The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210914_solutions-for-a-world-in-disarray-with-bret-weinst

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Sept. 14, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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20210914_solutions-for-a-world-in-disarray-with-bret-weinst

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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show 00:03:59
	And now, watch your kicks.
	Kicks can fertig grenzenless mangy selfies.
	The suit, handling a good accent in a crush detail.
	Men, moves at the beticky, a reddish dress.
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	So, will come to grenzenless me beauty, connect or your betick.
	Who's kicks?
	Beauty Unlimited.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	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.
	Brett Weinstein joins me now, along with Heather Hayig, 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 really doing something for me.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	People sometimes tell us it looks like a sauna, but it's cozy.
	I think it's bringing me home.
	I want to see 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 people I'm sure by this point know the story of what happened to you at Evergreen 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 very compelling story.
	My point is can we talk for a minute about Peter Bogosian?
	I had him on the show yesterday.
	He resigned from Portland State, not far from where Evergreen is, really.
	And it's just such a shame.
	You know, I just wonder, it must have brought something up in you guys because you too 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 Pete is a friend.
	And we didn't actually know that this was in the offing exactly.
	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 Substack 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 lies and slander that are really despicable that people seem willing to stoop to because they think they're on the right 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, 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.
	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.
The Illusion of Higher Education 00:08:22
	Professor's colleagues pulling out the microphone wires when he had people on campus, including you two, right?
	Now that I'm looking at you, it was you two and Christina Hoff Summers, right?
	Yeah, the moment when the AV was pulled was actually me and Helen Pluckrose, who, along with James Lindsay, 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, That the sound was pulled, that men are taller than women.
	And that was, and you know, this is.
	You picked.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Now, that is both true and actually not the full story.
	It's actually worse than that.
	That apparently that whole thing was timed, it was staged, it was yet more cosplaying.
	And that suggests that many of these people are engaged 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, 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 a lot of that, of course.
	Well, there is, of course, an honorable version of cosplay where people actually create quite elaborate costumes and regenerate characters from their favorite superhero narratives 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.
	And Ren Faire, right?
	Renaissance Faires.
	Right.
	So it's not that it is inherently a bad phenomenon.
	There's a secret there, Heather.
	I want to know more about you.
	Keep going, Brett.
	So, I did want to say a couple things about Peter that I know are going to get lost in his story.
	We have actually had the privilege of not only participating in events that he hosted 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.
	At an extraordinary level, he invests everything in teaching students how to think and not what to think.
	And the idea that everything from a bag of feces to trumped up charges that resulted in investigations, the use of every possible weapon to silence somebody who's saying something that is obviously true, 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 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 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, you know, having the attack be revealed as 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 perfection in order to have our stories heard?
	In fact, we know of some of These stories where people, you know, maybe weren't terrific professors.
	Maybe their scholarship wasn't as good as it might be.
	And it's harder to get those stories heard.
	And that is conflating two things, right?
	That you can be a canary in this particular coal mine, and we need more of them.
	And we should not force the standards to be that those people also have to be excellent in every area 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 was a college professor, 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?
	No one cares about the love of learning of these students on college campuses or K through 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 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 you two 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, 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's good.
	Especially on these very liberal campuses.
	That's absolutely right.
	You know, we need everyone 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, used to be anyway, that liberals were imagined to be and were found to be higher on the openness scale.
	You know, psychological measures.
	But that doesn't seem to be the case with the brand of, and I tend to call it pseudo liberalism, that is at least found on campuses and that's found in a lot of the media now, that this is running exactly counter to what old school liberalism was about.
	100%.
	Yeah, it's illiberalism.
	All right.
	So your book is not about wokeism, 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 seem to be positing that the rate of societal change right now is dizzying and that our, I was 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 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.
Why We Crave Sugar 00:05:40
	And so 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 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 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 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.
	Well, you have.
	Yeah, go ahead, Heather.
	Well, I would say.
	Authorities largely want to hand down very simple rubrics to us.
	And it is, you know, it 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, 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 knowledge comes with 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 for ourselves in our own work with our students 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 a 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 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 the sugar tastes good?
