wealthy and famous doing it are very good liberals. | |
| But both Martina Navratova and Chris Everett have said, there's no way it's fair to allow people born as biological men to compete in professional women's sports because you can never treat or hormonize out the advantages, the inborn advantages that come from being a biological male, especially if you pass through puberty as a man. | |
| This is all Riley Gaines is saying. | |
| She's talking about that issue that even supporters of this movement acknowledge is a valid one that requires, you know, debate and to grapple with. | |
| And she obviously has a lot of credibility since she's devoted her life to excelling at swimming and feels like she's being cheated against or mistreated. | |
| And to treat her like she's some kind of Nazi figure to the point where violence and those kind that kind of abuses is merited is sickening. | |
| But I'm not surprised this movement, once a movement gets so righteous, you know, it gets back to what we were talking about before. | |
| They feel like anything they do is justified in the name of their cause. | |
| And increasingly that is liberal politics in the United States. | |
| They're jumping the shark. | |
| This is their moment of, you know, when BLM would go up to the private diners in the summer of 2020 and say, raise the fist, get your fist up, or your table's going over, or you're getting attacked. | |
| And they lost the American people who they had after George Floyd. | |
| They had. | |
| This is that moment. | |
| You've gone too far. | |
| You're losing the people who are in the center, who are open-minded to you. | |
| It's done. | |
| And I do think this is an inflection point, what happened to her. | |
| The latest poll, I think it was by trying to find out who to NPR Ipsos, suggests nearly two in three Americans oppose allowing trans people to compete on the sport of whatever they identify with. | |
| So they don't support trans women competing against actual women in sport. | |
| That's two-thirds of the American people. | |
| That includes a lot of Democrats. | |
| And this kind of thing is not going to help. | |
| So that brings me to the problem with the university system, which deserves at least a nod here. | |
| I know we're all aware of it, but we can't just breeze by it. | |
| So when we saw the behavior out at Stanford, and it was terrible, and, you know, I mean, the protests out there with the judge and how disgracefully he was treated. | |
| At least Stanford tried to say, we're sorry, we stand for free speech. | |
| And we're going to do a half day re-education clinic for the protesters on why you should not say to a federal judge, you can't find the CLIT on a sign and do fake throwing up sounds as he begins his remarks. | |
| They need a little lesson on that at Stanford law. | |
| God help us. | |
| This university didn't even feel the need to pretend it cared about Riley Gaines and what happened to her. | |
| San Francisco State University issues this long statement. | |
| I got to tell you, Glenn, I read it and I literally thought they forgot a paragraph. | |
| Whoever posted this must be a San Francisco state hater. | |
| And they removed the paragraph where they said, we're very sorry about what happened to Riley. | |
| No, that's not what happened. | |
| It's not in there. | |
| I won't read the whole thing as it just goes on, but it's basically as follows. | |
| Let me begin by saying clearly the trans community is welcome. | |
| Okay, wait, that's not where you begin. | |
| What? | |
| What? | |
| No, no, Riley Gaines is welcome. | |
| Free speech is welcome. | |
| No, let me begin by saying the trans community is welcome and belongs at SFSU. | |
| Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care, and compassion. | |
| And we value different ideas. | |
| Okay, great. | |
| We do. | |
| How? | |
| How do we let those ideas be expressed? | |
| Walk us through it. | |
| Doesn't get to that. | |
| We may also find ourselves exposed to divergent views on campus and even views we find personally abhorrent. | |
| These encounters have sometimes led to discord, anger, confrontation, and fear. | |
| We must meet this moment and unite with a shared value of learning. | |
| Where's the condemnation? | |
| Where's the, we must not let those emotions take us to the place of violence where we actually hurt another human, not in there. | |
| Then this woman goes on to say, thank you. | |
| to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening's event. | |
| It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. | |
| Oh my God. | |
| I hope she's referring to Riley Gaines. | |
| I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions. | |
| I'm also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. | |
| This is, I don't, she's just ignoring what happened. | |
| And then she says, this is the capper. | |
| This feels difficult because it is. | |
| As you reflect, process, and begin to heal from what? | |
| Your assault? | |
| Your foray into the criminal behavior? | |
| Please remember there are people, resources, and services available. | |
| And she goes on to list them. | |
| Equity and community inclusion, counseling, psychological services, dean of students' office, and goes on, her name is Jamila Moore, Vice President of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management. | |
| My comment on my memo, I'm not going to lie, reads, you asshole. | |
| Well, you go back and look at our history, Glenn, it's a long list of DEI. | |
| Of course, it's straight out of central casting. | |
| Nothing to Riley Gaines, not even apology. | |
| It's all so Orwellian. | |
| I mean, first of all, the idea that to be a student of this extremely left-wing school in San Francisco, it requires courage to protest a speaker that I'm sure 98% of the faculty and student body at least are opposed to. | |
| It requires courage to join a mob, to join the crowd, to take the majoritarian position and threaten somebody from dissenting over it. | |
| That doesn't require courage. | |
| That requires this kind of mob behavior, this like thuggish sentiment. | |
| And, you know, I think when I see stuff like this, you know, people often, not often, but sometimes argue about what my political ideology is. | |
| Am I on the left? | |
| Am I on the right? | |
| Am I Democrat or Republican? | |
| Whatever. | |
| Really, my ideology is just anti-authoritarianism. | |
| I distrust human beings and institution, human institutions to wield power without limits, which is why I was so horrified that the idea that Joe Biden as president with all of his immense power could even ignore when the Supreme Court or the judiciary tells him that he's crossed constitutional lines. | |
| Like Democrats can just ignore that because they're the ones with all the guns and power. | |
| And that's what's happening at these kinds of universities when you're part of the mob that commands overwhelming majoritarian sentiment when almost nobody is willing to stand up and disagree with you because that's actually what takes courage is to disagree with the mob. | |
| They have this sense of power and it's very inebriating. | |
| Like what you were saying with going and forcing somebody to raise their fist against their will in support of a cause they may or may not support under threat of physical violence. | |
| That's the kind of power that when human beings get it, it pulsates through the body and it makes them do very, very dangerous and kind of threatening things. | |
| And I think that's really what you're seeing here is this is mob justice, the idea that if we gather enough people and we unite in hatred of somebody else based on their political viewpoint, there's nothing and nobody that can stop it. | |
| I wouldn't be surprised if they had torn her apart physically without being in a locked room and without that police escort. | |
| I think those measures were necessary because that's what mobs start doing when they work themselves into that kind of frenzy. | |
| But increasingly, that is what is animating left-wing politics on the culture war is that kind of sentiment. | |
| Yeah, mob justice is right. | |
| And that's why I, for one, was delighted to see the Tennessee legislature do something about these three out of order, rude, disruptive lawmakers. | |
| Teach them a lot. | |
| They're coming right back in. | |
| Please, give me a break. | |
| This is not the death penalty for these three. | |
| But they were trying to stand up for the constituents who they represented. | |
| There will be law and order inside of this chamber. | |
| There will be a protocol that you follow. | |
