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June 2, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:17:16
The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly | EP 552
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Half of Western women, 30 and under, have no child.
Half of them will never have a child, and 90% of them will regret it.
This is a catastrophe.
Your life will be happier if you have a partner and children.
That's just true.
And people should be told that, and then they should be told the realities of fertility.
But in my case, Jordan, from that day to this, I've always loved working.
I love it.
It's totally exciting and interesting and intellectually stimulating to me, and I cannot imagine not doing this.
We do potentially have a major societal issue in that men have their pathologies that are expressed socially: aggression, antisocial behavior.
Drug and alcohol abuse, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that women wouldn't bring their own pathologies to the workplace.
I've seen women behaving terribly over the past five years in particular, and they're at the apex of the bad messaging.
They're obsessed with abortion, which I just think speaks to a lot of things like the absence of religion in the public square.
So just think the whole system is set up to breed that kind of woman.
It's become mandatory in our culture to assume that the feminist movement has elevated women to the status that they now enjoy.
I'm not so sure about that.
I think that technological transformation and plumbing has had a lot more to do with that than ideological movement, let's say, especially one based on resentment.
But in any case, it is the case that...
There's a downside to all of that.
And the downside appears to be the mounting unhappiness among young women, the precipitous decline in birth rates, the collapse of marriage as a social institution, and a spate of childlessness among young women, as well as the feminization of our institutions in a manner that often borders on the pathological side.
I discussed these issues today with Megyn Kelly, a woman who's married, who has children, and who's had a stellar career.
And we attempted to sort through these 40 issues and come to a conclusion about how men and women might conduct themselves in relationship to one another and...
You've had a very successful career, and I'm kind of curious about how you've balanced your life and your work and how that's worked for you and what advice you would give young women who are apparently struggling quite radically.
Now, young men have their problems, and there's no doubt about that, but I think it's something in the neighborhood of 50 to 60% of liberal young women in particular between the ages of 18 and 34 who suffer from at least one diagnosable mental disorder.
And, you know, and polls show pretty consistently that since the 1960s, the average self-reported happiness of young women in particular has Well, I'm not surprised to hear those stats about liberal women in particular because,
look, I see it with my own daughter who's 14. The schools today try to exploit young girls' and young women's empathy to bend them to their democratic norms.
They try to impose all of their left-wing viewpoints on these young girls.
By tapping into the empathy vein.
You know, if you don't support Black Lives Matter, you're racist.
If you don't support trans girls, meaning boys, playing in girls sports, you're a bigot.
They're bullied.
Don't be a bully.
Be a nice girl.
That's how we've been raised for time in memoriam, to be nice girls who get patted on the heads.
And you're not a nice girl if you're a bully or a bigot or a racist.
So I'm not surprised at all that girls who don't get inoculated against that kind of thinking at home, who go into any normal school system, will be indoctrinated in that kind of thinking and will wind up very unhappy.
Very unhappy because her natural instincts will be to fight against things like watching a boy take all of her blue ribbons, but she's been told by all the people she respects, in the school setting at least, That she's a bad person if she objects to that.
And I think that incongruous feeling leads to unhappiness.
I think the reward system of K-12 and college education right now is for people who play the victim.
And so much the better if you could actually be a victim.
That would be terrific.
You will be celebrated.
You will be the cool one.
You'll get the snaps from your fellow classmates and your professors.
Writing your college essay about what a happy childhood you had and your intact family that supported you and loved you along the way will not get you in anywhere.
Maybe three universities in the United States.
But writing about the destitution derby that you have suffered from 0 to 18 can open doors that would otherwise be closed to you, especially if you happen to be a white person, a girl or a boy.
So all of the incentives are set up in a very backward manner.
And I think the other problem facing young liberal women is young liberal men who, by and large, are being turned into these, it's derogatorily referred to as soy boys, but I get it.
Like, they're taking the masculinity out of our young men and then telling them that's the only way that they're going to be accepted.
And especially young liberal men are buying that.
walking around in Birkenstocks with their Starbucks, being quick to cry at any emotional wound.
And crying's not...
You can cry as a man.
But most women would like somebody who doesn't do it all the time in response to all emotional upset.
They prefer the hunter-gatherer types.
And so these young women I talk to on college campuses are looking around for a man who will protect her, who will help lead, who is...
And who, while he treats her as an equal, will put his coat over her shoulders if it's a cool night out.
Will absolutely protect her if somebody messes with her on the street.
Will, like my husband does with me, gently move me to the side that's not.
Facing the traffic along the road.
Just those small little things that a man does for a woman and women have a different list that they do for their men if they're in a kind and loving relationship.
And instead, what they're getting is somebody who wants to braid each other's hair, which would depress you and make you question the whole experience.
Yeah, well, it's not surprising, I suppose, that boys are turning in that direction.
You know, I met a young man in a restaurant a while back.
He wasn't looking too bad when he approached me.
He was a waiter, and he said that he had started listening to first Ben Shapiro and then me six years ago, something like that, and that prior to that, it was his proclivity and his friends to compete with one another with regard to their victim status,
let's say, and to present themselves as He said that was necessary with the girl he had dated at one point because she was very radically liberal and that was a job requirement, you might say.
And he shook all that off and told me and my wife, who was sitting with me, that he was much happier for it.
But it doesn't really surprise me, Megan, because...
Their play preferences, I was just reviewing some stats on ADHD over medication among young boys with one of my producers, and what the original hypothesis, such as it was with regards to hypothetically hyperactive boys, was that stimulants, which is what Ritalin is, Have a paradoxical effect on hyperactive young boys calming them down.
And that's complete bloody biochemical nonsense, and it's a lie psychologically.
What stimulants do is focus people intently on whatever they happen to be focused on.
And they have exactly the same effect on ordinary boys as they do on hyperactive boys, not least because 90% or 95% of hyperactive boys are actually normal.
So if you give stimulants to young juvenile rats, for example, who are very playful, then they stop playing.