	It's like one of those things that our ancestors would try and say, hmm, you know, I'm not in a dangerous place.
	Place and I can eat it.
	And so, why isn't it more natural to have lots and lots of sugar 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 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 savanna.
	And that is indeed what the title of the book alludes to.
	And that is a piece of our history.
	And some of us were in the Paleolithic on the African savanna, some of us may be more coastal.
	There was even more variation at that moment in time than we imagine.
	But part of the point of the book is that, 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 also adapted to being alive from 3.5 billion years ago and to being animals and to being fish and to being mammals and primates.
	And 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 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 under.
	Well, I mean, don't you just have to look around America to see that, right?
	The obesity problem.
	And it's not just 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 balm.
	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.
Beyond Reductionist Numbers 00:14:54
	But somebody walking by you who is 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 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 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 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 the devices and the algorithms that we shove our children in front of.
	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 influences on our mental and physical well being?
	We're going to pick it up there when we come back in just one second.
	Going to squeeze in a quick break.
	And later in the show, my thoughts on the hypocrisy.
	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, we'll take that up in a minute.
	Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show, everyone.
	Back with me now, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hayek, 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 that's like the never ending quest to get enough.
	And I know in the book, You basically say that 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 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 nor I had any direct experience with kids 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 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.
	I mean, they are now 15 and 17.
	So we've gotten through childhood and 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?
	Do you just mean blue light like we're talking about on the screens or what?
	Well, our 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've 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 a long history with after dark, it does not disrupt, whereas blue light, as you point out, is disrupted.
	So just to be clear, 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 how we have been is that which we are best adapted to.
	So, early on, like when the child is a tiny baby, 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 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 laughable, right?
	We're not actually going to do that.
	That said, being able to actually get out, 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 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 the cycles in both your own body and the cycles that are being entrained by.
	The celestial bodies is fantastic and free, right?
	And easy to track.
	It requires no memorization about what did he say?
	What does the expert say?
	It's like figure out how you're actually feeling.
	And at some level, 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 going to say, I'd love to let my kids sleep in.
	There's such a great feeling when you see your sleeping child, you know, he or she's getting 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 720, 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.
	It was too early, I was exhausted all day.
	And I am not alone because there was a recent study saying almost half the population suffers from sleep related issues.
	People who sleep 30% less than they need to for 10 days 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 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 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'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.
	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 sun set, what are our other options?
	Well, just to go back to some of what you were saying earlier, part of the problem is 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 1,800 calories a day 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 the risk of having numbers, and this is the risk of reductionism.
	And so you have pseudo quantification.
	So, what is that?
	What does reductionism as a pseudo qualification mean?
	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, 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.
	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 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.
	Sounds scientific, but it's very often a kludge, a proxy that may not actually be an accurate proxy for what you're saying.
	I see.
	So this goes back to what you were 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 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 effectively the inverse.
	Chesterton's fence suggests that 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, 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 makes 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 likely to be much better because it's a natural trigger of neurological systems than something synthesized in a lab novelly.
	And 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 excellent.
	So that's actually, yeah, that's actually a hypothesis that one of our students, Josie Jarvis, proposed and did some research on.
	Which we cite her in the book, and it's remarkable.
	So, is the ability to pump breast milk a modern convenience that is super valuable to many mothers?
	Absolutely.
	It was for me.
	And I know it is for many, many people.
	So, we're not taking a regressive, traditionalist approach and saying 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.
	That's fascinating.
	In this one, it actually wouldn't take much more to, 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 we all do so that it doesn't spend too much time in the freezer, but time stamp it too.
	And give your baby milk expressed at the same time of day as when you're feeding.
Gender as a Shifting Construct 00:09:54
	I like that.
	I mean, what could it hurt?
	A lot of this stuff is like, what could it hurt?
	It's 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 second babies within six weeks of one another.
	And we had all this breast milk, mine and hers, stored in our respective freezers when Superstorm Sandy hit.
	And both of our houses lost power and it was freezing.