| You are not the leader of a protest mob. | |
| You are a lawmaker. | |
| You were elected here and agreed to follow certain protocols. | |
| You didn't do it. | |
| And I noticed you sent out a tweet that I thought was perfect because let's just say you disagree with me on Tennessee. | |
| They shouldn't have thrown out the lawmakers, whatever. | |
| Fine, that's okay. | |
| There's room for disagreement there. | |
| That's how you would see it. | |
| That's how I would see it. | |
| When reporting on it as straight news reporters, we would report the facts and let the people decide. | |
| Not if your name is Ben Collins and you work at NBC as a senior journalist over there. | |
| I loved your response to this. | |
| So Ben Collins tweets out. | |
| He retweeted somebody else and agreed with a Democratic Party activist, like an overt liberal Democratic Party activist. | |
| Yeah, you tell the story. | |
| I mean, I have the quote in front of me if you need it. | |
| Oh, no, you go read it. | |
| I just wanted to make clear that the person he was retweeting, because I don't want the quote, is someone who says, my goal in life is to advance the interests of the Democratic Party. | |
| I want to elect as many Democrats as possible because I'm a liberal and I believe in liberal ideology. | |
| That's the person, this news reporter for NBC was retweeting. | |
| And you go ahead and read the tweet because I don't have it in front of me. | |
| Okay. | |
| So this guy is tweeting out. | |
| He's outraged about the Tennessee lawmakers' expulsion. | |
| And Ben Collins, the NBC guy, tweets out exactly right. | |
| Both sides are not the same. | |
| And it's time for media outlets to stop pretending they are. | |
| The polarization is asymmetric. | |
| And you made a great point about how this is a good thing. | |
| It's a good thing that Ben Collins was bold enough to retweet that and say what he said on behalf of NBC News. | |
| Why? | |
| Yeah, you know, it's so ironic because when I first began writing about politics, I really disliked the conceit in journalism that journalists were objective. | |
| I don't think journalists or any human beings are objective. | |
| We're all the byproduct of our subjective biases. | |
| I think we strive toward objectivity. | |
| That's the goal is to present facts as neutrally as possible. | |
| So as you say, we inform the public rather than propagandize them. | |
| But everything about what we do, including who we recognize as experts, how we describe situations, what we react to, of course, we're seeing that through a subjective prism. | |
| And I never, I always felt that the journalistic claim that they're objective and partisans are subjective was a kind of fraud that corrupted the profession. | |
| Because if you start off lying to people about what you're marketing to them, which is journalism, they're already going to be suspicious of everything else that follows. | |
| And I always wanted more candor among journalism. | |
| So when I did that Soden story, I would report what the NSA was doing, but I would also be very clear that I opposed what the NSA was doing, mass buying on Americans, because I didn't want to hide my own views and pretend I had no perspective. | |
| I feel like reporting is more honest when journalists admit what their biases are. | |
| We're now at the point where NBC and CNN, like ostensibly apolitical or at least nonpartisan news outlets, that they claim to be, allow their reporters to be very explicit about the fact that they believe the Democratic Party is superior. | |
| And what was so notable about that tweet that he retweeted, that media coverage should reflect that premise that the parties are not equal, that the Democrats are superior. | |
| The Republicans don't believe in democracy. | |
| They don't believe in freedom or whatever. | |
| They're a fascist party. | |
| And so for an NBC news reporter to say, this is how I see the world, I believe the Democratic Party is not only better, but that journalism should be about making that clear was kind of a new level of candor to me that I do consider positive because that is really what they all think. | |
| So why not just have it on the table? | |
| Come right out and say it. | |
| So that, great. | |
| Half the country now knows this is explicit from NBC News' Ben Collins. | |
| Both sides are not the same. | |
| And it's time for media outlets to stop pretending they are. | |
| Okay, got it. | |
| Keep that in mind when you watch their coverage and read his reporting, how he feels about 80 million Americans. | |
| On the subject of NBC, I have to touch on what happened this morning. | |
| So some of the Easter festivities at the White House took place today, and Al Roker was sent over to the White House to interview President Biden. | |
| I assume because everyone on both sides is assuming zero damage can or will be done in such an exchange. | |
| Well, guess again. | |
| Watch what happened when Al Roker tried to get the president to make news on whether he is going to run again. | |
| Are you saying that you would be taking part in our upcoming election in 2020? | |
| I'll either be rolling an egg or being the guy who's pushing him out. | |
| Come on, help her brother out. | |
| Make some news for him. | |
| Well, I plan on running now, but we're not prepared to announce it yet. | |
| All right. | |
| There you go. | |
| I'm planning on running. | |
| I'm planning on running, but we're not going to announce it. | |
| I don't know what that first half is about. | |
| We're going to push it. | |
| We're going to don't know. | |
| But he said it. | |
| He said he's going to run again. | |
| And all we could talk about on the team before the show, Glenn, was they needed the Easter bunny again. | |
| Remember last year how the Easter Bunny was like, no, no questions. | |
| And he was in charge. | |
| That guy really served a purpose. | |
| Look, this person needed to get back in the suit and keep him away from Al Roker. | |
| I mean, it's really, you know, it's such an interesting media dynamic because on the one hand, obviously the overwhelming majority of people at NBC and places like it, CNN, want the Democrats to win, want Joe Biden to be re-elected. | |
| That was what we were just talking about. | |
| But on the other hand, and you're the one who pointed this out in a clip I always use because it was said so vividly and so clearly, nobody benefited more from Trump's candidacy and from Trump's prominence in politics than liberal media outlets because that's the only thing that generates ratings for them. | |
| Nobody watches their show if Trump's not in the news. | |
| The only time people watched was when he emerged in politics because he's interesting and liberals won't watch them unless they're excited by Trump and they need Trump. | |
| So they're in this very weird position where on the one hand, they obviously, as ideologues, don't want Trump re-elected. | |
| But as media figures, as people whose career depends on ratings, which they can't get without him, they do need Trump to go back. | |
| And if you're somebody who's worried about another Trump presidency, the fact that he's leading polls, especially after the Salvador Bragg indictment in the Republican side, and you watch Joe Biden, who is going to be even two years older when he runs. | |
|
Why Liberals Need Trump in News
00:04:23
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|
| He's going to be 82, Megan. | |
| His term, if he wins, well, he'll be 86 when he completes it. | |
| He's already so clearly aboled cognitively. | |
| I think it's going to be, you know, I don't think there are enough medications in the world to get him through that this time, let alone a COVID pandemic that really helped him hide in the basement the whole time. | |
| And I think they're playing a very dangerous game, but we'll see how that works out. | |
| But you really see that clip and he's just degenerating before our eyes. | |
| Well, here's another one, which is just funny. | |
| Look at this where he appears to be terrified that the Easter bunny is chasing him. | |
| This is from this morning watch. | |
| They're walking, he and Jill. | |
| The Easter Bunny holds hands with Jill. | |
| He turns around, notices that they're twice. | |
| You got to go to YouTube and watch this later. | |
| He's like, oh, shit, here he's coming for me again. | |
| He's going to stop me. | |
| It's pretty amazing. | |
| Well, I think there was like a jealousy. | |
| There was a little jealousy there. | |
| Was like, who is this rabbit holding my wife's hand? | |
| Like, there was some kind of like protectiveness. | |
| And then, yeah, he kind of got scared. | |