And that's exactly why they're administered to young boys in schools.
And so their play proclivity is...
Any attempt they make to be competitive in a world of cooperative games, and there's really no such thing as a cooperative game, although all games that are rule-governed are cooperative.
Any sign of ambition they have is pilloried.
They're associated constantly with the destructive patriarchy and presented to the world as enemies of the planet.
And so it's not surprising that they tilt in a, let's say, feminized direction, especially to appease the angrier women.
And there's a deeper problem here that I'd like your thoughts on.
You know, the most woke disciplines in the universities, and that's really saying something, are the female-dominated.
The more female-dominated they are.
There's another contributing factor, right?
So, the...
So physics is about the least woke discipline, whereas social work, well, you know, enough.
The less said about social work, the better.
But so we have an issue here, too, because I have a suspicion.
You tell me what you think about this, because I'm very curious that the default female ethos, let's say, is...
And in the absence of managerial training, let's say, or rigorous mentoring in the operation of large-scale organizations, every situation turns into an infantilized family.
I mean, it's become absolutely preposterous in universities.
I mean, the faculty, to their own discredit, have been infantilized by the administrators.
You know, we have never seen a large-scale incursion of women into large organizations prior to the last 40 years.
That's never happened in human history.
And we have no idea what the social psychopathology that would be associated But the infantilization of everyone and everything might well be it.
And so I'm curious about what you think about that.
You know, there is data, for example, that women prefer male supervisors.
So that's one.
You know, it's not overwhelming.
It's not overwhelming data, but it's suggestive.
And obviously that doesn't mean there are no good female managers.
We're talking about broad trends here.
But we do potentially have a major societal issue in that men have their pathologies that are expressed socially.
aggression, anti-social behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, a tilt towards a kind of self-serving narcissism in some cases, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that women wouldn't bring their own pathologies to the workplace.
And it is the female-dominated institutions that seem to be the most woke.
I mean, and that's how the 18 to 34-year-olds vote as well, right?
They're radically out of phase with the entire rest of the culture.
So, what do you think about that?
How would you reflect on that, like in your personal experience with the organizations that you've worked with and the managerial situations that you've been in?
It makes perfect sense to me.
I accept that as a likely cause of the problem that we're seeing and probably the more than likely culprit of it.
I see exactly what you're saying.
I guess with today's generation, I ask, it's like a chicken egg.
These woke institutions are trying to exploit girls' natural empathy, as I said.
But those women, at some point, were the first ones in to a system that hadn't been exploiting their empathy.
And they ran wild with it, clearly, because we're now at the place we are.
And I see it being done.
We just played videotape on the show today from peak BLM, right after George Floyd.
The riots everywhere.
And one of those infamous videos where BLM members got up in the face of, it happened to be a woman of color, she looked Latina to me, sitting there trying to eat her lunch at an outdoor cafe.
And the BLM crowd was crazy.
And it was all white women.
And I remember this from when I lived on the Upper West Side, which included 2020, during the George Floyd-a-palooza.
And it was all white women who tended to have some money in their Lululemon.
Out there at these BLM protests, it's like, okay, these women would never want that crowd coming back to their apartment building with them at the end of the day, but they want to be out there on the streets and pretend that they're one of them, that they understand the experience that your average inner-city person of color has had.
It's a lie.
So I accept, because I've seen women behaving terribly over the past five years in particular, and they're at the apex of the bad messaging.
And they're the last to come along on the Trump train, which is also disturbing.
You know, those same stats I've seen that you're citing with young women in particular.
They're obsessed with abortion, which I just think speaks to a lot of things, like the absence of religion in the public square.
No one's even telling them the other side or the other options.
We had laws at one point where you'd have to show women the picture of the fetus before they could abort it, and those got struck down.
It was like, no, you can't even show her what she's doing.
So I just think the whole system...
Like, you'd almost think that it's the kind of woman that society wants because they're so prevalent.
Welcome to this episode of Parenting.
Our 13-year-old throws tantrums quite often.
Loud, screaming tantrums when he doesn't get his way.
There's a time in every child's life when he or she realizes they stand on the precipice of adulthood.
It's during this window that learning responsibility becomes crucial.
We're trying to figure out how to get him through this part of his life, become a responsible adult.
They don't learn how to be autonomous in your household when they're teenagers.
How do you expect that they're going to be able to take care of themselves when they leave home?
Be really good to get this under control.
You have to sit down with your husband or wife and you have to see not only where you think things have gone wrong very concretely around specific episodes, but you have to flesh out a vision of what you would rather see instead.
You're going to get pushback, but better late than never.
Never.
You're going to get pushback.
Well, you know, the question is, you know, did we tilt in that direction?
There's certainly a strain of feminism that developed particularly in the 1960s, although it was there long before that, that really did in some ways aim at that kind of women.
And let me ask you something as well that's deeper.
You know, I've studied malevolence as deeply as I can for a very long time.
The philosophical representations of malevolence and the theological representations of malevolence.
And the deepest representation is Luciferian.
And that trope underlies, like, the evil scientist in, you know, popular entertainment.
The idea of the intellect gone mad.
The intellect that worships itself that then usurps and attempts to put itself in the highest place.
And so there's an idea that, this is Milton's idea that, you know, Lucifer, who's the spirit of the unbridled intellect, the light bringer, is the spirit that was most finely made that went most dreadfully wrong.
And so the psychological idea there is that there isn't anything more remarkable about human beings than their cognitive ability, but if it becomes master instead of serving something higher, then look the hell out.
Now, there's an echo of that that's very, very deep with regards to the maternal instinct.
And I think this is what's played out in the Genesis story of the consort between Eve and the serpent.
What seems to me to happen is that Eve clutches the poisonous serpent to her breast.
And so that's...
Human beings have the longest dependency period of any creature by a lot, and human infants are markedly helpless.
And so that self-sufficiency...
