Solutions for a World in Disarray with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying | 9/14/21

welcome to the megyn kelly show your home for open honest and provocative conversations hey everyone i'm megan kelly welcome to the megyn kelly show i'm excited for my guests today they are former professors evolutionary biologists co-hosts of the very very big podcast dark horse and authors of the new book a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century out today we are going to talk about it all sex love gender damaging parenting styles dangerous diets and why you need to get more sleep and can you pay your sleep debt the news is not good uh brett weinstein joins me now along with heather hayeg his wife who i've never spoken to so i'm very excited to have you both here together hey guys we are so pleased to be here thank you megan very excited for this conversation oh i like the woodsy background too like the cabin it's it's really it's doing something for me all right thank you people sometimes uh tell us it looks like a sauna but uh it's cozy i think it's it's bringing me home i want to see like a little fireplace in the background and maybe we'll have a little cognac before the interview's over okay so can i just start with this since you guys went through and and people i'm sure by this point know the story of what happened to you at evergreen um university and how you were basically pushed out because you had the temerity to say maybe we shouldn't force students to skip school in honor of certain race based issues it's really hard to short form what happened to you but brett and i did a long podcast where we got into it and it's a it's a very compelling story my point is can we talk for a minute about peter bogosian i had him on the show yesterday he resigned um from portland state not far from where evergreen is really and it's just such a shame you know i just i wonder it must have brought something up in you guys because you two were forced out you were you know liberal professors at a liberal university effectively forced out for not being woke enough let me start with you heather since you and i have yet to speak together yeah well again it's such a pleasure to talk with you megan and um pete is a friend and we didn't actually know that that this was in the offing exactly but uh he has been struggling with the psu administration and the ideology there for years as you are well aware so you know the letter that he posted on barry weiss's sub stack was telling that's you know the letter that he wrote to the administration detailing a little bit hardly all of what he endured not just the kinds of the ramifications of the ideology itself but the methods that people will stoop to the the lies and slander that really despicable that people seem willing to stoop to because they think they're in the right uh is you know really telling of our times and it is it also reveals how badly we need a functional higher ed system and how much we don't have one at the moment i was thinking about it as we um larry elder was complaining you know today's the recall election in california and he was like okay so a member of my team got assaulted a member of my team got shot with a bb gun um a woman wearing a gorilla mask attacked larry and threw an egg at him and he said so much for the intolerant left and that's what i was thinking when i listened to pete yesterday talking about a bag of feces being put outside of his office door he too was spat upon um professors colleagues pulling out the microphone wires when he had people on campus including you two right weren't we now that i'm looking at you it was you two and christina hoff summers right uh with the uh yeah the the moment when the av was pulled was actually uh me and helen pluck rose who along with james lindsey the the three of them were the grievance studies affair and james damore so we were it was the four of us on stage and brett introduced us and i was actually making the outrageous claim at the moment the that the sound was pulled that men are taller than women and that was and you know this this is your pitch exactly now that is both true and actually um not the full story it's actually worse than that that uh apparently that whole thing was was timed it was staged it was yet more cosplaying and that suggests that um that many of these people are engaged what i in what i have called a kind of read-only activism that nothing that you can say to some of them can actually even enter into their framework they already know what they know and they're already going to do what they do all right i've got to ask my dumb question what is cosplaying i see that word all the time i don't totally understand it yeah i mean i use it along with larping right you know costume playing long action role playing the idea that we are in fact uh on a stage you know it's at some level it harkens back to you know to shakespeare perhaps all the world's a stage we are all in a performance and it suggests that you can therefore step outside of the performance that you're engaging in like this is not your real life and we're seeing we're seeing a lot of that of course well there is of course uh an honorable version of cosplay where people actually uh create quite elaborate costumes and you know regenerate characters from their favorite superhero narratives or or whatever it might be star trek and of course there's a long history of people reenacting civil war battles and things like this so and run fair right renaissance fairs right yeah so it's not that it is inherently a fair phenomenon a secret there heather i want to know more about you keep going brad so i did want to say um a couple things about about peter that i know are going to get lost in his story that we have actually had the privilege of not only participating in events that he uh hosted uh at his college but also of lecturing in his classroom and so we've seen his relationship with his students and he is exactly the kind of professor that you want he cares uh at an extraordinary level he invests everything in teaching students how to think and not what to think and the idea that everything from you know a bag of feces to trumped up charges that resulted in investigations these the the use of every possible weapon to silence somebody who's saying something that is obviously true is it is it is a mechanism for generating a false appearance of consensus which then persuades people that something that isn't true is and that's what the attempt is here and having forced him out they have succeeded in something uh which will harm us all yeah as it turns out peter is a wonderful human being as well as being an excellent thinker and professor but he shouldn't need to be right you know just just like a rape victim shouldn't need to have led a perfect and honorable life in advance of a horrible attack and that attack being actually um you know having the attack be revealed is what it is so too should those of us who are seeing what is true in higher ed not need to have been paragons of of perfection in order to have our stories heard in fact you know we we know of some of these stories where people you know maybe weren't terrific professors maybe their scholarship wasn't as as good as it might be and it's harder to get those stories heard uh and that is that is conflating two things right that you you can be a canary in this particular coal mine and we need more of them and you we should not force the standards to be that those people also have to be excellent in every um areas of their lives as it turns out peter is you know it reminds me my dad was a college professor he died when i was only 15 of a sudden heart attack at age 45 but he he was a college professor um first at syracuse university and then at the state university of new york at albany and he used to go into my public schools when i was enrolled year after year and he would say to the teachers the same thing and it was his own philosophy too which was i don't really care exactly what you teach my child just don't destroy her love of learning and it just seems like that's we've totally abandoned that right that no one cares about the love of learning of these students on college campuses or k-12 it's all about indoctrination yeah it's actually cryptically an attempt to destroy the capacity to learn and i think one of the things that we saw when evergreen melted down was that our colleagues became incapable of learning they could not see the lesson in front of them they could not understand that they were on the wrong track and so they kept doubling down on the same incorrect ideas and it resulted in the collapse of the college so this is a it's a cautionary tale and peter's situation is the next chapter and while i'd love to say it's great to see i think he'll wind up with a bigger microphone in some way shape or form you two certainly have and so you know we've been exposed to youtube and your expertise in a way we wouldn't otherwise have been right unless we wound up on evergreen campus but it is such a loss because we do need to get to these college students before the indoctrination is utterly and totally complete and the more we remove folks like you from those campuses and yeah yes give you a national platform which is you know has other benefits the more we lose the opportunity to get in while the getting is good especially on these very liberal campuses that's that's absolutely right you know we need everyone needs to have an openness about them with regard to being receptive to new ideas and to things that might be true of the world experiences they have not had that sound at first wrong to them that sound like they run counter to their worldview and you know it's true that psychologically uh used to be anyway the liberals were imagined to be and were found to be higher on the openness scale and these you know psychological measures but that doesn't seem to be the case with the brand of of and i tend to call it pseudo-liberalism that is that is at least found on campuses and it's found in a lot of a lot of the media now that this is this is running exactly counter to what you know what old school liberalism was about 100 yeah it's illiberalism all right so your book is not about vocism it's really about life and how we deal with the incredibly fast rate of change that we happen to be seeing you know for whatever reason i was born in 1970. you guys were born somewhere around there and for whatever reason we're all on this earth at this particular time together we don't know why the cosmos dictated it or somebody else or nobody but here we are and you're you seem to be positing that the rate of societal change right now is is dizzying and that our i'm just quoting now our brains bodies and social systems are perpetually out of sync we are generating new problems at a new and accelerating rate and it is making us sick so what what was the point of writing a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century evolution and the challenges of modern life well we found over 15 years of teaching that the model that we used ourselves and we talked to our students was actually very liberating it didn't solve every problem that we faced but it simplified what it was to live because you simply understood what you were built for and why that was at odds