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

the least.

“Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to the Megan Kelly show and today's Double Feature”

episode. Today it's a double feature of duo's first our interview with Dakota Meyer and Rob O'Neill to badass military veterans with lifetimes of experience and incredible advice. Then we'll have our sit down with Brett Weinstein and Heather Hayeg, way back in 2021, one of our first interviews on Serious XM with practical solutions for a world in disarray.

I really love these two. I've thought about them so many times. I love Brett. I know him better than Heather, but she was so charming too and they've been through a lot.

They've got a great podcast of their own and they're always worth spending time with

a very provocative thinkers, very insightful and rather fearless. Enjoy and see Monday. I've got with me today two guys, you already love and two guys who have sacrificed so much for our country.

“They know firsthand about the sacrifice of war.”

They know about what it's like to put country above self when freedom and democracy are on the line. Rob O'Neill is a US Navy SEAL combat veteran. He has been a part of some of the biggest SEAL missions ever conducted. He has best known, of course, for being the SEAL team six member who shot and killed Osama

bitladen. But he also helped rescue fellow SEAL Marcus Latrell in Afghanistan and he was the lead paratrooper in the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from the Maris Gallabama. The hijacking became the basis for the movie, Captain Phillips, featuring Tom Hanks.

I mean, I joke with him last time he was on or the first time.

He's like the wall doe of military. He's been on everything and everything he touches turns into a Hollywood movie. You've got Captain Phillips, you've got Loan Survivor and then, of course, Zero Dark 30, all of which feature some of his heroism and speaking of heroes. Dakota Meyer is also with us today.

He is our country's second youngest living Medal of Honor recipient, our nation's highest military decoration. In 2009 under heavy enemy fire from the Taliban, Dakota disobeyed direct orders and repeatedly went back into the fight into the ambush area to find his fallen brothers and to retrieve the bodies of those who had died as well as rescue those who were still fighting and needed

his help, he received his Medal of Honor from President Obama at the White House in 2011.

And when they finally got to those trapped Americans, Dakota jumped out and he ran toward

them, drawing all those enemy guns on himself, bullets kicking up the dirt all around him. He kept going until he came upon those four Americans, laying where they fell, together as one team. Dakota and the others who had joined him knelt down, picked up their comrades, and through all those bullets, all the smoke, all the chaos, carry them out one by one.

“Because as Dakota says, that's what you do for a brother.”

A former Marine who read about your story said that you showed how in the most desperate final hours our brothers and God will not forsake us. And because of your humble example, our kids, especially back in Columbia, Kentucky and small towns all across America, they'll know that no matter who you are or where you come from, you can do great things as a citizen and as a member of the American family.

In the end, Dakota is credited with saving the lives of at least 36 US and Afghan troops that day. These two men have gone to Helen back for our country and when they returned home, civilian life led to a new host of challenges, which we will also discuss over the next two hours.

It's my honor to have them here today. They've written a new book titled The Way Forward. Master, Life's Toughest Battles and Create Your Own, Lasting, Legacy. It is a book they hope will help you learn to tackle obstacles in your own life and shows a bit of how they got to become these extraordinary human beings.

This is their first interview ahead of the books release tomorrow. Bob Dakota, welcome to the show, so great to have you back again. I'm so glad you guys did this. I'm glad as a human that I get to read this and that you've taken the time to sort of put your thoughts down on paper.

You've both talked about your missions before and written books about your missions, but this is like, okay, who is Rob O'Neill as a kid? I love the part about, I wasn't really like a mixed martial arts kid and I wasn't the bully and I wasn't on the football team.

your stories too about your Count, Tinker Bell and just puts a real, the seal team guys

don't start off totally grizzled in all cases. If you're hoping to be a Navy seal or a Marine in Dakota's case and you're, maybe you're hoping to for your son or whatever, maybe they're looking a little weak to you right now. You're not, if you're not, is they could one day wind up with two civil stars and three bronze stars like Rob or the Medal of Honor like Dakota.

Okay, so we're going to get to all of this. I love, love, love the book and your backstories, but let's just start with the latest news because unlike most of the people on Twitter right now, you guys actually know what it's like to be in a firefight to actually be in the middle of a war, try to figure out what's real and what's not.

And I want to tell you, this past weekend was extraordinary, extraordinary in Ukraine. To me, I'll give you my late-person assessment and you tell me whether I'm on to something,

“but I think this guy's a landscape, you know, the, the president of Ukraine, is singlehandedly”

turning this thing around. He refuses to leave, they, we went in and said, they're going to kill you, let's give you a transport out and he said, I don't need to ride. I need ammo. I'm not going anywhere.

This guy's former actor, nobody knew what he was going to be. He won't leave, he's inspiring all the Ukrainians not to leave. You're not supposed to leave if you're a fighting-age male, but they're not trying to leave according to all reports. They're staying.

They're making Molotov cocktails when they can't get their arms, their hands on arms. And so he's been inspirational and the Ukrainians have been inspirational, fighting, not giving up, you know, doing whatever they can to preserve their homeland, which is under invasion right now by 200,000 Russian troops.

“So that's sort of where we were going into the weekend, I was like, well, they're going”

to fall, because they're out manned and they're out matched, but wow, crazy fight.

And inspirational, you know, resolve, then, over the weekend, finally, Europe found its

spine, Europe found its backbone after all these years. And what we're seeing today, I'll give you guys some of the highlights, okay, because I've been looking for somebody who would just list for me everything that was going down. And here's some examples, okay? The UK, sending light anti-armor defensive weapon systems, France, more military equipment

as well as fuel, Netherlands, air defense rockets, and anti-tank systems to Ukraine. Germany, now planning on devoting 2% of its budget to its own military, which it hasn't been doing. It's gone totally soft. Now it's finding a new resolve, sending a thousand anti-take weapons, 500 stringer surface

to air missiles, Canada, sending lethal military weaponry.

“Canada, Justin Trudeau, oh no, Sweden, Sweden, 5,000 anti-take rockets to Ukraine, as well”

as field rations and body armor, Belgium, 3,000 more automatic rifles, 200 anti-tank weapons, 3,800 tons of fuel, poor Portugal, night vision goggles, bulletproof vest, helmets, grenades, M, ammo, autographic automatic G, 3 rifles, Romania, fuel bulletproof vest, helmets, other military material. In fact, Republic, 30,000 pistol, 7,000 assault rifles and so on, the U.S. anti-armor

small arms, body armor, various munitions and supportive Ukraine, now it gets crazier. EU will shut down EU airspace to Russian aircraft. We'll seek to ban Russian state-owned media, we'll target Russian ally Belarus with sanctions. Japan will join a group of 7 nations in the EU, we'll freeze the Russian central banks for an exchange assets, we'll prevent Vladimir Putin's government from accessing tens of

billion South Korea. We'll ban exports of strategic items and go on, Singapore, imposing appropriate sanctions in restrictions, Australia sending lethal aid Germany I mentioned, but they're also pushing aside a long-held government policy not to send weapons to conflict zones. They hadn't been doing that now, they will.

And they're also allowing the Dutch to send 400 German-made anti-tank weapons and Estonia to send cold-era howitzers, transfers it had been blocking for months. Turkey, Turkey calls it a war, which could pave the way for the NATO member Turkey to enact an international pack limiting Russian naval passage through the Black Sea.

Switzerland, Switzerland, that's the one we're always like, I'm Switzerland, you know,

like your brother and sister are fighting, I'm Switzerland, Switzerland is getting into this, adopting the EU sanctions against Russia, I feel like who knew, Hungary and so on. This is extraordinary in the way my pal Noah Rothman put it over on commentary was the Europe that existed last week, no longer exists, it looks very, very different today than it did.

So, sorry for the long wind up, but that's a extraordinary series of events. What do you guys make of it? Now, that's a great wind up, I appreciate that. It is, I mean, even a week ago, I was personally talking about Germany as far as NATO.

be ready to pay that until 2031, and I thought that was kind of rooted Germany because

“if you think about it, there's kind of the reason we needed NATO a hundred years ago, but”

now with this turnaround, it comes back to President Zelensky and again, on social media, you're going to get people here and there and it's propaganda, this propaganda, whatever. He's the face of it, and he's part of the reason a lot of people are coming together because whether or not he is exactly where he says he is fighting. He is there, along with the mayor of Kiev and all the men and women, the shop owners that

are making Molotov cocktails, I mean, I wouldn't personally want to be throwing burning booze at a tank, but if you have that in you to defend your country and I love the way they're saying we're doing this because we don't want to go anywhere else, this is our home. And with, I mean, Putin lost his marbles, and he did say once he got the stiff resistance

from Ukraine, well, hey, Finland and Sweden, you better not do this. And those two, they're not in NATO, but they've really not done much. They're getting involved. And I love, well, obviously, the Baltic States, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuanian, they're involved hungry, Poland, but it's almost, it's, this is Europe uniting.

And I was saying the first, I don't want American troops on the ground, but I was even

saying, you know, this is a European problem, Europe's step and up, and they're talking about paying more than any for NATO, even though Ukraine's not a NATO country, they're defending innocent people because a lot, I mean, if this is something that should almost unite everybody, nobody really wants this war except that crazy person in Moscow. Yeah, I mean, Dakota, it's like the, they're making military munitions there with these

Molotov cocktails. You're seeing grandmas in the street, go up to Russian soldiers and yell at them. I mean, like the Ukrainian people feel what we're all seeing, which is, this is a sovereign nation under attack for no reason. Right?

Putin's propaganda war isn't winning. He's, you know, belling on about how there are neo-Nazis in there and how they're torturing Russian speaking Ukrainians and these sort of more separatist regions, no one's believing it. Even the Russians aren't believing it, the Ukrainian resolve to fight this and get them out

of Ukraine and to live a peaceful life has been extraordinary. Usually we see these countries just collapse. When you see a stronger country, like a big bully, like Russia go in, you know, they just collapse. Like they don't, not so.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think you would have seen this collapse had the president left. I think that, you know, he's obviously not doing all, you know, everything, but I do think he is the keystone of this arch that's keeping that entire country fighting.

“And I think that, you know, that's what's going to be held on.”

You know, you see the media who's putting all this attention, everybody wants these, like, the winds are like, how far is it going to go or, you know, everybody's trying to get their tagline in there and they keep talking about, well, you know, Putin take in, keep, right? And even if he takes it, even if he runs his troops through it and he puts people inside of the city buildings, he's still going to have 20 years of insurgency across it.