Sacrificing compassion that's at the core of the maternal instinct is absolutely vital.
But as Freud pointed out, if that goes wrong within families and overextends its domain, so that, for example, that infant-mother bond isn't attenuated as the child develops, then there's nothing that's more devouring than the mother.
That's the story of Hansel and Gretel, right?
they go out into the forest, but it's made out of candy.
Maybe you might suspect that the jig is up when something's painted that beautifully on the outside.
I'm oh so compassionate and embracing.
And of course, inside there's a witch whose goal is to fatten up the children and to make them helpless so that she can eat them.
And so fairy tales are pretty vicious in that sort of representation, but that's also a portrayal of how all
Now, you know, it's not like men get off easy in that Genesis story, by the way, when Eve decides she's going to put herself at the center of the moral universe because that's what she does.
She's tempted to become like a god because that's the temptation and she clutches the serpent to her breast.
Adam doesn't object and he And he goes along for the ride.
And then later in this story, when God wants to walk with Adam so that they're working together, let's say, Adam is hiding behind a bush because he's realized that he's naked.
And so the woman and the serpent have made himself conscious, and now he doesn't have the courage to walk with God.
And when God asks him why, he blames the woman.
And he blames God for making her.
And so there's a, like, I don't want to lay this all at the feet of women, because what I saw in the universities, for example, is that, let's put it this way, that when the maternal instinct went astray, partly because it didn't have any valid target, the men just backed off and didn't oppose it.
And so, you know, they're complicit in this disintegration.
But we do have a problem on our hands that's not trivial.
And we also see this reflected in a growing political divide between young men in particular and young women all across the world, right?
Young men are becoming more conservative.
Yeah, I know.
And young women are becoming more liberal.
And they're also not finding each other very effectively.
The political, you know, who would have guessed that, you know, so we got two problems.
Men and women both have the vote.
Now, does that mean they're political enemies?
Because that's certainly one of the things that appears to be happening.
And then we have the mass migration of women into workforces of a size where empathy cannot be the regulating principle.
You know, I'll give you one more example, and then I'll turn it over for your comments.
If empathy was the appropriate ethos for...
Operation in a corporation, let's say, beyond the size of the family.
Then the personality trait agreeableness, which is the index of compassion and empathy, would positively predict workplace performance, particularly among managers.
But it isn't agreeableness that predicts.
It's conscientiousness, which is a cold virtue that typifies conservatives more than liberals.
Big organizations run on raw cognitive power and conscientiousness.
They don't run on empathy.
Little bitty families run on empathy, especially when there are infants.
But that doesn't scale.
And I actually think that's why the personality trait conscientiousness, which is diligence, orderliness, industriousness, it's associated often with patriotism and more conservative values.
I think that's why it evolved.
Because empathy does not scale.
Because everyone isn't a big, happy family, and once you exceed kin group size in your organization, you have to turn to a different ethos.
And I think that's particularly problematic for unconscientious women who self-aggrandize on the basis of their compassion.
There's a lot in there and I agree with a lot of it.
I keep thinking about the fact that And that generation of mothers did as told and left their kids alone for a large portion of their childhoods.
And that wasn't a bad thing.
And I have a great relationship with my mom.
I'm not saying I'm glad she wasn't around that much.
But it led to self-sufficiency and independence and absolutely no overbearing motherhood.
That wasn't a thing in the 1970s.
Or the 1980s.
We were so neglected.
We were called latchkey kids, where you had a key around your neck to let yourself back in after you walked home from school, and you didn't really know when your parents were going to come home.
There were rules like, you know, be home when it gets dark.
Your parents had no idea where you were and really didn't care.
Those were good things.
Those were, you know, building the ties for appropriate separation at the earliest possible age.
Love always remains, caring and all that stays, but not overbearing.
And that generation, so that's me now, and maybe my brother and sister, you know, who are older.
And I think we'll raise the solution to the problem that came.
Just a little bit after we came.
Because I think what started to happen was those women got into the workforce and they were doing it all and they would commit to work because there was an understanding that they would not blow it for the next generation of women.
They'd been given the keys to the kingdom.
Now you come in and you do well at these jobs and you don't talk about your kids and you don't leave to go home early and you don't insist on flexible work schedules.
So the women did it.
And they raised Tough Gen X kids who were fine.
But as they started to get more rights at the office, and it sounds great on paper, okay, flex time, and I only have to work part-time, and I have to leave early for this thing and the other thing, and so on.
And the workplace started to bend more to supporting what mothers needed in their motherly roles.
The mothers were home more and I think started to overcorrect, started to see like...
Where I'm never leaving you alone.
I'm going to somehow overcompensate and be the parent that I didn't have or that the generation before me didn't have.
And slowly we started to migrate to parents who never leave their children alone.
Mothers and fathers, for that matter, but especially mothers.
And that leads to helplessness.
And it leads to...
If you're in competition with a job and she's got to go to the job and you know that, you don't do anything as the child.
You understand that's the deal.
But if there's a split between her attentions and you've got to play for it, I think you lean into it.
More upset, more victimhood, more things that would get a mother's attention naturally.
Like, I have a disorder.
I'm not well.
I need extra help.
Yeah, well, that'll get her attention if she doesn't have anything better to do.
And it has no sense, right?
But that is another example of that exaggeration of compassion to the point that it becomes toxic.
And the fact that it's necessary to human beings, especially in the early years, like vital.
It also means that it's a very difficult force to regulate.
I mean, the general rule for caretaking, and this goes for the elderly as well, pretty much anybody you're actually taking care of, is don't do anything for anyone that they can do for themselves, right?
because you're actually stealing from them, not helping them.
You know, I mean, certainly one of the rules for psychotherapy You listen and you help people strategize and you ask them questions, but you don't provide them with the direction for their life because that's their enterprise.
And that requires a very, well, it requires.
Can I ask you a little bit about the way that you constructed your own family and career pathway?
Because I've been working with my wife, trying to sketch out.
