Dakota Meyer, Rob O'Neill, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying - Megyn Kelly's "Double Feature" of Fascinating Interviews

24:45We're so lucky that they're Americans, that they decided to risk their own lives and fight for us and now are continuing to share their wisdom with us. Rob O 'Neill, Dakota Meyer coming right back on their book. Their lives have been fascinating and they're going to share some of the lessons of heroism and strength and resilience right after this. Don't go away. hey chicagoland the wayfair store is in your neighborhood at edens plaza and wilmette finally you can feel the fabric sit on the sectionals and even open the refrigerators plus our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget yep we said free oh and did we mention the cafe so what are you waiting for come see all that's in store visit the wayfair store today at Eden Plaza and Wilmette.

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26:09All right, so let's go back to some of the lessons of childhood. Because I love the stories and sort of how you got there. Rob, I mentioned you, not so great necessarily on the football field, not kicking people's ass, more likely to be getting the ass kicked, which seems hard to believe. But okay. and you write in the book about one of the important lessons you took away from your time with your dad on the basketball court and i i have a little aspiring basketball player he's 12 and so i appreciate what you write in the book about this competition you had where you couldn't go inside at night unless one of you hit 20 free throws in a row which and you write in the book that's effing hard and that is hard that is hard i can see it just with my own son but tell us about where that went and what you learned from the experience.

26:59Well, that's, that's, that is hard, but when I was, I was actually learning stuff that would help me in life is do everything like you do anything. And, and, uh, if you want to be good at something, do it a thousand times. You want to be really good, do it 10 ,000. If you want to be great, do it a hundred thousand times and a free throw to me, that's just a great analogy for life. Um, a free throw it's, you know, bounce the ball three times backspin, bend the knees release. And And like the only argument my father, Tom and I, well, dad, and I had was do you look at the ball as you release or do you keep your eyes on the rim?

27:29I was a big believer you keep your eyes on the rim. He would keep his eyes on the ball. But, yeah, it was one of our things where you start with a make. Always start with a make because you know you're aligned. Your feet are on the free throw line. Start with a make and then keep going from there. Like I was – even when I watched college and pro basketball, they make their free throw and they go shake everyone's hands. Knock it off. Keep your feet on the line. Make the second one. Then we can all talk about how cool you are. but we got to a point where it was a 20 in a row, no matter what to leave the gym.

27:56Um, and it didn't matter if it took us the first try or five hours, but the cool thing was we also had at the beginning of our season, which ended after my season, it was 20 to leave the gym, but then 20 to go get a steak at the Derby. Uh, so it stayed 20 to leave, but once we hit the steak, then it goes up by five. So it's now it's 20 and 25 to get a steak, then 30 to get a steak, and then 40, 45. And we got to a point my senior year where my father made 91 free throws in a row and it was awesome. And that was a family record that lasted for less than a week. Cause the next week I made 105 in a row, but what we were learning is that's the same thing with shooting.

28:33It's the same thing with your follow-through do the same thing. Front sight focus. How are your knees? What's your position? And just shooting free throws like that is like, it's as simple as people like aspiring Navy SEALs are like, I'm not good at pull-ups. How do I get better at pull-ups it's like oh that's simple you do pull-ups simple yeah right do more pull-ups i got i want to go to this the derby does it still exist is it still in oh yeah i know you've been to butte and the derby and then my buddy owns it he's actually the principal at a school in chicago and i've dropped the derby that's three times i better get something out of this all right i'm going to go there they don't even know how good they they don't even know they're that good because it's you know it's beat montana they don't they just expect everything to be delicious derbies and I'm not going to put anything like that sort of challenge in front of myself to get there I'm just going to go and eat I'm not going to go get 106 three three throws and beat the Rob O 'Neill record that's what's funny about that story too is uh is uh I was I was okay with 105 in a row but I was so angry at missing 106 it's crazy talk you realize that right okay that's how that's how you become Rob O 'Neill I get it um but you know Dakota it reminded me uh you wrote something in the book forgive me I don't have his name right in front of me but it was about one of your commanding officers who kept saying, what was it?

29:46Hold the line or nine, nine. What was, what was the, he kept, it was like the lesson that he kept drilling into you and you hated it at the time. Couldn't understand why you had to keep doing it. Well, you know, so like when I, when I got to the fleet, I came to a group of Marines that had just came back from Haditha, the triad. And one of my seniors, he'd lost, quite a few of our unit. And yeah, his name was Daniel Kreitzer. I'll never forget him. Just an incredible guy. He always just ran into us nine lines, like nine line medevac. It's a format that we use to medevac out wounded Marines or wounded service members on the battlefield.

30:29And it's so critical, right? He just drilled it into us. While a lot of other Marines, their team leaders were messing with them and we're, you know, playing games and, and doing all these other things, you know, ours was always just making sure that that was something that we could do with their eyes closed at any point in time under any piece of stress, because at the end of the day, that was ultimately what was going to take care of, you know, to get our, whoever one of our brothers or, or us or whatever to, to safety to where they can get help. And that was why, you know, that was the core to everything that we did, whether we were out training for IEDs or whether we were out shooting, our nine line was the very basic, the minimum that we had to be proficient at in order to go out.

31:16And everything's habitual, right? Everything in life is habitual. Don't ever think that you can do it when it matters if you can't do it when it doesn't matter. Exactly. And that's kind of what Rob was saying about the basketball in the book. He's saying it's not about becoming a great basketball player, It's about getting muscle memory and getting to the point where you don't even have to think about it. You just keep doing it over and over and over. It becomes second nature, whether it's basketball or it's shooting or it's the nine lines. And in the military, they get that. But it applies, as you point out in the book, to regular life.

31:51I mean, a lot of people have goals that they want to achieve. And it's like, if you've got to think about it in the moment when the stress is on, you're already in trouble. Yeah, I truly believe that. You know, I truly believe, and I speak on this a lot, is that, you know, the results of the time, like, look, all of us are going to be tested. We're all tested at some point. And the results of that test, when it comes up, are already decided. They're already decided by the micro decisions that you made all the way up to that point, right? The results, whether you're going to succeed or fail, are already decided at that moment.

32:28And so it matters. It matters what you put in your body. It matters every little aspect of it. You can't expect to be a good person, but only be a good person in parts of your life. You can't expect to, you know, like it's just it's either one way or the other. You can't be both. And I truly believe that. Now, Dakota, you you write in the book about your own personal background, born and raised in Kentucky. Yeah. OK. And you tell us a little bit about Big Mike and the role that he played in. I don't want to be too dramatic and say saving you, but kind of in a little, in a way, saving you. Yeah.

33:08I mean, you know, my, my dad is, uh, my dad's probably the greatest man that's that, uh, you know, I've ever met that walks the face of planet. Um, my dad's very simple man. Uh, my dad is principally based, you know, my dad didn't, he never, you know, he was all about, you know, he never cares what anybody else thinks. Right. But with that, you know, my dad's very direct. My dad is very straightforward. But my dad does that not because he's trying to be controlling or not because he's trying to do it out of convenience for for himself or to make things easier. My dad was that way because he cared about you.

33:46Right. My dad was that way because he he he wanted you to be better and he was going to hold you to a standard that that would accept nothing less than you being the best that you can be. And, you know, my dad was all about people, right. Um, about taking care of yourself, taking care of the things around you and, and, and, and, you know, taking care of the people around you, not, not, you know, dishonoring your name, right. There's a lot of people that have the same last name. And when you disrespect that, or you make that look bad, uh, that, that, that's a spill factor for everybody. Um, yeah, you know, and, and what's incredible was, is I didn't know it until I was 13.

34:20Um, you know, but, but, But but my dad, Big Mike, he adopted me. And so, you know, the father, I didn't know that until you were 13. Yeah. Yeah. My my mother gave me up when I was like nine or 10. And I honestly I don't even know the whole story about how they got together. I've asked. I mean, like if you want to talk about you want to put an investigator and you should go try to figure out where I was born, because if I asked my mom where I was born, she tells me one place. My dad tells me another place and my birth certificate says an entirely different place. Oh, boy. So, you know, yeah. So just to go ahead and give you a little bit of coordination on that.

35:02So so, you know, I found out I was I was adopted when I was 13. My mom kind of gave me up when I was nine or 10. Let me go live with my dad, whatever she's got to say to justify it. But, you know, I I went to live with my dad. My dad took me in and just, you know, full time dad, you know, working 40 to 60 hours a week on his job and then living on the farm and working. And he's just you know, he was an example. And, you know, I found out when I was 13. And this is this will give you a true perspective of just how my dad is. You know, my mom brought me in on my 13th birthday and laid these papers down in front of me because she wanted me to move back in with her.

35:39And she said, hey, you know, this is you know, you're adopted. and I was like what like yeah she's like you're you're adopted your dad adopted he's not your real dad and um I just I'll never forget just being like so lost is like what do you what do you mean like like this this is like what do you mean and um so I went back I got dropped off at my dad's house my dad had no clue she did this um and I was so mad and I'll never forget my dad I could tell I was upset, obviously. And my dad came in and he looked at me, he heard me out. And I was like, I was really mad at him. Like, why didn't you tell me you've been lying to me?

36:18And he looked at me and he goes, Dakota, what does it change? What does it change? What does it change between us? He goes, I'm still your dad. You know, we don't have the same blood running through us. You know, I'm still your dad. And it doesn't change how much I love you. It doesn't change, you know, anything about our relationship, does it? And so at a young age, my dad taught me that, you know, blood, just because your blood doesn't mean your family. And just because you're not blood doesn't mean your family. And, you know, that's just the type of man that he is. I mean, he is the, uh, I mean, he's just an incredible human being.

36:53That's an amazing story. And he comes as one of the heroes of the book for sure. I mean, the way, and he got you when you came home and I want to know big Mike, big Mike sounds like an extraordinary person. And, you know, it's good because to me, it's like a, it's just a reminder of the importance of a strong, in particular, male role model for little boys, you know, and the importance of a dad in one's life. A strong father figure or father can teach you all sorts of lessons that, you know, you may not see common. And over on the front in Butte, Montana, Rob, you had great parents, but you write about a story I hadn't yet heard about you about there, there was a guy in town named Ben who turned out to be pretty much a badass and little Rob O 'Neill wanted to be just like him.