	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.
	Next up.
	We're going to get into some highly controversial topics like the difference between men and women.
	Newsflash.
	There are some.
	Yeah, 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 Hyang.
	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.
	You believe, this is very controversial, there really are differences between men and women.
	You stand by that.
	So we are quite radical.
	This is the hill I'll die on.
	Yes, yes, right.
	Let's start at the 30,000 foot level and you walk us through some of those differences based on.
	Evolutionary biology?
	Yeah.
	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 that mean?
	There are two sexes.
	Sexual reproduction has value.
	We won't go into what the value is here.
	It hasn't reversed in their lineage.
	And it involves two gametes coming together to make 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 from mom, half from dad, but they also have to bring 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 bring the cytoplasm, has this big, bulky gamete that has all of the machinery of the cell.
	And then that leaves the other job, the finding, generally to the other gamete, which in animals is.
	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 have an asymmetry in the investment of the partners, 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 And none of this is new.
	None of what I've just said is new or, frankly, controversial in evolutionary biology.
	Where it gets more interesting is 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 is going to be, it's going to map onto sex pretty well, but it's going to be 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 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, we're being told that gender is 100% 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 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, like, 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?
	But that's the current.
	Is that gender is 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 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 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 it.
	Absolutely.
	So, the female parts will have a long, 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.
	Whereas the pollen doesn't care.
	I mean, we all mate with anyone.
	The pollen's all over 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.
	So that asymmetry is not about animals at all.
	It's certainly not about humans.
	It's about A strategic fact that arises every time you have these two different size gametes, as Heather points out.
	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 breast milk example is a great one.
	Pumping breast milk means men can now 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, Its power on other groups and subjugating them, and that that's where gender came from.
	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 the one who was Biologically female, but presenting as male, actually gave birth to.
	So it's a biological male sitting there going, I don't understand the old milk 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 depending on your identity.
	But you guys recognize, I think, accurately, right, that it goes beyond that.
	It goes beyond the flower and the 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.
	In some circles, you're not allowed to say things like that.
	That's one step away from what James Damore of 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 sort of circles back to where you started talking about Peter Bogosian and what he was facing at Portland State and what All faculty really are facing who have a fundamental belief in an underlying reality of the universe.
	You know, we should all be able to talk to all range of people across all demographics.
	And the one kind of people who I find it very difficult to have a conversation with is those who actually don't believe that there is an underlying reality.
	And that's quite far 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.
	In the end, you know, this is the mistake of the extrapolated postmodernism we're dealing with.
	I was just going to say that.
	So I didn't understand postmodernism 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.
Testosterone and Biological Reality 00:11:40
	Everything's massageable and arguable.
	Yeah.
	And I think, you know, there is a base value in some elements of postmodernism, but the way that it's instantiated in the modern academy and modern campuses, and then, you know, Crawling off campuses, speeding off campuses into the media, for instance, in Hollywood, is it's bad shit.
	You know, it doesn't make any sense.
	And so, you know, you can be, for instance, you can be gender non conforming as I was and still have no confusion at all about whether or not you're a girl or a boy.
	Same, same, Heather.
	I'm the same as you.
	When I was a kid, 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 grateful.
	Sounds like you're grateful for the parents you had.
	I'm 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 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.
	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 is an MMA fighter 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 was born a boy, who lived 38 years as a man, absolutely eviscerate a biological female.
	I think we have the tape.
	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.
	McLaughlin not looking like the stronger fighter and taking a ton of punishment coming in.
	Getting pecked 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 the tap.
	Alana McLaughlin victorious in her MMA debut.
	I don't know.
	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.
	Trans is real.
	And there is a lot in the discussion around trans people and trans rights that is actually complex and 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 the idea that she passed hormone panels at whatever age she is now 48, I guess.
	48.
	Yeah.
	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 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 endocrinologists refer to activational versus organizational effects.
	But basically, on or off, are you currently benefiting from testosterone?
	That's just the activational effects.
	It doesn't reflect all of the so called organizational effects.
	Yeah, like benefits that you've got.