She does a podcast on issues related to femininity.
And we've been trying to sketch out, at least hypothetically, something like a...
So here's a stat for you.
We hit this milestone last year.
Half of Western women, 30 and under, have no child.
So it's a little more than half now.
So we hit more than half.
Half of them will never have a child.
And 90% of them will regret it.
That means we're setting up, this is a catastrophe, this is a catastrophe if it's true, and the data are pretty clear, I believe.
This means we're setting up one woman in four for isolation, right?
And that gets increasingly brutal as you get older.
And I also think we're setting up that 25% of women to be preyed upon in a manner like nothing we've ever seen when they enter their lives.
This is not going to be good.
So, let me sketch out an idea for you in terms of a timeline and tell me what you think about that.
I mean, one couple in three have fertility problems by the age of 30. And that's defined as not being able to conceive within a year of trying.
And so it seems pretty obvious.
All assistive reproductive technology notwithstanding, which is very expensive and very unreliable and certainly not something to be depended on except in cases of absolute necessity.
Having your children before you're 30 is a wise move if you want to ensure that it's going to happen.
And so then the question is, Order.
You know, we're best served probably as human beings to have our children in our 20s and probably our early 20s.
And of course, that's going to be more demanding for women, more demanding and more of an opportunity, I would say, because each child really requires something approximating three years of pretty dedicated care.
You know, the data seem to show that Before that, especially with transformation of caregivers, it doesn't look like it's a very good idea.
So you need three years per child.
And maybe you want two children or three children.
And so that's something like...
Now, women live about six or seven years longer than men.
So that's kind of an interesting little twist on the whole situation.
And if you started your career at 30, you could have 40 years of career, which is a lot.
And that way, I would say...
But there are no real guidelines developmentally for young women, and they don't know what to do, and they're increasingly not married, and they increasingly don't have children, and they're increasingly unhappy.
And it doesn't look to me like slave to a corporation is necessarily a substitute for family life and children.
Now, some people have a career.
You have a career.
Some people have a career.
Most people have jobs.
So, anyways, I'm not saying that that's a hard and fast rule, but I don't really see any way around it.
And here's another little twist that is worth adding.
I think most people who are popular and attractive get five chances to establish a permanent relationship, and that's about it.
That's fascinating.
Well, you know, I figure it's a year to kind of get to know someone and then assume that, you know, you're fortunate enough so that people are lining up, which is not that likely and probably not the position that most people are in.
And so maybe it's two years, including the failure, and five is a 10-year span.
You know, I mean, I'm not trying to be...
You get more different from other people.
It isn't easier to establish a relationship when you're older, I wouldn't say.
And more people are snatched up.
Well, there's that.
That's a big problem.
you know, who's left.
And the other issue, I would say, too, that's germane is...
You know, you're going to, what, forestall that?
For what reason?
You know, I got married to Tammy when I was 27, I think.
And one of our regrets is that we didn't do that earlier.
Now, there were reasons for that.
Maybe they were valid.
Probably they weren't.
But I'm not happy that that time was missed.
It would have been better.
To have spent it together.
So I'd like your thoughts on that.
I mean, the timeline, just that general layout.
I mean, I think there's no problem in setting out those honest truths, which are your life will be happier if you have a partner and children.
I just think that's just true.
And people should be told that.
And then they should be told the realities of fertility.
Because those are realities that, you know, can be potentially meddled with, but there's no guarantee.
And if you're one of the people who cannot meddle with it and you missed your window, it will be a lifelong regret that will be unsolvable and will be like a deep source of pain, an ongoing deep source of pain.
So it's not something that you could easily brush off.
And so all those truths need to be shared while at the same time prizing and sharing That's the other piece of it.
Like, if you listen to Jordan, if you listen to Ben, if you listen to, you know, The Daily Wire, you'll hear that.
You won't hear motherhood, early motherhood, or any kind of motherhood generally bashed.
You'll hear it praised.
But in society still, in the movies, on the television shows that women watch, it's not.
You're still, like, you still hear, she's just a stay-at-home mom, you know, or she doesn't work.
They still don't look at, you know, motherhood as something that's, you know, something valuable.
Like work as though it's a bad word.
Motherhood is work too.
It's great work.
It's life-fulfilling work.
But it still has this like, and women who I know all over New York and now I'm in Connecticut, they say things like, it's very important to me that my daughter see me going to a business meeting.
Like mommy's got a business meeting or going to the office if they have just like some small meeting.
And I'm like, why?
Why?
Because they don't think the daughter will think that they're important if they don't have some sort of business pressing on them, which is absurd and hashtag part of the problem, right?
No, we all need to be teaching young girls and boys that motherhood is enough.
Being a mother is a completely valid, beautiful, awesome, really important choice.
I actually went to my daughter's school and I said, I think it's fine you have career night.
It's an all-girls school.
And you bring in doctors and lawyers and journalists and whomever.
You need to bring in a stay-at-home mom.
You need to have somebody stand up there and tell the girls, I made a totally different choice.
And so much the better if she's got a great education.
And she can say, yeah, I have all the same skills you have.
And I was on the exact same path as you were.
And I loved learning and being introduced to the classics and being able to sit around a dinner table with so-called intellectuals and know the references.
And I chose a totally different path when I graduated from those schools.
Because there was one thing that was most important to me, and let me tell you how that's rewarded me.
The school did not do it.
So, you know, we've got a counter program at home.
So having said all that, I'll tell you my own personal experience, which doesn't really reflect that way of thinking or this recommended course at all.
And yet still, I'm very, very happy.
I'm a very contented person.
Happy is a charged word, but I really am very happy with my life.
I'm contented.
I have a very, very strong marriage and extremely intact, loving, present, and meaningful relationships with my three kids.
But I also have a very large career that's been hugely successful, not to be self-aggrandizing, but just saying on the scales of careers, mine has worked out very well.
So in no way did I really sacrifice much in that lane.