37:40Now he wasn't a SEAL, but tell us about Ben and the lesson you learned in particular when he walked into, I think it was a bar or something. You were like, okay, I see a difference here. Yeah. So I grew up with Ben. We went to the same school and he was always, you know, he was always lifting weights, always working out huge guy on the football team. And And ever since I knew him, he wanted to be a Marine. And that was his thing. He was going to be a Marine. He always had a great haircut. As soon as he got a truck, I'm like 15 years old. He had the Marine Corps sticker on there. And as soon as he graduated the next day, he was going.

38:13It's not like he was from a military family. Ben was just going to do that. He was a monster when he left. And when he came back, now we were talking about there's tough guys in Butte, and then there was me. I was working. I was delivering pizza. And it was a pizza joint and a bar at night. and it was called the VU Villa. And I was in the VU one night and Ben came in and he just looked like a Marine now. That's him. He kind of, he walked in and he almost, he was so cool. He almost looked like he didn't recognize anybody because he knew everyone was staring at him. And it's like the whole, you know, yes, I will go home with that girl, but I'm going to beat up her boyfriend first type guy.

38:52But I mean, he obviously didn't do that. Just a great guy, but he looked like that. And it was impressive that that got my interest in the Marine Corps. I still wasn't quite going to go yet, but it was like, if I ever decide to, that's what I, that's what I want to aspire to be. I want to look like, and like, you'd be, but it's not a big place. You'd be driving around town and he's out there getting his PT on, you know, his physical training, running down black tail lane with no, you know, Marine Corps shorts and no shirt on. Just like, that's a Marine. That's what Marines look like. God help the enemy.

39:16Yeah. Right. And you're like, I'll do it. I'll do it. And then you told us in our last interview about you got a little sidetracked by the Navy recruiter. It was like, well. Yeah, when I decided to join, I went into it because it was a time to get out of town. And the quickest way out of Butte, Montana is to join the military. And because of hunting, you know, my dad and I thought we were the best shots in the world. I'll go be a Marine sniper because after, you know, I saw Ben and then I watched Full Metal Jacket. And I read Carlos Hathcock's book, who was the greatest Marine Corps sniper. And I went to join the Marine Corps.

39:45And I walked down there right in the office. And the Marine recruiter was not in the office. But the Navy guy's office right next door. And Ben had actually been the guy that told me he was he was a guy that would mess with you. But he's messing with you and he's joking, but he looks like he could squash you. He said the Marine Corps is actually part of the Department of the Navy. It's just the men's department. And that's why I went to the Navy guys. Dakota's shaking his head. Yes, for our listening audience. Dakota, the Marine likes this story. I'm trying not to brag too much about the Marine Corps because the war heroes.

40:16next year and uh so i went in there and um the navy now what i didn't know about the navy is if you wear khakis and have anchors you're a chief and chiefs are very very clever and uh i said hey if anyone knows where the marine is you will because you're part of the navy and he goes why do you want the marine i said i want to be a sniper marines have the best snipers in the world he said look no further we have snipers here in the navy you need to be a navy seal first no big deal then we'll send you to sniper school kind of brushed over that part and um super fun and i'm looking at this guy and he's kind of, you know, he looks like a Navy guy, got some coffee stained on his shirt.

40:50And I said, you know, I'm naive. I'm 18, but this guy's a professional recruiter. Why is he going to lie to me? And that's how I became a Navy guy. Way before going to secret training, but that's, you know, they signed, I signed the government contract and then he showed me videos of Navy SEALs. I was like, oh, I guess they swim a little. I didn't really know how to swim. We don't swim in Butte, Montana very much. We shoot free throws. it's so crazy to think about that guy sitting out there in the middle of what ocean was it when you rescued captain phillips that was in the indian ocean um yes so that was uh fly from virginia beach jump it i think we you know just below 10 000 feet with four boats and then uh we're in the indian ocean i was good at that point i learned how to swim yes i think so i think we know that by that point can you tell a story we never actually got to this on my one if you want to listen this is literally my favorite interview i've done since i launched the show it was my Memorial Day interview with Rob O 'Neill.

41:41It was unbelievable. People stop me on the street. Dakota's rolling his eyes. He's like, don't feed his ego. Too late. But seriously. To be fair, I think you should go ahead and say it's only because you haven't had a one-on-one interview with me yet. Definitely. We need to get into, hello, Medal of Honor. I was reading all of Rob's awards, his many, I mean, the double silver star and the triple bronze star and all this stuff. I was floored until I got to Dakota's resume. Yeah, I know. I know. No, but I was just going to say, if you don't like my May 31st, my Memorial Day interview with Rob O 'Neill, I can't please you.

42:18I'm not for you. You were spectacular. The way you told the story, just riveting. So if you got two hours, you got a nice long car ride, put it on. Listen, you're welcome. But one of the things we didn't get to in that interview that I wanted to ask you about was the moment before you went off to rescue Captain Phillips. And you wrote a story. I don't know if it was your first book. I can't remember. But it was about how you were training back stateside. And they gave you the call. You got to go. And you went into, like, the place where you buy the food. And you were in line. And some guy was looking at the newspaper.

42:52Yeah. Well, we had never done this. Like, Steel Team 6 was designed to rescue Americans at sea. and we'd been announcing since, well, not me, but like the team since 1980, we can be anywhere within 24 hours. Never done it. And we got the call. It's like, you no kidding get the call. Like, it's on. We know we're going. And I had a set amount of time to get to where I was going, but I was ahead of schedule. And there's a 7-Eleven right outside the base. So I stopped there with a plan. I'm going to get as much cash as I can out of the ATM. And for an E6 in the Navy, that's a lot of cash. 200 bucks.

43:24200 bucks. a log of Copenhagen and a carton of cigarettes. And the reason I'm doing this is because we are going to be jumping today. We'll be on the East coast of Africa, but there's never a perfect plan and we might not end up where we want. But if I land in a semi-permissive environment, I might be able to buy my way to safety with the cash. I might be able to barter with the tobacco. I do have a gun and I used to call my gun, the M4 charge card, like a credit card. Like the way that works is you have a car. I have a gun. Now I have a car and a gun. But I'm in line to get my stuff. And there's a dude in front of me who I'm assuming was like a lineman up on the power poles or whatever.

44:03And he's working all night. Night shift. Now he's off. No hurry whatsoever. And he's one dude in front of me. And one of the things this dude, other than a big thing of coffee he's buying, was a USA Today. And the headline on the newspaper I could see over his shoulder was about the mission we're trying to go do. and very patriotically he slammed it on the counter and kind of announced to the entire store you know whomever would listen man i sure wish someone would do something about this and i i'm recognizing the irony and i tap him on the shoulder and i go buddy pay for your shit and we will and now he's looking at me i'm looking at this blue color worker and i'm like i'm not even kidding bro like the national security timeline is squarely on your very broad shoulders my man and like and he was nice he kind of realized he's right in front of where we're supposed to go and he was cordial and he and he got out of the way and um you know we got to work on time and uh everyone got to work on time and what was i mean you got to figure so there's navy seals but now there's boats that needed to be ready gassed up their parachute riggers had to have them already rigged the the parachutes for us to jump to tandem rings the pilots were on the way the air crew everyone had to be ready by the time we all got the call 15 hours and 46 minutes later, we had a full head count of the Indian Ocean.

45:16We rescued Richard Phillips a day and a half later. It was amazing. Oh my God. It's so crazy. This is reminding me of like your story and your story, Dakota. I'll take you back many years ago when I was in law school and I was, we were applying for like the law school or the law review. I think it was law. Oh no, no, no. Oh, actually I take it back. We were applying for jobs, for jobs for out of law school. And I was on the law review with this guy who I went to school with. His name was Brian. And Brian had served in the first Gulf War and Brian had received a Bronze Star. And Brian had received the Bronze Star because he got to a minefield and his job was to refuel the tanks at the front line.

45:54And the tanks had almost no gas and he was going to refuel. So he had the fuel. And so, as he said, you know, we call it tank with no gas, a target. So he's like, I've got to get there. He's like, I got to get the fuel up there. but so he comes up to a big minefield and there's no way around it and he realizes like i'm not if i try to go left or go right i'm not going to make it in time but his commanding officer said go left or go right because you're not going to try try to drive these refueling trucks over this minefield all these guys and brian said this is a dakota meyer move where you just totally disregard the orders you've been given this is how you get a star by the way that's apparently how you get a medal you just got to disregard our orders and then live um so he got out of his truck.

46:38And he personally, even though he was in charge of the unit, he walked personally and you could see the mines, you know, so he picked them up and moved them and created a path for the trucks to go through to refuel the tanks at the front line. And they made it. And his commanding officer knew he made it because they got there in far too fast a time for him to have been compliant with the orders. And he reamed him out on the spot for disobeying the orders. But that's how he got the Bronze Star. And let me just flash forward to you. So Brian is applying for the same job I was. He was in the one in the one office talking about leadership and so on.

47:11And I was in the other office talking about law review and how I used to be the head cheerleader.

47:20Hey, it's like Theo Vaughn says, you know, everyone has their own Vietnam.

47:28That's right. For Trump, it was what was like syphilis. I don't know. Oh my God. This is the thing about leadership. You really do have to do it in order to learn and put yourself out there and do not, do not put yourself up against somebody who's won a bronze star, a silver star, medal of honor. You'll lose. All right. There's so much more to go over with these guys, Rob and Dakota. They're sticking around for the whole show, loving the interview. And remember, if you are loving the interview, would like to hear that Rob O 'Neill interview or any interview just like it, check us out. We are, in addition to being live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east, we're a podcast too.

48:05And so you can go ahead and subscribe to Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, subscribe to our show on those platforms and you'll get the podcast for free. The Rob O 'Neill interview you need to listen to is episode 109 and check us out on YouTube as well if you want to watch the episode instead of listen. YouTube.com slash Megan Kelly. Go ahead and subscribe to that too if you would.