	Bone length and strength.
	All right, I'm going to just 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 Brett.
	We'll pick it up right here in just a few.
	Don't go away.
	We are joined today by Brett Weinstein and Heather Hyang, 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, 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, among many other reasons, because of organizational effects of the testosterone that were present during your time in utero and early development and puberty, which will have shaped things like.
	Bone length, bone density, bone shape.
	You know, female and male skeletons are different.
	Women are adapted to have wide hips for childbearing.
	And yes, that may sound conservative and all, but it is true.
	And that means that we are less stable, for instance, just that one simple parameter.
	It is also true, for instance, that the Y chromosome itself has 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 science.
	And it's more like scientism that says, ah, we can measure the thing, therefore, that's all that matters.
	And it just doesn't.
	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.
	I mean, of course, you know, in Connecticut, we had on a couple of the girls who got burned by this, who were runners at the high school level, who were kicking butt.
	And then the 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.
	And in the fall, started crushing the biological girls.
	And the biological girls raised their hands and said, This doesn't feel fair.
	And then it was, You're bigots, you're bigots.
	And the poor girls were 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 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.
	There was a report out today from the National Student Clearinghouse saying 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 of 50 50 representation.
	You've got just this increasingly lopsided approach to admissions.
	When it took me like more women, more women.
	I just don't think this is going to solve it.
	I don't know that women have the same interest in all the STEM fields as men.
	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.
	So there's a question about 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 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, he, You know, that's the way I want it to stay for my Lola.
	And the point is, he is actually sympathetic to her cause.
	I never realized it was telling a story like, all I know is Lola, la It's like a la Well, there is a story there.
	The story is a beautiful woman comes up to him in some kind of a bar situation and asks him to dance.
	And she speaks like a man.
	And in any case, the point is everybody got this.
	This is a boomer phenomenon.
	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 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.
	They can.
	The answer to that question is absolutely they can do that.
	And they are doing it in places like California, where last I looked, it 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 people claiming to be female who may have a sexual predator history, they've got to be behind bars in a 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, 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, 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.
Learning to Be Us Through Experience 00:15:56
	And so that's a good way of putting it.
	We're a year older than you, but we're all Gen Xers here.
	And I don't know about you, but I'm going to guess, Megan, 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 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 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 to go have a double mastectomy.
	It's like we've lost our ever loving minds, and the girls always suffer.
	All right, 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 with individuals now who just are 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 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 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 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, 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 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 extreme example of this, Brett, is Rose Kennedy and the Kennedy family.
	And she said something I think about all the time, which is better a broken arm than a broken spirit.
	So we actually have rules.
	In our household, which our children would have no trouble 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 when they do, our question 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 is a very dangerous trend.
	So, I do a little speech on Stanford campus once a year, usually.
	And I actually said this past year something not controversial, which is 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 have to use that word.
	I get why you would.
	And you'll maybe I agree exactly with you, but 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 at their 18th birthday having been magically anointed by some fairy with all the knowledge they're going to need?
	You do this by experience.
	This is not hardwired.
	We're not moths.
	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 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 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 so Brett mentioned that we tend to ask our children after something has gone wrong, what did you learn?
	But we also ask them that when something almost goes wrong, right?
	And we talk in the book about the value of close calls, which is exactly the content of what we're discussing now.
	But 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? will be met with disbelief at best.
	But spending just a little time to figure out, Okay, 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 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 heaping onto our children and how we've settled on living in this.
	Constantly abusive way.
	I mean, it's.
	I went to this parenting seminar in New York City last year or the year before, I don't know, 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 fucked up?
	I'll tell you why.
	It's because you all think that they need to get perfect A's 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 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 a 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.
	That's it.
	School should be better for the students in the first place.
	That's it.
	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 and 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 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 anxiety, even though, frankly, looking at the world they're entering, one could easily forgive them 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 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 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 going to give you my take and I would love to hear from you.
	Call us 833 44 M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
	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.
	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.
	Okay, so I just want to pick it up back where we left off before we move on to relationships on child rearing and 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 tied it in my mind to boredom.