with the world that you found yourself in and so the the recognition that the problem is not chaos that it's actually definable and that the various maladies we have are addressable by thinking your way through them is is powerful and our students frankly frequently asked us to provide a book like this so that they could share what they were learning with people who weren't in the class because they felt it changed their lives but it was hard hard to convey so like what do you mean what was the problem more specifically well if you think about what it is like to live it is very confusing when you face the question of how am i to deal with my love life why am i chronically unable to fall asleep why am i confronted with a desire to eat things that i'm told i shouldn't all of these things have a an underlying cause they are symptoms of a disease that we don't diagnose and recognizing what that disease is is actually the first step to figuring out how to minimize the harm that comes to us from the mismatch between what we are built for and the world we live in hmm well you yeah go ahead heather well i would say authorities largely want to hand down very simple rubrics to us and it is you know is famously true both in covid and from a long ways back that the authoritative messaging as to what we should do with regard to say food oh definitely eat a low fat high sugar diet that'll be good for you oh no it turns out sugar is bad for you well um it should have been obvious and it was to anyone thinking evolutionarily all along that a high sugar diet and that's not to say a high carb diet necessarily but a high sugar diet is not going to be good for you some of that some of that knowledge comes with you know further understanding of things like the gut microbiome but some of it comes with simply an evolutionary toolkit with which to understand what we are and so what we were doing you know for ourselves in our own work with our students uh was framing an understanding of what humans have been and what we can be so that instead of trying to pick and choose things that you hear from authorities that you learn and that you memorize as opposed to memorizing rules we want to build a framework by which you can assess any new thing that comes your way and say ah that does make sense i'm going to incorporate that into my model and how i live or no that doesn't make sense and uh and therefore i can ignore it even though an authority is saying it well so just to get practical so if you take an evolutionary look at the way we eat i mean weren't we always told that that the sugar tastes good it's like one of those things that they they you know our ancestors would try and say um you know i'm not in a dangerous place i'm in a good place and i can eat it um and so why isn't it more why isn't it natural to have lots and lots of sugar and and also tons and tons of red meat all day right if we're going to eat like our ancestors did well the problem isn't so much the sugar itself in fact we are wired to seek it for a reason the problem is that we have figured out how to generate it in such abundance and because our ancestors never faced an abundance of such a substance we don't have a circuit that tells us when enough is enough effectively programming a creature to eat sugar when it's available in a world where there isn't very much sugar is a fine modality but when you have that program and there's sugar sitting on the table when you sit down at the diner you've got a problem that is a good point and it's also true that um you know most of us if we think about what humans used to be have this sort of romantic notion in our heads of hunter-gatherers on the african savannah and that is indeed what the title of the book alludes to and that that is a piece of our history and you know some of us were you know in the paleolithic on the african savannah some of us may be more coastal there was even more variation at that moment in time than we imagined but part of the point of the book is that uh to use the term of art and evolution that was one of our environments of evolutionary adaptedness but hardly the only one so we're all so adapted to being alive from 3.5 billion years ago and to being animals and to being fish into being mammals and primates and within within human evolution alone we are adapted yes to being hunter-gatherers but also to being agriculturalists and to being post-industrialists and we've had less and less time in each of those states but we are also adapted to each of those states to to varying degrees and again the rate of change now is changing itself so rapidly that we can't help but be ever less well adapted to modernity as it changes out from well i mean don't you don't you just have to look around america to see that right the the obesity problem and it's not just you know a few pounds extra on your average american it's morbid obesity on so many millions of people because we have seemed to have lost our ability to regulate to self-regulate the abundance of sugar everywhere the abundance of processed food everywhere and it's cheap so it's easy and then we live these lives that are overly stressed and overly depressed and food is the soothing bomb but all of that seems to be playing into what you guys are saying yes obesity makes a good example because you can see it but the point that we are trying to make is that that same phenomenon happens in all sorts of places that you can't see so our psychological ill health is of the same sort but somebody walking by you who is uh suffering from extreme anxiety and therefore heavily medicated and therefore suffering all of the consequences that come from introducing these chemicals into their body is also sick and what one has to do is realize that for each of us the sickness starts somewhere it starts mostly after you're born you're born into a world and if that world was well well uh tuned to you then you would develop in a way that would not leave you at odds with it so what that means is for example the first job of parents has to be to limit as much as possible the novel influences whose consequences we don't know many of the pathologies that we see we treat symptomatically but really what we should be doing is looking at their cause and trying to exclude it from our children absolutely that's that's what's so crazy about the way we live right now is oh i'm depressed i need a pill you know i have anxiety i need i need a pill as opposed to wait what is the cause of my depression and my anxiety or my child's yeah i know you guys spend some time on on the devices and the algorithms that we shove our children in front of and child pornography not child pornography but pornography consumed by young children and how damaging it is obviously we need to keep our kids away from it but how how in a world that's ubiquitous with that stuff do we do that and how do we protect ourselves from these terrible influence influences on our mental and physical well-being we're going to pick it up there uh when we come back in just one second gonna squeeze in a quick break and later in the show my thoughts on the hypocrisy i'm i'm i'm genuinely ticked off about this of aoc bill de blasio and the hollywood elite going completely unmasked and very close to one another at last night's met gala while my kids and your kids probably are sitting in classrooms masked all day including the vaccinated children uh we'll take that up in a minute welcome back to the megan kelly show everyone back with me now brett weinstein and heather hayeg authors of the new book a hunter gatherer's guide to the 21st century out today all right let's spend a minute on sleep because this is something it's like the never ending quest to get enough and i know i know in the book you basically say that um we're supposed to all right let me get it allow celestial bodies to set our sleep wake pattern and i read that and thought do brett and heather have kids because you know they will not allow the celestial bodies to dictate wake times and sleep times and really just life doesn't allow it either well i i wouldn't leap to that conclusion it happens that modern life does not facilitate this and you know we have occasional sleep issues in our house too but i will say we have taken neither heather or i had any direct experience with kids when when our kids were born and so we sort of bootstrapped some method for figuring out how to parent and wasn't successful everywhere but we um have treated them in a way that has restored these patterns and i think heather correct me if i'm wrong i think one of our children has gotten out of bed after going after putting themselves to sleep once or twice in i mean they are now 15 and 17 so we've gotten through childhood and there have there were not wild sleep problems very early on there were issues of how do you put the child down and do what needs to be done to be a modern person without upsetting the child but by and large we have tried to isolate them from artificial light after bed and in the run-up to going to bed and it's been very effective and what do you mean by artificial light just mean blue light like we're talking about on the screens or what well our our uh family certainly operates on the model that certain spectra of light trigger the mind to believe that it is daytime and that our light bulbs very often put that out so we biased in the direction of warm light which tends not to trigger these things and essentially if you lean towards the spectrum of light that is put out by a fire which is something our ancestors have long history with after dark it does not disrupt whereas blue light as you point out is disruptive so just to be clear we we reject a paleo vision of humanity we are not trying to restore an ancient way of living but we are recognizing that there are many ways in which uh how we have been is that which we are best adapted to so you know early on like when the child is a tiny baby you know really touching an adult who loves them and who will care for them is the thing that will entrain their sleep patterns and i think the point about celestial bodies is the prospect for most moderns of actually uh abiding by the sun's rising and setting especially if you live far from the equator and so it's highly variable throughout the year is is laughable right we're not actually going to do that that said being able to actually get out uh you know even just for a few days into a place where you actually find your body wanting to go to sleep as the sun is setting and rising with the sun when it comes up will do wonders and you will absolutely do wonders for your ability to continue on with a more normal sleep pattern afterwards if your sleep was disrupted so you know finding finding the cycles in both your own body and the cycles that are being entrained by the celestial bodies uh is a you know fantastic and free right and um you know easy to track it requires no memorization about you know what did he say what does the expert say it's like figure out how you're actually feeling and you know when at some level you know let letting children sleep seems like both obvious and absurdly simple advice and yet of course most school schedules don't allow for it i was gonna say i'd love to let my kids sleep in you there's such a great feeling when you see your sleeping child you know he