It doesn't mean anything. I mean, Putin better be ready for a long, long war, because if not, I mean, look, we know what it's like to walk in somewhere with air superiority and we know what it's like to walk in with the money and the troops and the training and then have to fight for 20 years.

You know what I mean? And I don't think that we can over underestimate the over complexity of street fighting, right? I mean, it is a complex deal. It took the United States, which is by far the best fighters on the face of planet that ever existed, and it took us over three weeks to take over Felicia that had what 300,000

people in it. You're talking about a city that has, it's the size of Chicago. I mean, you know, that this is going to be no small undertaking and then what does he do after he gets it, right?

It's just incredible to see these people, they're willingness to rise up and fight for their

own country, to fight for what they believe in, you know, there's all this stuff coming out now about, you know, who's supporting who, and all this, you know, trying to look at, you know, well, what can we believe and what can we not?

“At the end of the day, you know, you have to humanize this aspect of it.”

And that's what we did in the way forward, right, is obviously our first books came out. We were talking more about, you know, about the war and the black and white side of it of, you know, who's wrong and right, but there's just a humanization factor to this that we cannot miss and you're seeing this across the globe right now of what hope can do and these people hope and they believe so much that they can win in their country, that

they're going to take Maltoff cocktails and throw them at tanks. Yeah, I mean, they're at the point now where, uh, reportedly, Putin's people are going to meet with senior Ukrainian diplomats. Uh, I guess they had to agree to go meet in Belarus, which is Putin's puppet and they've been doing whatever Putin wants this country, sort of in between the two.

It's not going to be Putin and it's not going to be Zelensky, but it's going to be, you

know, underlings that are going to go meet and no, there are no preconditions and Putin last week had been saying, you will agree, you will agree to neutrality and you will agree not to join NATO and then we will meet and now here they are no preconditions meeting. I mean, who knows, you know, Zelensky saying, I don't think it's going to amount much and they haven't stopped the fighting in the meantime, but it's something.

Uh, meanwhile, can I ask you guys about this, because the most concerning headline has been about Putin's sabre rattling with his nukes, uh, he's like, that's not really what you want to hear, but, you know, who knows whether it's true, but there reports that he, he seems unstable to those who are around him, people have been watching him for a long time.

“I think he's, Putin might be losing it, you know, that he, he changed during the pandemic”

was the reporting and now he's putting their nuclear arsenal and those who oversee it on alert, um, that's concerning and it's especially concerning because of all the things I listed at the top, he's, he's got to be feeling concerned about, you're up, uniting against him. This is his worst nightmare.

I mean, you've got, you've got, you've got like, Kosovo applying now openly for NATO membership. You've got these other countries, you know, who had been like considering it, um, I'm trying to see who it was, it was Finland and Sweden, at least making noises about it. And, uh, this is the last thing he wanted, right? He, he hates a United Europe.

He does not like to be seen as the universal bad guy. So that, that combined with the threat of nukes, hmm, makes you wonder what is next move is. Well, his, his, uh, issue was he was saying the NATO's against the NATO wasn't against him and Ukraine was not a threat and he's gotten an exactity opposite of what he wanted.

Now he's like, you said with Kosovo, they want in, and you mentioned Belarus, uh, Putin thought, uh, Ukraine is going to be like Belarus, but they're just kind of rolling no one fights and all of a sudden, bam, you're part of Russia. Ukraine, you mentioned Feluca, uh, we were fighting with 300,000, uh, Syria 300,000, but not everyone was fighting.

There's several million in Kiev and they all want to fight.

“Uh, and then of course, Putin's going to, you know, I, I think he went crazy during the”

pandemic.

The reports that his family had, uh, COVID, he never wanted to admit it, but even Connelly's

a rise was saying he looks like he's a little crazy like his face is chubby and he's not quite making sense. So he's, he's Saber rattling that the nuclear threats there, that's scary. I mean, that's, that's something we can't even imagine, uh, but what I, I think the, the first option is a little bit worse.

There's, there's a bomb that he has about 22,000 pounds. It's a thermal barric charge. We have one that we dropped extra on the, um, the Taliban, it's called a massive ordinance air burst. We call it the mother of all bombs of the MoEb, but he's got one that it's, um, it's a thermal

barric charge that detonates about six feet off the ground and it'll make a crater three football fields. And it, it'll, it'll liquefy anyone inside. If, if he dropped that on a populist, um, it's devastating, but he can say he didn't go nuclear.

That's, as close you can get and everyone knows we've done it, uh, Russia made when I'm assuming because China steals everything from us, they have one too. But that, that's like the next step in how serious are we, and it's scary when you get someone that, uh, maniacal, a little bit seen out, but his backs against the wall finger on the trigger.

I don't care how many times are in treaties, they say, what we have them, but they're not aimed at anyone. That's, that's a, that's a bunch of both. They're aimed at something and, uh, he's got access to stuff and, um, I'm not sure going into Belarus is going to do anything and Putin wants to say face, but, you know,

it's going to come down to something really, really graphic or it's going to turn it like a Julia Caesar thing, just step back and a coup. You know, before I went over there to interview him, one of the, uh, I had briefings with former FBI former CIA folks, you know, who've spent their lives studying Russia and Putin.

And one of the things that I learned was that, you know, Russia's basically a kleptocracy

and, uh, whoever's in charge is totally corrupt and has tons of money and houses and assets stationed all over Russia and the sort of way it works is you just have to stay in power.

“Like, the way of preventing oneself from winding up dead or in jail is you have to stay”

in power and that's what he's been doing, right? I mean, he's effectively just an authoritarian leader there now. He, he went through the, sort of, the motions of pretending that Medvedev was president for a while but he took back over and hasn't given it up since and there's a real worry if he feels trapped, if he feels in a corner where he feels like, okay, not only is

Russia losing face and compromising positions that they've worked 75 years to not compromise. What if he's, what if the Russian people and even, you know, his underlink start turning on him and that the solution within Russia is Putin needs to go, right? I mean, I know Dakota, you read in the book a lot about like, and of course, this is the sled to your mental honor, there's there are times in which soldiers need to disobey orders

and understand what's right might not line up with what's what you've been told to do. Yeah, I mean, look, and I totally agree with that. I truly think that the, you know, the results of of Ukraine is going to come down to how far, Putin will take this, right?

But I think on the back side of that is there's going to have to be someone under him

pushed the button to go nuclear and you can't ever pull out that, that I call it the humanization factor, right? Like the, the factor that I have to push this and I have to know that my family is going to pay for this because they know that as soon as the new comes out, they know that the wrath of the world is going to be unleashed on on Russia.

They know that the wrath of the world is just going to come out and they're going to be no extra than whatever he does in Ukraine will be a hundred times worse on him. So Putin's kind of in this position, though, that's a, it sucks for Putin, man, we should send him a book because he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna need a way forward right after this.

But I think he thought that he was going to run through this, like Rob said, be over in a couple days. Nobody's going to fight. He's going to have it and he's going to go back. But you know, for our generation, you know, Putin's kind of been like this guy,

that we've all been warned about, right? He's kind of like the guy in the bar of, hey, you know, that, that guy can fight, you know, don't mess with him, you know, don't, don't, don't ever, don't ever mess with him.

So now he comes out and we're watching him fight for the first time that I can remember

in my life and he's, and he's, and he's losing, not good, he's losing, he's not good at it, right? So if Putin goes back and he's going to be the leader of Russia and they want to be powerful, I mean, he's really Putin's the laughing stock of, of the world right now. Well, he's put himself in a bad spot too, because he's been quoting Vladimir Lenin and

“Joseph Stalin, the key to Krushev, and, you know, he's, he's, he's talking legacy talk now.”

And he's pushing 70, another scary part is he's realizing that he's not tough. What if he needs to go out with the bank? And there's, there's, there's all the, like he said, the human element parts of the legacy element. How does he, because he wants his own legacy, but he also wants some other Russia.

And if he makes a look, we, who knows what they'll do, so, you know, this, you know, he, he, yeah, I mean, it's, it's scary. There's a lot of, a lot of ins and outs. And, you know, it's one of those things where you, you don't want to believe something bad

will happen because it never has.

Here's a guy that said, if, if you interfere, you'll see a response you've never seen in the history of your nation. He's talking to us. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And I didn't, I didn't, yeah, that had, but I, I just think that look, no matter how this goes, whether he takes you crane, or whether he backs out, like, I, my prediction is this is the end of Putin, very well could be. I mean, all the things that we were saying that they should do, they're now doing, except for cutting off the oil and gas access to, you know, to Russia, that, that no one's

giving up yet. Although Germany has now made the Nord Stream 2, you know, disconnection and sort of, he, they've said, we're done and we're, we're permanently done. It's crazy what happened in Germany. They totally underestimated the new chancellor of Germany.

They thought they had another angle of Merkel on their hands. They wanted to appease Russia and be more doveish and not build up the military and not be confrontational. And this new guy is like, how you like me now? It's crazy.

I mean, it's really worth reading what happened in Germany over the, over the weekend. So we'll see that the actual line was that Putin has his nuclear deterrent forces on high alert amid the spiraling tensions, that the defense minister and the chief of the military's general staff have been ordered to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a special regime of combat duty could absolutely just be saber rattling.

“But then that's what people said about the 200,000 troops around Ukraine.”

There's so much more to go over with the two greatest guys. We're so lucky that they're Americans that they, they decided to risk their own lives and fight for us. And now are continuing to share their wisdom with us. Now, 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. All right, so let's, 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 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 and let's, one of you hit 20 free throws in a row, which, and you write in the book, that's Evan Hart. And that is hard.

It 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, well, 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 if you want to be good at something, do it a thousand times, don't be really

And a free throw to me, that's, it's just a great analogy for life, a free throw. It's, you know, basketball three times, backspin, bend in these, release. And like the only argument my father, Tom and I, well, dad, and I had was, do you look

“at the ball as you're released or do you keep your eyes on the rim?”

I was a big believer to keep your eyes on the rim, he would keep his eyes on the ball.