48:32Dakota, I can't skip past my cheerleader story without talking about your cheerleader story. And it's not what the audience is thinking. It's not like the young, hot Dakota Meyer and the cheerleaders. It's a lesson about learning to trust and how important it is and staying humble, which you, I understand, were taught firsthand while in high school. absolutely yeah i um you know i was a football i was a football player unlike rob um i wasn't getting beat up unlike rob i gotta bring up um but uh yeah you know like i was your typical i ran track played football um played some basketball uh you know and that was kind of that's what i did and so there was these uh you know they're like sisters uh these girls and uh mary and mckenzie and um they were cheerleaders and so you know i was always have, we had that, you know, brother, sister kind of, uh, like lingo, your conversation, whatever you want to call it, picking on each other.

49:33And I was like, you guys are cheerleaders. Like that's not even a real sport. And, uh, so then they're, you know, they're like, well, well, you should come with us. And I was like, I'll come, I'll come one day. Yeah. I'll come to your cheerleading gymnastics or whatever it was. And so we went over and it was a, I guess it was like a travel team or, or whatever. And so got over there and I did their, their gymnastics and And we did, you know, where you do back tucks and things, back handsprings and whatever. And afterwards, they were going to do like some stunt stuff. Well, they had this great idea that in a basket toss, you know, the back is like really the person that, you know, catches the head of the person that you're tossing.

50:13They're the person that, you know, is throwing. You get probably the most leverage on throwing. So we had this girl. Her name is Keisha. She was tiny. So, like, come over here and do this basket toss. And I'm not going to lie, like hanging out with a bunch of girls was not so bad. And went over there and threw up, you know, got under it. And I was like, I'm going to show I got to show off. There's all these girls watching. So I threw Keisha and the ceiling in this place was not the highest. And I'll never forget, like Keisha went up in the basketball. She had to lay flat so that she didn't slam into the ceiling and came back down.

50:51And I caught her and, you know, and there was just, it was really humbling for me to, you know, see just what it took to be a cheerleader. And so obviously I had to join, you know, I was forced to join. It wasn't that I liked it or anything, but just like being, you know, understanding and just seeing like, you know, just the athleticism that it took for those girls to do that and to be part of it was something that, yeah, I got taught and to be humble about it. Yeah. I got taught real early. And to trust the people that they're going to catch you. You know, I mean, that's like the military summed up in a line or two, right?

51:24Like, nothing's going to happen unless you trust each other to have each other's back. You get thrown up in the air or you go out first on the mission. It doesn't happen unless you've got this brotherhood or sisterhood. Yeah, and it's the same thing in life, right? You know, everything I've done, whether it's played football, whether it's work on a farm, whether it's be a firefighter, whether it's be a cheerleader, whatever it is, you know, So everything's been a team sport for me and life's a team sport. The need to maintain calm in stressful situations, whether it's being tossed up with the ceiling coming towards your face like Keisha did, but not panic has been a central theme, really, I mean, of both of your stories, really.

52:07I mean, in extreme circumstances, the ability not to panic cannot be overstated, but not everyone has it. and it's one of the things they try to train you when you're getting ready for these missions and i know rob you've talked about how fear like when people say like how do you not get afraid and you're like i don't know i don't ask me i'm i'm afraid every time but there's a there's a line between fear and panic not everyone can find it talk about it and how you mastered it that that's a that's a tough one to teach it needs to be learned through observation and i remember the like even the first time I went to war, I was assuming the worst.

52:43Suicide bombers everywhere, gunfights everywhere. And as I'm creeping around, wasting energy, trying to hide behind everything, every step I take, I look at my boss and he just looked really cool. He was calm. And I just remember thinking, I want to be like that. I want to be cool like that. And what I've learned is calm can be contagious. No one can tell what you're feeling inside. but if you portray calm, everyone around you will be calm. And that'll happen. But fear is fine. Fear makes you think more clearly. Fear is when you're watching a movie and you can hear everything in your house. That's fear working for you.

53:16But it's when you start to freak out that it's dangerous. Panic is very, very contagious. The proof is recent. I will prove that panic is contagious. It's called, I call it the great toilet paper debacle of 2020. The reason that happened. As far as I know, and as far as most people should know, using toilet paper is not a survival necessity. It's just nice to have. You can get on with it without toilet paper. But someone freaked out at a store and bought all the toilet paper. And some asshole watched him do that. And he sprinted to the next store and he bought it all. And some other asshole watched him do it.

53:51And then everyone started doing it. Bam, we're out of toilet paper because one person panics. We all start to panic. And that's how it is. I mean, you can see it. It's actually fun. I get to go in airports all the time. I flew in here where I am today. I'm flying out tonight. I get to see people in airports and people are generally nervous in airports. That's why there is no such thing as drinking alcohol too early as a problem in the airport. But watch people as somebody moves anywhere. As soon as they announce, hey, we'll be boarding this flight in 15 minutes, look around and watch people as one.

54:21It's like watching a herd of cattle. They start to move their heads. They start to stand up. And God forbid someone from zone five tries to board with zone one. that's when the fight breaks out and and it's it's that thing where everybody panics but we talked earlier about muscle memory once we get on the plane muscle memory how you should be you know do everything like you do anything i guarantee you the guy talking really really loud on his phone in first class about how important he is in his business trip he doesn't know where um his life vest is he doesn't know how to open an emergency exit because he's too good for that but he certainly can be the first one on the plane and then you know once i always said kind of i don't want to be in a bad one but like a semi crash i want to see how people respond on a plane as you need to get out?

55:00Who's grabbing their iPads? I heard the flight that went down in the Hudson when Sully Sullenberger, he said he was the last one in the plane. They're in the Hudson, which I'm assuming has got to be not normal. He said he was walking through the plane. Some dude came out of the bathroom in nothing but his boxer shorts. He went in there, got his boxers, and Sully said, what are you doing? And he said, well, we're going to swim, aren't we? Huh? What? What? Yeah. So that's panic and panic can overtake you. But if you're good enough, if you've done like Dakota said, if you've done everything in your life to get to that point and muscle memory needs to take over.

55:36Hopefully you shot the free throws like you should have. Hopefully you did everything every single time and you're good at it or you're great at it. And I mean, it's January in the Hudson. I'm not jumping in there in my box. You know, I have a mild fear of playing. Rob's been kicked off playing for less. Way less. You know what I mean? Oh, I want to know more. Did that make news? Should I know about this? Okay, but you're in no position to cast stones, Dakota, you little Medal of Honor winner. No, you have not. Because I teased earlier that one thing that happened at your Medal of Honor ceremony that we did not know, and I played that moment over and over again.

56:13I mean, I interviewed you on the Cali file, and when it happened, we watched it. President Obama, the whole bit, very moving. And at Fox News, we take the whole ceremony and put it on. Wonderful stuff. Dakota wasn't necessarily all there at that appearance. Apparently, speaking of drinking booze in the airport, it can happen before a Medal of Honor ceremony, too. Yeah, you know, I mean, what do you expect when you invite 200 and some Marines to the White House, right? You know, we were founded in a bar, just so you know. So we got there and they were serving drinks and before. And I just mean, you know, everybody wants to have a drink with you, right?

56:53Oh, you got to have a drink with me. And we were drinking and drinking. I'll never forget. Like they put, you know, everybody went in to sit down. They actually ran. The White House ran out of beer. They ran out of beer at the ceremony and they had to find a way to get more in, which it's not just going down to the 7-Eleven on the corner. That was very risky by you. Speaking of your big risks. I mean, can you imagine if you would like thrown up in the middle of the Medal of Honor ceremony? It would have been awful. You know, sometimes I don't really think about those things. You know, I, but I'll never forget.

57:27I didn't realize how, so everybody went in to sit down. I didn't realize how drunk I was until, you know, me, the president and, you know, Michelle, we walked in after everybody was in there together. And I'll remember walking in and I'm like, I am wasted. And so I'm standing up on stage and there's this moment, you know, because like the whole back of the room is lined with cameras. And I promise there was nobody who didn't want to be there more than, more than me. And so I'm standing up there, you know, my family, they're all fighting already. Well, some of them. And so I'm standing up there on stage and, you know, I'm at, I'm at position of attention.

58:08I hadn't been in a uniform in two years, you know, and I'm up there and I'm standing position of attention. I know how Marines are like, if you do one thing wrong, you know, they're going to crucify you and you've just, you know, ruined the legacy of the United States Marine Corps. Right. And so I'm standing up there and I'm sweating so bad because these lights from the cameras and I go and I'm so drunk that I have to go up and I'm just, I'm like, and it's, you don't ever touch your face and I can't do it. So I've got to wipe the sweat off. And I think we thought that I was crying and all these cameras start going off like everywhere.

58:43And I'm like, yeah, I was just wiping my head off guys. It's all good. Yeah, not it. Not it. I'm just drunk. I'm just drunk. Well, the other thing is, with respect, you're a little heavier in that particular shot in that video than you are now. And certainly then when you were fighting and you write about that, too, in the book and about your friend who gave it to you straight. Like everyone needs this friend. I usually think it was just a woman thing, you know, because we need the friend who will be like, your ass does look fat in those jeans. You should not be wearing those. And you have your ass looks fat in those jeans, friend.

59:15I did. His name is Tim Kennedy. I don't know if you ever heard of him. Yes, of course. Yeah, we had him on. Yeah, just an incredible guy. He's a no bullshit kind of guy. I moved to Austin. I was going through my divorce, which was just by far, I would rather go through five Afghanistans than a divorce.

59:42And I remember coming into the gym, we were working out on it, myself, him, and another guy. We were working out just on it. And it was kind of – on it was kind of like my – the gym was kind of my grounding piece to get me through this, right? Working out and working with Tim and Shane and Juan, and it was my getting me through this, right? Like they were literally the people – you know, when you talk about contagious, right? Like they were the people around me that were holding the line. And I'll never forget, I came in one day and I was just, you know, probably looking for some maybe a little empathy.

1:00:13And I came in and I was like, man, I said something about like I'm fat. Yeah, I said, I think I'm fat. And Tim kind of like, or I'm weak or something. I can't remember what the exact line was. But Tim looked at me and he goes, hey, hey, check it out. People look up to you as a warrior and you need to look like one. You understand? And I'll never forget. I'm already down because my whole life is shattering around me. And that was Tim's way of empathy. But, you know, you have to surround yourself with people who tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. That's Richard. You know, it's such a so many times we surround ourselves in and I see this a lot.