or she's getting the the rest they need but of course school starts so ridiculously early i feel like i'm still scarred from having to hit that 720 bell during my high school years and i'll tell you a story so if you didn't make homeroom by 7 20 you would get basically a demerit you know you'd get sort of a black ball and if you got a few of them then you would get internal suspension and that is what i got and so i wound up with a mark on my permanent record because i could not make it was too early i was exhausted all day and i am not alone because there was a recent study saying uh almost half the population suffers from sleep related issues people who sleep 30 less than they need to for 10 days they don't fully recover their cognitive function even seven nights after recovery sleep so you can't pay sleep debt you know if you screw it up you can't get it back previous research has found that people who are sleeping fewer than six hours a night for two weeks in a row they functioned as badly on cognitive and reflex tests as people who were deprived of any sleep for two full nights and then here's the latest heather and brett you tell me if you've if you've done this there's something just out in the news today called revenge bedtime procrastination revenge bedtime and it's when you don't think you had enough me time during your day and so once you get your kids down and you know you've had your dinner and your husband and you or your spouse whatever you're sitting there in bed you don't turn off the lights and go to sleep you waste your time on insta or facebook or watching real housewives or doing something totally stupid utterly mindless maybe shopping online you're trying to create some me time because you're bitter that you don't have enough regulation over your leisure time and they're saying that too is very damaging to your cognitive function and will wind up you know costing you a car accident or something far worse than missing an hour on twitter earlier in the day so anyway the solution to all this according to two evolutionary biologists is what if you can't wake up with the sun you can't go to sleep with you know the sunset what are our other options well just to to go back to some of what you were saying earlier part of the problem is that we that we humans love it when we hear numbers and much of the modern world grabs onto numbers comes up with simple solutions that sound quantitative like you need eight hours of sleep a night or you need 1800 calories a day to you know to not gain weight and these numbers have some truth in them for some people with limits but those numbers once you have them they seem like they're the only numbers that count this is you know this is the risk of having numbers and this is the risk of reductionism and so you have pseudo-quantification so and what does that mean what is reductionism as a pseudo-qualification what does that mean so reductionism refers to looking at a complex system and saying what is the thing that i can count for instance in it and imagining that that thing that you've counted is the only thing that matters about it so everyone has a sleep deficit if we could only get them to sleep for eight hours then that would solve it well not necessarily because among other things uh if you know if you imagine that you can just add up the sleep hours that you need in a week and as long as you get that number of hours every week you're fine well no some of the research you just related reveals that you can't actually do that you can't just lump numbers together and add them in a complex system like you would if you were doing simple arithmetic same thing with calories you know a fat calorie and a carbohydrate calorie are not the same they don't interact in your body the same way it depends not only on whether it's you know what macronutrient it is fat or carbohydrate but what else you're eating with it how long it's been since you've eaten how long before you go to sleep or exercise or how long it's been since you've slept or exercised so complex systems are just that complex and reducing them with things that we can measure and count sound scientific but it's very often a clue a proxy that may not actually be an accurate proxy for i see so this goes back to this goes back to what you're saying at the top which was your students feeling frustrated about you know i'm doing all the things i'm told to do and why aren't they working for my life why aren't i thinner why don't i feel more rested it's like well it doesn't actually work that way and i'll tell you i've seen it just in my own life on on sleep i do do intermittent fasting we did a whole show about it and i think you guys like that but it's very hard to do intermittent fasting or any other sort of eating regulation if you haven't had enough sleep they're so intertwined right if you are sleep deprived you eat i do i way overeat much more than if i'm hungover if i'm sleep deprived i'm going to break my good eating habits so i think you asked the question what can you do and we can obviously point that question at any of the subtopics but the overarching point that we make in the book is that effectively disrupting what works as little as possible is the objective and so there are sort of two tools that are a mirror image of each other there's the precautionary principle which many people are familiar with and chesterton's fence which most will not be familiar with but it's it's effectively the inverse um chesterton's fence suggests that uh were two people walking down a road and were they to encounter a fence that appeared to have no purpose and one proposes to remove it the other should say not until you figure out why it was placed there can you remove it because you don't know if it's still doing that job or if that job is irrelevant so when looking at something like sleep one should try to figure out what does work the discovery that on a camping trip that you naturally feel like going to bed shortly after the sun has gone down and you wake up easily with the sun is a clue right that system still works in all of us it's just being thrown data that confuses it and creating these kinds of regular patterns in your life make sense to the extent that you can avoid chemicals that disrupt your body's capacity to figure out what time of day it is or what mode it should be in that's a good idea to the extent that you have to use something to get to sleep using something that is as minimally disruptive as possible like melatonin is much likely is likely to be much better because it's a natural trigger of neurological systems than something synthesized in the lab novelly and you know interestingly we talk in the book about the patterns that children pick up when they are learning what it's like to be a human and when to go to sleep and we talk about the question of whether or not there are signals in breast milk that may allow a mother you know we tend to think of breast milk as food but it's food plus a lot of information and the mother may be sending information to the baby about what time it is it's time to start ratcheting down and heading towards sleep and if you've used a breast pump and not recorded the time of day that you pumped the breast milk and you feed the child that milk at an arbitrary time you may be sending chaotic messages that's exactly that's actually yeah and that's actually a hypothesis that one of our students uh josie jarvis proposed and did some research on uh which you know we cite her in the book and it's it's remarkable so you know is is the ability to pump breast milk a modern convenience that is super valuable to many mothers absolutely it was for me um and i know it is for many many people uh so it's you know we're not taking a regressive traditionalist approach and saying you know the only way to do things is what was done in the past but as we introduce modern amenities to our lives let us think about what systems we might be disrupting and how to disrupt them as little as possible so fascinating in this one you know it just it actually wouldn't take much more to if you know if you're in this position of being a mother to an infant and you're expressing breast milk don't just date stamp it which which we all do so that it doesn't you know spend too much time in the freezer um but time stamp it too and you know give your baby uh milk expressed at the same time of day as when you're feeding i like that i mean what what could it hurt a lot of this stuff is like what what could it hurt it's a one step closer to how we used to live and there's no downside if you've got it in the freezer janice dean my good friend from fox she was on the show yesterday and she and i had our um we had our second babies within six weeks of one another and we had all this breast milk mine and hers stored in our respective freezers when super storm sandy hit and both of our houses lost power and it was freezing you could it was like i don't care i'll put my kids in 45 sweaters save the breast milk it was like whatever has to be done it's liquid gold all right um next up we're going to get into some highly controversial topics like the difference between men and women news flash there are some yeah there are there are some we're not the same and we're going to dive into this crazy mma fight from last friday where a trans woman absolutely obliterated her female opponent it's raising a lot of eyebrows you'll see why we'll be right back welcome back to the megan kelly show everyone we are joined today by co-hosts of the very popular dark horse podcast brett weinstein and heather heing uh okay so back to the confused students why why why is there an incongruity between how i feel and how everybody tells me i need to behave to feel well because i'm doing it all and it's not happening and one of the things you guys dive into is gender um you believe this is very controversial there really are differences between men and women and you stand by that so we are we are let's start at the 30 000 foot level and you walk us through some of those differences uh based on evolutionary biology yeah um well a conservative view is that in our lineage we have been sexually reproducing with two and only two sexes for 500 million years it's possible that that lineage of sexual reproduction goes back one to two billion years but at the very least at a minimum it's 500 million years in our lineage alone so what does what does that mean uh there are two sexes uh sexual reproduction has value uh we won't go into what the value is here but it hasn't reversed in our lineage and uh it involves two you know two gametes coming together to make a new a new being and those two gametes have to do two things they have to bring together not just the dna from two different beings half half from mom half from dad but they also have to bring the the cytoplasm the machinery of the cell and they also have to find one another and so basically they divide the labor so one of the gametes we call it the egg and we call the things that have eggs females brings the cytoplasm has this big bulky gamete that has all of the machinery of the cell and then that leaves the other job uh the finding generally to the other gamete which in animals is uh is sperm and in plants is pollen and we call those things that have those gametes males so that's ancient history quite