But yeah, it was, it was one of our things where you start with a make, always start with

a make because you, you know, you're in line, you're, your, 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 in 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. And 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. 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 within 28 to go get a stake at the derby. So it stayed 20 to leave, but once we hit the stake, then it goes up by five. So it's now it's 20 and 25 to get a stake, then 30 to get a stake, and then 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, because the next week, I made 105 in a row. But what we were learning is that's the same thing with shooting. It'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 throw 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 go, I want to go to this, the Derby does it still exist? Is it still in my mind?

Oh yeah, Derby's everything about that. I know you've been to the beauty and my buddy owns it. He's actually a 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. They don't even know how good they are. They don't even know that. Good, because it's being Montana.

They just expect everything to be delicious Derby's. 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 going to. Go, go, go.

I'm going to eat. I'm going to eat. That's just one thing about that story, too, is I was okay with 105 in a row, but I was so angry at missing 166. It's crazy talk.

You realize that. Right? Okay.

“That's how that's how you become Rob O'Neill.”

I get it. But you know, Dakota reminded me, 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?

Hold the line or nine, nine, what was the, 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 lost.

They lost quite a few of our unit and yeah, his name was Daniel Kreizer, I'll never forget

him. Just a incredible guy. He always just like ran into us, nine lines, like nine line metapack. It's a, it's a format that we use to metapack out wounded wounded Marines or, you know, wounded service members on the battlefield and it's so critical, right?

I mean, he just drilled it into us while a lot of other Marines, their team leaders were messing with them and were, you know, playing games 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, or whatever, to save you 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, you know, shooting, you know, our timeline was the very basic, the minimum that we had to be proficient at in order to, to go out and, and everything's habitual, right?

“Like, everything in life is, is, is habitual.”

You can't, don't ever think that you can do the, you know, 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 is saying, it's not about becoming a great basketball player.

It's about getting muscle memory and getting to the point where you're, you don't even have to think about it.

You just keep doing it over and over and over and over, it becomes second nature, whether

it's basketball or it's shooting or it's the nine lines, you know, and then the military, they get that. But it applies, as you point out, the book, to regular life. I mean, a lot of people have goals that they want to achieve and it's like, if you got to think about it in the moment when the stress is on, you're already in trouble.

Yeah, I, I truly believe that, you know, I truly believe that I speak on this a lot is that, you know, the, the, the results of the time, like, look, all of us are going to be tested.

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. And so it matters.

It matters what you put in your body. It matters. Every little aspect of it. You can expect to, to be a good person, but only be a good person in parts of your life. You can expect to, you know, like, it's just, it's either one way or the other.

You can't be both. And I, and I truly believe that. Now, Dakota, you, you write in the book about your own personal background, born and raised in Kentucky. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. 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 way, saving you. Yeah.

I mean, you know, my dad is, my dad's probably the greatest man that, you know, I've ever met that walks at face of planet, but that's very simple man.

My dad is, 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 himself or to make things easier. My dad was that way because he cared about you, right? 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, that would accept nothing less than you being the best that you can be. So my dad was all about people, right, about taking care of yourself, taking care of the things around you 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, and when you disrespect that or you make that look bad, that, that, that, that's a spill factor for everybody, you know,

and, and what's incredible was, is I didn't know it until the 13, you know, but, but my

dad, uh, big Mike, um, he adopted me and so, you know, the father didn't know that until you were 13. Yeah, yeah, um, my, my mother gave me up when I was like nine or 10, um, 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, um, you want to put an investigator”

in 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. I'll bless though, you know, yeah, so just to go ahead and give you a little bit of coordination on that.

Um, so, so, you know, I, I, I felt I was, I was adoptive 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, um, but, you know, I, um, I went to live with my dad, my dad took me in and, 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 just a give you a true perspective of just how my dad is, um, you know, my mom brought me in on my 13th birthday and lay these papers down in front of me because she wanted me to move back in with her. And she said, um, uh, hey, you know, this is, uh, you're, you know, you're adopted.

And I was like, what, like, yeah, she's like you're adopted, your dad adopted. She's not how you're 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, you know, I got dropped off of 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 could

tell I was upset. Obviously, and my dad came in and, and, and he looked at me, 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? And he looked at me and he goes Dakota, um, 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 is just an incredible human being.

Hmm. That'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, 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 a little boys, you know, and the importance

of lessons that, you know, you, you may not see coming. And over and on the front in, uh, in mute 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. Now he wasn't a seal, but tell us about Ben and the lesson you learned in particular

when he walked into, if he was a bar or something, you were like, okay, I see a difference here. Yeah.

So I grew up with Ben, um, we went to the same school and he was always, you know,

he was always lifting, when it's always working out, huge guy on the football team. And ever since I knew me wanted to be a Marine, and that was this thing, like he was going to be a Marine, always had a great haircut. As soon as he got a truck in the 15 year old, he had the Marine Corps sticker on there. And as soon as he, um, as soon as he graduated the next day, like he was going, it's not

that 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 this tough guys in mute and then there was mates. Uh, I was working, I was delivering pizza, and it was a pizza joint and a bar at night.

Um, and it was called the Vue Villa. And I was in the Vue when I, and Ben Ben came in and he just looked like a Marine now. That's him. He, he kind of, he walked in and, uh, he almost, he was so cool. He almost looked like he didn't recognize anybody because every, you know, everyone was

staring at him. And it's like the whole, uh, you know, yes, I will go home with that girl, but I'm going to

eat up her boyfriend first type guy, uh, but I mean, he obviously didn't do that.

Just a great guy. But he looked like that and it was impressive that, uh, that guy on 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 at, and like, you'd be, you'd be, it's on a big place, you'd be driving around town and he's out there and getting his P.E.T on, you know, physical screening, running down, black tail lane with the note, you know, Marine Corps shorts, and they're sure it on.

Just like that's a Marine. That's what it means. Look like God help the enemy. Yeah, right. Like I'll do it, I'll do it, and then you tell us our last interview about, you got

a little sidetracked by the Navy recruiter, who was like, well, yeah, when I decided to join, I went into it, because it was time to get out of town, and the quickest way out of me, my tan 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 be a Marine sniper because, uh, after, you know, I saw Ben, and then I watched Full Mill jacket and I read Carlos Hathcock's book,

who was, uh, the greatest Marine Corps sniper, and I went to join the Marine Corps, and I walked down there, right in the office, and the Marine recruiter was not in the office. Uh, but the Navy guy's office right next door, and Ben had actually been the guy that told me, because 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 just 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 Navy guys off.”

Dakota's shaking his head, yes, for our listening, it's Dakota the Marine, like, this guy, I'm trying not to brag too much about the Marine Corps, because the war hero says next time. And so I went and the Navy, now, I didn't know about the Navy, is if, if you wear khakis and have anchors, you're a chief, uh, and chiefs are very, very clever, and, uh,

I said, hey, if anyone knows where the Marine is, you will cause 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, they said, look, no further, we have snipers here in the Navy. You need to be a Navy.

There's no big deal, then we'll send you this sniper school, kind of brushed over that part. And now, super fun. And I'm looking at this guy, and he's kind of, you know, he's, it looks like a Navy guy, got some coffee stain on his shirt. And 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were going to disagree with that. That's, you know, they, they signed, I signed the government contract, and then he showed

me videos of Navy sales. I was like, oh, I guess they swim a little. I didn't really know how to swim. We don't swim and view my tent very much, but you're free through it. 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. Yeah. So that was a fly from Virginia Beach to jump. But I think we, you know, just below 10,000 feet with four boats, and then we're in the

Indian Ocean. I was good at that point. I learned how to look forward to it. I think so. I think we know that by that point.

Can you tell us story?

We never actually got to this.

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. It was unbelievable. I have so I have people stopped me on the street to quote his rolling his eyes.

It's like, don't feed his ego to wait.

“But seriously, I think you should go ahead and say it's only because you haven't had”

a one-on-one interview with me. Definitely. Like we need to get into, hello, Medal of Honor, I was like reading all of Rob's, like awards as many, I mean, like a silver double silver star and the triple bronze star and all this stuff.

And I was, I was floored until I got to Dakota's resume. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. I know.

No, but I was just going to say, if you don't like my May 31st, my memorial day interview

I'm not for you. I'm not for you. You were spectacular in the way you told the story of 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, it's your first book, I can't remember, but it was about”

how you were training back state side 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 in some guy was looking at the newspaper.

Yeah, we, we, we had never done this, like the steel team six was designed to rescue

Americans at sea. And we, we'd been announcing since not, well, not me, but like the team since 1980. We could be anywhere within 24 hours, never done it. And we got the calls and you know, kidding, get the call, it gets on, we know we're going. And I had a set of amount of time to get to where I was going, but I was ahead of schedule.

And there's a 7/11 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 these six in the name, that's a lot of cash. Yeah.

Yeah. I'll log of Copenhagen in a carton cigarette. And the reason I'm doing this is because we are going to be jumping today will 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, to barter with the tobacco.

I do have a gun. And I used to call my gun the M4 charge card, like 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 upon the power of polls or whatever and he's working all night, nightchip. Now he's off. No hurry whatsoever and he's one dude in front of me. And one of the things that's due to other than the big thing a coffee is 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 slanted on the counter and kind of announced the entire story, who members would listen, man, I sure with someone would do something about this.

And 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 just going to me. Thanks. Moving on.

Yeah, I'm looking at this book called a worker. I'm like, I'm not even kidding, bro, like the national security time light is squarely on your very broad shoulders. My man. And then like, and he was nice.

He kind of realized he's right in front of where we're supposed to go and he was gorgeous and he got out of the way and we got to work on time and everyone got to work on time. And we've just, I mean, he got a figure. So there's Navy SEALs.

But now there's boats that needed to be ready, gasped up their parachute rigors had to have them already rigged. The parachute's for us to jump the tan and rigs. The pilots from the way they air through everyone had to be ready. By the time we all got to the call 15 hours and 46 minutes later, we had a full head

county in the ocean. We rescued Richard Phillips a day and a half later. It was amazing. Oh, my God. It's so crazy.

Just remind me of 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. 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. And 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 a tank with no gas, a target. So he's like, I've got to get there.

He's like a guy to get the fuel up there but he comes up to a big minefield and there's no way around it and he's realized it's 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 offers just said, go left or go right because you're not going to try to drive these refueling trucks over this minefield while 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, this apparently how you get a medal, you just got a disregard our orders and then live. So he got out of his truck and 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 him 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 and far too fast a time for him to have been compliant with the orders and he's 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 the Brian is applying for the same job I was he was in the one in the one office talking about leadership and so on and I was in the other office talking about law review and how you used to be the head cheerleader.