1:00:57We surround ourselves with people who make us feel good. You know, and that's the same thing that I was doing when I got out of the Marine Corps was I was I was surrounding myself with people that made me feel good. And I was eating things that made me feel good. And that's why I looked like this fat piece of trash that I did as a student behind the globe. I think Dakota learned a lesson I learned from my grandma. She said there's a big difference between a surprise party and an intervention. I needed an intervention. And my life didn't really get back on track. It didn't really start going forward until I started surrounding myself with people who would hold me accountable.

1:01:35who would, you know, we have this false sense of brotherhood across the globe now. And I see it in a lot of services. I see this in being a firefighter. I see this in a lot of things. And it's we want people to like us. And I see this with people parenting. And it's not about people liking you. It's not about, you know, not hurting someone's feelings. It's about telling them what they need to hear so that they can go ahead and fix it, right? Could you imagine if you walked in and a doctor just told you, you know, what was going to make you feel good? oh, oh, yeah, you have you have diabetes from eating too much sugar and you're you know, you're morbidly obese.

1:02:11But hey, hey, it's OK. There's just more of you to love. Yeah. No, you need somebody who'll give it to you straight. I always talk about my primary care physician on the show because I love him and he really he's he's one of those people for me. He's on the Radical Honesty program, but he definitely does not like it when his patients get too heavy because it's it's not healthy. It's just not. And apparently there was a guy who went to see him, you have to pay cash and then you seek reimbursement later, more and more doctors doing it. Anyway, there was a patient who went in with his wife and they each got a physical and they just moved to the area.

1:02:44So he was paying the bill at checkout and his physical cost $1 ,000 more than his wife's physical. And he said to the receptionist, why is my physical$1 ,000 more than my wife's physical? And the doctor heard it and he came out and he goes, because you're fat. Oh my God. I was like, what? But he's like, these are the number of things that are going to go wrong with you that I'm gonna have to take care of her long, long list way longer than your wife's. And so yeah, you're gonna have to pay more. But like, as it may sound mean, it's also good to hear because it can be the wake up call that people need, you know, to sort of start changing their lives.

1:03:21And you you did. I mean, you look great. And you got the drinking under control and you know, all the all the things. So hats off to you. All right, now I want to talk about sort of the rule-breaking parts of your lives. And it's, it's interesting because you're, you know, you're these decorated military heroes, but you're also kind of rule breakers. By the way, Rob, my team graciously reminded me that you were banned by Delta for an anti-mask tweet. I wasn't going to bring it up. I was going to say something that rhymes with Delta. What'd you do? Just for a tweet, you got banned? I, you know, I, I, I took a selfie because they look, I had a mask on and And they were serving us like stuff.

1:03:58And I said, I could take my mask off to eat this. They said, yeah. So I took a picture and posted it. That was a bad idea. Don't tweet that. But then what's crazy is as I took off like a two hour flight, I didn't know it went viral. And I landed. No one had said a word. I was wearing a mask the whole time. And I get off, turn my phone on, getting blasted. And my wife called and said, what did you just do? I'm like, I don't know. You had horrible selfies in the New York Times, you idiot. Didn't you say, like, did you consider saying, do you know why? Have you heard of Isama bin Laden? Did you try to play that card at all?

1:04:30No, no, I didn't. All I said was it was amazing on the 20-year anniversary at 9-11. I'm the one on a no-fly list. That's something you and him had in common. Oh, geez. It's crazy. They put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on a plane before they put me on. I don't get it. Oh, my God. Please tell me they reversed themselves. Did they reverse themselves? Not yet. They're too woke. Oh, Delta. You're going to get a lot of people banning you. We're going to choose it on an airline tape. I kicked your ass last night. All right. Right. American Airlines. I prefer American Delta. Anyway, I got to say so. OK, so that that wasn't exactly the thing I was talking about.

1:05:01But let's talk about because we didn't actually get to this last time either. You killed bin Laden. You were the man who actually shot bin Laden. And then there's a reason we know that because you had an interview with, was it Esquire? Who did you give the anonymous interview to? Anonymous was with Esquire. And that was just more of proof that a lot of veterans don't know what to do when they get out of the military. That's what that was. And then I remember being at Fox News when you gave the big interview to Peter Doocy, who back then was just known more as like Steve Doocy's son. Now everybody knows him as Biden's chief antagonist in the White House press corps.

1:05:37But and I know you knew Brian Kilmeade and all that stuff. So you came out with it and you'd been out. You were outed against your will prior to the revelation on Fox because some magazine got a hold of the fact that it was you and they tried to get ahead of it, which wasn't good because you needed to secure the safety of your family. and you have to take arrangements before you come out with something. So, but there was definitely blowback. And you write in this book about how even before that moment, there was jealousy. And I do want to talk about it because I think we revere our military so much.

1:06:05We try to skirt past anything that doesn't reflect so well on them. But can you just talk about that? Because it was a little bit of a breaking rules to come out. And, you know, I think you say in the book, don't sit in the front row. That was sort of the lesson. and there were people who had negative feelings about you even prior to you outing yourself yeah and um i can't blame them i i've seen missions done before where i wasn't part of it and i was actually why didn't i get to do that type thing and you have guys so close to doing something and they didn't do it and at first it's i mean everyone knew what happened um and the first thing that was as soon as anyone found out bin Laden was dead especially the seals the first question they would ask was who got him and it was actually kind of funny at first because i was known for like, I like morale.

1:06:51I like to tell stories and jokes. I guess the common answer was, yeah, O 'Neill got them. They would say, oh, we are never going to hear the end of this. And it was kind of funny about that. But then, you know, the further we get out, it would be a Navy SEAL out in town and they would say, who got them? Like the bartender, don't tell anybody, but. And so the word got out, my name got out around Virginia Beach, DC, New York, and then other Navy SEALs in California. And so that right there was, it was more of a, yeah, he's out there telling everyone, just trying to get, you know, we'd be at lunch somewhere and a shot of tequila would show up and the bartender would say, they don't want to know, but someone sent this to you, you know, it's for, and just weird stuff like that.

1:07:27I didn't want the attention. My, my plan was to be in the Navy for 30 years. I was going to be a buds and a seal instructor out in Coronado with a mustache and a cigar. Like I had my line ready and everything. All right, gents today, we are going to run 10 miles. And of course, by we, I mean, you stuff like that, but this, this happened and it was just sort of, So it got uncomfortable in the Navy. And then obviously, you know, it was in May of 2011, the greatest time of our lives. And then in August, the worst time of our lives, we lost extortion when seven 31 Americans, to include the dog bark, died.

1:07:57And we went from planning missions to planning funerals. Morale just hit rock bottom. And then, you know, we needed to move guys around. And I decided at that point I was going to get out. It would have been a few months, but I extended for a year to go to Afghanistan one more time. I went because I want I kind of told them, look, I'm not telling the story. I came in through the front door. I'm going to leave through the front door after another deployment. And it was just time to get out. And then I went to work in Washington and a congresswoman, Congressman Carolyn Maloney from New York said, you should probably donate something to the Memorial Museum.

1:08:29I did donate a shirt anonymously and with a flag on it. And it was just, you know, just to have there. And once I gave the shirt, there was 30 people and they wanted to hear the story. I told the story. I did actually Peter Doocy was there with the camera crew. We were filming it for historic sake. And I told the story and watching their responses, they'd all lost someone in 9-11. And just the way they came up to me and said, putting a face and a name with this, there will never be closure, but this is healing. And, you know, a lot of sitting around with it. I was like, you know what, if I can help them, I've assumed risk before I can do it.

1:09:01And then I came up with a manuscript and I submitted it to the Pentagon. So my book is the only one that was approved by all the agencies and the Department of Defense. And I believe if you have something historical, you know, and American, the world should know. I'm really happy George Washington had a biographer with him. I did it the right way. And then, well, you know, that was after the Fox News came out. You were actually, I was watching your show. That was the first time I saw my face on television because there was so much bad press. And we kind of had to get ahead of it. But I couldn't get on because the special was not for a few days.

1:09:31But I mean, that was a that was a weird awakening, kind of like the way forward. You're here. You're launching the limelight. And now what do you do? Right. Right. Right. And you dealt with it. And I know a lot of a lot of the opinion on you speaking out softened once they saw the piece on Fox and saw how humble you were. You were given the credit away. That's what you always do. Yeah. But that week of sitting alone in a hotel room watching all the horrible stuff, I couldn't even watch the news. Just a horrible anyone that ever saw anything was trying to get the exclusive and it was all over the news saying stuff like I didn't say that.

1:10:04Why would you say that? And then but then the Fox News special came out. It was really good. Peter did a great job. He's still doing a great job. Yeah, he is. Well, you know, it's so crazy about that. And then and then people were like, oh, it wasn't really Rob O 'Neill who shop in Laden. And of course, you've already been backed up. It was you. And then I know with you, Dakota, Medal of Honor winner. The Vipers came out like, no, he overstated what he did. Not true. And it happened to Marcus to Marcus Luttrell and his story alone survivor. No, he over like what? Who are these disgusting press people who decide it's time to eat our military heroes to tear down these stories of heroism?

1:10:39I mean, my own personal belief, being a member of the media, is there are people who hate America and they don't like any story that reflects well on Americans or the American military or this country. They much rather tell a story of like abuse at Abu Ghraib. All right. Hold on. I'm going to get your reaction to that. And I'm going to get more on Dakota's extraordinary story and his rule breaking right after this quick break. Don't go away. Looking forward to more of our conversation with Dakota and Rob in two seconds.

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1:11:54Listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash 20. Visit IXL.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. And Dakota, you write about how when you went for that Medal of Honor ceremony, that President Obama told you that your life was never going to be the same, that it was going to change forever in the wake of that medal. And you write in the book, Obama was right. Nothing was the same again afterward, not by a long shot and not in the way that the president and other people praising me intended. After the ceremony, reporters began questioning the whole story of what happened, claiming that parts were embellished or made up, that I had never killed the guy with the rock, reference to your story, and maybe hadn't killed any Taliban at all, that I couldn't have saved as many people as I claimed and so on and so forth.