literally and what that sets in motion is a tendency because the egg has so much more stuff in it than the sperm does to to have an asymmetry in the investment of of the partners of of the parents and so if only one parent is going to invest further in offspring it will tend to be females this then gets into you know and and none of this is new none of what i've just said is new or frankly controversial uh in evolutionary biology uh where it gets more interesting is if if gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex and sex is binary there are males and there are females well behavioral manifestation of sex or the software of sex uh is going to be you know it's to map onto sex pretty well but it's going to be more much more highly variable and then especially in us for humans who are more software than any other organisms on the planet the fact that we have a history of being mammals where we have obligate maternal care in the form of pregnancy and lactation and breastfeeding that is true and that's not going to change and there have been some things that have tended to follow from that with females being more typically domestic in other regards but those things can change and those things are changing and there's nothing wrong with them changing as long as you don't deny the underlying reality of the differences between the sexes well we definitely are doing that brett i mean in today's day and age that we're being told that gender is 100 percent a social construct and that there was just some article it was i think a parenting article in slate a woman wrote in and said really struggling with you know trying not to raise boys or girls but trying to raise completely gender neutral beings who then will just figure out for themselves whether they're boys or girls you know they help me and was you know shamed appropriately for you know what are you saying like it shouldn't be hard grow up evolve right um but that's that's the current fancy is that it's genders 100 a social construct yeah it's nonsense and it's nonsense in several different ways one thing that has to be said is that we make the point very strongly in the book that just because something is cultural does not take it out of the realm of evolutionary and adaptive culture is just as adaptive as genes it is just as biological and so even noticing that certain things are transmitted culturally does not free you from uh obligation to the evolutionary logic but the more subtle point i think is that the logic of male and female as heather points out are incredibly ancient and they are also incredibly consistent so if one looks at a a plant a flower that has both male and female parts you can notice that the female parts are much more reluctant about having sex with strangers than the male parts that has nothing to do with absolutely so the female parts will have a long uh uh extension that forces the pollen grains to grow down towards the ovules it's effectively a test it's like a long courtship how badly do you want it right exactly where the pollen the pollen doesn't care i mean we all pollen's all over your your car and your house and your life because the males are effectively they don't have any reason not to mate with any tree that will have them um so that asymmetry is not about animals at all it's certainly not about humans it's about a strategic fact that that arises every time you have these two different size gametes as heather points out and so that doesn't mean that we can't change the dynamics in humans and in fact we are changing the dynamics in humans and in many ways it's very positive i mean the the breast milk example is a great one pumping breast milk means men can now we can democratize the work of feeding babies that's a good thing it doesn't mean you have to do it but having the option is a good thing so it's not that we can't change these things but we are it's not those who think that this has something to do with recent human history and one group imposing its uh its power on other groups and subjugating them and that that's where gender came from that's that's nonsense it's way too ancient and consistent for that you know it's annoying we did a story on courtney cox doing some story about two people who were together and they had a baby and it was a trans man and a trans woman who wound up together so you know the one who was biologically male was presenting as female the one who was biologically female was presenting as male and the one who was biologically male is sitting there trying to breastfeed this baby that they just had that that the one who is biologically female but presenting as male actually gave birth to so it's a biological male sitting there going i don't understand has come out of my breast yet it's like i got news for you buddy i need to break it to you but some things are not going to change uh depending on your identity but you guys recognize i think accurately right that it goes beyond that it goes beyond the flower and you know pollinating everywhere and say in the book that women tend to be more altruistic trusting and compliant also more prone to depression and anxiety disorders men are more prone to being diagnosed with adhd that men prefer working with things women prefer working with people you know in some circles that's not a you're not allowed to say things like that that's what's one step away from what james daymore of um google said that got him fired right these characteristics i happen to agree you're 100 right but we're no longer allowed to talk like that yeah and i mean this this sort of circles back to uh where you started talking about peter pagosian and uh you know what what he was facing at portland state and what all faculty really are facing who have a fundamental belief in underlying reality of the universe you know we we should all be able to talk to all range of people across all demographics and the the one kind of people who i find it very difficult to to have a conversation with is those who actually don't believe that there is an underlying reality and that's quite a that's quite far from from saying you know how close are we to getting there what are the best ways to get there but is there an underlying reality yes yes in fact there is so in the end you know this this is the mistake of the extrapolated post-modernism we're dealing with i was just going to say that so i didn't understand post-modernism until recently but if you're a postmodernist you're one of those people you don't believe that there's a truth a reality everything's massageable and arguable yeah and i think you know there's there is a there is a base value in some elements of post-modernism but the way that is instantiated on the in the modern academy on modern campuses and then you know crawling off campuses speeding off campuses into the media for instance in hollywood uh is it's bad you know it does it doesn't make any sense and so you know you can be for instance you can be gender non-conforming as i was yeah and still have no confusion at all about whether or not you're a girl or a boy same heather i'm the same as you when i was a kid i i looked like a boy i acted like a boy in today's day and age they try to make me a boy not my parents but society and i'm all woman right exactly i think you know i'm i'm grateful it sounds like you're grateful for the parents you had i am grateful for the parents i had and especially had we been born 40 years later my god you know that would have been a very dangerous moment and it's it is only those parents who see reality who are able to protect their children but even that is becoming harder and harder yeah because we are so insistent that there's no difference to the point where we have i mentioned this in the tease situations like this mma fighter it made a lot of news yesterday uh her name is alana mclaughlin it's a biological man who transitioned to being a woman in 2010 at age 38 so we are well past puberty and all the changes that come to the male body thanks to testosterone and so on alana served as a man in the u.s army special forces and now as an mma fighter in in the women's league fought somebody named celine provost it took alana three minutes and 32 seconds into the second round to beat celine in a video that is disturbing to watch but we're told fear not because alana mclaughlin passed all the medicals including a hormone panel issued by the florida state boxing commission and therefore we're not supposed to be upset when we see what is clearly somebody who who was born a boy who lived 38 years as a man absolutely eviscerate uh a biological female i think we have the tape if uh yeah but take a look at it find out as provost comes out swinging as we expected has one mma fight inside for the pocket or go for the legs not looking like the stronger fighter and taking a ton of punishment coming in getting picked away there as they get in the clinch and this is where mclaughlin could have an advantage get this punishment but big right from mclaughlin second overhand did not find it protection there from provost and that's a tap alana mclaughlin victorious in her mma debut i i don't know i i i feel uncomfortable i want to be supportive of alana but i also feel really uncomfortable seeing that there's so much to say here uh you know trans trans is real and there is a lot in the discussion around trans people on trans rights that is actually complex and uh not totally clear no matter how much truck you hold with reality but trans women in women's sports is the shallow end of the pool this is really easy this is really easy and part of the reason it's easy to say actually that's not okay that's not fair that marks the end of women's sports is because uh the idea that she passed hormone panels at whatever age she is now 48 i guess yeah is is absurd it's again taking a measure that we have current levels of testosterone do current levels of testosterone suggest things about current levels of strength sure but are they only the only things that indicate whether you have benefited from being male no they're not just to pick two other things there are different kinds of effects of hormones and in endocrinologists refer to activational versus organizational effects but basically on or off are you currently benefiting from testosterone that's just the activation effects it doesn't it doesn't reflect all of the so-called organizational effects yeah like bone length and strength all right i'm going to stand you by quickly heather because we're going to squeeze in a quick break before the top of the hour but we're coming back with heather and brent we'll pick it up right here in just a few don't go away welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show we are joined today by brett weinstein and heather heing and we are discussing their new book a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century all right let's pick it up where we left it off uh heather on the fact that your testosterone levels may be the same as your opponent does not mean you don't have a physical advantage if you've lived three decades as a man that's right because of uh among many other reasons because of organizational effects of the testosterone that were present during your time in utero in early development and puberty which will have shaped things like uh bone length bone