That's right for Trump.

“It was what was like syphilis, I don't know where is the big of that 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. It's a silver star. It's metal fodder. You'll lose. There's so much more to go over with these guys Robin 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'Neal interview or any interview just like it. Check us out. We are a new addition to being live on Series XM Triumph channel 11 11 every week

date noon east. We're a podcast too and 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'Neal 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 dot com slash making Kelly Gordon subscribe to that too if you would. Dakota you, 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 we're taught firsthand while in high school. Absolutely. Yeah, I was a football player on like Rob I wasn't getting me up on like Rob. You know, like I was your typical ran track played football played some basketball, you

know and that was kind of it's what I did and so there was these you know they're like

“sisters of these girls and Mary McKinsey and they were cheerleaders and so you know”

I was always have we're at that you know brother sister kind of like the lingo you

conversation whatever you want to call pick out each other and I was like you guys are cheerleaders like that's not even a real sport and so then there 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 she was like a travel team or or whatever and so got over there and I did their their gymnastics and we did you know

where you do back talks 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 they're the person that you know is throwing you get you get probably the most leverage on throwing so I went this girl her name is Keisha she was tiny so like come

over here and do this basket toss and I'm not gonna lie like hanging out with a bunch of girls it is not so bad and went over there and threw up you know got under and I was like I'm gonna show I got show off there's all these girls watching so I threw Keisha and the ceiling in this place was not the highest and I'm there for getting like Keisha went up in the basket toss she had to lay flat so that she didn't slam into the ceiling and I came back down and I called 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 I got taught and to be humble about it yeah I got taught really and to trust the people

that they're gonna catch you you know I mean that's that's like the military summed up in a liner too right like you got it nothing's gonna happen unless you trust each other having

each other's back you get thrown up in the air or you go out first on the mission doesn't happen

unless you've got this brotherhood or sisterhood yeah it's 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 everything's been a team sport for me in life's a team sport the the need to maintain calm in stressful situations whether it's being tossed up that is a with the ceiling commenter to your face like he should

did but not panic has been a central theme really I mean of your both of your stories really I 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 you've talked about how fear like when people say like how do you not get afraid

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 the suicide bombers everywhere gun

fights 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 learned is calm can be contagious no one can tell what you're feeling inside but if you portray calm everyone around you will become and and and that'll that that that that that that'll happen but the y'all like

fear is fine fear makes you think more clearly fears when you're watching a movie and you can hear everything in your house that's fear working for you but it's when you start to freak out that it's dangerous like like panic is very very contagious the the proof proof is recent I will

prove the panic is contagious it's called I call it the great toilet paper to buckle 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 you can get on with it without toilet paper but someone freaked out at a at a store and bought all the toilet paper and some asshole watched and do that and he sprinted the next door and he bought it all on some other asshole watched him do it and then everyone started doing it bam right to toilet paper because

“one person panicked 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 and 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 announced hey we'll be boarding this flight in 15 minutes look around and watch people as one it's like watching a herd of cattle they start to move their

head they start to stand up and God forbid someone from zone five tries to board the zone one that's what the fight breaks out and and it's it's that thing where everybody panics but we talked early 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 his business trip he doesn't know where his life has

density doesn't have to open an emergency exit because he's too good for that but he's shown

they can be the first one on the plane and then you know what I always said kind of I don't want to

“be in a bad one like a semi crash I want to see how people respond on a plane as you need to get out”

who's grabbing their eye patch who's just I heard the the flight that went down in the Hudson when Sully Solumberger he said he was the last one in the plane is they're in the Hudson which I'm assuming is got to be not normal he said he was walking through the plane some dude came out of the bathroom and nothing but his boxer shorts he went in there got his boxer and and Sully said what are you doing he said what we're gonna swim aren't we what yeah so that's panic

and panic and overtake you but if you're good enough if you've done like this code said if you've done everything in your life to get to that point and muscle memory needs to take over hopefully you shot the free feels 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 the Hudson I'm not jumping in there in my box you know I have a mild feeling yeah I mean

oh I want I want to know more did that make news should I know about this okay but you're a no position you are a no no position to cast stones to color you little metal water winner no you have no because of I teased earlier that one thing that happened at your metal of honor ceremony that we did not know and I played that moment over and over again I mean I interview like you won the Kelly file and when it happened we watched it what president Obama the whole bit very

moving and it Fox news we take the whole ceremony put it on wonderful stuff Dakota was a necessarily all there at that at that appearance apparently speaking of drinking booze in the airport it can happen before a metal of honor ceremony too yeah you know we I mean what do you expect when you invite 200 some Marines to the White House right you know we we were founded in a bar just so you know so we got there and they there were serving drinks and before and I just mean you know

everybody wants to have a drink with you right oh you got to have a drink with me and we we're

“drinking and drinking and I'll never forget like they put you know everybody went into sit down they”

they actually ran the White House ran out of beer they ran out of beer out the ceremony and they had to find a way to get more in which it's not just going down to the 7 or 11 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 metal of honor ceremony would have been awful you know something

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 and I'm like hi I'm wasted it's on 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 you know I'm at position of attention I'm been 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 they're going to crucify you and you have 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 not that I was crying and all these cameras are going off like everywhere and I'm like yeah I was just wiping my head off guys so good yeah not it I'm just drunk well the other thing is and with you know respect you're a little heavier in that particular shot in that video then 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 me 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 and those jeans you should not be wearing”

those and you have the your ass looks fat and those jeans friend I did his name is his name is Tim

Kennedy I don't know if you ever heard of yes yes of course he yeah we had him on just just an incredible

guy he's no he's a no bullshit kind of guy you know I moved to Austin and I was going through he was going through my divorce which was just you know by far I would rather go through you know five afghanistan's and a divorce and and you know I remember coming into the gym we're working out on it myself and another guy we're working out this on and it's kind of on it was kind of like my the gym was my kind of my my grounding piece to get me through this right working out and working

with Tim and Shane and and why and they they 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 we're holding the line and I never forget I came in one day and I was just you know”

probably looking for some maybe little empathy and 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 and Tim kind of like or I'm weak or so I came or what the exact line was but Tim looked at me and he goes hey check it out um people look up to you

as 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 you got Richard you know it's such a so many times we surround ourselves in and I see a lot we surround ourselves with people who make us feel good you know and that's the same thing that I was doing when I got a Marine Corps was I 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 um like this fat piece of”

trash yeah that I did as I turned the globe I think 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 uh I needed an intervention we know and in my life didn't really get back on track you know it didn't really start going forward um until I started surrounding myself with people who would hold me accountable who would you know you know we we have this false sense of brotherhood across the globe now

and I see in a lot of services I see this in the fight and in the being a firefighter I see this and a lot of things and it's it's we want people to like us and and I see this with people parents and and it's not about people like you it's not about you know not hurting someone's doing it's about time what they need to hear so that they can go ahead and fix it right could you imagine if you walked in a doctor just told you um you know what was going to make you feel good oh

oh you have you have you have diabetes uh from eating too much sugar and you you know you're morbidly obese but hey hey it's okay there's just more of you to love hmm yeah no you need

somebody who'll give it to you straight I was 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

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 see reimbursement later more and more doctors doing it anyway there's a parent there's”

a patient who went in with his wife and they each got a physical and they just moved to the to the area so they who's paying the the bill check out and his physical costs a thousand dollars more than his wife's physical and he said to the reception why is my physical a thousand dollars 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 this isn't 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 that people need you know to sort of start changing their lives and 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 reminding me that you were banned by Delta for an anti mask tweet what's going to bring it up I was going to say something the rhymes with Delta would you do it is it's just for a tweet you get banned I do you know I I took a selfie because they look I had a mask on and they were serving us like stuff and I said I could take my

mask off to eat this and they said yeah so I took a picture and posted it that was the bad idea don't tweet that but then what's 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 instead of where I was wearing a mask the whole time when I get off a trim my phone on getting blasted and my wife called said what did you just do I'm like I don't know that horrible selfies in the New York Times you you said like did you consider saying don't

“do you know why like do you have you heard of Isama Bin Laden like did you try to play that card at all?”

No no I didn't all I said was it was amazing on the it's one year anniversary at 9/11 I'm the one on a no fly list

it's not the new in your main call out is that it's crazy they put collegiate Muhammad on a plane before they put me on I don't get oh my god please tell me they reversed themselves did they reverse themselves not yet they're too woke oh Delta you're gonna get a lot of people banning you you're gonna choose an American line. All right American Airlines I prefer American Delta anyway I got to say so okay so that that wasn't exactly the thing I was talking about but let's talk about

because we didn't actually get to this last time either um you killed Bin Laden you were the man who actually shot Bin Laden and then there's a reason we know that because um you you hadn't interview with was it Esquire who who do you give the anonymous interview to? The anonymous was with Esquire and that was just more of a proof that a lot of veterans don't know what to do when they get out of the military that's what that was that was and then I remember being at Fox News when you gave the big interview to

Peter Ducey who back then was just known more as like Steve Ducey son um now everybody knows him as Biden's chief antagonist in the White House press corps but um and I know you knew Brian kill me and all that stuff so you came out with it and you'd been out you were out at against your will prior to the revelation on Fox because uh some magazine got a whole of the fact that it was you and they 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 a range of things 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 we tried 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 you you that think you say in the book don't sit in the front row that was sort of the lesson uh and there 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've seen missions done before where I wasn't part of it and I was actually why did I get to do that type of 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 up in London was dead especially the seals the first question they would ask was who got it

and it was actually kind of funny at first because I was known for like I like morale I like to tell stories and jokes I guess uh the common answer was yelling Neil got him they would say oh we are

never gonna 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 um around Virginia Beach DC New York and then then other Navy seals in in California and so that right there was it was more of uh yeah he's out there telling everyone just trying to get you know we'd be at lunch somewhere and a shot of the key that would show up and the bartender would say use they don't want to know but someone sent

was to be in the Navy for 30 years I was gonna be a buzz and seal instructor out in Portland out of the mustache and a cigar like I had my line ready and everything all right Jen's today we are gonna run 10 miles and of course by we I mean you so I feel like that but this this happened and it was just sort of um it got uncomfortable in the Navy and and then obviously you know it was in May of 2011 the greatest time of our lives and then August the worst time of our lives we lost

extortion one seven thirty one Americans to include the dog bark died and we went from planning misses to planning funerals morale just hit rock bottom and then you know we needed to move guys around and I decided that when I was gonna 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 into the front door I'm gonna leave for the front door after

another deployment and it was just time to get out and then I worked to work in Washington