| He like scamfered to stay in front of the rabbit so the rabbit couldn't get him. | |
| Meanwhile, they really should have used the rabbit again to keep him away from Al Roker and making any additional news. | |
| He's obviously running again. | |
| I think that's right. | |
| He was supposed to announce in February he didn't. | |
| Now here we are in April. | |
| He hasn't. | |
| There's no way they want Kamala Harris, who at this point would be the only realistic attorney. | |
| I mean, the closer they wait until we get to the summer debate system season, the less likely anybody else can run. | |
| Although Robert F. Kennedy has thrown his hat into the ring. | |
| And Maryam Williams. | |
| Always a pleasure. | |
| Oh, I forgot about Marianne. | |
| Yeah. | |
| My friend. | |
| Thank you, Megan. | |
| Great to talk to you. | |
| It's great to see you. | |
| All right. | |
| We're looking forward to Dr. Peter Attia. | |
| He's back. | |
| His new book is so good. | |
| And there are really, really great approaches to your well-being, your long-term well-being, and your longevity. | |
| Don't go away. | |
| Aging is a fact of life, but what if our health did not have to decline with the passage of time? | |
| I mean, we all got to go sometime, but what if we could push that time back and live really well up until the moment of death? | |
| In a new book, Dr. Peter Attia challenges the conventional medical thinking on aging. | |
| This is a brilliant man who's done so much research and study on all the aspects of aging. | |
| We are so lucky to have him here. | |
| When we had Peter on the show last year, he mentioned he was working on this book, and now it's out to save us all. | |
| It's called Outlive: the Science and Art of Longevity. | |
| And it is a number one New York Times bestseller, which is not easy to do. | |
| Peter, congrats, and welcome back to the show. | |
| Thank you so much, Megan. | |
| And thanks for having me back. | |
| Oh, I think it's so interesting. | |
| And I love how you sort of say upfront: look, I know if you're reading this book, you're like, tell me what to eat. | |
| Tell me exactly how to exercise. | |
| Tell me exactly what I should be taking, right? | |
| So I can live forever or at least to 110 well. | |
| And you talk about how that's not exactly what this book is. | |
| We're talking about approaches and educating you on what matters and what doesn't matter. | |
| And you do get lots of very practical, useful tips, but it's an education on how to think about your life and your wellness. | |
| And before we get to all that, I think that you set it up beautifully when you started the book with the egg story. | |
| And as I listen to the books, I listen to the audio with you reading it, the egg story keeps coming back and it makes sense to me. | |
| Can you tell us about that nightmare that plagued you for a long, long time? | |
| Yeah, it was basically kind of standing beneath a building and trying to catch eggs that were being thrown off the top of the building and being sort of quasi-successful, right? | |
| So you catch an egg, but then you miss an egg and it sort of splats all over the ground. | |
| And this was just, you know, kind of a feeling of helplessness, but it led to an epiphany eventually, which was the strategy of waiting until the eggs are about to hit the ground and then trying to make a miraculous catch was really doomed to fail in the long run. | |
| A far better strategy was to go to the top of the building and find the guy who was throwing them and either forcefully or not remove his basket of eggs. | |
|
Calcium Scan Zero Great News
00:07:56
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| And that's the same when it comes to one's wellness, one's health. | |
| You talk about how, as a doctor, you saw young people dying in the hospital and you think, God, that's terrible, the woman with the aneurysm. | |
| But really, that aneurysm, even though she was a young woman who died of it, was coming her way a long time prior to that. | |
| And so there's very little the doctors can do when you come into the hospital about to have an aneurysm, but there's a lot the doctors can do 15 years before that in checking your wellness and advising you on how to avoid the aneurysm 15 years later. | |
| And where does it start? | |
| Does it start by just a good person going in to see a good doctor and saying, here are the blood panels I actually want, not the nonsense lipid panel that we do that just gives us surface level info every year? | |
| It's actually many things. | |
| And I don't think I could say it's just one thing, but I think the most important thing and the most important first step is the cognitive shift from what I describe as medicine 2.0 to medicine 3.0. | |
| And that cognitive shift, I liken to as important a shift as what took us from basically witchcraft into the modern era of medicine, you know, 150 years ago. | |
| That was the scientific method. | |
| So that was a huge step forward, you know, being able to realize that not only was everything that we saw happening in the body explained by actual nature, you know, laws of science, but that you could, you know, form hypotheses and test those hypotheses with experiments using the experimental and scientific method. | |
| That's basically what allowed us to eradicate, for the most part, infectious diseases and double human lifespan in the span of five generations. | |
| Well, we're sitting here looking at a deeper problem today, or at least a different problem, for which that solution isn't working. | |
| The solution of let's just extend life once life is close to its end, as the example we've just discussed, isn't working. | |
| We need a radical shift. | |
| And the radical shift is living longer does not mean living longer with disease. | |
| It means living longer without disease. | |
| And you can only accomplish that if you truly adopt principles of prevention that get a ton of lip service in the conventional system. | |
| There's nobody who's going to say, oh, I don't agree with prevention. | |
| The question is, what does that mean? | |
| How early do you have to start and how aggressive do you need to be? | |
| Well, and also what came across to me in the book is you're not without data. | |
| Like there are data that are available if you connect with the right doctor on where you are right now, what genetic blessings you may have, what genetic, not I want to say curses, but challenges, as they say when you get your school kid review, opportunities, yet another opportunity for us to work on, opportunities for you. | |
| So it's not just, I have shitty genes and that's that. | |
| I'm going to die young. | |
| There's so much that you actually can do, even if the magic age of 52, you write about it in your book, you use it as an example age. | |
| It's where I am now. | |
| Last year, you told me I really needed to be committed to a health routine and like sort of be getting my fitness on by 53. | |
| So I've got about seven, eight months. | |
| I don't know what it is. | |
| Anyway, there are things that you can do. | |
| And to me, the reason I mentioned the lipid panel is because that's one thing that's, that's real data you can get, that's available to you. | |
| Yeah, it's really interesting. | |
| We got an email through our website over the weekend from a guy who had read the book already and I say already because the book's only been out about 10 days and it's, as you know, it's not the shortest book. | |
| Um nevertheless, the guy read the book and immediately and went and had uh, his LP little a. | |
| Checked now, lp little a is a is a lipid that most people aren't aware of. | |
| It's a lipoprotein most people aren't aware of, yet it's the, the most common hereditary cause of cardiovascular disease. | |
| He went and had his check and it was a little bit elevated, not hugely elevated, but certainly elevated. | |
| His APO B, which is another lipid we talk about, was also slightly elevated, but not enough that anybody would have cared. | |
| But a CT angiogram revealed a 90% occlusion in the main artery that runs down the left ventricle. | |
| Interestingly, this guy's a remarkable athlete, you know, has done several Ironmen. | |
| And in the past, he'd even complained a little bit of chest pain, but it was never taken seriously because how would you take that seriously in a 41-year-old who's as fit as a fiddle? | |
| And there are lots of other reasons why people have chest pain, especially young, healthy athletic people. | |
| To make a long story short, he ended up requiring two stents in his left anterior descending artery over the weekend and just wanted to write us to tell us, hey, thank you for alerting me to all this stuff so I could go out and get this done. | |