density bone shape you know female and male skeletons are different women are adapted to have wide hips for child bearing and yes that may sound conservative and all but it is true and that means that we are less stable for instance just just that one simple parameter it is also true for instance that the y chromosome itself has masculinizing masculinizing effects and that is not widely known but the idea that we have the one thing again the one thing testosterone as measurable right now this is a failure of of science and it's more like scientism that says ah we can measure the thing therefore uh therefore that's all that matters and and it just doesn't so um you know i would say the number of mediocre male athletes who transition and become elite female athletes tells us all we need to know it's so true it's so true we of course you know in connecticut we had on a couple of the girls who got burned by this who are runners at the high school level who were kicking butt and then competitors who were biologically male who ran as males the previous spring and couldn't win anything crossed over without taking any hormones without doing anything different uh and in the fall started crushing the biological girls and the biological girls raised their hands and said this when it doesn't feel fair and then it was your bigots your bigots and the poor girls are like we am i i don't want to be bigoted i just kind of want it to be fair but can i expand it beyond that brett because you guys are i think taking a fair look at beyond the physical advantages we are different and we seem to be unwilling in today's day and age to admit that i had a great talk with abigail schreier about it how there's a there's a reason beyond discrimination why you don't see tons of women in stem it's not all about gender bias and yet what we're looking for now is just absolute parity we need to have absolute parity in every field at every college uh there was a report out today from the national student clearinghouse saying um we're losing men on college campuses like crazy that there's 1.5 million fewer students enrolled in higher ed today than there were in 2016. men account for 71 of the decline soon two women will graduate for every man on college campuses this as stem fields say we've got to have more women they've committed to reaching a target at 50 50 representation you've got just this increasingly lobster lopsided approach to admissions uh when it was like more women more women i just don't think this is going to solve it i i i don't know that women have the same interest in all the stem fields as men well there's a question about what there is even to solve and as we get better and better at generating opportunity that really is available to a wider range of people our focus on small things parameters that may not indicate anything is actually off right a basic difference between males and females in what they're interested in is not an indication that anybody has been excluded from anything uh so there's a question about what what all of this activism is is it really targeted at problems that need solving undoubtedly some of it is but a large amount of it appears to be activism for its own sake and i would point out you said you were born in 1970. that happens to be the year that the song lola by the kinks rose to the top 10 in both the uk and the us on behalf of my serious xm colleagues i thank you for that bit of music history keep going well i mean it's important because if you've ever i mean we you know probably the three of us uh all know the lyrics to that song he uses her pronouns he recognizes that she is in fact a man but he is compassionate towards her in fact he um he you know that's the way i want it to stay for my lola and the point is he is actually uh sympathetic to her cause this is i never realized it was telling a story like all i know is it's not like a la la la la la lola well there is a story there the story is we go back and look beautiful woman comes up to him in some kind of a bar situation and asks him to dance and uh she speaks like a man and in any case the point is everybody got this this is a boomer phenomenon right boomers understood this and is it tough to be trans undoubtedly but the point is not only is the recognition that there was a problem to be solved at least 50 years old but we've made progress since then the fact is almost everybody is on board with the idea that you should effectively be able to present as you wish within reason but there are places where that has to stop it does not allow a man to declare himself female and use that loophole to compete fairly in women's sports it obviously can't be and there's an even worse case which is uh the separate prison system for men and women can you just simply can a sexual predator declare themselves female and go to a women's prison this is obviously absurd and anybody who can't see it is either a fool or not telling the truth they can't they can the answer to that question is absolutely they can do that and they are doing it in places like california where the last i looked was about a month ago not a single request for transfer had been denied from a biological male in a men's prison who says i'm trans and by the way you don't have to have a history of being trans either you can suddenly come to jesus in the prison and say aha i think i'm really a woman and they will transfer you nothing's been denied yet and the women in the women's prisons are terrified they have to not only you know live amongst these you know people claiming to be female who may have a sexual predator history they've got to be behind bars in a you know nine by 12 cell full-time with said person no one seems to give a damn all in the name of wokeness equity what have you it's absurd and i've said this before but every time at every turn the women lose this debate at every time you know whether it's running in a race at an mma fight while sitting in a prison women who are there with their daughters in a locker room who say i don't she's a little young to see a penis come out of nowhere you know while we're in the women's locker room they're not trying to be insensitive they're trying to ask for some sensitivity to biology and as you point out millions of years of human history yeah it's societally sanctioned misogyny and yes weird way of putting it we're a year older than you but we're basically we're all gen xers here and i i don't know about you but i'm gonna guess megan uh that you and i had similar experiences growing up on opposite coasts of being girls who felt like the world was our oyster we could do anything we were now allowed to consider doing anything that once had been the domain of men and um that is not the same as imagining that we were men or we were going to become men or that we're going to displace men but just that the opportunities were now open and boy are we going backwards yeah oh 100 i mean it's it's crazy to me because at no point did i have any gender confusion whatsoever i enjoyed looking like a boy i enjoyed having boy hair and what really looked like a boy face and certainly boy fashion and all my toys were incredible hulk and you know superheroes my mom begged me to get a dress and a doll i was like hell no well look at me now right like in today's day and age they'd be sending me in it go have a double mastectomy it's like we've lost our ever-loving minds and the girls always suffer alright let's talk about childhood because this is something i really wanted to get into i love what you write in the book about childhood listen to this here's a quote from the book we're stealing childhood from the young you say stealing childhood from the young by organizing and scheduling their play for them by keeping them from risk and exploration by controlling and sedating them with screens and algorithms and legal drugs practically guarantees that they will arrive at the age of adulthood without being capable of being adults that explains so much about what we're discussing and what we're seeing on college campuses and and with individuals now who just they're not very good at adulting they do seem really quick to go to the drugs go to the screens and don't seem to be able to handle conflict or adversity at all that's right and you know it misunderstands what childhood is we have the longest childhoods of any organism on the planet but other organisms have childhoods too and the other organisms that have childhoods other apes elephants dolphins wolves what they're doing during that childhood is learning how to be their future selves learning how to be you know apes dolphins elephants wolves whatever it is and they do that through play they do that through exploration they don't do that by being protected from all risk so what do you get like what what do you maximize if you do the things that we lay out in what you just read well you get as close to a guarantee as you can possibly imagine that your child will survive to the age of 18. what you do not get is an 18 year old who has any functionality in the world so you have to expose your child to risk you have to you know with every passing you know day a week month year let them do more and more let them take more and more risk and tragedy may happen and you know every time i say that i literally get visceral chills you know we have been lucky i i do not know how you go on if you do lose a child but it's a much greater societal level tragedy and frankly an individual level tragedy as well to simply survive but be incapable of actually being a human being the the um extreme example of this brad is rose kennedy and the kennedy family and she she said something i think about all the time uh which is better broken arm than a broken spirit so um we actually have rules in our household which our children would have no trouble uh recounting which are you're allowed to break your arm or your leg you're not allowed to damage your eyes your skull your neck or your back and these aren't perfect rules but the basic point is we expect you to live in such a way that things are going to happen and you know when they do our question is is effectively what did you learn and the point is our kids are going to be excellent at managing risk as adults because they will have seen a lot they will have made their errors when those errors were relatively easy to recover from and that's what we should be doing for everybody and it is the exact opposite of what we are doing the conventional wisdom now is creating incredibly fragile adults which as you say is what's happening in college campuses it's why we're seeing that rebellion it's effectively a tantrum a demand for others to solve the discomfort of life which um is a very dangerous trend so i i do a little speech on stanford stanford campus uh once a year usually and i actually said this past year something not controversial which is no words are not violence they're not and you know talked a lot about some of the words i've received and i'm fine i'm just fine i actually perfectly sound healthy probably stronger for having gone through it but you should have seen the reaction you guys i mean they were like ah what you're pro bullying no but i mean i might be pro bullying a little bit like you know what i mean just like a little bullying you know what i'm saying yeah and you know like