“and a congressman congressman Carol and the loan from New York said you should probably”

donate something to the memorial museum I did donate a shirt anonymously and with it 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 hit the story I told the story I did actually Peter Doosey was there with a camera crew we were filming it for historic uh say and I told the story and watching their responses they all lost someone in 9/11 and just the way they came up to me and said putting a

face in a name with this this there will never be closure but this is healing and I you know

a lot of sitting around with it I was like you know what if I can help them I I've assumed risk before I can do it and then I 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 if you have something historic you know and 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 when I was you had it 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 but I mean that was a that was a weird awakening to kind of like the way forward you're can hear your launch of the line light and now what do you do right right and you

dealt with it and I know a lot of a lot of the opinion on you speaking out uh softened once they saw

“the piece on fox itself yeah you were you were given the credit away you that that's what you always”

do yeah that that that that week of sitting alone in a hotel watching all the horrible stuff I couldn't even watch the news just a horrible and 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 why would you say that and then but then the fox and a special came out it was really good Peter did a great shop 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 out but it was you and then I know with you Dakota mele of honor winner the the viper's came out like no he overstated what he did not true and it happened to Marcus too Marcus the Trell and his story loans if I've 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 I I mean

my own personal belief being a member of the media is there people who hate America and they don't

“like any story that reflects well in Americans or the American military or this country they”

much rather tell a story of like abuse that I've agreed all right hold on I'm gonna get your reaction of that and I'm gonna 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 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 gonna be the same that that it was going to change

forever and in the wake of that medal and you write in the book Obama was right nothing was the same again after word 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 saw on and so forth and 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 up 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 a long time but like so the one who came out started talking started writing this

these narratives he was actually embedded with the set that he was on the mission

we were never in the valley at the same time on my way in he was on his way out

and he left he left out went back to the base where it was safe while I continued to make four more

“trips and and so this was kind of his moment to I don't know and you know he talked a lot of”

the guys there's a lot of guys on the mission that day that that that have their own opinions but

all I'll say is is you know I don't I've never claimed to I've never claimed that I

killed anybody that day other than the good guy with the rock I don't know how many people I killed I don't know how many people I saved just in my mind I didn't kill enough because the award would be over and I didn't that didn't save enough because I lost a lot a lot of friends at 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 on there for get coming home

I flew in from a speech one day and I drove home and on the front page of the the biggest news paper in the state was my me on the front of it and it said metal is honor and I didn't ask this metal I didn't ask for the metal you know in the whole process of the metal there's only one statement that's not included and it's mine so 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 a contradicting

thing but it really just said more about him than me right he could have grabbed a weapon 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 a lot of people were a lot closer to my teammates and the guys and they're getting you know getting killed than I was um but again it's back to the individual choice it goes back to the preparation and you know Rob talked about a little bit earlier about you know why do you

you know why do some people act on chaos and why do some people not and 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 was the case of that day is is is most of them should have had no business um being in that in that situation and it showed whenever whenever they were tested and yeah I mean that's another piece of your story is that you you had the smarts to disobey the authorities when you could see the authorities were wrong and that they the trust in them was not warranted as we've seen now thanks to the investigations into your military

commanders who were calling shots that day have played out that you you were right that that they were giving you bad orders that they they 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 it's like

“the from a few good men oh do you only get to obey the orders you believe in or you know you”

it's up to you and he's like no I have to obey all the orders yes I get it right you you found a way to disregard what you were being told and you did save three dozen lives at least and and took a lot of lives that need to taking that day and and I don't want to skip over retrieve

the bodies of of four of your fallen comrades including first lieutenant Michael Johnson's death

sergeant Aaron Kenifick gunnery sergeant Edward Johnson Jr and hospital courseman 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 you know the people who loved those guys I mean these are extraordinary acts of honor so I don't know I mean when you how do you describe what what what made you see separate the wheat from the chef that day and know what to do

well you know so before we move on from you know the the people who criticize or come out because you know with with what I did that day you know I was I was 21 years old I left the room it was about the size of the comfort 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 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 and I was the only one that came back there I came back and I had a 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 and so you know anybody who criticizes that or what I did and they wanted to speat seven versus nine or six or whatever it is numbers I mean they're 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

because what I did was easy it 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 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 um you just described 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 the bodies of the fallen trying to save US troops afghan troops fight the enemy but like how do you describe it and if you lines like what what happened that

day on September 8th 2009 yeah I'll never forget like I turned like what we've got the truck

close of Rodriguez Chavez was driving and we turned and it it was like a riverbed going up into this valley and and I 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 the it was just I was always a worst case scenario guy and this was worse than my worst case

“scenario and 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 a new I was and all I could think about as each one of these guys are shooting at me um was I know I'm going to die you're going to get me but you're going to have to earn it and you know we came in and like on each trip we came in we would bring in the trucks behind us these little these little afghan toyodas and we would I would or four ranges yeah and I don't know where much one was but anyways it was all these trucks and we would throw

I would throw the bodies in the back of the truck I tried 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 and you know all I could think about that day was it wasn't about afghans it wasn't about you know the afghans soldiers versus us 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 um distinct between in these types of situations well you know I've

talked to Robo Neal 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 yeah 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 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 a 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 this for 20 years um afghanistan and iraq who were safer than they'd ever been in afghanistan when there was a US flag on on when someone was wearing a United States flag going over there and they were going through these places the women were allowed to go to school

it was as safe as it had ever been that they'd ever seen um when America is somewhere the places 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 uh 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 what 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 uh calling it an extraordinary success not the war

“but his his command of the withdrawal uh I mean look I I think that I mean this is this is his way”

right I mean you know it's it's um he sinks the boat and then he rescued three people off of it as you know 10 others drown and you know he it's a success that he saved those three people don't mind the fact that he sank the boat right um I mean this is you know the Biden Biden his administration are so incompetent um that the competency is led to to Russia doing this I mean I I can tell you right now that that is what America is on America shoulders because of

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 they can do anything and say anything because most of the media is going to go with it you even had genocide the other day saying that we need to stop relying on

and we need to become energy independent without creating more gas like it's like you know and I I you know we can we can all ride unicorns that would work what it it's just the the issue is it's a political reason to pull out of Afghanistan because they wanted the 20 year anniversary if look at us look at us and 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 bilan Raid we had some of the best practical minds

of the world come up with the perfect plan if we took those same 23 guys um yeah here we go and said uh come up with a worse way to get out of Afghanistan we would have come up with exactly what they did the worst way possible um I mean let's be honest everything they've touched being the administration has turned the shit and I should point out to the audience that you you're not like blindly anti Joe Biden 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 socks he's a Democrat and I know you've said before and he've said in this book when people ask me if I'm a Democrat or a Republican you would tell him what you said no I'm American and I I'm a big believer I don't need to blindly

“follow one party says I think party politics it's I think John Adams thought that too is the worst thing”

two parties in the story of the country you have people up there on Capitol Hill right now I love

the ones both sides you out they call themselves war hawks even though they've never been a war no one

of the family's been a war but they sure are good at setting us because a lot of these big-time contractors are huge funders they're realistic campaign everyone on Capitol Hill I mean if you're like Nancy Pelosi 19th term because we just need some change are you kidding me yeah but I mean that's that's where a lot of this nonsense comes from and and I think it's okay to go issue by issue what's best for America first and what's best for the world and a lot of this I I mean

one of my 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 there's no money in the care there's money in the process what's the last time the government started an agency and a year later said well clear that problem up just down the agency doesn't happen it grows and grows it's like biographial when we had it we as guys on the ground could call it the self-licking ice cream

phone not sure what to hell you do but to keep it 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 said make these decisions yeah go ahead nobody wants to tell their boss the truth in the military because one day they were

didn't they're going to be that boss you're going to fly in line up like you you ask a forced start general how the Afghan troops were going to do against the Taliban you're going to get a different answer than the E4 and the ground not going to happen 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 there was I 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 and then again and that's how you got all of the wounded out not to mention the bodies of the fallen but I think you made 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 difference to authority is not always what's right

what 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 this sort of blind knee jerk difference to authority that we've had for far too often I mean I think there's one good thing about COVID and the restrictions and all that maybe it's stopping that maybe it was the beginning of the end of the American peoples knee jerk difference to authority yeah I mean well I don't know

“I mean I think if something else let me 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 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 they're selected like they're they're in politically to be able to get those stars right that's one of the problems but yeah I see

it I see it firsthand I see it firsthand 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 through the leadership

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 meal it's like I can tell you right now the guys on the ground the guys who are the the lower and listed there's no there's no problem there like 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 generations weak well let 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 Jaco you know

“I think we mentioned Jaco earlier but you know Jaco talks about how there are no there are no bad”

teams there's only bad leaders and let me tell you something we've had quite a few bad leaders here in the past well 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 and this you know this 21st century David versus Goliath such a well and Jaco Jaco will and 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 about because I think I think it about this about you point you made the last time because you made this even before you wrote the book about you know the generals and so on um part of this is why people are reluctant to do too much and Ukraine if we hadn't done Iraq if we hadn't done Afghanistan for 20 years never mind

the initial response but the that I think everyone it would would agree that was justified except for the truly far left loons but if we hadn't done those things I think we know it we would have come to Ukraine saying oh yeah we need to go do something this is a you know sovereign nation it's 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 that we're the

beacon of freedom in the world and we're the strongest military in the strongest country and then when so on we got to go in there and no fly zone or something the reason we don't want to do it not only are we were 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 II 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 do up nuclear weapons on Japan to win that thing but