| And in some ways, that's a success story, but in some ways it's a tragedy, right? | |
| It's a tragedy in that, why aren't we checking LP little A on everybody in their teenage years? | |
| Because there's a lot that can be done about this if you catch this early. | |
| You know, it makes me think because Abby knows my assistant every year because my dad died at 45. | |
| And I know you've had lots of early death thanks to cardiovascular disease in your family, which I now believe was like, there was a reason for it. | |
| It gave you, it gave us, you, determined to look into these issues. | |
| But yeah, so my dad died of a sudden heart attack at age 45. | |
| So every year I go for a stress test. | |
| And Abby's always got to give me the 30-day warning because I do exercise going into my stress test, Peter. | |
| I'm defrauding myself. | |
| Study for the test. | |
| Yes, it's very sad. | |
| But in any event, now I'm wondering, what am I doing? | |
| Why am I getting, you know, the stress? | |
| It's the real stress test with you're hooked up to the monitor and you get down right after you do the 13 minutes and they check your breathing. | |
| But like you're, I don't know, I didn't, I'm not sure. | |
| I can't remember how you feel about that, but I've also had my calcium score done. | |
| It was zero, but you're not even saying the calcium score is all that reliable. | |
| It's the CT angiogram, which I do think is really, should everybody be getting that? | |
| I think at some point it depends. | |
| Well, let me back up for a second. | |
| So the calcium score is directionally helpful, but as you're alluding to, as I wrote about in the book, 15% of calcium scans give a false negative. | |
| So 15% of the time, if you get a zero on your calcium score, it's not actually zero. | |
| Either there is calcification that's so small it's being missed. | |
| That actually happened to me once. | |
| Alternatively, you don't have calcium, but you have soft plaque, which is just as problematic, meaning you still have atherosclerosis, even at the level or at the gross resolution of a CT scan. | |
| So that's one point I would make. | |
| The other point I would make is, you know, I don't believe in doing tests unless the test is going to alter your behavior. | |
| So if I'm treating a person who's young and has other risk factors that we deem relevant, I don't necessarily need the CT angiogram because the probability that, you know, a 30-year-old is going to have advanced atherosclerosis that's going to change our management might actually be low. | |
| So, you know, in your case, having that C, that calcium scan of zero is great news, but I'd want to make sure I knew what your LP little A was, what your APO B was, and were those things being treated as aggressively as you could tolerate medically. | |
| And if they are, then I wouldn't feel the need to repeat those scans or move you to CT angiogram. | |
| And as far as the stress test goes, you know, a stress test is a great test because it's, as its name suggests, putting you under the maximum amount of stress, which is when we can see changes in the heart that would be different in its electrical activity. | |
| And those would be real, you know, canary in the coal mine changes for ischemic heart disease. | |
| The good news is generally for people who are exercising aggressively, if they're doing it symptom-free, a stress test is not adding a whole heck of a lot in a case like yours. | |
| But again, I still think the stress test is a valuable test and we do use them in select patients. | |
|
Obesity as Metabolic Continuum Disease
00:03:31
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|
| You talk about the four horsemen of death and what's going to get us. | |
| We all know something's going to get us. | |
| But can you just walk us through what those are? | |
| Yeah, the four horsemen are basically the big chronic diseases that took over. | |
| So once Medicine 2.0 ushered in an era of remarkable success against infectious diseases and communicable diseases, which really happened again in the late 1900s and the early part of the 20th century, we basically started living longer, right? | |
| We went from living an average of 40 years to getting into our eighth decade of life, living into our 70s. | |
| And all of a sudden, something happened, which was all of these chronic diseases started to kill us. | |
| So basically the way I think of them is these four horsemen, right? | |
| So atherosclerotic diseases, so heart disease and stroke, far and away number one. | |
| Cancer, which is not one disease, of course. | |
| Cancer is a herd of diseases that all get lumped in under one umbrella. | |
| So breast cancer and colon cancer are totally different diseases, different risk factors, et cetera. | |
| But nevertheless, we think of it as one disease. | |
| Neurodegenerative diseases. | |
| And when a lot of people think of that, they think, of course, of the most prevalent of these, which is Alzheimer's disease, but that also includes Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's disease, et cetera. | |
| And then the third one doesn't directly account for a lot of lists on the death certificate, but indirectly may be the single greatest contributor of them all. | |
| And that is the suite of metabolic diseases that ranges all the way from even just insulin resistance through fatty liver disease, which is an enormous epidemic at this time, all the way up to type 2 diabetes. | |
| So I kind of think of that as a metabolic continuum of disease that, again, in terms of actual lives lost in a given year is not a huge number. | |
| But when you have those conditions, your risk of the other three horsemen that I mentioned goes up significantly. | |
| And on that last front, I do think it's interesting. | |
| You don't really refer to obesity so much in the book. | |
| It's about metabolic disorder because you could be thin and have the fatty liver. | |
| You tell some harrowing stories in there about cutting people open and seeing, oh my God, this is a thin person who's not a drinker. | |
| And there it is. | |
| So don't assume you don't have that just because you're not heavy into booze or you're not obese. | |
| The metabolic disorder could encompass you. | |
| And as Peter points out, it could lead to one of the other three horsemen. | |
| So that's disconcerting. | |
| Yeah, we have this preoccupation with weight, right? | |
| That, you know, obesity is the big boogeyman. | |
| And I don't want to suggest that obesity doesn't come without its problems or that it isn't correlated strongly with some of these other issues. | |
| But I also think like we should be smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. | |
| Like we should be nuanced enough to actually be able to talk about what really is causing the issues. | |
| And it's not obesity per se. | |
| It is the metabolic derangement that often comes with obesity, but as you point out, is often present without obesity. | |
| I think I have a figure in the book that I drew that shows the Venn diagram, the overlap of lean people who are metabolically unhealthy, obese people who are metabolically unhealthy. | |
| And interestingly, a lean person who is metabolically unhealthy has worse outcomes than an obese person who is metabolically unhealthy. | |
| In other words, there's something really dangerous about a person who can't get fat, but goes directly to metabolic unhealth. | |
|
E4 Gene and Metabolic Health Nuance
00:08:18
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|
| If memory serves, it was like 10 million people are walking around in that boat. | |
| So it's a lot. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| And it's about the most conservative estimate I can come up with is that there are 100 million adults in the United States that are metabolically unwell from both of these camps. | |
| So, how does one, before we get to lifestyle changes, because a lot of this is within your control. | |
| It is not just the genetic lottery. | |
| Did you win it or didn't you? | |
| But there are ways of finding out whether you won it or you didn't, which we can talk about too. | |
| But how does one begin? | |
| Like people who are inspired by your book, by this conversation, who say, I'm with you. | |
| What should I do? | |
| How do I get data to figure out where I am? | |
| Well, I mean, you know, unfortunately, we do live in the medicine 2.0 world still. | |
| And so that means that as an individual, you have to become a bit more of a consumer. | |