we don't we don't have to use that word i get why you would and you maybe i agree exactly with you but um pro letting kids figure it out for themselves which sometimes is going to look like adults don't think it should and sometimes may even involve some physical stuff yeah yeah because if you prevent children from doing any of that on their own where exactly do you think they're going to learn it like do you think they wake up with their 18th birthday having been magically anointed by some by what some fairy with all the knowledge they're going to need you you do this by experience this is not hardwired you know we're not we're not moths you know we have to learn how to be us and the ways that people are parenting now and that schools are educating are preventing humans from becoming humans yeah i want to defend your pro-bullying point because it's easy to misunderstand it right bullying is not a good thing skinning your knee is also not a good thing but being in favor of a world in which kids skin their knees is not the same thing as being in favor of abrasion right the point is it's about the things that guarantee abrasions will happen and what you don't want is adults who don't know how to deal with a bully who cave in the face of a bully and we're seeing an epidemic of this kind of cowardice now precisely because we have over insulated children from the bullies that would teach them how to stand up yeah it's it's like i used to be obsessed with oprah less so these days but i used to be obsessed with her and she used to say and now i say to myself whenever life throws some massive challenge at me the first reaction is thank you because it's an opportunity to grow to to build your superhero muscles there's only one way to get there and it is to go over those huge mountains right take them on one at a time and i do feel to some extent this way about my children when something negative happens in their life socially it's a great opportunity to learn and i'd much rather your point heather to have it while they're in my home my husband and i can speak to them about it and help them navigate it then just protect them from it and leave this nubile 18 year old out there at college to try to figure it out on his or her own absolutely and you know so brett mentioned that we tend to ask our children after something has gone wrong uh what did you learn uh but we also asked them that when something almost goes wrong right and we you know we talk in the book about the value of close calls which is exactly the content of what we're discussing now but you know usually if someone has narrowly escaped an injury or a social faux pas they want to move on and pulling them back to it and saying hey what did you learn uh will be met with disbelief uh at best uh but spending just a little time to figure out okay how could i how could i have done even better with that close call will help you move into the future with greater grace and skill and then you know the fewer of those conversations you have to have in the future well but one of the things that's annoying on a bigger level is how much abuse we're keeping on to our children and how we've settled on living in this constantly abusive way i mean it's yeah i went to this parenting seminar in new york city last year or the year before i was within the past 18 months and all these kids are sitting up there from all these new york city private schools very privileged schools and the kids the one kid said do you want to know why your kids are so up i'll tell you why it's because you all think that they need to get perfect days so they can go to the perfect ivy league college and they have to be in 10 different clubs and they have to play at least three sports and they're they're doing drugs on the weekend as an escape just to get their minds off of this hideous lifestyle forget sleep right forget any deposits into wellness going to sleep with the sun down and waking up with no no right so it's like i was noticing there was an article just out yesterday in the new york times talking about should students be allowed to miss school for mental health reasons and now more and more states are passing laws that will allow students to miss school to take care of their mental health you don't need a law for that we've been doing that since the 70s at least when my mom used to call up and say she doesn't feel well today she's not going in if you need a day you take a day why do we need laws for it but anyway yeah if you need a day you take a day but also the school should be set up so that the students don't need as many mental health data schools should be better for the students in the first place that's it so what so what do we do about that the way we've agreed to live well again back to the question of how one raises children we can speak best to the way we've raised our children and we can say in some sense what its consequence has been we have been incredibly open with them about virtually every topic and in fact we've been open with them about everything there were a couple topics we delayed slightly because we thought it would be confusing too early but sex drugs rock and roll the whole shoot match we have talked to them about the reality of the world they are going into we've talked to them about the fact that they have not been provided the tools to navigate it and they will have to bootstrap those tools and that we are here to help them figure out how to do it but in fact being told how to do it won't work one has to actually learn that process right you can know how somebody climbs el capitan without being able to climb a damn thing you have to you have to go climb yourself to learn how it's done and it has worked very well our kids have their eyes wide open they do not have uh anxiety even though frankly looking at the world they're entering one could easily forgive them for for being terrified that's not their experience because they've grown up looking at it and it's not going to come as a shock to them when they emerge into that world and you know maybe what we've done is a prototype but i would recommend that people take something like this approach because you're not doing your kids any favors by insulating them from a world that will be as bad or worse when they get to it the big reveal at the end where they say oh my gosh what what have you been hiding from me all right up next we're going to talk about marriage and how society is changing as a result of declining marriage rates in our country brett and heather have some ideas on that we're going to discuss them next plus do you want to sound off about aoc bill de blasio and all the hollywood celebrities going unmasked at the met while your kid has to sit there eight nine hours a day with a mask on even if he or she has been vaccinated i am so irritated about this in about 20 minutes i'm gonna give you my take and i would love to hear from you call us eight three three four four m e g y n that's eight three three four four six three four nine six welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show joining me today brett weinstein and heather haying they have a new book out today hying i keep messing it up heather uh it's called a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century and we're diving into their possible solutions to a world in disarray um okay so i just want to pick it up back where we left off before we move on to relationships on on child rearing and and read read the following from your book if your child has been made totally safe living a life with no risk then you have done a terrible job of parenting yes love that agreed then you go on to say we should create new opportunities for engagement for creation for discovery for activity that provides an alternative and this is where it took an unexpected turn for me that provides an alternative to the boredom that leads to addiction did not see that coming i always thought addiction was the product of family history trauma right bullying excessive bullying something like that i never i never tied it in my mind to boredom love to have you expand on that well there are um there are of course many factors which go into addiction and it is you know it's multifactorial but one of them does appear to be boredom so there are and we recite this study in the book or one of them there are some studies um with rats uh which basically demonstrate that sure if you give rats i think the study i'm thinking of is with methamphetamine if you give them methamphetamine and you give them nothing else to do they use the methamphetamine they become addicts whereas if you give the same rats methamphetamine and you enrich their environment you give them other things to do that rats like to do they are um more likely to do the other things so this simple model yeah the simple model of we are simply physiologically liable to become addicted if you expose us to certain drugs is again this reductionist oversimplified view of of what we are and it extends not just to humans but to rats so a life that is enriched because we have found meaning because we know what it is that we're interested in doing in the world be it you know creating art or speaking truth or climbing mountains you know whatever it is if you have something that you know you're seeking you are less likely to become addicted even if exposed to the very same exogenous substances so you're doing your kid a favor in so many ways by helping them fill their life up and and letting them find ways of filling up their life but i i notice that even you know sometimes with adults brett where the people who seem the smallest to me in terms of their emotional wellness are people who are not busy enough you know i oh if i had a nickel for every time i'm like she needs to get busier or even frankly a lot of these workstars i just i always feel like they need more in their lives to worry about because most people are out there doing doing real things taking care of their families working for a living they don't have time to worry about pronouns and a bunch of other nonsense and getting offended yeah not only do they need more in their lives but they need experience that would tell them what it is like to actually build something because building something if it's at all complex will force you to balance competing concerns for example it makes it very hard to be a utopian if you've actually had to make something work and so in some sense the place that i actually do feel sympathetic for this movement is that i do think they have been betrayed they have not been provided a world that educates them properly that exposes them to things that would make them highly capable and so in some sense their anger is understandable but their anger is so deeply misinformed about what a solution looks like that we have an obligation not to listen we actually have to address this in a way that might work rather than give in to demands that will cause disaster you know what i'm thinking of i mentioned abigail schreier a minute ago in her book she has a it's a very useful prescription in case you see the sudden onset of gender dysphoria in your teenage child you know it wasn't there before and one day she comes home and says oh you know i think i might be a boy and you know you have very good reason to suspect this is a social contagion and not