	Love to have you expand on that.
	Well, 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 cite this study in the book, or one of them, there are some studies with rats, 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 and 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 more likely to do the other things.
	So the 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 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, 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 letting them find ways of filling up their life.
	But I noticed it even 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.
	If I had a nickel for every time, I'm like, she needs to get busier.
	Or even frankly, a lot of these wokesters, I just always feel like they need more in their lives to worry about because most people are out there doing real things, taking care of their families, working for a living, blah, blah, blah.
	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.
Monogamy and Male Reproduction 00:15:46
	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 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 just like basically go for it, go on a six month to 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 just my thumbnail.
	But you guys should write the summary of what to do if you see wokeism in your child, right?
	Like, 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'm hearing it right now.
	It's like, well, maybe you did just write the book, but you didn't title it the right way.
	Yeah.
	I mean, having your children, and 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 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 as you just said.
	And this has been a drumbeat 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 was going to be, 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.
	It nails so many different things.
	It's like you, as the grown up, grow.
	You have bonding time with your children.
	There's nothing that promotes bonding, like traveling together and navigating new circumstances.
	But you gave me a little chill there with the new people and finding out who you are.
	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.
	There are relationships, and in particular, our love relationships and our romantic relationships.
	Before there were the little Brett and Heathers, there was the original Brett and 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.
	You said it.
	Okay, when I was on NBC, we did a segment on throuples, 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 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 polygyny in our species.
	But it is also true mild what?
	Polygyny, well, what your listeners are more likely to understand is polygamy.
	Okay.
	Got it.
	An individual male having multiple wives.
	But It is also true that the later we go in human history, the more change has come to that system.
	And effectively, our cultural software layer has overwritten what is in the ancestral genetic layer.
	So, most people alive today come 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 landmass or a resource.
	And it also makes for a fairer, safer, more productive society.
	It distributes opportunity more evenly.
	It makes people less warlike.
	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.
	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 if there's one thing I would wish for younger people, That would upgrade the quality of their lives and make them more secure and more capable, it would be that they find a person with whom they can build such a relationship and build it.
	So, let me ask you this.
	This is probably a sexist question, but 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 I don't think women are built for that in the way men are.
	And maybe that's a sexist comment, but it's something I happen to believe.
	And I don't know, what does evolution tell us on that front?
	We, in fact, know 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 symmetrical or identity relationship.
	And the fact is, this goes back to the issue we were discussing earlier with the flower parts showing the same kind of difference in.
	In perspective, 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 in raising that child.
	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.
	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 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 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 consequences.
	It has liberated women to plan when to have their families, to enter 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 your point, 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 we had a night together.
	I was sitting there looking at him the next morning, and he looked so great with his hair all messed up and 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 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 see 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 Bob Trivers, who is an extraordinary evolutionary biologist and was our undergraduate advisor.
	And, excuse me, we asked him if he would be the, gosh, what's the word for the officiant?
	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. Trivers knew us as undergrads and as burgeoning evolutionary biologists.
	And so he agreed to do this wedding ceremony for us in the mountains.
	But he insisted the day before on basically interviewing us, as clergy might have.
	And one of the only questions 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.
	But for him, that was a key part of what the marriage ceremony was about.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	So, how has it gotten so turned on its head?
	We mentioned birth control and sort of women's liberation, which we've talked about the benefits of, 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 Tippercore.
	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 asses everywhere, the Kardashian body.
	It's like, it's so in your face.
	There's nothing left to the imagination.
	It just feels vulgar to me.
	I don't know.
	I feel like our sexual relationships 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 asses everywhere, as you say, Megan, is about some sort of sex positivity.
	Sorry, I actually think it's quite the opposite.
	That's sex negativity.
	That is treating sex like it's nothing.
	And 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 passionate experience it brings and still not want to engage and rather explicitly not want to engage in cheap junk sex everywhere.
	Mm hmm.
	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 premarital sex.
	And then, like everything, we totally overcorrected to where now somehow you're fierce, again, to use that word, if you've lost count of your partners and you're living in a thrupple and monogamy is a joke to you.