1:12:46and you say, even before I received the award, I knew I didn't want it. Receiving it made that notion feel even more true. So why, why is that? Why do you think the press, because I just pointed out before the break, has a pattern of doing this to our military heroes? Well, so in my instance, you know, so we started, we started embedding the press. I mean, obviously it's been for a long time, but like, so the, the one who came out and started talking, um, started writing this, these narratives, um, he was actually embedded with us that day. He was on the mission. Um, we were never in the Valley at the same time on my way in, he was on his way out.

1:13:27Um, there was a point at where he wanted to go in with me. And, uh, I looked at him and just said, no. And he left. He left out, went back to the base where it was safe while I continued to make four more trips in. And so this was kind of his moment. I don't know. And, you know, he talked to a lot of the guys. There's a lot of guys on the mission that day that have their own opinions. But all I'll say is, you know, I don't I've never claimed to I've never claimed that I killed anybody that day other than the guy with the rock. I don't know how many people I killed. I don't know how many people I saved.

1:14:10Just in my mind, I didn't kill enough because the war would be over. And I didn't save enough because I lost a lot of friends that day. And, but when they come back and they start writing these articles and they start saying these things, you know, it used to bother me. I mean, it used to smash me. I'll never forget coming home. I flew in from a speech one day and I drove home. And on the front page of the biggest newspaper in the state was my me on the front of it. And it said medal of dishonor. And I didn't ask this medal. I didn't ask for the medal. You know, in the whole process of the medal, there's only one statement that's not included and it's mine.

1:14:49So, you know, by writing that he's calling all of his friends, a bunch of liars. So, you know, it's just, it was just an incredible, like just such a contradicting thing, but it really, it just said more about him than me. Right. He could have grabbed a weapon and, and, and got busy too, you know and everybody's like, oh, they wouldn't let me or they, well, they told me no too. Right. So we, a lot of people were a lot closer to my teammates and the guys in there getting, getting, you know, getting killed than I was. But again, it's back to the individual choice. It goes back to the preparation.

1:15:25And, you know, Rob talked about a little bit earlier about, you know, why do, you know, why do some people act on chaos and why do some people not? And I just think it's, I don't think it's a nature thing. I think it's, it's a, it's a preparation thing, right? People who aren't prepared don't, don't act. And, and I think that that was the case of that day is, is, is most of them should have had no business being in that, in that situation. And it showed whenever they were tested. And yeah, I mean, I just think - Well, that's another piece of your story is that you had the smarts to disobey the authorities when you could see the authorities were wrong and that the trust in them was not warranted.

1:16:07As we've seen now, thanks to the investigations into your military commanders who were calling the shots that day, have played out that you were right, that they were giving you bad orders, that they were not on the right path. but it takes an extraordinary human being, especially as a soldier, to understand a Marine, to understand the difference because you're trained the entire time in the military to obey orders. And, you know, it's like from a few good men. Oh, you only get to obey the orders you believe in or, you know, it's up to you. And he's like, no, I have to obey all the orders. Yes, I get it.

1:16:39Right. You found a way to disregard what you were being told. And you did save three dozen lives at least and took a lot of lives that needed taking that day. And I don't want to skip over, retrieve the bodies of four of your fallen comrades, including First Lieutenant Michael Johnson, Staff Sergeant Aaron Kennefic, Gunnery Sergeant Edward Johnson Jr., and Hospital Corpsman Third Class James R. Layton, including taking the things off of their bodies that you knew that the families would want to make sure that those got back to the people who loved those guys. I mean, these are extraordinary acts of honor.

1:17:18So I don't know. I mean, when you how do you describe what what what made you see separate the wheat from the chaff that day and know what to do? Well, you know, so before we move on from, you know, the people who criticize or come out with what I did that day, you know, I was I was 21 years old. I left a room that was about the size of the conference room that we live in right now. And I had, you know, three teammates that that were as close to me as it got. Right. We stood up. We woke up every day next to each other. We ate next to each other. We fought next to each other. And I left I left there on a Monday and I returned on a Wednesday.

1:17:58And I was the only one that came back there. I came back and I had literally every bed that was in that where I lived in my home at that moment. Every guy that I relied on, every guy that I loved, I was literally putting their stuff in a bag to send home to their to their family. And so, you know, anybody who criticizes that or what I did, they want to dispute seven versus nine or six or whatever it is, numbers. I mean, they're cowards themselves. as far as like why I did what I did. You know, I, I just, it was a simple, you know, I always talk about what's why I don't understand how I got a medal or I got awarded anything because what I did was easy.

1:18:47It was what needed to be done. It was clear. There were, there were human beings who were suffering. They were my brothers. They were my family. It was, it was very clear, very obvious that they were trapped, that they were hurt, that they were scared, that they needed help. And that was that was clear across the board. Can you just describe I mean, I described it at the top of the show as an ambush in which folks were caught. And you kept going back in trying to save people trying to remove the bodies of the fallen, trying to save US troops, Afghan troops, fight the enemy. But like, how do you describe it in a few lines?

1:19:23Like what what happened that day on september 8th 2009 yeah i'll never forget like i turned like we've got the truck close to rodriguez chavez was driving and uh we turned and it was like a riverbed uh going up into this valley and and um i'll never forget going in there and there were bodies everywhere i mean there were bodies everywhere i mean you had the taliban i mean like my driver in the truck was literally like he ran like i'll never forget he was running over the enemy because they were that close to the truck. You know, it was just, I was always a worst case scenario guy. And this was worse than my worst case scenario.

1:19:59And I didn't think I was going to die. There was a point that I remember that I didn't think I was going to die. I just, I just accepted and knew I was. And all I could think about as each one of these guys were shooting at me was, I know I'm going to die and you're going to get me, but you're going to have to earn it. and um you know we came in and like on each trip we came in um we would bring in these trucks behind us these little these little afghan uh toyotas and we would i would or ford rangers yeah and i don't remember which one it was but anyways it was all these trucks and we would throw uh i would throw the bodies in the back of the truck i'd try to put the dead ones on the bottom and then i would the ones that had a chance to live on top of that and and just send them out just truckload after truckload.

1:20:45And, you know, all I could think about that day was it wasn't about Afghans. It wasn't about, you know, the Afghan soldiers versus U.S. soldiers or Marines. It wasn't anything about that. It was about good versus evil. And it was literally that simple. It was good versus evil. And that's not very hard to distinct between in these types of situations. Mm hmm. Wow. You know, I've talked to Rob O 'Neill after the Afghanistan withdrawal. I haven't talked to you. This is our first time since that happened. How do you make sense of it? Right. It's been on a lot of minds lately, given what we've seen with Putin.

1:21:23Yeah, I mean, look, this is something we all knew there. I mean, anybody who went over there and thought that we were ever going to put, you know, some type of democracy or we were ever going to have, you know, build a military up in Afghanistan that was going to be able to sustain itself as soon as we leave. they were just they were just kidding themselves right but but with that being said you know how do I justify it and and and I justify it this right you can like if you want to get in in the rabbit hole um you know of why we were there and how we got there I mean that that's a whole other ball game but but for me I leave it at this is I didn't make the decision to go in and none of us who were in that uniform did who wore the nation's cloth and what I'll tell you is is for 20 years um Afghanistan and Iraq were safer than they'd ever been uh in Afghanistan when there was a U.S.

1:22:16flag on on when someone was wearing a United States flag over there and they were going through these places uh women were allowed to go to school um it was as safe as it had ever been that they'd ever seen um when America is somewhere the place is better uh the the wherever we're at it's better And I'll say that while we were in Afghanistan, while our soldiers and Marines and airmen and everyone who served wherever they were in these countries, the place was a better place. And we were over there just trying to leave it better than we found it. Right. It's not our fault that the people above us couldn't make the right decisions.

1:22:54What do you make of the the president, Biden? And, you know, we're going to hear from him in the State of the Union finally this week, calling it an extraordinary success, not the war, but his his command of the withdrawal. I mean, look, I think that I mean, this is this is his way. Right. I mean, you know, it's it's he sinks the boat and then he rescues three people off of it as, you know, 10 others drowned. And, you know, it's a success that he saved those three people. Don't mind the fact that he sank the boat. Right. I mean, this is, you know, the Biden Biden, his administration are so incompetent that the incompetency has led to Russia doing this.

1:23:34I mean, I can tell you right now that that is what America is on America's shoulders because of we picked a weak leader. And the fact is, is people don't want to don't want to hear this. But the fact of the matter is you're seeing this firsthand right now is that when America is strong, the world hates us. But when America is weak, the world suffers. And you're seeing that across the globe right now. Do you agree with that, Rob? Do you think that's fair to Biden? Well, I mean, it's scary because like Dakota was saying, they can do anything and say anything because most of the media is going to go with it.

1:24:08You even had Jen Psaki the other day saying that we need to stop relying on, we need to become energy independent without creating more gas. It's like, you know, and I tweeted the other day, we can all ride unicorns. That would work, wouldn't it? It's just the issue is it's a political reason to pull out of Afghanistan because they wanted the 20-year anniversary of look at us, look at us. And they're going to still say it was a success, even though if we you know, I can always resort back to the planning for the Biden raid. We had some of the best tactical minds in the world come up with the perfect plan.

1:24:39If we took those same 23 guys a year ago and said, come up with the worst way to get out of Afghanistan, we would have come up with exactly what they did the worst way possible. I mean, let's be honest. Everything they've touched being the administration has turned to shit. And I should point out to the audience that you you're not like blindly anti Joe Biden. And you write nice things about him, Rob, and say, you know, he was, of course, Obama's vice president at the time of the bin Laden raid. And so it's not like you came in saying he sucks. He's a Democrat. And I know you've said before and you've said in this book, when people ask me if I'm a Democrat or Republican, you would tell them what you say.

1:25:17No, I'm an American and I'm a big believer. I don't need to blindly follow what one party says. I think party politics, I think John Adams thought that it was the worst thing. Two parties are going to destroy the country. You have people up there on Capitol Hill right now. I love the ones both sides of the aisle that call themselves war hawks, even though they've never been to war. No one in their family has been to war, but they sure are good at sending us because a lot of these big time contractors that are huge funders, their reelection campaign, everyone on Capitol Hill. I mean, if you're like Nancy Pelosi, 19th term because we just need some change.