“now I think part of the issue with the leadership other than wanting their job and not wind”

up say your boss is a lot of these places as far down to joc was an exception because he was always

the the buck starts and stops here this is my fault right now that with their good at teaching a structure they think they're teaching leadership but nobody teaches winning you know we could pull that out of Afghanistan for I run 2005 we had we went in there we do what military does we crush people and then we leave give us turn no that's a deterrent I rack I mean no and still no one knows what that was all about other than the you know Dick Cheney was feeling his

pockets full of money I personally took like 11 shots of anthrises he had some stake in that but I mean now you look back at at Iraq and all the hundreds of thousands of people dead and we can I thought 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 guys dad let's invade I think the towers were still smoltering two weeks later and the pentagon

is coming up a plan to invade Iraq and this is the kind of stuff that's happening it's it's core leadership a lot of not you know personal greed personal power and no personal responsibility how does mark millies still have a job and the only one that fired was the the crown of the had the he didn't even he wasn't even disrespectful he just said where's the accountability boom you're fired put him in the break yeah that's exactly right there's been absolutely no kind of

belly for any of it like you say for Afghanistan in the first place in the way it went south

for the lies that we were told you guys we saw on 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 when 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 I 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 to stay union we're gonna hear President Biden try to spin this all like it's hugely successful from from you know Afghanistan to you know Putin stands 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 was going to

do it and you weren't able to stop like how did any of that happen and so accountability at least with the politicians can happen at the voting box with these generals not so much um listen well I'll give you the last word and we don't wrap it but I only give you guys the last word unlike the regular mob post it now there so isn't it in the middle of my my imaginary viewer match she sits in Iowa and uh she works all day and she comes home she has a glass of wine

she takes care of her kids but she you know she's tired she can't pay that much attention to the

all cut from the same block and uh it doesn't matter what you look like you're aware of from

“you can do anything and one of the points I've been making recently to is the 24 hour new cycle”

and social media is not real which real is out that the real person is coming home taken care of kids the real person uh don't you know that really I've mentioned before real america's not the people yelling at each other on who's left or who's right that it's the convoy that starts in southern California that rose through Texas new Mexico picks up people to go to Florida they help the people who are hurting from a hurricane 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 uh and uh you know don't don't live in the past learn from the past

get over it move forward mm and perfectly said the way forward now Dakota while I have you

here and we've we've given each other shit about robbs interview will you will you be my memorial day interview this year I would love to talk to you about your mission and uh those we lost and and just get into it more detail it'd be such an honor uh the honor would be mine and that of my viewers and my listeners I'm sure we'll love it I look forward I didn't want to give it short shift 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 you both and thank you for your service thank you for having us really appreciate it 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 gatherers guide to the 21st century out today we are gonna 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 mm the news is not good uh Brett Weinstein joins

me now along with Heather Hayig his wife we'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'd like to witsy background too like the cabin it's it's really it's doing something for me all right thank you people sometimes uh tell us it looks like a sauna but uh it's cozy

“I think it's it's bringing me home I want to see like a little fire place in the background and”

maybe we'll have a little cognac before the interviews over um okay so can I just start with this since you guys went through and and people I'm sure by this point know the story of what happened you would evergreen um university and how you were basically pushed out because you had the temerity to say maybe we shouldn't force students to skip um school in honor of certain race based issues it's not really hard to short form what happened to you but Brett and I did

a long podcast where we got into it and it's a it's a very compelling story my point is can we talk for a minute about Peter Bogosian I had him on the show yesterday he resigned from Portland State not far from wherever green is really and it it's just such a shame you know I just I want to it must have brought something up and you guys because you too were forced at your you know liberal professors at a liberal university effectively forced out for not being woke enough

let me start with you Heather since you and I have yet to speak together yeah well again it's such a pleasure to talk with you Megan and um Pete is a friend and we didn't actually know that that this was in the offing exactly but uh he has been struggling with the PSU administration and the ideology there for years as you are well aware so you know the letter that he posted on Barry Weiss's sub stack was telling that's you know the letter that he wrote to the administration

detailing a little bit hardly all of what he endured not just the kinds of the ramifications of the ideology itself but the methods that people will stoop to the the lies and slander that really despicable that people seem willing to stoop to because they think they're in the right is you know really telling of our times and it is it also reveals how badly we need a functional higher ed system and how much we don't have one at the moment. I was thinking about it as we

Larry Elder was complaining you know today's the recall election in California and he was like okay so a member of my team got um 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 um professor's colleagues pulling out the microphone wires when he had people on campus including you too right where we're not now that I'm looking at you it was you too in Christina Hoffs summers right

who along with James Lindsay the the three of them were the grievance studies affair and James

“to more so we were it was the four of us on stage and right introduced us and I was actually”

making the outrageous claim at the moment that the sound was pulled that men are taller than women and that was and you know this this is it but yeah like exactly now that is both true and actually um not the full story it's actually worse than that that uh it apparently that whole thing was was timed it was staged it was yet more cosplaying and that suggests that um that many of these people are engaged what I in what I have called a kind of read-only activism that nothing

that you can say to some of them can actually even enter into their framework they already know what

they know and they're already gonna do what they do all right I've got it as 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 larking right you know costume playing long action role playing the idea that we are in fact uh on a stage you know it's you know at some level it harkens back to you know to Shakespeare perhaps all the worlds of stage we are all in a performance and it suggests that you come therefore step outside of the performance that you're engaging in like this is not your real life and we're seeing

a lot of that of course well there there is of course uh an honorable version of cosplay where people actually uh create quite elaborate costumes and you know regenerate characters from their favorite superhero narratives or whatever it might be Star Trek and of course there's a long history of people reenacting civil war battles and things like this so- and Renfer right Renison's fairs right so it's not that it is inherently a bad fair

“commoner secret there Heather I want to know more about you keep going for it so I did want to say”

a couple things about about Peter that I know are going to get lost in his story that we have actually had the privilege of not only participating in events that he 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 uh at an extraordinary level he invests everything in teaching students how to think and not what to think and the idea that everything from you know

a bag of feces to trumped up charges that resulted in investigations these the the use of every possible weapon to silent somebody who's saying something that is obviously true is it is it is a mechanism for generating a false appearance of consensus which then persuades people that

“something that isn't true is and that that's what the attempt is here and having forced him out they”

have succeeded in something which will harm us all yeah as it turns out Peter is a wonderful human being as well as being an excellent thinker and professor but he shouldn't need to be right you know just just like a rape victim shouldn't need to have led a perfect and honorable life in advance of a horrible attack and that attack being actually you know having the attack be revealed as what it is so true should those of us who are seeing what is true in higher ed not need to have been

paragons of of perfection in order to have our stories heard in fact you know we we we know of some of these stories where people you know maybe weren't terrific professors maybe their scholarship wasn't as good as it might be and it's harder to get those stories heard and that is that is conflating two things right that you you can be a canary in this particular coal mine and we need more of them and we should not force the standards to be that those people also have to be

excellent in every um areas of their lives as it turns out Peter is you know and reminds him out my dad was a college professor he died when I was only 15 of a sudden heart attack

at age 45 but he he was a college professor first at Syracuse University and then at the

state University of New York at Albany and he used to go into my public schools when I was enrolled year after year and he would say to the teachers the same thing and it was his own philosophy too which was I don't really care exactly what you teach my child just don't destroy her love of learning and it it just seems like that's we've totally abandoned that right that no one cares about the love of learning of these students on college campuses or K through 12 it's all about indoctrination

yeah it's it's actually cryptically and attempt to destroy the capacity to learn and I think

incapable of learning they could not see the lesson in front of them they could not understand

that they were on the wrong track and so they kept doubling down on the same incorrect ideas and it resulted in the collapse of the college so that 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 reform you two certainly have and so you know we've been exposed to YouTube and your expertise in a way we wouldn't otherwise have been right unless we wound up on evergreen campus but it is such a loss because we do need to get to these college students before the indoctrination is utterly and totally complete and the more we remove folks like you from those campuses and yeah yes give you a national platform which is you know

has other benefits the more we lose the opportunity to get in while they get in is good especially on these very liberal campuses that's that's definitely right you know we need everyone needs to have an openness about them with regard to being receptive to new ideas and to things that might

“be true of the world experiences they have not had that sound at first wrong to them that sound”

like they run counter to their world view and you know it's true that psychologically used to be anyway the liberals were imagined to be and were found to be higher on the openest scale and these you know psychological measures but that doesn't seem to be the case with the brand of and I tend to call it pseudo liberalism that is at least found on campuses and it's found in a lot of a lot of the media now that this is this is running exactly counter to what you know

what old school liberalism was about 100% yeah it's a liberalism all right so your book is not about bookism it's really about life and how we deal with the incredibly fast rate of change that we happen to be seeing you know for whatever reason I was born in 1970 you guys were born

“somewhere around there and for whatever reason we're all on this earth at this particular time”

together we don't know why the cosmos dictated it or somebody else or nobody but here we are and you're you seem to be pausing that the rate of societal change it right now is dizzying and that our I'm just quoting now our brains bodies and social systems are perpetually out of sync we are generating new problems at a new and accelerating rate and it is making us sick so what what was the point of writing a hunter-gatherers guide to the 21st century evolution

and the challenges of modern life well we found over 15 years of teaching that the model that we used ourselves and we talked to our students was actually very liberating it didn't solve every problem that we faced but it simplified what it was to live because you simply understood what you were built for and why that was at odds with the world that you found yourself in

and so the the recognition that the problem is not chaos that it's actually definable

and that the various maladies we have are addressable by thinking your way through them is is powerful and our students frankly frequently asked us to provide a book like this so that they could share what they were learning with people who weren't in the class because they felt it changed their lives but it was hard hard to convey so what was the problem more specifically well if you think about what it is like to live it is very confusing when you face the

question of how am I to deal with my love life why am I chronically unable to fall asleep why am I confronted with a desire to eat things that I'm told I shouldn't all of these things have a underlying cause they are symptoms of a disease that we don't diagnose and recognizing

what that disease is is actually the first step to figuring out how to minimize the harm

that comes to us from the mismatch between what we are built for and the world we live in well you can't go ahead either well I would say authorities largely want to hand down very simple rubrics to us and it is you know it is famously true both in COVID and from you along ways back that the authoritative messaging as to what we should do with regard to say food oh definitely eat a low fat high sugar diet that'll be good for you oh no it turns out sugar is

bad for you well it should have been obvious and it was 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

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 what we were doing you know for ourselves”

in our own work with our students was framing and 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 anything that comes your way and say ah that does make sense I'm going to incorporate that into my model and how I live or no that doesn't make sense and and therefore

I can ignore it even though an authority is saying it well so just to get practical so and if you

take an evolutionary look at the way we eat I mean we're not we always told that that the sugar

tastes good it's like one of those things that the 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