actual gender dysphoria and you should read her book to find out what she says to do because it's very helpful it's like basically go for it go on go on a six month two year long trip to europe log off of all devices for the love of god get her or him off of youtube anyway i'm not doing her justice but that's that's just my thumbnail but you guys should write the summary of what to do if you see wokism in your child right like this that's what you're talking about like get them busy give them challenges have them weigh competing factors to try to make real life decisions on complex matters i i'm hearing it right now it's like well maybe you did just write the book but you didn't title it the right the right way yeah i mean doing you know having your children this holds for adults too engaging the physical world as brett just said you're learning how to build or make or do something in the physical world where the results aren't negotiable you can't you can't claim that you did it if you didn't you can't claim that you won if you didn't you either summited or the cake is edible or the eggplant grew or the table is made you know whatever it is doing something that has a physical manifestation in the world will create strength and ability and then also you know travel just just as you just said and this is this has been a drum beat of ours forever and it's what we used to do with our undergraduate students and also with our own children is exposing people to ways of being to places in the world that they have not heretofore imagined and they especially if they had ideas about what it looked like because you know because they watched a lot of disney or because they watched a lot of documentaries you know no matter how good the information was that they thought they had about what being in quito or panama city or the amazon rainforest or galapagos is going to be there's no there's no replacement for being there so experience reveals your biases and it reveals the holes in your thinking and it informs you and enables you to become a much more complete and frankly compassionate human being and you grow in the process to say it it nails so many different things it's like you you as the grown-up grow you you have bonding time with your children there's nothing that promotes bonding like traveling together and navigating new circumstances and but you gave me a little chill there with like the you know the new people and finding out who you are um okay let's talk about relationships because that's the foundation of children i think it's the foundation of happiness i think it's the reason we're here right there our relationships and in particular our love relationships and our romantic relationships you know before there were the little uh bretton heather's there was the original bretton heather who found one another managed to fall in love and navigate a successful relationship through this crazy crazy world and one of the ways you posit one can do that and really should do that is via a monogamous relationship ah you said it okay when i was on nbc we did a segment on thruples okay and then quads people who are living in a relationship with three people or four people and it was fascinating it wasn't something i would endorse but it was fascinating but you say that's that's probably not the route to happiness via if you look at evolutionary history yeah the puzzle is a complex one because we can tell the fact that males and females in our species are different sizes tells us that there's a long history of at least mild polygony in our species but it is also true mild what polygyny uh well what your listeners are more likely to understand is polygamy okay um got it an individual male having multiple wives um but it is also true that the later we go in human history the more change uh has come to that system and effectively our cultural software layer has overwritten what is in the uh the ancestral genetic layer so most people alive today come from from populations that are monogamous and there's a reason for that which is that monogamous cultures have certain advantages in an era of growth and expansion they bring all adults who are capable of contributing to child rearing into that process and that makes for it increases the rate at which a population can capture a land mass or a resource and it also makes for a fairer safer more productive society it distributes opportunity more evenly it makes people less war-like it makes people more prone to cooperation and these are all major advantages and that's before you ever get to the question of personal satisfaction and i think something you alluded to in your initial comment is that there is something indescribably important about having that one person in your life who you absolutely bond with you have an understanding of who they are and they have an understanding of who you are in a way that no one can match and they're capable of providing a reality check and just simply being non-negotiably there that it's hard to describe this to people who haven't yet experienced it it's hard to give them a sense for why it is so different from having maybe casual relationships with more people or bonds with more people involved but there really is no substitute and uh if there's one thing i would wish for younger people um that would upgrade the quality of their lives and make them more secure and more capable it would be that they find a a person with whom they can build such a relationship and build it so let me ask you this this is a this is probably a sexist question but um the advent of birth control and so on led a lot of women to believe that they had reached sexual liberation and that they could now behave as men did and have multiple partners and emotionless if that's possible sex and um i don't think women are built for that in the way men are and maybe that's a sexist comment but i it's something i happen to believe and i don't know what it what what does evolution tell us on that front we we in fact know uh that we are not built to be symmetrical in this way we are built to be complementary so it's a yin-yang relationship not a simple uh symmetrical or identity relationship and the fact is this goes back to the issue we were discussing earlier with the the flower parts showing the same kind of difference in in perspective as as humans or any other animal will there is a lot to be lost to women if they reproduce without first establishing the willingness of a partner to invest in participating and raising that child children human children are extremely expensive to raise and they are much better raised by a team so that is the reason that women are wired to be very reluctant about behavior that could saddle them with a child and no help in raising it and that creates the dynamics that we all know exist wishing them away does not cause them to go away but i guess the last thing i would say is what people don't realize is that yes men do men are wired to be ever aware of the possibility of sex without commitment that is an ancient pattern but it is not the only thing that men are wired for men because the way most men have reproduced in history is through investing in a particular woman and her offspring that that pattern causes them to be choosy and careful in a very symmetrical way to the way women behave generally and the mistake was on the invention of birth control which has many very positive uh consequences it has liberated women to plan when to have their families to enter uh lines of work they couldn't have otherwise entered so it's very positive but it resulted in sexual chaos because somehow women thought that they would only be equal when they behaved like men at their worst rather than a system in which we all recognized what a gift birth control is and treated it with respect and used it to renegotiate our relationships in the mode where males and females are both very careful i love that i will share a personal story with you on that on your point your your penultimate point there when my husband and i were first getting together i mean it was a suitable time into the relationship i'll just leave it at that and uh we had we had a night together um i was sitting there looking at him the next morning and he looked so great with his hair all messed up in his white t-shirt and his jeans and he looked at me and said by the way if you don't want children you should tell me soon i was like oh i mean ladies you can feel my heart swooning right it was like i was in love with him from that minute forward because he was expressing exactly what you're saying brett he was this evolved incredibly great guy who was putting it on the table saying yeah i'm i want you and i want to build a family with you and if that's not your goal if you're somebody who just wants to be the career woman i say on fox news that's actually not for me there are men like that out there i think heather sometimes we convince ourselves they don't exist yeah i mean to your anecdote i've got one it's not as personal but um bob trivers uh who is an extraordinary evolutionary biologist and was our undergraduate advisor and excuse me um we asked him if he would be the uh gosh what's the word the officiant at our wedding and so he came up into the sierra nevada and officiated at our wedding we've been together for many years and bob knew us dr trippers knew us as undergrads in his you know burgeoning evolutionary biologists uh and so he agreed to do this wedding ceremony for us in the in the mountains um but he insisted the day before on basically interviewing us as clergy might have and one of you know the only question i remember that he asked us was do you intend to have children and it became very clear that if we had said no he was going to have a harder time knowing what to say about us even though he respected our brains greatly and us as friends um but but for him that was you know a key part of what the marriage ceremony was about wow wow you know what so how how has it gotten so turned on its head we you know mentioned birth control and sort of women's liberation which we've talked about the benefits i'm sure but how has everything gotten so weird where now promiscuity is somehow a sign of your fierceness and i know i said this yesterday i feel like typical i really feel uncomfortable saying this stuff but i have to be honest because i know i speak for a lot of people i'm uncomfortable with the the asses everywhere the kardashian body it's like it's all in your face it's there's nothing left to the imagination it just feels vulgar to me i don't know i feel like our sexual relationships our and our love relationships have gotten really confused they absolutely have and i think one of the things that we argue is that there's been a takeover of language which is part of what's confusing people so the idea that ass is everywhere as you say megan is about some sort of sex positivity uh sorry i actually think it's quite the opposite that's sex negativity that is treating sex like it's nothing and you know just as we all know that junk food is bad for us junk sex is bad for us too and you can be wildly enthusiastic about sex and know that it's amazing and know what enriching and you know and passionate experience it brings and still not want to engage and rather explicitly not want to engage in cheap junk