| I guess that's why I wrote the book. | |
| So, think about it from your profession, right? | |
| So, you're a lawyer, Megan. | |
| And if a person comes to you and says, you know, Megan, I need to retain an attorney. | |
| I'm just going to go to Google and find the person closest to me. | |
| Would you say to them, like, that's a great strategy? | |
| Definitely do that. | |
| I mean, of course not, right? | |
| If they said, I need a contractor to build my house, I guess I'll just find the guy with the nicest truck. | |
| Like, you know, in most other areas of our life, we're relatively sophisticated consumers and we're relatively interested in taking some ownership of the problem. | |
| Somehow, medicine has turned into this deity state where we just assume every doctor is equal and every doctor is incredibly knowledgeable. | |
| And we don't have the right to become stewards of our own health. | |
| And I think step one is sort of saying, How much of this stuff can I do without a doctor? | |
| For example, I can go and get a DEXA scan without a doctor, and that DEXA scan will tell me how much muscle mass I have, how much body fat I have, how much visceral fat I have. | |
| And the data is all readily available to tell me how I stack up against other people in the population. | |
| So, in other words, I'm not just going to have some abstract number that doesn't mean anything to me. | |
| I will know for my age and for my sex if I'm doing well or if I'm not. | |
| Similarly, I could go and get a VO2 max test, and that will tell me how fit I am. | |
| And you can certainly ask the doctor to say, Look, I know that you're going to order these standard tests, but I also want to see some of these more advanced tests, for example, APOB and LP little A. | |
| And right there and then, you have a checkgate because a doctor that says, I don't know what those are, bingo, failed the test. | |
| Time to get another doctor. | |
| So, I know that people don't necessarily want to hear that because that's work. | |
| You know, it takes work to go out and doctor shop and find people who have this level of sophistication. | |
| But I can't think of a problem that's more pressing, that's more worth putting effort into. | |
| So, one of the things you would love to hear if you go through all that is that under this APOE, APOE, I think it is, which I wrote about in the book, there are three little subsets: E2, E3, and E4. | |
| And I loved hearing about this. | |
| I don't know what my numbers are, but okay, E2, one copy of this gene and no copy of E4 is good. | |
| That seems to protect you against dementia and suggests you are more likely than the average person by far to reach old age. | |
| So, yay, you would love to go get this test and find out you have one copy of E2 and no copies of E4. | |
| However, E4 is not so good. | |
| One copy of E4 increases your risk of Alzheimer's by a factor of between 2 and 12, and it makes you 87% less likely to reach old age if you have two E4s. | |
| You got one from mom and dad. | |
| So, you may be thinking I'm screwed if I've got two of these E4s. | |
| However, if you keep reading the book, you go down and you find out there's another possible longevity gene, FOXO3, where you can activate, you can activate better things for you when it comes to longevity. | |
| So I don't know that I'm making them all relate to one another accurately, Peter, but to me, it seems like people are afraid, right? | |
| They don't want to hear that they have two E4s. | |
| But it's better to know because there are things available to you to activate longevity genes inside of you. | |
| You can fight that. | |
| It's better to... | |
| Don't just let it sit dormant. | |
| It is what it is. | |
| The truth is there yesterday, tomorrow, and today. | |
| But tomorrow could be a lot better if you take action. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it comes down to a philosophical question. | |
| So I've been spanked very hard in the past from various physicians when I've tested for their APOE status. | |
| And it's exactly as you say with a couple differences. | |
| So if you have one copy of the E4 gene, so if you're a 3-4, your risk of Alzheimer's disease is about twofold higher, maybe up to threefold higher. | |
| But as you said, when you have two copies of the 4-4, we're talking about that eight to 10, maybe even 12-fold higher risk. | |
| That's an enormous risk difference. | |
| So I've had some doctors say, how careless of you, how cavalier of you to order such a test because all you're doing is giving the patient something to worry about for which they can do nothing. | |
| Now, I was involved in this series called Limitless that was part of NatGeo, and Chris Hemsworth was kind of the protagonist. | |
| He's the star of the series. | |
| And then there's a whole bunch of little two-bit people around him like me that are kind of helping him along this longevity journey. | |
| And in the process of this, Megan, unbeknownst to any of us going into this, we discovered Chris had two copies of the E4 gene. | |
| Now, keep in mind, this is pretty rare. | |
| Only one to 2% of the population have this. | |
| But what I explained to Chris and what Chris now understands and has accepted and embraced is knowing that at such a young age, I mean, Chris found this out when he was 37, empowers you to make a lot of changes that will reduce risk greatly. | |
| And where people like me fundamentally differ from people who are kind of stuck in the old way is I think the data is overwhelming that you can indeed reduce risk of all of the horsemen, including Alzheimer's disease. | |
| And if that's true, and again, I could point to reams of data that suggest it's true, then not knowing is simply the worst thing that you can do from an outcome perspective. | |
| Wow. | |
| The Chris Hemsor thing made national news. | |
| And I didn't realize that he was quite that young. | |
| My God, I thought he was a little older and that you were involved from the baseline in that. | |
| That had to be a moment on your heels. | |
| Yeah, it was kind of an interesting situation because we're getting ready to do this thing. | |
| We took advantage of Chris being in the U.S. passing through to get his blood tested. | |
| And then the plan was I was going to go out to Australia for the first shoot. | |
| This is over three years ago, right? | |
| COVID really slowed down the production of this thing. | |
| And two weeks before I'm supposed to go out to Australia to begin the shoot, I get the blood test back and I go through it and I see that he has two copies of the E4 gene. | |
| Again, you don't see this all the time. | |
| This is very rare. | |
| And I knew that they wanted me to present the data to Chris on screen for the first time because it is a documentary. | |
| And so I was stuck in a bit of a bind because one, I just didn't think that was the right thing to do to present that type of news to a person for the first time on camera. | |
| So I called Darren Aronofsky, who is the producer and also a very close friend. | |
| That's the reason I was involved. | |
| And I said, look, I can't tell you why, but I need to talk to Chris before we're on camera alone, meaning like now, like in the weeks that lead up to this. | |
| And you have to trust me because I'm not going to, you know, I couldn't tell Darren why I wanted to have this discussion. | |
| And Darren was like, yep, no problem. | |
| I trust you completely. | |
| So he connected me and Chris beforehand. | |
| Chris and I had a chance to discuss just that one finding. | |
| And truthfully, Chris was not sure that how comfortable he would be with that information being public. | |
| So interestingly, as we filmed Limitless over the course of several years, everything was done in parallel. | |
|
Centenarians Die Like Non-Centenarians
00:09:16
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|
| There was a version that included that information and a version that did not. | |
| So that at the end, Chris could make the decision. | |
| And completely on his own, Chris decided, you know what? | |
| I really do want people to know this because I know that 25% of the population have one copy of this gene. | |
| So if being public about this is going to help those 25% of people, that's a lot of people. | |
| Does it mean, I mean, he's also got a very famous brother. | |
| Does it, if you have it, does it mean your siblings also have it? | |
| Because you have the same gene pool? | |
| You have to go back and look at the parents. | |
| So for example, if his parent, if one parent has a two, four and one has a two, three, say a three, four, one sibling could be a four, four, the other could be a two, three. | |