	And by the way, so is gender.
	And it was like, I feel for these 20 year olds.
	Bretton is 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 six to eight years, it's all going to be solved.
	No, 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 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.
	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 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 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 chase, Doug is still chasing me.
	We've been married for 15 years.
	You know, he's still on unsteady ground.
	I agree.
	I said it wouldn't be as exciting.
	Right.
	I didn't say it wouldn't be as satisfying.
	I agree with you that 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.
The Long Game for Satisfaction 00:05:39
	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 hard to spot.
	And it's especially hard to spot because 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 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, tends to be about appealing to that longer term male strategy that is a mirror for the longer term female strategy.
	So, of course, Doug should still be chasing you.
	And you should also still be chasing him.
	One of the things about monogamy is that we are, it's not just male male competition and female choice.
	It's also female female competition and let's be good about it.
	But and male choice.
	And so we've got choice by both partners 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 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 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 going to light a fire.
	You're not going to give a damn that he chose silver instead of white or whatever it was.
	There's some evolution in that too.
	You two are amazing.
	Well, this was so fun.
	I love the book.
	I love everything you stand for.
	And I hope you'll come back.
	Good luck with all of it.
	Thanks so much.
	Thank you so much.
	It's been a pleasure.
	All the best.
	Okay.
	So, up next, we're going to 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 some of that discussion we had about everything hanging out, the Kardashians and so on.
	It's a lot.
	What do you think?
	Force for Good?
	Phone lines are open.
	Call me at 833 44 Megan.
	44, like the Syracuse 44.
	It's a shout out to my alma mater.
	44 Megan, M E G Y M. That's 833 446 3496.
	Welcome back, everyone, to the Megan Kelly Show.
	We're taking your calls at 833 44 Megan, 44 M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
	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?
	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 costs $35,000 a head, shows up in a dress that reads Tax the Rich.
	By the way, she drives a Tesla.
	Okay, so please pardon me if you look a little hypocritical to me, 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 not paying their fair share, then don't go there and lick their boots, which I'm sure is exactly what happened.
	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 masks for kids K through 12.
	So does Connecticut, K through 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.
	And 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 you some phone calls in because I can see the lines are lighting up right now.
	Okay, let's start with.
	Here's somebody, it looks like Nile in California, talking about the celebrities and the masks.
	Hey, Nile.
	Hi, Megan.
Combating Social Media Bullying 00:02:17
	What do you think?
	Pardon?
	Well, what do you think about these maskless celebrities who are trying to change life for you and me and our kids?
	Well, we have to remember, Megan, they're.
	Ethically, morally, intelligently, they're superior to you.
	So the virus knows not to hurt them.
	But you and I, if we walk into Target, we could possibly die.
	That's exactly right.
	If you go to a BLM protest or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg morning or Joe Biden celebration, you don't get COVID.
	Yeah, but if I go to the Raider Gate, I might die.
	It's better to go.
	Because it's all about, you know, it's about being good enough for Z, but not for me, you know?
	That's exactly it.
	It's a theory.
	Ice cream.
	And yet, 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 not?
	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'd you think, Will?
	Well, I enjoyed it.
	I got to listen to a good last 30 minutes of it.
	And 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 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 the 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 to almost like sound the whistle and tell the partner.
	And that's a weird thing.
	You know, like tell the other person.
	That's 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.
	If you want to see the show, go to youtube.comslash Megan Kelly because we're posting it every day.
	And check out our COVID show from last week because it's En Fuego.
	All right, we'll talk tomorrow.
	See you then.

Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show
00:03:59 The Illusion of Higher Education
00:12:22 Why We Crave Sugar
00:18:02 Beyond Reductionist Numbers
00:32:56 Gender as a Shifting Construct
00:42:51 Testosterone and Biological Reality
00:54:32 Learning to Be Us Through Experience
01:10:28 Monogamy and Male Reproduction
01:26:15 The Long Game for Satisfaction
01:31:55 Combating Social Media Bullying