And I realize this puts me in the.00001% of people and probably even fewer percent of women.
So the way that I did it was not that unconventional for when I grew up.
I was definitely part of a generation that felt, you work.
You get to work.
You graduate from college, go to college.
But when you finish college, you work.
That's the thing you do.
But in my case, Jordan, from that day to this, I've always loved working.
I love it.
It's totally exciting and interesting and intellectually stimulating to me, and I cannot imagine not doing this.
It's been really important to me.
And if I looked at the 21 or 22-year-old version of me versus me now, or let's say when I had my kids, which was later, 38, 40, and 42, I guarantee you, I personally, this isn't true of everybody, but I personally would not have been anywhere near as good a mother.
I was much more selfish and less capable of giving, and I was more of a taker, like most young people are.
not all, but most.
And so I really think that the calm I've brought to motherhood, the life lessons, the wisdom has been a boon to my children who are calm and cool and not panickers and have a wisdom about them that I think you kind of get through osmosis and maybe some genetics.
But they're in a very good place, I think, in part thanks to the fact that I was, it's not age-related for everybody, It means that my children and I have a shorter runway together.
And I hate that fact.
It haunts me.
I'm so grateful that I have them at all, you know, unlike so many women who weren't this fortunate.
But I hate the fact that every time we talk about their lives, I'm calculating, you know, it's his age plus 42. That's what I'll be, you know, when my youngest has his children.
And boy, my kids better have kids young.
If they want me to be part of that child's life at all, if I get to be a grandparent.
And it's its own special form of pain, you know?
Like, would I have traded my career building and doing the things that I love?
Because I was a lawyer for the first 10 years, and then I switched to journalism.
I don't know if I can say that.
I didn't meet the right man until I was 35. If Doug had come into my life at 22 and I rejected him, But I don't have that regret.
We didn't meet until the time I think God brought us together.
And for me, that was the time.
That's when I was ready.
I was ready to not downshift in my career exactly, but to make compromises in my career that I hadn't been prior to that.
And I was fully committed to devoting myself to motherhood in a way I never had been before.
And some of it was born of the intense love that I had for my husband and still have, in which my kids were born into, this swath of like truly mad romantic love that they're products of and are immersed in every day, which is probably the best medicine for them.
So I have no regrets about how I did it, but I also acknowledge it's not all roses and unicorns.
there are downsides to doing it the way I did.
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Yeah, well, you know, our culture is so youth-obsessed, and I suppose that came out of consumer culture in the 1960s when, for the first time in human history, young people had excess money to spend and could be, you know, marketed at, we tend to construe, especially in popular culture, life as if it
Oh, Jordan, when I broke into journalism, I was 32, and I thought, I'll never be accepted in this business.
I'm too old.
I will have no future in this industry.
It was like, so silly.
That turned out to be wrong.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's why it's so useful to start a discussion, let's say, about the actual span of life.
I mean, you said that one of your regrets, your potential regrets, is that You know, you've truncated the time that you'll have as a grandmother, let's say.
And you took advantage of that when you were young and there was some utility in that for you.
But that is a price that is lurking and, you know, it's very difficult to tell how it will play out.
But as a pattern, it's something for people to give some consideration to.
You know, you optimally, you want to be a grandparent when you're still youthful enough to be active and engaged, and then you get to have the pleasures of having children again.
And that's a pretty good deal, and it is something...
That's what roles were for, so you didn't actually have to think about that.
But we have to think about it now.
There's another perversity in this that I really have a hard time figuring out.
Because I would say that by and large, the feminist movement that's at the bottom of some of the things we're talking about has been a left-wing movement.
And I do not understand for the life of me how in the world it can be logically coherent that the left can be anti- Capitalist, anti-corporate, and pro-career.
Like, I don't, I just can't.
Yeah, so there's that.
So we could talk about that for a bit.
It's like, okay, corporations are evil and...
It's like, okay, I'm not exactly sure what to make of that.
Now what?
Then I want to tell you a weird little story, too.
I was looking at the Brothers Grimm Snow White version recently because I went and saw the Disney Snow White version, which, you know, was exactly the sort of mistake that you'd think it would be both to attend and to produce.
So, I want to just tell you a snippet of that story.
So, Snow White is young and beautiful, and the evil queen wants that, right?
So, she's an older woman who is competing with the younger woman for the younger woman's advantages.
That's the evil queen.
Okay, now Snow White has to run away from the evil queen.
Right.
And where does she go?
Well, she goes out into the forest, which is the unknown, but she goes to where the dwarfs are.
Now, in the Grimm's Brother fairy tale, the dwarfs don't have names, so they're kind of generic.
But they keep an orderly house, and they work very hard.
So the Grimm Brothers dwarves, now we don't know how old these fairy tales are, by the way.
There have been some folklorologists, folklorists, folklorists, who've traced some fairy tales back like 10,000 years.
They're very old.
Okay, so it's wisdom speaking, you could say.
So Snow White goes to what?
To serve the dwarves.
Okay, so what does that mean?
It means that to escape the evil queen, she has to make a pact with ordinary masculinity.
Right?
She has to serve the dwarfs.
Now, why?
Because they protect her from the evil queen.
Now, among primates, there is a phenomenon called fertility suppression, which is where women compete, the females compete, to suppress the fertility of other females.
And it's a very widespread phenomenon that's well known among primatologists and biologists, and it definitely characterizes human beings.
And so, the evil queen in the Snow White story is suppressing the fertility of Snow White.
Now, she runs away from that and takes shelter among the ordinary men, the dwarves, let's say, who are the positive side of the patriarchy, you might say it that way.
When the evil queen comes back, She shows up again, right?
And she offers Snow White three gifts.
The first is a bodice that's too tight and just about strangles her.
So that's a narcissistic exaggeration of sexuality as a temptation.
The second is a poisoned comb, right?
Same thing in slightly different guise, right?