1:25:44Are you kidding me? Yeah. But I mean, that's that's where a lot of this nonsense comes from. And I think it's OK to go issue by issue. What's best for America first and what's best for the world? And a lot of this, I mean, one of the things I've come up with is we're going to get destroyed by climate change regulations long before we get destroyed by climate change. Because there's no money in the cure. There's just money in the process. When's the last time the government started an agency and a year later said, well, clear that problem up, disband the agency. It doesn't happen. It grows and grows and grows.

1:26:17It's like Bagram Airfield when we had it. We as guys on the ground would call it the self-licking ice cream cone. Not sure what the hell you do, but you keep eating. You know, the last time you were on, you made the point about how these these long wars haven't gone very well in general because the generals aren't making the right calls and they don't really have a finger on the pulse of what's happening with the troops who are actually fighting the wars. And they sit in the conference room and they make these decisions. Yeah, go ahead. Nobody wants to tell their boss the truth in the military because one day they're going to be that boss.

1:26:47You're going to lie and lie. You ask a four star general how the Afghan troops are going to do against the Taliban. Ben, you're going to get a different answer than the E4 on the ground. Not going to happen at all. The thing with the military, too, is if you have if you're in the military and someone else is carrying your bag, you need to retire. Carry your stuff. I love it. Well, and Dakota, you realize this firsthand in the fight at 21 years old that you were being given bad information. They were saying, don't go back in there. And you went back in there and then you went back again and then again and then again and then again.

1:27:17And that's how you got all of the wounded out, not to mention the bodies of the fallen. But I think you raise an interesting point in this book about how what you did that day was what was right, not what was expected. And you make the point that deference to authority is not always what's right. It's not always the right thing to do. It's not always good. And you write that it may actually be the downfall of the United States one day. Just this sort of blind, knee-jerk deference to authority that we've had for far too often. I mean, I think if there's one good thing about covid and the restrictions and all that, maybe it's stopping that.

1:27:54Maybe it was the beginning of the end of the American people's knee jerk deference to authority. Yeah, I mean, well, I don't know. I mean, I think if something else, I mean, look how long it took everyone to stand up to that. Right. I don't know. I think there's just too much trust put into people who are in roles. Right. And the issue is, is that because like I spoke on earlier, people don't want to tell people what what they need to hear. They just want to make people feel good. Right. You know, all of our generals are all like they have to like they're they're selected. Like they're they're in politically to be able to get those stars.

1:28:30Right. That's one of the problems. But, yeah, I see it. I see it firsthand. I see it firsthand that, you know, there was two investigations that were done on our battle that came back and said, and I'll quote, a direct loss of life due to leadership. No one was held accountable. No one was held accountable. You know, and that's the issue is the lack of accountability inside of our military, the lack of accountability across the globe. Like we don't, we don't have a, we don't have a military. I can tell you right now, the guys on the ground, the guys who are the lower enlisted, there's no, there's no problem there.

1:29:06Like there's no issue of, of what they believe in, when you start seeing them become, you know, I hear so often, well, you know, our military's becoming weak or, you know, this new generation's weak. Well, let me tell you, if they're becoming weak, it's because of their direct reflection of leadership, because the leadership's weak. You want to talk about leadership. You know, we just, we mentioned Jocko, you know, I think we mentioned Jocko earlier, but, you know, Jocko talks about how there are no, there are no bad teams. There's only bad leaders. And let me tell you something, And we've had quite a few bad leaders here in the past.

1:29:40Well, since I've been alive and, you know, but you're also seeing the power of what a good leader can do over in Ukraine right now in this, you know, this 21st century David versus Goliath situation. And Jocko, Jocko Willink, he's been on the program. He talks about extreme accountability, right? He's the first one to say it was my fault. Here's what I did. Here's what I could do differently. That's the mindset you guys have, too. And that's exactly the opposite of what we've seen, you know, in the wake of so many of these conflicts. You tell me, Rob, because I think I'm thinking about this, about your point you made the last time, because you made this even before you wrote the book about, you know, the generals and so on.

1:30:15Part of this is why people are reluctant to do too much in Ukraine. If we hadn't done Iraq, if we hadn't done Afghanistan for 20 years, never mind the initial response, but that I think everyone would agree that was justified except for the truly far left loons. But if we hadn't done those things, I think we would have come to Ukraine saying, oh, yeah, we need to go do something. This is a sovereign nation. It's a democracy. It's not perfect. It's not exactly a democracy like ours. But you can't invade a sovereign nation like Putin's doing. And, you know, the United States is, you know, we're the beacon of freedom in the world.

1:30:48And we're the strongest military and the strongest country. And so on. We got to go in there, no fly zone or something. The reason we don't want to do it, not only are we war weary, but we don't believe in the people calling the shots anymore. Forget Biden. We don't have the same faith in the generals that we used to. No, we don't. We haven't won a war since World War Two. And even if you look at that, I mean, Russia was on that side, too. So they're kind of in there. You know, we had to drop nuclear weapons on Japan to win that thing. But I think part of the issue, too, with the leadership, other than wanting their job and not wanting to upset your boss, is a lot of these places as far.

1:31:21Now, Jack was an exception because he was always the buck starts and stops here. this is my fault. Right now, they're good at teaching a structure. They think they're teaching leadership, but nobody teaches winning. You know, we could have pulled out of Afghanistan probably around 2005. We had it. We went in there. We do what military does. We crush people. And then we leave. Give them a stern no. That's a deterrent. Iraq. I mean, still no one knows what that was all about other than Dick Cheney was filling his pockets full of money. I personally took like 11 shots of anthrax because he had some stake in that.

1:31:51But I mean, now you look back at Iraq and all the hundreds of thousands of people dead. And we can, I've fought there a couple of times and I can literally sit there over a cup of coffee and say, huh, what was that all about? It turns out one guy was pissed that one guy tried to kill the other guy's dad. Let's invade. I think the towers were still smoldering two weeks later and the Pentagon's coming up with plans to invade Iraq. And this is the kind of stuff that's happening. It's poor leadership. A lot of not, you know, personal greed, personal power, and no personal responsibility. How does Mark Milley still have a job?

1:32:19And the only one they fired was the colonel that had the, But he didn't even he wasn't even disrespectful. He just said, where's the accountability? Boom, you're fired. Put him in the brig. Yeah, that's exactly right. There's been absolutely no accountability for any of it. Like you say, for Afghanistan in the first place and the way it went south, for the lies that we were told, as we saw in the Afghanistan papers. Of course, that came right from the top and and for the withdrawal. Right. And so it's like we don't trust them anymore. If we if you guys were commanding the armed forces and we knew we could send them in under your leadership and it'd be a quick strike and it'd be effective and we'd do something that mattered and not get us into some drawn out conflict that would cost way too much American blood and treasure.

1:32:55I think the American people would be more like, let's let's go. Let's, you know, ball to the wall. But we're weary of a lot of things these days in the United States. And, you know, tomorrow night at the State of the Union, we're going to hear President Biden try to spin this all like it's hugely successful from from, you know, Afghanistan to, you know, Putin's stance now like he fought back. It's like, well, how did he get how did he get to the point where he felt confident enough to do this? How did he get to the point where he actually evade after weeks of being on the border saying he's going to do it and you weren't able to stop?

1:33:23Like, how did any of that happen? And so the accountability, at least with the politicians, can happen at the voting box with these generals. Not so much. Listen, I'll give you the last word. I'm going to wrap it. But I want to give you guys the last word on, like, the regular mom-paw sitting out there in the middle of my imaginary viewer, Madge. She sits in Iowa. And she works all day and she comes home and she has a glass of wine. She takes care of her kids. But, you know, she's tired. She can't pay that much attention to the news. What does she need to know in this book? Like, why should she buy it?

1:33:51Well, first of all, we're all cut from the same cloth. And it doesn't matter what you look like or where you're from. You can do anything. And one of the points I've been making recently, too, is the 24-hour news cycle in social media is not real. What's real is out. The real person is coming home, taking care of her kids. The real person, you know, I've mentioned before, real America is not the people yelling at each other on who's left or who's right. It's the convoy that starts in Southern California that rolls through Texas. New Mexico picks up people to go to Florida to help the people who are hurting from a hurricane.

1:34:17And that's America. And most people are good, believe it or not. Face to face. Most people doesn't matter what you do behind closed doors face to face. Most people get along and, you know, don't don't live in the don't live in the past. Learn from the past. Get over it. Move forward. And perfectly said the way forward. Now, Dakota, while I have you here and we've we've given each other shit about Rob's interview, will you will you be my Memorial Day interview this year? I would love to talk to you about your mission and those we lost and just get into it in more detail. It would be such an honor.

1:34:49The honor would be mine and that of my viewers and my listeners. I'm sure we'll love it. I look forward to it. I didn't want to give it short shrift by just trying to figure it, fill it into like one block today. It's worth so much more than that. So honored to know you guys. Really appreciate you being here. All the best to you both. And thank you for your service. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate it. For the mountain kind, it's the peace and quiet of a winter forest. the joy of carving a beautiful arc across a freshly groomed ski slope warm smiles around the fireplace after a day on the mountain discovering your new favorite dish in a historic charming town it's all of the things that make a trip to park city so special learn more at visit parkcity.com park city utah for the mountain kind If you're a parent and want to help set up your child for success, then IXL is right for your family.

1:35:45As an effective and affordable online learning program, IXL covers math, language arts, science, and social studies using interactive practice problems for kids from pre-K to 12th grade. Listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash 20. Visit ixl.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. 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.

1:36:29We 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 it's really it's doing something for me. All right. Thank you. People sometimes tell us it looks like a sauna, but it's cozy.

1:37:06I think it's bringing me home. I want to see like a little fireplace in the background and maybe we'll have a little cognac before the interview's over. Okay. So can I just start with this since you guys went through and 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.

1:37:41My point is, can we talk for a minute about Peter Boghossian? 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 I wonder it must have brought something up in you guys because you two were forced out. You're, 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 that this was in the offing exactly.

1:38:15but he has been struggling with the PSU administration and the ideology there for years, as you are well aware. So, you know, the letter that he posted on Barry Weiss's sub stack was telling that's, you know, the letter that he wrote to the administration, detailing a little bit, hardly all of what he endured, not just the kinds of the ramifications of the ideology itself, But the methods that people will stoop to, the lies and slander that are really despicable, that people seem willing to stoop to because they think they're in the right, is really telling of our times. And it also reveals how badly we need a functional higher ed system and how much we don't have one at the moment.