| So as a general rule, we just sort of test everybody. | |
| And, you know, if we, if we can't figure it, it's not worth trying to guess what a person is. | |
| I mean, does this, is this what explains? | |
| Because you talk in the book a fair amount about the, I'm not going to pronounce it right, but it's not centurions, it's centenarians. | |
| Centenarians, the people who live above to be above 100. | |
| And happily, we have one of those in my in my family. | |
| I think I mentioned my Nana to you last time. | |
| My mom's mom lived to 101 and broke all the rules. | |
| And you mentioned that's not unusual. | |
| It's not all Japanese fishermen. | |
| You know, that's what you think of, right? | |
| It's like, it can like, there's lots of examples in your book of the person who loved the whiskey every day, the person who smoked cigarettes, the person who had two glasses of wine every day and just caught back on calories. | |
| There's just no unifying principle if you look at diet, exercise, or general approach to life. | |
| In my Nana's case, she, yes, she was born in 1915 and she ate natural foods for most of her life. | |
| But then for most of my life, she was eating processed foods. | |
| She was kind of stressed out. | |
| She never once exercised a day in her life. | |
| All the rules, right? | |
| She didn't smoke and she didn't really drink a lot. | |
| But I will say one good thing she did was she was very social, very social. | |
| And I think, you know, you write in the book about how important that is in emotional wellness and connection. | |
| In any event, what do you glean from these centenary? | |
| Like, what, what? | |
| Because of course, everybody's like, I'll do it. | |
| I'll drink whiskey. | |
| I'll eat processed foods. | |
| I'll socialize. | |
| I'll get grumpier. | |
| What do I need to do? | |
| Yeah, the lesson from the centenarians is pretty clear. | |
| And you're right. | |
| There's an entire chapter devoted to them because they teach us a very important lesson. | |
| And there's some sub-lessons. | |
| The most important lesson we learn from centenarians is that they live long despite their lifestyle, not because of it. | |
| Because on average, centenarians are indeed doing things less healthy than the non-centenarians. | |
| It's kind of crazy, but they're more likely to smoke, more likely to eat poorly, less likely to exercise. | |
| And despite all of those things, they live longer. | |
| So this points to a very clear set of genetic attributions that they have. | |
| And, you know, the truth of it is the genetic study of centenarians has proved less exciting than people would have hoped. | |
| There are a handful of genes that seem to crop up more often than not in this group. | |
| You've already mentioned a couple of them, right? | |
| So APOE, like two version of that gene, crops up disproportionately here. | |
| A certain variant of FOXO3 pops up disproportionately here. | |
| I could rattle off a few others. | |
| It's not relevant. | |
| Here's what is relevant. | |
| The superpower of the centenarian is their ability to live longer without disease, not their ability to live longer with disease. | |
| This is so important, it's worth reiterating. | |
| Once a centenarian comes down with a given disease, i.e. has their first heart attack or develops cancer, they're just as likely to die in about the same time period as a non-centenarian. | |
| What their superpower is, is the length of time it takes them to get that disease in the first place. | |
| So, what everybody else looks like at 60, they look like at 80 or 85. | |
| And this effectively becomes the cornerstone of the strategy for medicine 3.0. | |
| You must delay the time it takes for chronic disease to sink in, not do what medicine 2.0 does, which is figure out ways to extend life once disease has taken hold. | |
| That strategy has produced lousy outcomes. | |
| That's so helpful. | |
| I mean, and we can spend some time now on how, even though it's not, as I pointed out, a TikTok on exactly what to eat and how to exercise. | |
| But let's talk about the E-word because exercise is really, I mean, if it boils down to one thing, it really is exercise. | |
| Yeah, there's virtually nobody out there who doesn't have opportunity to get better based on exercise. | |
| And I know we talked about this the last time I was on Megan, so I won't need to rehash it. | |
| And, you know, exercise is so important that of the 17 chapters in the book, three of them are devoted to exercise. | |
| There's no other chapter, there's no other topic in the book that warrants so much attention as exercise. | |
| But I think the simplest way to explain it is the following. | |
| Take the magnitude of harm that is caused by the most harmful things you can think of. | |
| Smoking, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, cancer, you name it. | |
| When you look at the all-cause mortality risk associated with those things, in other words, if you have X, let's take smoking. | |
| If you are a smoker, when compared to someone who is otherwise identical but not a smoker, what is the risk that you will die in a given year relative to the non-smoker? | |
| It's about 40% higher. | |
| That's huge, right? | |
| Do the same exercise with high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, all of these things. | |
| You're going to see anywhere from a 20 to 100% increase in the risk of all-cause mortality. | |
| When you do the same exercise and compare being unfit to being fit or being weak to being strong, that magnitude difference is two, three, and even four times higher than the ones we just spoke about. | |
| In other words, being unfit relative to being fit is worse than having any of these typical medical conditions that we know so clearly are associated with a shorter life. | |
| That is huge. | |
| Okay, so define fit. | |
| So typically, fit is defined by this metric called VO2Max because it is reproducible. | |
| It is highly objective. | |
| And it's been, you know, we have so much data on it. | |
| It is the gold standard by which we measure peak aerobic performance. | |
| It's not a pleasant test. | |
| So it's a test where by definition, you are exercising to the point of maximum exertion and failure. | |
| It's typically done on a bicycle or on a treadmill. | |
| So it's sort of like your stress test, Megan. | |
| It's almost exactly like your stress test, except my guess is they stop you a little earlier on your stress test because they probably just target a certain heart rate for you. | |
| And they say, okay, you got there. | |
| You're fine. | |
| We're going to stop you. | |
| With the VO2 max, you'd be doing the same thing, but you'd also be wearing a mask. | |
| And that mask is measuring how much oxygen you're consuming and how much carbon dioxide you're producing. | |
| And you would go until you truly failed, until you couldn't stay on that treadmill any longer. | |
| What we'd be looking for is at your peak, how much oxygen were you able to extract from the air you breathed in? | |
| That number is called VO2 max, ventilation of oxygen max. | |
| And that number is so predictive of how long you live. | |
| In fact, I haven't seen, and I've been looking, I haven't seen a single number that can be gleaned from an individual, either a biomarker, test, or otherwise, that is more predictive of how long you will live than your VO2 max. | |
| What if you could do really well on that after 30 days of exercise, but then you totally abandon it? | |
| You've got to keep the VO2 max going, I imagine. | |
| Well, here's the good news. | |
| The reality of it is if you did nothing for 11 months and then just trained for 30 days, you wouldn't really get to a high VO2 max. | |
| To truly have a high VO2 max, it does require consistently training. | |
| By the way, it doesn't require consistently killing yourself. | |
| It just requires consistently training. | |
| And, you know, you don't have to be in the top 5%. | |
| That's certainly where you're going to see the most benefit. | |
| But simply going from being in the bottom 25% of the population to being in the third quartile, so being from the 50th to the 75th percentile, that's a very reasonable jump, right? | |
| To go from being in the bottom quarter to the third quarter has the equivalent of reducing your mortality by 50% in any given year. | |
|
Gastric Bypass Beats Miracle Drugs
00:10:57
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|
| Huge. | |
| So, yeah, it's just like there is nothing, there's no drug that does that. | |
| There's no diet that does that. | |