Tempting Snow White to be poisoned by the worship of her own beauty.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
That's what the evil queen does.
The third gift is the poisoned apple.
Now, of course, that harkens back to the Genesis story.
Anything you incorporate is something that changes you.
It's like you incorporate knowledge.
And so it's poisoned knowledge.
And the dwarfs can't save her from that.
And that's the situation young women are in in the modern world, because the evil queen feeds them poison knowledge.
And the deep question is, why?
And the real skeptic would say, well, the older, jealous, childless women are doing absolutely everything they can to destroy the fertility of young women.
Now, there's a corollary to that, which is, this happened to Ion Hirsi Ali, for example, it's often the...
Yeah, that's for sure.
And so there's a brutality in this, you know, a brutality in that.
And I think you see it taken to its logical conclusion, by the way, with this trans phenomena.
Because I told the bloody Senate in Canada in 2016, when they crammed through that idiot pronoun bill that was a compelled speech bill, I told them that they would produce a psychogenic epidemic among young women.
What happens when you confuse people about something basic, like their sex, you confuse the most confused the most.
And so, for example, a 1% increase in unemployment produces a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalizations.
Because you put a little pressure on the people who are barely hanging in there and they're done.
Well, if you take...
You take the swath of them that are confused for 15 reasons and you add six more reasons and they're like, they're done.
And so, you know, we can see the full, what, the full horror show that's the surgical mutilation and sterilization as the ultimate exemplar of this evil.
Queen phenomenon.
It's really dark.
Let me ask you a question about it.
Do you think in this scenario that the evil queens are conscious of what they're doing?
It's their own self-loathing working itself out.
Well, here's a way of thinking about it.
Every time you make a decision, you're conscious of it.
But you make a lot of micro-decisions, and you don't remember them, right?
Like, you don't remember all the decisions you made yesterday, or certainly not a week ago, but that doesn't mean you weren't conscious when you made the decision.
Okay, now, if you make a thousand little decisions in the wrong direction, you were conscious at each of those decision points.
You might not be cognizant of where you've ended up.
And, you know, that's the tale of many a society's disintegration into, what, blind totalitarianism.
Look, When people fail to speak up in a state that's tilting towards totalitarianism, every time they know they should say something and they don't, they're conscious.
Now, they might not be conscious of where they're going to get to if they keep that up, because that's the road to hell for sure.
But they're conscious every step of the way, and so they're culpable.
If you're talking to someone who's made a lot of bad decisions in therapy, for example, and trying to help them identify where they met the devil at the crossroads and made the wrong choice, you're going to have to do a lot of reviewing.
And to some degree, that's the representation of all that to consciousness.
Because it's become implicit.
It's become part of the way that you look at the world.
But it's conscious when you do it or don't do it.
Well, I mean, I would like to think that this is what I've been thinking while you've been talking, with all due respect, because I have a lot of friends who are Democrat women.
But I feel like you're talking about liberal women and not just women.
Because the conservative women I know are just not like that.
They just have a totally different set of values and they live by them and they raise children by them.
I think we see the results of it.
I don't know why, and not even necessarily your average Democrat woman, but a lot of them, but certainly leftist women.
Yeah, I mean, I just feel like everything you said applies and it's obvious.
Well, here's another weird data point.
So psychologists have known for a long while, sociologists as well, that people become more conservative as they get older.
So that's how the data is explained.
As people age, they become more conservative.
But you can take exactly that same data and you can put another twist on it.
It's exactly as explanatory and I think it's more accurate.
The reason this hasn't happened is because academics, including the researchers, are radically biased in the direction of the liberals.
It isn't that you become more conservative as you get older.
It's that conservatism is the political expression of maturity.
And liberalism, progressivism, and the hedonism that goes along with it, that self-centered hedonism that is part and parcel, let's say, of the pride movement, that is the political expression of immaturity.
And so here's something else this explains, you know, because this is a perverse fact.
There has been no economic and conceptual doctrine that's been more radically discredited than Let's say the radical leftism, the Marxist brands of leftism.
But it doesn't go away.
So it's not leftism.
It's not Marxism.
It's Marxism is the most radical expression of hedonistic immaturity.
And the reason it doesn't go away is because hedonism, It battles with maturity.
And as you become more mature, you become more conservative, because conservatives are community-oriented and not self-oriented.
Now, interestingly as well, on the psychological side, there is no distinction between thinking about yourself and being unhappy.
Those things are so tightly aligned that you can't dissociate them statistically.
Right.
So, as you become more conservative, but truly more mature, the way you orient your life is toward the future and towards other people.
And that turns out not exactly to make you happy, you know, and you pointed this out.
You said happiness was a fraught word, and I agree, because happiness is a hedonistic goal.
Secure in your identity, free from chaotic anxiety, goal-directed, purpose-driven, and in service to others, right?
Well, that's not bad.
That's a good substitute for happiness.
In fact, if you were wise and mature, that's what you would substitute for happiness, right?
That's why Pinocchio discovers nothing but slavery on Pleasure Island, by the way.
It just makes you a slave.
Right, right, right.
So, okay, so But let me ask you because I look at the political divide you mentioned when we kicked this off between young people, young men and young women.
And it doesn't surprise me one iota that young women are liberal.
But it does surprise me that young men are now becoming conservative.
I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't.
It doesn't because I follow politics for a living and I've seen what the left has done to young men.
So I see it's a natural gravitation.
But do you think that that's what's caused it?
And if so, why aren't young women open to that?
You know, we've seen some.
We've seen some young women start to vote Trump with the Trump hats.
I tend to believe, maybe I'm totally wrong, this is completely anecdotal, but I tend to believe it's Okay, okay.
Let's delve into that a little bit.
First of all, I think it's happening to young men.
I think that the podcast crowd has had a fair bit to do with that.
And I think the reason for that is that that's the only place that young men find encouragement.
And that encouragement, I've been struck to the core in my travels and my encounters with thousands of people or tens of thousands of people, many of them young men, how little encouragement is enough.