1:39:04I was thinking about it as we Larry Elder was complaining, you know, today's the recall election in California. And he was like, OK, 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 professors, 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?

1:39:49Yeah, 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 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 yeah this this is exactly now that is both true and actually um not the full story it's actually worse than that that uh apparently that whole thing was was timed it was staged it was yet more cosplaying and that suggests that um that many of these people are engaged what i in what i have called a kind of read-only activism that nothing that you can say to some of them can actually even enter into their framework.

1:40:42They 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? Costume playing, long action role playing, the idea that we are in fact on a stage. At some level, it harkens back to Shakespeare, spirit perhaps, all the world's a stage. We are all in a performance and it suggests that you can therefore step outside of the performance that you're engaging in. Like this is not your real life. And we're seeing, we're seeing a lot of that, of course.

1:41:18Well, there, there is of course, an honorable version of cosplay where people actually create quite elaborate costumes and, you know, regenerate characters from their favorite superhero narratives or whatever it 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 Faire. 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 of things about Peter that I know are going to get lost in his story.

1:41:59that 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, it is a mechanism for generating a false appearance of consensus, which then persuades people that something that isn't true is.

1:42:53And that's what the attempt is here. And having forced him out, they have succeeded in something which will harm us all. 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? 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, having the attack be revealed is what it is, so too should those of us who are seeing what is true in higher ed not need to have been paragons of perfection in order to have our stories heard. In fact, we know of some of these stories where people 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.

1:43:44And that is conflating two things, right? 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 areas of their lives. As it turns out, Peter is. You know, it reminds me, my dad was a college professor. He died when I was only 15 of a sudden heart attack at age 45. But he 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.

1:44:30And 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.

1:45:07So this is a it's a cautionary tale. And Peter's situation is the next chapter. And while I'd love to say it's great to see, I think he'll wind up with a bigger microphone in some way, shape or form. You two certainly have. And so, you know, we've been exposed to 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 they're getting good, especially on these very liberal campuses.

1:45:50That's that's absolutely right. You know, we need everyone needs to have an openness about them with regard to being receptive to new ideas. and to things that might be true of the world, experiences that they have not had, that sound at first wrong to them, that sound like they run counter to their worldview. And it's true that psychologically, used to be anyway, the liberals were imagined to be and were found to be higher on the openness scale and these 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.

1:46:40A hundred percent. 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'm just quoting now, our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync.

1:47:21We 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 taught to our students was actually very liberating. It didn't solve every problem that we faced, but it simplified what it was to live because you simply understood what you were built for and why that was at odds with the world that you found yourself in. And so the 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.

1:48:14and 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. 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.

1:49:01And 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 go ahead, Heather. Well, I would say authorities largely want to hand down very simple rubrics to us. And 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.

1:49:42And 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 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.

1:50:29I'm going to incorporate that into my model and how I live? Or no, that doesn't make sense. And, and therefore I can ignore it, even though an authority is saying it. Well, so just to get practical. So if you take an evolutionary look at the way we eat, I mean, weren't we always told that, that the sugar tastes good. It's like one of those things that they, they, you know, our ancestors would try and say, Hmm, you know, I'm not in a dangerous place. I'm in a good place and I can eat it. And so why isn't it natural to have lots and lots of sugar and also tons and tons of red meat all day, right?

1:51:05If 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.

1:51:40That 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 maybe 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.

1:52:17So 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 us. Well, I mean, don't you just have to look around America to see that, right?

1:52:59The 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 bomb. But all of that seems to be playing into what you guys are saying. Yes. Obesity makes a good example because you can see it. But the point that we are trying to make is that that same phenomenon happens in all sorts of places that you can't see.

1:53:39So our psychological ill health is of the same sort, 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.

1:54:29Many 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. I have anxiety. I need a pill. As opposed to, 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 and child pornography, not child pornography, but pornography consumed by young children and how damaging it is.

1:55:08Obviously, 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? 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.

1:55:52Well, I wouldn't leap to that conclusion. It happens that modern life does not facilitate this. And, you know, we have occasional sleep issues in our house too, but I will say we have taken neither Heather or I had any direct experience with kids when, when our kids were born. And so we sort of bootstrapped some method for figuring out how to parent and wasn't successful everywhere, but we have treated them in a way that has restored these patterns. And I think Heather, correct me if I'm wrong. I think one of our children has gotten out of bed after going, after putting themselves to sleep once or twice in, I mean, they are now 15 and 17.

1:56:35So 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 But by and large, we have tried to isolate them from artificial light after bed and 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.

1:57:16So 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 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, 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.

1:58:05And 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, you know, even just for a few days into a place where you actually find your body wanting to go to sleep as the sun is setting and rising with the sun when it comes up will do wonders. And, you know, we'll absolutely do wonders for your ability to continue on with a more normal sleep pattern afterwards if your sleep was disrupted.

1:58:48So, you know, finding the cycles in both your own body and the cycles that are being entrained by the celestial bodies is a, you know, fantastic and free, right? And, you know, easy to track. It requires no memorization about, you know, what did he say? What does the expert say? It's like figure out how you're actually feeling. And 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.

1:59:30But of course, schools start 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'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.

2:00:09People who sleep 30 % less than they need to for 10 days, they don't fully recover their cognitive function even seven nights after recovery sleep. So you can't pay sleep debt. You know, if you screw it up, you can't get it back. Previous research has found that people who are sleeping fewer than six hours a night for two weeks in a row, They functioned as badly on cognitive and reflex tests as people who were deprived of any sleep for two full nights. And then here's the latest, Heather and Brett. You tell me if you've done this. There's something just out in the news today called revenge bedtime procrastination.

2:00:46Revenge bedtime. And it's when you don't think you had enough me time during your day. and so once you get your kids down and you know you've had your dinner and your husband and you or your spouse whatever you're sitting there in bed you don't turn off the lights and go to sleep you waste your time on insta or facebook or watching real housewives or doing something totally stupid utterly mindless maybe shopping online you're trying to create some me time because you're bitter that you don't have enough regulation over your leisure time and they're saying that too is very damaging to your cognitive function and will wind up, you know, costing you a car accident or something far worse than missing an hour on Twitter earlier in the day.

2:01:29So anyway, the solution to all this, according to two evolutionary biologists, is what? If you can't wake up with the sun, you can't go to sleep with, you know, the sunset, what are our other options? Well, just to 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.

2:02:10But 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 pseudo-quantification. What does that mean? 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.

2:02:42Well, 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. You know, a fat calorie and a carbohydrate calorie are not the same. They don't interact in your body the same way. It depends not only on whether it's, you know, what macronutrient it is, fat or carbohydrate, but what else you're eating with it, how long it's been since you've eaten, how long before you go to sleep or exercise, or how long it's been since you've slept or exercised.

2:03:22So complex systems are just that complex and reducing them with things that we can measure and count sound scientific, but it's very often a kludge, a proxy that may not actually be an accurate proxy for what it is that we need to do. 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.

2:03:59We 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 hung over if i'm sleep deprived i'm going to break my good eating habits It's 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.

2:04:40And 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. um chesterton's fence suggests that uh were two people walking down a road and were they to encounter a fence that appeared to have no purpose and one proposes to remove it the other should say not until you figure out why it was placed there can you remove it because you don't know if it's still doing that job or if that job is irrelevant so when looking at something like sleep one should try to figure out what does work the discovery that on a camping trip that you naturally feel like going to bed shortly after the sun has gone down and you wake up easily with the sun is a clue, right?

2:05:27That 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 the 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.

2:06:17And 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 actually a hypothesis that one of our students, Josie Jarvis, proposed and did some research on, which we cite her in the book.

2:06:58And 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. 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 timestamp it too.

2:07:47And give your baby milk expressed at the same time of day as when you're feeding him or her. Yeah, 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.

2:08:22I'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. Picture this. You are immersed in a quiet winter landscape as the snow lightly falls. or carving a beautiful arc across a freshly groomed ski slope, or unwinding after your day on the mountain with friends and family around the fireplace.

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2:09:58Welcome back to The Megyn Kelly Show, everyone. We are joined today by co-hosts of the very popular Dark Horse podcast, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying. 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. Yes, yes. Let's start at the 30 ,000 foot level. And you walk us through some of those differences based on evolutionary biology.

2:10:42Yeah. 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, but it hasn't reversed in our 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.

2:11:37And so basically they divide the labor. So one of the gametes, we call it the egg, and we call the things that have eggs females, brings the cytoplasm, has this big bulky gamete that has all of the machinery of the cell. And then that leaves the other job, the finding, generally to the other gamete, which in animals 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.

2:12:20And 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 if gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex and sex is binary there are males and there are females well behavioral manifestation of sex or the software of sex uh is going to be you know it's going to map onto sex pretty well but it's going to be more much more highly variable and then especially in us for humans who are more software than any other organisms on the planet, the fact that we have a history of being mammals, where we have obligate maternal care in the form of pregnancy and lactation and breastfeeding, that is true, and that's not going to change.

2:13:16And 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, you know, trying not to raise boys or girls, but trying to raise completely gender neutral beings, who then will just figure out for themselves, whether they're boys or girls, you know, help me and was shamed appropriately for, what are you saying?

2:14:03It shouldn't be hard, grow up, evolve, right? But that's the current fancy 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.

2:14:54So 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... Absolutely. So the female parts will have a long 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. The pollen doesn't care. I mean, 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.

2:15:39So 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. And so that doesn't mean that we can't change the dynamics in humans. And in fact, we are changing the dynamics in humans. And in many ways, it's very positive. I mean, the breast milk example is a great one. Pumping breast milk means men can now we can democratize the work of feeding babies. That's a good thing. It doesn't mean you have to do it, but having the option is a good thing. So it's not that we can't change these things, but we are.

2:16:20It'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 that's nonsense. It's way too ancient and consistent for that. You know, it's annoying. We did a story on Courtney Cox doing some story about two people who were together and they had a baby and it was a trans man and a trans woman who wound up together. So, you know, the one who was biologically male was presenting as female. The one who was biologically female was presenting as male. And the one who was biologically male is sitting there trying to breastfeed this baby that they just had that that the one who is biologically female but presenting as male actually gave birth to.