“more why isn't it natural to have lots and lots of sugar and and also tons and tons of red meat all”

day right if we're going to eat like our ancestors did well the problem isn't so much the sugar itself in fact we are wired to seek it for a reason the problem is that we have figured out how to generate it in such abundance and because our ancestors never faced in abundance of such a substance we don't have a circuit that tells us when enough is enough effectively programming a creature to eat sugar when it's available in a world where there isn't very much sugar is a

fine modality but when you have that program and there's sugar sitting on the table when you sit down at the diner you've got a problem that is a good point and it's also true that you know most of us if we think about what humans used to be have this sort of romantic notion our heads of hunter-gatherers on the African Savannah and that is indeed what the title of the book alludes to and that that is a piece of our history and you know some of us where you know

in the Paleolithic on the African Savannah 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 adaptiveness

but hardly the only one so we're also adapted to being alive from 3.5 billion years ago

and to being animals and to being fish and to being mammals and primates and within 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 it. Well I mean don't you don't you just have to look around America to see that right the the obesity problem and it's not just you know a few pounds extra on your average American it's morbid obesity on so many millions of people because we have seem to have lost our ability to regulate to self-regulate the abundance of sugar everywhere the abundance of processed food everywhere and it's cheap so it's easy and then we live these

lives that are overly stressed and overly depressed and food is the soothing bomb but all of that seems to be playing into what you guys are saying yes obesity makes a good example because you can see it but the point that we are trying to make is that that same phenomenon happens in all sorts of places that you can't see so our psychological ill health is of the same sort but somebody walking by you who is 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 your born your born into a world and if that world was well well tuned to you then you would develop in a way that would not leave you at odds with it so what that means is

for example the first job of parents has to be to limit as much as possible the novel influences

whose consequences we don't know many of the pathologies that we see we treat symptomatically but really what we should be doing is looking at their cause and trying to exclude it from our children

“absolutely that's that's what's so crazy about the way we live right now is oh I'm depressed I need”

a pill you know I have anxiety I need I need a pill as opposed to what what is the cause of my

and the algorithms that we shove our children in front of and child pornography not child pornography

“but pornography consumed by young children and how damaging it is obviously we need to keep our kids away”

from it but how how in a world that's ubiquitous with that stuff do we do that and how do we protect ourselves from these terrible influence influences on our mental and physical well-being.

Let's spend a minute on sleep because this is something that's like the never-ending

quest to get enough and I know I know in the book you basically say that we're supposed to alright let me get it allow celestial bodies to set our sleep wake pattern and I read that and thought do Bretton Heather have kids because you know they will not allow the celestial bodies to dictate wake times and sleep times and really just life doesn't allow it either. Well I wouldn't leap to that conclusion it happens that modern life does not facilitate this

and you know we have occasional sleep issues in our house too but I will say we have taken neither Heather or I had any direct experiences 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 so we've gotten through childhood and there have there were not wild sleep problems very early on there were issues of how do you put the child down and do what needs to be done to be a modern person without upsetting the child but by and large we have tried to isolate them from artificial light after bed and then the run

up to going to bed and it's been very effective. What do you mean by artificial light just mean blue light like we're talking about on the screens or what? Well our our family certainly operates on the model that certain spectra of light trigger the mind to believe that it is daytime and that our light bulbs very often put that out so we've biased in the direction of warm light which tends not to trigger these things and essentially if you lean towards the spectrum of light

that is put out by a fire which is something our ancestors have long history with after dark it does not disrupt where as blue light as you point out is disrupted. So just to be clear we reject a paleo vision of humanity we are not trying to restore an ancient way of living but we are recognizing that there are many ways in which how we have been is that which we are best adapted to so early on like when the child is a tiny baby you know really touching an adult

who loves them and who will care for them is the thing that will entrain their sleep patterns

“and I think the point about celestial bodies is the prospect for most moderns of”

actually abiding by the sun's rising and setting especially if you live far from the equator and so it's highly variable throughout the year is is laughable right we're not actually going to do that that said being able to actually get out 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 will absolutely do wonders for your ability to

continue on with a more normal sleep pattern afterwards if your sleep was disrupted so you know finding finding the cycles in both your own body and the cycles that are being entrained by the celestial bodies 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 is the expert say it's like figure out how you're actually feeling and you know when at some level you know letting children sleep

seems like both obvious and absurdly simple advice and yet of course both schools schedules don't allow for it I was gonna say I'd love to let my kids sleep in you there's such a great feeling when you see your sleeping child you know here she's getting the the rest they need but of course school starts so ridiculously early I feel like I'm like still scarred from having to hit that 720 bell during my high school years I'll tell you a story so if you didn't make home room

by 720 you would get basically a demaret you know you'd get sort of a black ball and um if you

got a few of them then you would get internal suspension and that is what I got and so I wound

day and I am not alone because there was a recent study saying almost half the population suffers

“from sleep related issues people who sleep 30% less than they need to for 10 days they don't fully”

recover their cognitive function even seven nights after recovery sleep so you can't pace sleep death you know if you screw it up you can't get it back um previous researchers 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 hedon bright you tell me if you've if you've done this there's

something just out in the news today called revenge bedtime procrastination revenge bed 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 and bed you don't turn off the lights and go to sleep you waste your time on insta or Facebook or watching real housewives are doing something totally stupid utterly mindless maybe shopping online you're trying to create some me time because you're better 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 we'll wind up you know costing you a car accident or something far

worse than missing an hour on Twitter earlier in the day so anyway the solution to all this according to two evolutionary biologists is what if if you can't wake up with the sun you can't go to sleep with you know the sun's set what are our other options well just to go back to

some of what you were saying earlier part of the problem is that we that we humans love it when we

hear numbers and much of the modern world grabs on to numbers comes up with simple solutions that sound quantitative like you need eight hours of sleep a night or you need 1800 calories a day to you know to not gain weight and these numbers have some truth in them for some people with limits but those numbers once you have them they seem like they're the only numbers that count this is you know this is the risk of having numbers and this is the risk of reductionism

as we've pseudo quantification so and what is that Mary what is reductionism as a pseudo qualification what does that mean so reductionism refers to looking at a complex system and saying what is the thing that I can count for instance in it and imagining that that thing that you've

“counted is the only thing that matters about it so everyone has a sleep deficit if we could only”

get them to sleep for eight hours then that would solve it well not necessarily because among other things if you know if you imagine that you can just add up the sleep hours that you need in a week and as long as you get that number of hours every week you're fine well no some of the research you just related reveals that you can't actually do that you can't just lump numbers together and add them in a complex system like you would if you were doing simpler 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 slept or exercised so complex systems are just that complex and reducing them with things that we can measure and count

sound scientific but it's very often a clooge a proxy that may not actually be an accurate proxy I see this goes back this goes back to what you're saying at the top which was your students feeling frustrated about you know I'm doing all the things I'm told to do and why aren't they working for my life wire and I thinner why don't I feel more arrested it's like well it doesn't actually work that way and I'll tell you I've seen it just in my own life on on sleep I do do intermittent

“fasting we did a whole show about it and I think you guys like that but it's very hard to do”

intermittent fasting or any other sort of eating regulation if you haven't had enough sleep they're so intertwined right if you are sleep deprived you eat I do I weigh over eat much more than if I'm hung over if I'm sleep deprived I'm going to break my good eating habits so I think you asked the question what can you do and we can obviously point that question at any of the sub topics but the overarching point that we make in the book is that effectively

disrupting what works as little as possible is the objective and so there there's sort of two tools that are a mere image of each other there's the precautionary principle which many people are familiar with and Chesterton's fence which most will not be familiar with but it's it's effectively the inverse Chesterton's fence suggests that were two people walking down a road

the other should say not until you figure out why it was placed there can you remove it because

“you don't know if it's still doing that job or if that job is irrelevant so when looking at”

something like sleep one should try to figure out what does work the discovery that on a camping trip that you naturally feel like going to bed shortly after the sun has gone down and you wake up easily with the sun is a clue right that system still works in all of us it's just being thrown data that confuses it and creating these kinds of regular patterns in your life 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 much like it is likely to be much better because it's a natural trigger of neurological systems than something synthesized in a lab novely and you know interestingly

“we talk in the book about the patterns that children pick up when they are learning what it's”

like to be a human and when to go to sleep and we talk about the question of whether or not there are signals in breast milk that may allow a mother you know we tend to think of breast milk as food but it's food plus a lot of information and the mother may be sending information to the baby about what time it is it's time to start ratcheting down and heading towards sleep and if you've used a breast pump and not recorded the time of day that you pumped the breast milk

and you feed the child that milk at an arbitrary time you may be sending chaotic mosquitoes that's actually yeah and that's actually a hypothesis that one of our students Joseph Jarvis proposed and did some research on which you know we we cite her in the book and it's it's remarkable so you know is is the ability to pump a breast milk a modern convenience that is

“super valuable to many mothers absolutely it wasn't for me and I know it is for many many people”

so it's you know we're not taking a regressive traditionalist approach and saying you know the only way to do things is what was done in the past but as we introduce modern amenities to our lives let us think about what systems we might be disrupting and how to disrupt them as little as possible so in terms in this one you know it just it actually wouldn't take much more to if you know if you're in this position of being a mother to an infant and you're expressing breast milk

don't just state stamp it which which we all do so that it doesn't you know spend too much time in the freezer but time stamp it too and you know give your baby milk expressed at the same time of days when you're feeding I like that I mean what what get it hurt a lot of this stuff is like what what could it hurt it's a one step closer to how we used to live and there's no downside if you've got it in the freezer Jan is dealing with my good friend from Fox she was on the show yesterday

and she and I had our we had our second babies within six weeks of one another and we had all this

breast milk mine and hers stored in our respective freezers when super storm sandy hit and both of our houses lost power and it it was freezing now you could it was like I don't care I'll put my kids in 45 sweaters save the breast milk it was like whatever has to be done it's liquid gold all right next up we're gonna get into some highly controversial topics like the difference between men and women news flash there are some yeah there are some we're not the same and we're gonna

dive into this crazy MMA fight from last Friday we're a trans woman absolutely obliterated her female opponent it's raising a lot of eyebrows you'll see why we'll be right back welcome back to the Megan Kelly show everyone we are joined today by co-hosts of the very popular dark horse podcast Brett Weinstein and Heather Huying 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 we are quite proud yes yes we're the let's start in the 30,000 foot level and you walk us through some of those differences based on evolutionary biology yeah well a conservative view is that in our lineage we have been sexually reproducing with two and

only two sexes for 500 million years well it's possible at the belt 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

we won't go into what the value is here but it hasn't reversed in our lineage and it involves