| There's no anything that does that, not even close. | |
| And that's not a big ask. | |
| That's the kind of thing that you could, you can achieve that level of fitness exercising five hours a week, combined with weight training, right? | |
| So it doesn't have to be five hours of cardio. | |
| It's like five hours, six hours of really well-balanced exercise consisting of both strength and cardio. | |
| That's completely achievable. | |
| The cardio is important, though, because in my world of women who would like to be thin, the messaging is don't be a cardio bunny. | |
| You know, that the new messaging is cardio bunnies, they don't lose weight. | |
| You know, you just tread away, tread away, you know, you spin, spin, spin, and you never lose any weight. | |
| And it's better to just eat less, not drive up your appetite and remain thin. | |
| But that doesn't take into account at all fitness, cardiovascular or other strength, or longevity. | |
| It just takes into account appearance. | |
| Yeah, it's a real tragic set of messaging. | |
| And it's, again, it's missed the mark. | |
| I think obviously there are lots of reasons for that that are certainly beyond my area of expertise in terms of the social and cultural reasons of why we place such an emphasis on leanness aesthetically without any concern for health. | |
| I mean, I'm sure you're very familiar with the latest craze with semaglutide, which is an injectable drug that hasempic being the diabetes version of that, Wagovi being the pure weight loss version. | |
| It's the same drug, just a different name. | |
| You know, there are clearly patients who benefit from this drug, but oh my God, what I see behind the scenes of what it's doing to people, and I'm sure other doctors can tell you similar stories. | |
| This, so I'll give you an example, Megan. | |
| If a person, let's just say a person wants to lose weight and they need to, right? | |
| You know, you do the DEXA scan, they've got too much body fat, they've got visceral fat, they need to lose 20 pounds. | |
| Here's what we consider ideal weight loss. | |
| Ideal weight loss would be if you lose 20, 15 of it should be fat, five of it should be lean mass. | |
| So you can't just lose fat mass, but three quarters of your weight loss should be fat mass. | |
| When we're putting people on a Zempic, and every person we put on Ozempic or semaglutide or, you know, whichever one of the variations, there's another drug called trzepatide that's actually even better than semaglutide. | |
| When we're putting patients on these drugs, we're doing DEXA scans before and after. | |
| This is something the FDA did not require the company to do when they sought approval. | |
| We're seeing two-thirds of the weight loss is lean mass. | |
| Only one-third is fat mass. | |
| Wow. | |
| So they're getting lighter, Megan, but they're getting fatter, meaning their body fat is either not improving or getting slightly worse, and they're disproportionately losing muscle mass. | |
| They are becoming less healthy. | |
| They might look better in some perverse metric where they, you know, wear a smaller set of genes, but there's nothing about them that's healthier. | |
| Furthermore, we track our patients' heart rate overnight every night. | |
| And without exception, every patient who is on a GLP-1 agonist, or dual agonist, so semiglutide or trisepatide, every patient, Megan, and we've seen this for the last three years, their resting heart rate at night is going up by eight to 12 beats per minute. | |
| Wow. | |
| There's nothing I'm aware of that is good about your resting heart rate going up at night. | |
| Well, that's scary. | |
| What did you say? | |
| You said that one of the drugs is better. | |
| Do you mean better at curbing appetite or better at messing you up? | |
| No, more potent. | |
| No, it's more potent. | |
| It's just trisepatide is a more potent version of this type of drug. | |
| It just produces better results. | |
| It may be more durable as well. | |
| I think it's too soon to say because that's the other drawback of these drugs. | |
| And again, I don't want to suggest that these drugs shouldn't be used. | |
| There absolutely are use cases for them. | |
| And clearly we use them in some patients, but we don't use them in patients who say, I just want to lose 10 pounds to look really good in a bathing suit or look good at the wedding next summer. | |
| We're like, that's, you know, you can find another doctor, but that's not how we operate. | |
| And we think that that's a lousy strategy. | |
| But one of the challenges with these drugs that we don't really know is when you stop taking the drug, are you eventually just going to regain all the weight? | |
| And in the short run, it looks like that's mostly the case. | |
| Yeah. | |
| They say that, right? | |
| They say you get that in the studies, people regained at least two-thirds of the weight. | |
| And that if you go on it, it's really kind of a lifetime drug. | |
| If you don't want to regain the weight, you just have to stay on it forever. | |
| And it's very expensive. | |
| Unbelievably expensive. | |
| I mean, truthfully, as draconian as it sounds, you're better off getting a gastric bypass, which has equal efficacy that lasts indefinitely and costs a fraction of the, you know, the whole thing is just, again, if we could just come back to metabolic health, muscle mass, you know, caring about those things, I think there'd be less demand for this. | |
| I want to ask you about metformin because a good friend of mine read your book and had a question about that. | |
| That could be a potential miracle drug. | |
| It's also got some downsides, but we'll talk about it. | |
| Let me squeeze in a quick break and come back and we'll talk about that and food more with the one and only Dr. Peter Attia right after this. | |
| We're kind of on the subject of meds because I brought up metformin. | |
| The book talks about rapamycin, talks about AMPK. | |
| Is there something right now in the form of a pill? | |
| Moving on from the shot, let's move to the pill that can help us live longer that we should be considering. | |
| I think it's a bit too soon to say. | |
| To your question about metformin, that question is being posed in a clinical trial. | |
| I don't know if the trial has started yet, but it has secured funding. | |
| So, you know, at the pace at which this type of science moves, it might be five years before we know the answer to that question. | |
| But it is asking this question, which is, does taking metformin, if you are not a diabetic, because metformin is a drug that is indicated as a first-line treatment for people with type 2 diabetes, and it's proved beneficial in that regard. | |
| But is a non-diabetic person who takes this likely to delay the onset of chronic disease, which, as we've discussed, is tantamount to living longer? | |
| I think it might to some extent. | |
| I don't, I don't, you know, and again, I could be happy to be proved wrong on this, right? | |
| So I'd be happy in five years to look at this clip and have egg on my face. | |
| My intuition is it's not going to be a dramatic difference. | |
| Um, but again, I could be wrong. | |
| Uh, but I, but the reason I say all that, Megan, is if you go back and look at all of the epidemiology that has been suggestive of metformin's geroprotective benefits, gyroprotective is just a word that means it broadly tackles or targets the hallmarks of aging. | |
| I actually think the epidemiology is not as compelling as it looks on the surface. | |
| In other words, I think there are enough confounders in those data that I don't think metformin is as potent as we would be led to believe if just looking at the surface level data. | |
| Is there another drug that we should be considering? | |
| A supplement? | |
| People, a lot of people think there's a supplement they need to be taking. | |
| Again, my bias is having looked at all of these data, I think rapamycin is the most promising girro-protective agent out there. | |
| But I say that with an enormous set of caveats. | |
| First, it's unambiguously the most gyro-protective agent if you're anything other than a human. | |
| In other words, when you look at these. | |
| This is what they give to transplant victims. | |
| Is this the one they give to people treatment? | |
| It is. | |
| Transplant patients take this and it's an immune suppressant, but it's all about the dose and it's all about the frequency. | |
| So if you take a low dose of this drug every day, it suppresses the immune system. | |
| If you take a higher dose, say once a week, it actually enhances immune function. | |
| And it seems that almost independent of how you give it to animals, they live longer. | |