2:17:01So it's a biological male sitting there going, I don't understand. No 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.

2:17:35In 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 Boghossian and what he was facing at Portland State and what all faculty really are facing who have a fundamental belief in underlying reality of the universe. You know, we 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.

2:18:23And 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. So in the end, 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. Everything's massageable and arguable. Yeah. And I think there is a base value in some elements of postmodernism, but the way that instantiated in the modern academy and modern campuses, and then crawling off campuses, speeding off campuses into the media, for instance, in Hollywood, it's batshit.

2:19:12It doesn't make any sense. And so 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 or a woman or a man. 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, I'm, I'm grateful. It 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.

2:19:50And it's, it is only those parents who see reality, who are able to protect their children. But even that is becoming harder and harder. Yeah, because we are so insistent that there's no difference to the point where we have, I mentioned this in the tease, situations like this MMA fighter. It made a lot of news yesterday. 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.

2:20:32It took Alana three minutes and 32 seconds into the second round to beat Celine in a video that is disturbing to watch. But we're told, fear not, because Alana McLaughlin passed all the medicals, including a hormone panel issued by the Florida State Boxing Commission, and therefore we're not supposed to be upset when we see what is clearly somebody who who was born a boy who lived 38 years as a man absolutely eviscerate a biological female. I think we have the tape if you know, we'll 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.

2:21:10Not looking like the stronger fighter and taking a ton of punishment coming in, getting picked away there as they get in the clinch. And this is where McLaughlin could have an advantage get this punishment by big right from McLaughlin second overhand did not find it protection there from provost and the tap a lot of McLaughlin victorious in her MMA debut

2:21:37I 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 track 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, she was, yeah, is, is absurd.

2:22:27It's again, taking a measure that we have current levels of testosterone to current levels of testosterone suggest things about current levels of strength. Sure. But are they only the only things that indicate whether you have benefited from being male? No, they're not. Just to pick two other things. There are different kinds of effects of hormones and 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 bone length and strength.

2:23:05All 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.

2:23:20Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show. We are joined today by Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying. 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.

2:23:57female 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.

2:24:37So 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, 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 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.

2:25:17And then it was, you're bigots, you're bigots. And the poor girls are like, wait, 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.

2:25:55There was a report out today from the National Student Clearinghouse saying we're losing men on college campuses like crazy. 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, 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.

2:26:37Well, 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.

2:27:17And 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, 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.

2:28:03I never realized it was telling a story. All I know is lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo. It's like a lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo. Well, there is a story there. The story is that this 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, right? The 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.

2:28:50But 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.

2:29:35And 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, you know, nine by 12 cell full time with said person. No one seems to give a damn all in the name of wokeness, equity, what have you. It's absurd. And I've said this before, but every time, at every turn, the women lose this debate at every time.

2:30:15You know, whether it's running in a race at an MMA fight while sitting in a prison, women who are there with their daughters in a locker room who say, she's a little young to see a penis come out of nowhere, you know, while we're in the women's locker room. They're not trying to be insensitive. They're trying to ask for some sensitivity to biology. And as you point out, millions of years of human history. Yeah, it's societally sanctioned misogyny. And so we're a year older than you, but we're basically 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.

2:30:55We 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 superheroes. My mom begged me to get a dress and a doll.

2:31:33I 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.

2:32:16That explains so much about what we're discussing and what we're seeing on college campuses and with individuals now who just, they're not very good at adulting. They do seem really quick to go to the drugs, go to the screens, and don't seem to be able to handle conflict or adversity at all. That's right. And 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.

2:33:01and they do that through play. They do that through exploration. They don't do that by being protected from all risks. So what do you get? Like what, what do you maximize if you do the things that we lay out in what you just read? Well, you get as close to a guarantee as you can possibly imagine that your child will survive to the age of 18. What you do not get is an 18 year old who has any functionality in the world. So you have to expose your child to risk. You have to, with every passing day, week, month, year, let them do more and more, let them take more and more risk. And tragedy may happen.

2:33:40And every time I say that, I literally get visceral chills. 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 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.

2:34:25You'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.

2:35:07It'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?

2:35:45No, but I mean, I might be pro-bullying a little bit. You know what I mean? Just a little bullying. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. We don't have to use that word. I get why you would, and 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, you know, by what some fairy with all of the knowledge they're going to need.

2:36:25You do this by experience. This is not hardwired. You know, we're not, we're not moths. You know, we have to learn how to be us. And the ways that people are parenting now and that schools are educating are preventing humans from becoming humans. Yeah. I want to defend your pro bullying point because it's easy to misunderstand it, right? Bullying is not a good thing. Skinning your knee is also not a good thing, but being in favor of a world in which kids skin their knees is not the same thing as being in favor of abrasion, right? The point is it's about the things that guarantee abrasions will happen.

2:37:04And 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?

2:37:43Take 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 than 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?

2:38:21And 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? We'll 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.

2:39:04I 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.

2:39:35Forget sleep, right? Forget any deposits into wellness, going to sleep with the sun down and waking up with it. 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, where 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.

2:40:04Why do we need laws for it? But anyway. 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 days. The 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.

2:40:43There 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.

2:41:17You 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.

2:41:56The 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. Picture this. You are immersed in a quiet winter landscape as the snow lightly falls. Or carving a beautiful arc across a freshly groomed ski slope. Or unwinding after your day on the mountain with friends and family around the fireplace. If you saw it, then you're the mountain kind, and you belong in Park City, Utah.

2:42:39Learn more at visitparkcity.com. If you're a parent and want to help set up your child for success, then IXL is right for your family. As an effective and affordable online learning program, IXL covers math, language arts, science, and social studies, using interactive practice problems for kids from pre-K to 12th grade. Listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash 20. Visit IXL.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

2:43:17Welcome back everyone to the Megan Kelly show. Joining me today, Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying. They have a new book out today. Haying. 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.

2:44:00And 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'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.

2:44:51If 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 of we are simply physiologically liable to become addicted if you expose us to certain drugs is again, this reductionist oversimplified view of, of what we are. And it extends not just to humans, but to rats. So a life that is enriched because we have found meaning because we know what it is that we're interested in doing in the world, be it, you know, creating art or speaking truth or climbing mountains, you know, whatever it is, if you have something that you know, you're seeking, you are less likely to become addicted, even if exposed to the very same exogenous substances.

2:45:48So 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, you know, sometimes with adults, Brett, where the people who seem the smallest to me in terms of their emotional wellness are people who are not busy enough. You know, 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, I always feel like they need more in their lives to worry about because most people are out there doing, doing real things, taking care of their families, working for a living, blah, blah, blah.

2:46:23And 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.

2:47:09And so in some sense, their anger is understandable, but their anger is so deeply misinformed about what a solution looks like that we have an obligation not to listen. We actually have to address this in a way that might work rather than give in to demands that will cause disaster. You know what I'm thinking of, I mentioned Abigail Schreier a minute ago. In her book, she has a, it's a very useful prescription in case you see the sudden onset of gender dysphoria in your teenage child. You know, it wasn't there before. And one day she comes home and says, oh, you know, I think I might be a boy.

2:47:46And, 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 your 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? That's what you're talking about. Get them busy. Give them challenges. Have them weigh competing factors to try to make real life decisions on complex matters.

2:48:23I'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 Pratcha said, 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, whatever it is. Doing something that has a physical manifestation in the world will create strength and ability.

2:49:00And 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, there's no replacement for being there.

2:49:40So 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 like 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.

2:50:13I 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. Oh, 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.

2:50:50And 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 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 uh well what your listeners are more likely to understand as 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.

2:51:35And 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.

2:52:21It 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.

2:53:04It'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.

2:53:52And 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 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.

2:54:44Children, human children are extremely expensive to raise and they are much better raised by a team. So that is the reason that women are wired to be very reluctant about behavior that could saddle them with a child and no help in raising it. And that creates the dynamics that we all know exist. Wishing them away does not cause them to go away. but I guess the last thing I would say is what people don't realize is that yes men do men are wired to be ever aware of the possibility of sex without commitment that is an ancient pattern but it is not the only thing that men are wired for men because the way most men have reproduced in history is through investing in a particular woman and her offspring, that that pattern causes them to be choosy and careful in a very symmetrical way to the way women behave generally.

2:55:45And 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.

2:56:28when 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.

2:57:15And if that's not your goal, if you're somebody who just wants to be the career woman, I say on Fox News, that's actually not for me. There are men like that out there. I think, Heather, sometimes we convince ourselves they don't exist. Yeah. I mean, to your anecdote, I've got one. It's not as personal, but 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? 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.

2:57:53Trivers 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 question I remember that he asked us was, do you intend to have children? And it became very clear that if we had said no, he was going to have a harder time knowing what to say about us, even though he respected our brains greatly and us as friends. But for him, that was a key part of what the marriage ceremony was about. Wow. Wow. You know, so how has it gotten so turned on its head?

2:58:36We 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 typical. I really feel uncomfortable saying this stuff, but I have to be honest because I know I speak for a lot of people. I'm uncomfortable with the 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.

2:59:15They absolutely have. And I think one of the things that we argue is that there's been a takeover of language, which is part of what's confusing people. So the idea that ass is everywhere, as you say, Megan, is about some sort of sex positivity. 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.

3:00:02Right. 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 thruple and monogamy is a joke to you. and by the way, so is gender. And I was like, I would, I feel for these 20 year olds. Breton 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 and, you know, six to eight years, it's all going to be solved.

3:00:37Now 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.

3:01:16And 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, 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.

3:02:16And 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 extending the chase. Doug is still chasing me. We've been married for 15 years. You know, he's still on steady ground. I agree. I said it wouldn't be as exciting. 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.

3:02:57Yes. And you also point out in the book the difference between hotness and beauty. And I thought that was a great point, too. And 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.

3:03:39And 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, you know, of course, Doug should still be chasing you. And, you know, you should also still be chasing him. You know, one of the things about monogamy is that we are, you know, it's not just male-male competition and female choice. It's also female-female competition, and let's be good about it, and male choice. And so we've got choice by both partners and not ever sinking into the sense of, well, this is what I've got and I'll have it forever.

3:04:16And 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.

3:04:47There's some evolution in that, too. You two are amazing. 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. So much, Megan. It was a pleasure. A pleasure. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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