sex everywhere right and we don't see that message anywhere near as much it was like you know back in the 50s you'd be totally shamed if you wanted to have pre-marital sex and then like everything we totally over-corrected to where now somehow you're you're fierce again to use that word if you've lost count of your partners and you're living in a throuple and monogamy is a joke to you and by the way so is gender and i was like i would i feel for these 20 year olds bretton as the mother of three young kids i feel for them too i'm really hoping and praying that by the time they get to college in you know six to eight years it's all going to be solved now they have a serious problem that i think many of them are just not aware of right because they don't understand that there is some sort of alternative to the world they've been handed but they need to discover it and figure out how how to make it work and this is not simple because let's say for example that you correctly understand that there's something wrong with these new sophistications and that it doesn't result in sexual satisfaction for anyone as far as i can tell um so you decide you're going to not do that well suddenly you're in competition for attention with all sorts of people who haven't decided that and you're i don't know that phones ring anymore so much but your phone's not going to ring if that's what they do and so it's going to seem like you've made an error when in fact one needs to recognize you know if we go back to the idea that men have two different ways of reproducing and one involves no commitment if you are trying to compete for attention and you get attention of men by behaving in this incredibly provocative way it works but it's not the right kind of attention because men are wired to view women who behave that way differently than they view women who behave in a choosy way and so the way to do this if if you are a young person and you're trying to figure out how to navigate this part of your life i think the thing to shoot for is a culture in which people who get it opt out of these false sophistications and begin to generate some new set of rules about how they will behave towards each other and you know what it's not going to be as exciting on a nightly basis but will it result in you being satisfied years down the road the chances are much much greater okay but i'll challenge you on that i actually think it is more satisfying on a nightly basis because the chase is fun and you know extending the cha doug is still chasing me we've been married for 15 years you know he's still on steady unsteady ground i agree i said it wouldn't be as exciting correct i didn't say it wouldn't be as satisfying i agree with you that the the all wisdom is very closely related to delayed gratification and so the point is the sex you ultimately have at the end of that chase is a whole different sport yes and you also point out in the book the difference between hotness and beauty and i thought that was a great point too it's it's hard to spot and it's especially hard to spot because some some women have both which is confusing but i think the thing that reveals this is that it is possible to be hot and not at all beautiful it's possible even to be hot and be ugly this is something we see fairly regularly and we don't realize it because we assume they are closely related but in fact they're completely separable and you know what we argue in the book is that hotness tends to be associated with appealing to that less interesting short-term male strategy and beauty which fades much more slowly uh tends to be about appealing to that longer-term male strategy that is a mirror for the longer term female strategy so you know of course doug should still be chasing you and you know you should also still be chasing him you know that one of the things about monogamy is that we are you know it's not just male male competition of female choice it's also female female competition and let's be good about it um but and and male choice and so we've got choice by both partners and um and you know not ever sinking into the sense of well this is what i've got and i'll have it forever and i guess i don't have to work at it anymore we should we should always be working at it and always excited by it as well i said to my one friend she was annoyed with her husband they hadn't been connecting in a while and uh she was talking about how he was putting up these shelves and he wasn't doing it the way she liked it and i said and this is a very good looking guy and i said why don't you just ask him if he can do it with his shirt off just watch him just watch him he's so good looking it's gonna light a fire you're not gonna give a damn that he chose silver instead of white or whatever it was um there's some there's some evolution in that too you two are amazing well this was so fun i i love the book i love everything you stand for and i hope you'll come back good luck with all of it thank you so much so much it's been a pleasure all the best uh okay so up next we're gonna share my thoughts on all the hollywood and political elites hanging out last night unmasked you saw aoc unmasked in her tax the rich dress not socially distanced while my kids and yours are sitting in school and can't even speak at lunch okay i'd love to hear your thoughts on that on uh i know some of that discussion we had about like everything hanging out the kardashians and so on it's a lot uh what do you think force for good phone lines are open call me at eight three three four four megan four 4 like the syracuse 44 it's a shout out to my alma mater for for megan m-e-g-y-n that's 833-446-3496 welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show we're taking your calls at 8 3 4 4 megan 4 4 m egyn that's 8 3 3 4 4 6 3 4 9 6. i want to take a minute to share my thoughts on the met gala last night it's this very tony affair in new york that anna wintour puts on i'm over anna wintour she needs to go away the devil wears prada needs to go right out the door why are we still allowing this woman to hold this event 35 000 ahead after all the abuse she's heaped on employees over there we still allow society to pretend she's somebody we want to idolize we want to live up to no she's a bully she's a bully and she's in particular a bully toward anybody who's not an open and declared liberal democrat anyway she hosts this thing every year and all these stars go and last night it was a parade of hypocrites aoc at again a dinner that cost 35 000 ahead shows up in a dress that reads tax the rich oh by the way she drives a tesla okay so please pardon me if you look a little hypocritical to me um hobnobbing with the billionaires buttering up to them while you're saying oh but i said tax the rich because i'm trying to call attention to it oh bull then don't go if you really have a problem with the tax system with the billionaires and they're not paying their fair share then they'll go there and lick their boots which i'm sure is exactly what happened and and the worst the worst of it was no mask right on top of other people aoc bill de blasio carolyn maloney congresswoman from the upper west side these people are the ones who imposed mandatory masks on my kids and yours if you live in new york city new york state has mandatory mass for kids k through 12. sodas canada k-12 mandatory masks even if they're vaccinated okay so kids like mine are sitting in class all day long eight to nine hours with masks on because of politicians like this even the older ones who have gotten vaccinated have to have masks on but she can show up aoc can be there mayor de blasio can be there yes they're vaccinated without their masks hobnobbing rubbing elbows sitting at dinner tables chatting it up all night long you know what the new york city kids have to do they have to sit outside have their lunches six feet apart while they sit on the ground okay they have to wear masks outside if they're not six feet apart in new york even if they are six feet apart that's how the kids are living but these people can go to the met gala and live it up large because it makes them feel good about themselves i'm so mad i hate listening to these people i wonder when people are going to rise up and say enough is enough i don't know about you but i'm there okay i want to get some phone calls in uh because the i can see the lines are lighting up right now um okay let's start with oh here's somebody who looks like nile in california talking about the celebrities and the masks hey nile hi megan what do you think um well what do you think about these maskless celebrities who are trying to change life for you and me and our kids well you have to remember megan they're uh ethically morally intelligently more superior than you so the virus knows not to hurt them right but you and i if we walk into target we could possibly die that's exactly right and if you go to a blm protest or a ruth bader ginsburg morning or joe biden celebration you don't get covet yeah but if i go to the raider game i might die it's a better event because it's all about you know it's about being good enough for z but not for me you know that's exactly what they're looking for and yet there isn't there isn't the massive protests there aren't the massive protests in the streets that we've seen in places like france and i do wonder why not right like why why not um let's talk about the last segment we've got will in pennsylvania and he was listening to our discussion with brett and heather on marriage and sexuality and so on what do you think will well i enjoyed it i got to listen to a good last 30 minutes of it i always wanted to say too i always love hearing the stories about you and doug i'm someone who's married 21 years and i just love my wife so dearly and uh i sometimes even have cried when i heard you tell your stories i'm actually wow it's an honor to talk to you and uh the thoughtful thought was like you know when you got that kind of love and it's so good it's almost there's this weird thing where when other people are you know are cheating on each other you want almost like sound the whistle and tell the partner and that's a that's a weird thing you know like it'll be true i want to grab those people and say life can be so much different you know if you commit to the person you're with if you look at them through the most generous lens if you give of yourself and not just expect to receive things can be so much better and when you've got a relationship that works you can take on anything you can take online bullying you can take social media you can take all this crass behavior in the news and say i'm good listen i'm so glad tomorrow we're going to get more calls uh and it's so fun talking to all of you guys in the meantime if you want to see the show go to youtube.com megan kelly because we're posting it every day and uh check out our coveted show from last week because it's infuego all right we'll talk tomorrow see you then

Channel: Megyn Kelly

Views: 19,602

Rating: 4.9220147 out of 5

Keywords: Politics, News, Media, Journalism, Journalist, Podcast, Show, Interviews, Interview, Megyn Kelly, Megyn, Megyn Kelly Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, Current Events, Trending News

Id: 1lIF7V9BeyE

Length: 94min 22sec (5662 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021