| So the sort of accolades supporting rapamycin's efficacy in anything from mice to worms, fruit flies, yeast, up to dogs seems pretty promising. | |
| There is a very large study that's undergoing, well, I guess it'll be done in 2025 or 2026, looking at dogs. | |
| It's called the Dog Aging Project, done by Matt Caberline at the University of Washington. | |
| That will be the closest we get to human data. | |
| And frankly, that's as close as it's going to get. | |
| So the real question is: could we believe that a drug that has proven efficacy across a billion years of evolution on basically all model organisms, will it extend to humans? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Full disclosure, I take rapamycin myself. | |
| I've been taking it for five or six years. | |
| But it's a bit of a leap of faith because we don't have a biomarker for it. | |
| You see, if you're taking a drug to lower your cholesterol, you have a biomarker. | |
| You can measure your cholesterol. | |
| You know the drug is working, at least through that metric. | |
| We have no biomarker for the efficacy of a giro-protective drug like rapamycin. | |
| So it's possible. | |
| When I read the book about the dog study, first, I was like, no, dogs. | |
| But if you're saying that it helps them either way, then that makes me feel a little better. | |
| But the point you make in the book is that this is on another thing. | |
| This is on intermittent fasting, which got my attention since I'm a fan of it. | |
| The studies that have been done on that saying it's, oh, it's so good for you, have been done on mice. | |
| And they're useless because mice have a very limited time on this earth. | |
| And so you're basically saying, like studies on mice really are very limited in terms of your takeaways. | |
| Well, certainly for that application, they're a little more, depending on the strain of mice, you can learn something about drugs from them. | |
| But yes, on the fasting cause, boy, it's really tough. | |
| The reason is if you keep mice fasting for 14 hours a day, and it does something heroic to them, you really have to be careful how you extrapolate that to humans because a mouse not eating for 14 hours is like you not eating for probably three days. | |
| Very different. | |
| Yeah, very different. | |
| I know. | |
| So you're not really a fan of the intermittent fasting anymore, but you do acknowledge that lower calorie intake on a daily basis has beneficial effects. | |
|
Seed Oils and Dietary Restriction
00:04:10
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| If you're overnourished, meaning I sort of go through these three questions when I'm looking at everybody. | |
| Are you undernourished or overnourished? | |
| Meaning, are you storing excess energy? | |
| Yes or no? | |
| Are you under muscled or adequately muscled? | |
| And are you metabolically healthy or not? | |
| Only when you have the answer to those three questions can you begin to dole out advice on how a person should be eating. | |
| Do they need to be in a calorie deficit? | |
| Are they eucaloric? | |
| Do they need to be in a calorie excess? | |
| Are they getting sufficient protein? | |
| Yes or no? | |
| You know, obviously, what's the role of exercise and sleep? | |
| Because those play a huge role in insulin sensitivity and metabolic health as well. | |
| So sometimes you get these really hard cases, right? | |
| The hardest case is the person who's overnourished, meaning they're overweight, but they're under muscled. | |
| Because in that person, you have to lose weight while adding muscle, which is not easy to do. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, ask anybody. | |
| Pretty much everybody would like to do those two things simultaneously. | |
| You also spend a little time on seed oils, which is interesting because we've done shows on that and I was turned hard against the hateful eight and all that. | |
| Tell me. | |
| Well, look, it's a great story, right? | |
| It's a great story to demonize seed oils because as you know, having had people on the show, I'm sure, you know, these things didn't really exist 150 years ago and now they're running rampant. | |
| But if you look at the data, and I'd love to demonize seed oils because I think that the foods that they come in are horrible for the most part. | |
| But if you look at the data, Megan, if there is, if there's a downside to seed oils, it must be pretty small at the level, at the resolution that we can measure it. | |
| And I cite the three most comprehensive meta-analyses ever shot into our civilization on this subject matter. | |
| And there just doesn't seem to be much of an effect. | |
| So I think the precautionary principle is a reasonable approach, right? | |
| I think when it comes to the three main types of fats, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and the polyunsaturated fats, which are predominantly made up of seed oils on the omega-6 branch, you know, the data are pretty clear. | |
| One of those is a clear winner. | |
| And my view is, why not make that the fat that is the dominant fat in your diet? | |
| That fat, of course, being the monounsaturated fat. | |
| So rather than dwell on, you know, seed oils, like I don't eat a lot of seed oils, not because I think they're bad, which they may be, but the data doesn't really suggest it if you're being honest and looking at it, but because the data are so clear that omega, pardon me, that monounsaturated fats like olive oil, olives, avocado, that those things are really beneficial. | |
| So it's, it's, it really should be 50 to 60% of our total fat intake should come from from, you know, olive oil and the like. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And just finally, because people wonder about the diet, you said this last time and you maintain it in the book. | |
| You're not, you're not a keto, paleo, vegan. | |
| It's the diet. | |
| It's just, there's no silver bullet there. | |
| No, I mean, look, any sort of named diet is going to be an improvement over the standard American diet. | |
| The standard American diet, which says basically eat whatever you want, whenever you want, in whatever quantity you want, that's our default state. | |
| We live in a default environment that fosters that. | |
| And that for most people is devastating. | |
| Our genes did not have enough time to catch up to that environment. | |
| So instead, I argue that virtually everybody to be healthy is going to have to live in some form of restriction. | |
| And there are three things you can be restricting. | |
| You can obviously do combinations of these, but you have to be thinking about this through the lens of dietary restriction, time restriction, or caloric restriction. | |
| So dietary restriction is kind of where most people think of diets. | |
| It's pick a boogeyman and just don't do it. | |
| So the boogeyman might be plant food or whatever, animal food or sugar or carbs or fat or whatever. | |
| That said, it could be, you know, limit the time in which you eat. | |
| That's time-restricted feeding. | |
| Or of course, just restrict the calories altogether. | |
| And that's what calorie restriction is. | |
|
Three Ways to Restrict Diet
00:00:59
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| That's, I mean, that's, that does make sense. | |
| And the way you outlined the questions you should be asking of your doctor before you get to what's my next move makes sense too. | |
| All of this is in the wonderful Outlive. | |
| And this is a gift from Dr. Peter Attia, who didn't have to write this down for us at all, but has, and there's a reason that it's number one on the New York Times. | |
| I mean, this is legit. | |
| Thank you so much for writing this. | |
| And please, will you come back? | |
| There's so much more to discuss. | |
| I feel like we only scratched the surface, but hopefully got people inspired. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Thanks so much, Megan. | |
| Really appreciate it. | |
| And thanks for taking the time to read it or listen to it because I know it's oh, the pleasure is all mine. | |
| Again, the book is called Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity. | |
| And it's well, well worth your time. | |
| And you're going to have more time. | |
| Thanks to this book. | |
| It's out now. | |
| We'll be back tomorrow with the EJs. | |
| The gals are going to come on. | |
| There's so much to discuss. | |
| Don't miss that show. | |
| Thank you for spending the past hour plus with us. | |
| Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. | |
| No BS, no agenda, and no | |