None is not enough.
Some is enough.
And they've got some encouragement from the podcast sphere world.
And that's enough.
Now, why not young women?
Well, Megan, one of the mistakes that pollsters make is assuming that 16-year-old boys or 18-year-old boys, let's say, and 18-year-old girls inhabit the same world.
They don't.
Because worldwide, Women prefer men who are about four years older.
And I would say that proclivity is even more pronounced in the teen years and in the early 20s.
So I think we should be matching young men against girls who are four years younger, not the same age.
So we'll see how that plays out in the upcoming years.
That would be the first thing.
It is also not obvious to me that the conservative types have done a particularly good job of communicating with young women.
Now, there's a bunch of reasons for that, you know, like the 18 to 34 year old female crowd gravitates not towards YouTube and the longer form content that at least at once was the hallmark of YouTube, but to these more pathological sub.
You know, Tumblr was one of them.
Wherever you get a large aggregation of young women who are unsupervised, let's say, or unmentored, that's a better way of thinking about it.
Look the hell out, because that's a breeding ground for social pathology.
Young women get a lot of their information, I think it's 60-70% from TikTok.
I know, it's terrifying.
And TikTok is a complete bloody snake pit, and the Chinese and the Iranians and the Russians have a major hand in that.
And so that's not good.
This is one of the main reasons I'm on TikTok, you know, as a show, as a content creator.
I want my voice out there, and I want people to hear me and my message, especially young women, to hear it.
There's another way, and there are different ways of thinking about this.
But I think about the Trump election, Jordan, and And there were 16, 17 of them.
And we were up late.
The election wasn't called until, I think, the 2 a.m. hour.
And these guys, they didn't have to be a conservative or a Trump supporter to come here.
Probably, naturally, a lot of them just were.
But when we called it for Trump, and I'm sure you saw this in your own world, but they weren't just like, yes.
They were like this.
Thank God.
They were head in hands, like running their hands through their hair, like near tears.
It was more than joy.
It was like relief.
Relief, yeah, yeah.
Well, could you imagine a four-year term of Kamala Harris?
No, but when I was 18 or 17, these guys were that into it because they knew they had seen what happened, I think, to the class ahead of them and the one ahead of that and their older brothers and maybe their fathers.
And that's why, to me, it's so crazy.
You've got in our society now, Democrats throwing $20 million, was in the New York Times this week, at trying to figure out the syntax to use to connect with young men.
Like, you're so...
You don't have the first idea where you've gone wrong or how profound the loss is.
You actually think you're going to be able to reach those boys with their heads in their hands in that sort of profound relief that Trump won by changing your syntax?
Or we've seen some of these Democrat senators throw out a swear word here or there.
They have no idea the depths of the betrayal, I think, that these young men are feeling.
From those political leaders.
And to me, that's the biggest divide right now.
What the left has done to these young men, not as much with just women.
Yes, women, but also men of the left who have abandoned them or at least gone along with these dominant women at the BLM protests and in corporate America preaching these things because they can't find their balls to stand up for what they know is right and exercise, Yes, maybe some toxic masculinity.
Here and there, it's actually- Well, as I said, my experience has been that the best pathway out for those young men is encouragement.
Say, you know, you're not who you could be.
You could get your act together.
There could be a lot more to you if you were willing to develop it.
And, you know, don't accept the line that you're intrinsically pathological.
You know, I had a friend who committed suicide because of that, fundamentally.
When he was about 40, you know, he had bought the sort of nihilistic Buddhist line that, you know, the patriarch was evil and male ambition was part of the force that was destroying the world and he was a guilty colonialist.
He lived up in northern Alberta where there was a lot of native Canadians and there was a fair bit of tension there and he wouldn't even defend himself in a physical fight if it came to that because he was so guilty.
And some of that was irresponsibility on his part, let's say, and unwillingness to grow up and take on the challenges of productive life.
I'm not trying to lay it all at the feet of the social world, but I saw that in him, and it did him in by the time he was 40. And he was a very smart, attractive, talented person.
He had his problems for sure.
That betrayal that you describe, it strikes right to the core.
There's nothing moral about demoralizing young people, young men, in the name of defending Mother Nature against the patriarchy.
That is the...
It always ends in child sacrifice, which is exactly the situation today.
It's pathological to the core.
And as you said, the Democrats, all they can do is ape respect for masculinity.
I mean, they tried to trot out Tim Waltz as a man.
You know, I mean...
Really.
I mean, you know, there are worse examples of men than Tim Walz, admittedly, but we might also point out...
No one's coming to mind, but I'm sure theoretically...
I mean, right, right.
Well, and the fact that that was even an idea, I'm not trying to denigrate walls specifically, but the idea that that was...
Can I just say on the same front, yes, as horrible as they come, I mean...
Tampon Tim is enough to convince me he's not the archetype.
They put those in the military bathrooms in Canada, you know.
They've been in some bathrooms at Facebook.
That was one of the things that Mark Zuckerberg undid as he became more right-wing or more of a Trump supporter.
But I think more about somebody like Doug Emhoff.
To me...
He is utterly feckless.
If you see him speak publicly or in interviews, all he's trying to do is project sweater man.
You know, I would never wear a suit because I'm a sweater man.
I'm approachable.
I'm a feminist.
I'm likable.
I'm non-threatening.
And he buys into all the tropes.
You know, I'm married to a professional, successful woman.
I'm happy to be the second gentleman.
Not threatened by it at all.
Only in his case, as it is in so many of these people who bend over backward to live up to that image, it's all fake.
He's actually not a supportive partner at all.
he's not comfortable in his own skin.
And I mean, I don't like the word feminist and I don't call myself feminist, It could be used in modern-day America in a way that could really embody what could be great about femininity.
Anyway, my point is he's not it.
And he is, behind the scenes, according to the Daily Mail and the woman to whom it happened, an abuser, a physical abuser of women.
So it's always those guys, right?
The ones who are...
That's the allegation.
I've spoken to his accuser directly.
There's plenty of corroborating evidence, and not one journalist would even ask him about it, Jordan, when they got this guy in front of them.
Now, all these self-serving leftists who say that that kind of a man would be terrible, we wouldn't want that man anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, never mind a role model for our little boys and girls, not only did they not inquire into the story, when they had him across from them, wouldn't even ask about it.
And to me, that is the embodiment of the problem on the left.
They elevate guys like that who actually are complete shits.
And they want us to celebrate them as non-toxically masculine.
Whereas they're looking at an actual man who will throw a punch in defense of a woman or just a weakling who might be getting bullied in a public setting and say he's the problem.
His natural male instincts to protect or compete or get ahead are somehow problematic.
Yeah, well, that's the same ethos that underlies the insistence in so many schools, for example, that there can only be cooperative games, right?
There's no winners and losers, because we're all winners, and there can only be...
So they're founded on cooperation, right?
And everyone accepts that.
And then if you're a fair player, you abide by the rules in practice and spirit, and that's cooperation.
And so what it actually is, is civilized combat within a container of cooperation.
So it's unbelievably sophisticated.
And then the victory and the loss issue is, well...
And how about you learn to have some resilience in the face of loss and take some responsibility for it?
And all that does is strengthen you in every possible way.
And our education systems, K through 12, are so pathological and so miseducated that they don't even understand those basics about games, right?
Games are the...
And so that ambitious striving forward towards victory, you might say, that's the hallmark of stereotypical masculinity, has become demonized, even though it's a hallmark of the civilized conduct that's also protective and resilient.
Well, let me ask you this question.
What if we did an experiment starting, you know, the 2025-26 school year where we...
And I don't know what we would do with those women who were formerly in those leadership.
They're now running these universities, but let's just say they don't all have to go, but let's say we reduce the numbers dramatically.
Forget where the women go and what we do with them.
It's a different problem for a different day.
But do you think that the men who would be running those universities would actually change them?
Would today's collection of men...
Be the men to?
That's a good question, Megan.
Like, well, you know, men, what's the old joke?
You know what happened?
Never.
Twenty women got together and built a boat and traveled to a distant land.
Right?
I mean, well, we don't actually...
Right, right, right.
Well, we don't actually know, I would say, a tremendous amount about those...
You know, men are pretty good at sorting themselves out on the basis of competence when they're thrown together in a group.
And I think the reason for that, think about it this way, evolutionarily, you know, why would you ally yourself with the best hunter?
Because maybe the best hunter is the highest status guy.
It's like, well, you don't die, that's a start, and you get to eat, and so does your family, and maybe proximity to the top dog confers status.
Not the highest status, but, you know, do you want to be the quarterback on the winning football team?
Yes, but being even the water boy is better than not playing at all.
And men are pretty good at that, you know, if they're thrown together in a group and there's a task.
They sort themselves out pretty quickly in relationship to competence at the task.
Now, that can get perverted by power and tyranny and, you know, aggression.
But all things considered, that's the way men conduct themselves.
Let me ask you something.
Let me ask you something.
there's a follow-up on that, forgive me.
My worry about that scenario, this is completely offbeat, but I genuinely have this worry, is like, These guys, through no fault of their own, may be getting more and more feminine.
Well, it's also the case, Megan, that women on the birth control pill are less attracted to masculine men.
Well, that's definitely hormonal manipulation.
There's no question.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we have absolutely no idea whatsoever the political consequences of the birth control pill.
We have no idea.
It could be catastrophic for all we know because we don't know what it means that women find masculine men less attractive on the pill than off.
Like, we don't know what the political ramifications of that are.
They don't have to be that great to be determining, given the small margins of victory that constitute the typical political campaign.
So, these sorts of questions that you're raising, like, they're open-ended.
We don't know, and the same thing applies with regards to hormonal alteration in the environment.
I don't think we're finally going to look into it, though.
This is one of the reasons why I was such a big supporter of RFKJ, is I really think...
I mean, the microplastics, geez, I don't even know how we're going to solve that.
But there is evidence that it's hormonally manipulating us in a very unfortunate way.
And if that's true, I mean, the latest data says that we have the equivalent of five bottle caps worth of plastic in our brains.
We'll never be able to solve that.
We need medical doctors to actually help.
Further depressing us is the fact that even if you eliminate all plastics from your life, you never put plastic in the microwave so it doesn't seep into your food, you're inhaling plastics that they're using in Germany.
That's what the data are.
So to me, I just feel like there's so many things we have to solve for.
Even if we were to take out our pen and write the guidelines down and then everybody were to live by them, we've lost something as a society when it comes to basic health, wellness, Yeah,
well, I guess that's what we hope will transpire as a consequence of this tilt spearheaded by the U.S. towards productive conservatism.
Hopefully we'll see that spread, well, not to Canada by all appearances, but...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, look, we should bring this to a close.
I know that your time is constrained today.
We're going to go over to the Daily Wire side.
I think what we'll do there is I think we'll continue a discussion on motherhood per se, because I'm curious about how you managed that and also about...
It's a very different thing than looking at someone else's child.
So I think we'll delve into that.
Yeah, I did a lot of management consulting with women as part of my clinical practice and watched a number of them have I appreciate your
insights on this thorniest of all problems and, you know, maybe we'll make some headway.
With it, you know, it's certainly the case that your work on TikTok is extremely useful because young women are dying for guidance in the same way that young men were 10 years ago.
I know.
They need some women who aren't evil queens to guide them, you know?
That's right.
Well, I mean, bit by bit, right?
Brick by brick, as they say.
Yeah, right, exactly.
A typical conservative attitude.
Good to talk to you, Megan.
You too, Jordan.
Thanks for having me.
And thank you for everybody who's watching on the YouTube side and to The Daily Wire for making this possible to the film crew here in Scottsdale today.
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