“two you know two gametes coming together to make a new and new being and those two gametes have to”

do two things they have to bring together not just the DNA from two different beings have half from mom, half from dad but they also have to bring the the cytoplasm the machinery of the cell

and they also have to find with another and so basically they divide the labor so one of the gametes

we call it the egg and we call the things that have eggs females brings the cytoplasm has this big bulky gamete that has all of the machinery of the cell and then that leaves the other job 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 to have an asymmetry in the investment of of the partners of the parents and so if only one parent is going to invest further in offspring it will tend to be females

this then gets into you know and and none of this is new none of what I've just said is new or

frankly controversial in evolutionary biology where it gets more interesting is if gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex and sex is binary there are males and there are females well behavioral manifestation of sex or the software of sex is going to be you know it's going to map on to 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 obligant maternal care in the form of pregnancy and lactation and breastfeeding that is true and that's not going to change and there have been some things that

have tended to follow from that with females being more typically domestic in other regards

but those things can change and those things are changing and there's nothing wrong with them changing as long as you don't deny the underlying reality of the differences between the sexes. Well we definitely are doing that Brett I mean in today's day and age there we are being told that

“gender is at 100% a social construct and that there was just some article it was I think a parenting”

article and 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 their boys or girls you know like help me and was you know shamed appropriately for you know what are you saying like it shouldn't be hard grow up evolve right but that's that's the current fancy is that it's gender is 100% a social construct. Yeah it's nonsense and it's nonsense

in several different ways one thing that has to be said is that we make the point very strongly in the book that just because something is cultural does not take it out of the realm of evolutionary and adaptive culture is just as adaptive as genes it is just as biological and so even noticing that certain things are transmitted culturally does not free you from obligation to the evolutionary

“logic but the more subtle point I think is that the logic of male and female as Heather points out”

are incredibly ancient and they are also incredibly consistent so if when 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 where is the pollen the pollen doesn't care. I mean we all with anyone. Pollins all over your your car and your house and your life because the males are effectively they don't have any reason not to mate with any tree that will have them so that a symmetry is not about animals at all it's certainly not about humans it's about a strategic fact that that arises every time you have these two different size gametes as Heather points out and so

that doesn't mean that we can't change the dynamics in humans and in fact we are changing the dynamics in humans and in what many ways it's very positive I mean the the breast milk example is a

good thing doesn't mean you have to do it but having the option is a good thing so it's not that we

can't change these things but we are it's not those who think that this has something to do with recent human history and one group imposing it's it's 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 I said as 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 his female the one who was biologically female was presenting his 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 his male actually gave birth to so it's a biological male sitting there going I don't understand the 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 you know pollinating everywhere and saying the book that women tend to be more altruistic trusting and compliant also more prone to depression and anxiety disorders men or more prone to being diagnosed with ADHD that men prefer working with things women prefer working with people you know in some circles that's not all you're not allowed to say things like that that's the book's one step away from what James Daymore 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 this sort of circles back to where you started talking about Peter Begozen and you know what what he was facing at Portland State and what all faculty really are facing who have a fundamental belief in underlying reality of the universe you know we we should all be able to talk to all range of people across all demographics and the one kind of people who I find it

very difficult to to have a conversation with is those who actually don't believe that there is an underlying reality and that's quite that's quite far from from saying you know how close are we to getting there what are the best ways to get there but is there an underlying reality yes yes in fact there is so in the end you know this this is the mistake of the extrapolated postmodernism we're dealing I was just gonna 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 or reality everything's

“misogable and arguable yeah and I think you know there's there is a there is a base”

value in some elements of postmodernism but the way that is instantiated on the in the modern academy I modern campuses and then you know crawling off campuses speeding off campuses into the media for instance in Hollywood is it's batshit you know it doesn't make any sense and so you know you can be for instance you can be gender non-conforming as I was and still have no confusion at all about whether or not you're a girl or a boy or a man same had there I'm the same as you

when I was a kid I I look like a boy I acted like a boy in today's day and age they tried 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 sounds like you're grateful for the parents you had I'm grateful for the parents I had and especially had we been born 40 years later my god you know that would have been a very dangerous moment and it'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 T's situations like this MMA fighter it made a lot of news yesterday uh her name is Alana McLaughlin it's a biological man who transitioned to being a woman in 2010 at age 38 so we are well past puberty and all the changes that come to the male body thanks to testosterone and so on uh Alana served as a man in the U.S. Army special

forces and now as an MMA fighter in in the women's league fought somebody named Celine provost

it took Alana three minutes and 32 seconds into the second round to beat Celine in a video that is

disturbing to watch um but we're told if you're not because Alana McLaughlin passed all the medical 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 a viscerate a biological female I think we have the tape if uh”

yeah take a look at it find out as provost comes out swinging as we expect it has one MMA fight

a ton of punishment coming in getting picked away there as they get in the glitch and this is where

“McLaughlin could have an advantage get this punishment big right from a glove from second”

overhand did not find it protection there from provost and the tap Alana McLaughlin victorious again her MMA debut I don't know I feel uncomfortable I want to be supportive of Alana but I also feel really uncomfortable seeing that there's so much to say here you know trans trans is real and there is a lot in the discussion around trans people and trans rights that is actually complex and uh not totally clear no matter how much truck you hold with reality but trans women in women

sports is the shallow end of the bull 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 sports is because uh the idea that she passed hormone panels at whatever age she is now 40 eight

“a guess she was yeah um is is absurd is 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 be the only things that indicate whether you have benefited from being male no they're not just to pick two other things there are different kinds of effects of hormones and in endocrinologists

refer to activation versus organizational effects but basically on or off are you currently benefiting

from testosterone that's just the activation effects it doesn't it doesn't reflect all of the so-called organizational effects like I know that you've got bone length and strength right I'm going to just stand you by quickly had it 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 will pick it up right here uh in just a few don't go away welcome back everyone of the Megan Kelly show we are joined today by Brett Weinstein and Heather

Haying 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 uh 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 uh bone length bone density bone shape you know female and male skeletons are different women are adapted to have wide hips four child bearing and yes that may sound conservative and all but it is true and that means that we are less stable for instance just just that one simple parameter it is also true for instance that the wide 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 of science and it's more like scientism that says ah we can measure the thing therefore therefore that's all that matters and and it just doesn't so um you know i would say the number of mediocre male athletes who transition and become elite female athletes tells us all we need to know it's so true it's so true we have of course you know in Connecticut we had on a couple of the girls who get burned by this who are runners at the high school level who were

kicking butt and then the guy competitors who were biologically male who ran as males the previous spring and couldn't win anything crossed over without taking any hormones without doing anything different uh and in the fall started crushing the biological girls and the biological girls raised their hands and said this when it's still in the field fair and then it was your biggest your biggest and the poor girls were like we I am I I don't want to be big at it I just kind of wanted to be fair but can I

“expand it beyond that prep 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-nage to admit that I had a great talk with Abigail Schreyer about it how there's a there's a reason beyond discrimination while 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 an absolute parity in every field and every college there was a report out today from the national student clearinghouse saying we're losing men on

college campuses like crazy that there was 1.5 million fewer students enrolled in higher ed today

then there were in 2016 men account for 71% of the decline soon two women will graduate for every

a target at 50/50 representation you've got just this increasingly lopsided approach to admissions

when it's 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 well there's a question about what there is even to solve and as we get better and better at generating opportunity that really is available to a wider range of people are 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 what all of this activism is is it really targeted at problems that need solving undoubtedly some of it is but a large amount of it appears to be activism for its own sake and I would point out you said you're born in 1970 that happens to be the year that the song Lola by the kinks rose to the top ten in both the UK and the US I'm behalf of my serious

“XM colleagues I thank you for that bit of music that's great 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 wanted to stay for my Lola and the point is he is actually

sympathetic to her causes I never realized it was telling a story like all I know is Lola

Lola Lola Lola Lola Lola Lola Lola well there is a story there the story is go back and 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 boomer's understood this and is it tough to be trans undoubtedly but the point is not only is the recognition that there was a problem to be solved at least 50 years old but we've

“made progress since then the fact is almost everybody is on board with the idea that you should”

effectively be able to present as you wish within reason but there are places where that has to stop it does not allow a man to declare himself female and use that loophole to compete fairly in women's sports it obviously can't be and there's an even worst 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 the last I looked was about a month ago not a single request for transfer had been denied from biological male in a men's prison who says I'm trans and by the way you don't have to have a history of being trans either you can suddenly come to

“Jesus in the prison and say ah ha I think I'm really a woman and they will transfer you nothing's”

been denied yet and the women and the women's prisons are terrified they have to not only you know live amongst these you know people claiming to be female who may have a sexual predator history they've got to be behind bars in a you know nine by twelve sell 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 it before but every time it every turn the women lose this debate at every time you know whether it's running

in a race at an MMA fight while sitting in a prison women who are there with their daughters in a locker room who say I know she's a little young to see a penis come out of nowhere you know while we're in the women's locker room they're not trying to be insensitive they're trying to ask for some sensitivity to biology and as you point out millions of years of human history yeah it's societally sanctioned misogyny and yes we're good we're way of putting it we're year older than you

but we're basically a world gen Xers here and I I don't know about you but I'm gonna guess Megan

that you and I had similar experiences growing up on opposite coasts of being girls who felt like the world was our oyster we could do anything we were now allowed to consider doing anything that once of in the domain of men and that is not the same as imagining that we were men or we're gonna become men or that we're gonna displace men but just that the opportunities were now open and where are we going backwards yeah oh 100% I mean it's it's crazy to me because at no point

hair and what really looked like a boy face and certainly boy fashion and all my toys were

“incredible Hulk and you know superheroes my mom begged me to get a dress and a doll I was like hell”

no well look at me now right like in today's day in AJB sending me in it go have a double

mastectomy and it's like we've lost our ever loving minds in 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 this into this here's a quote from the book we're stealing childhood from the young you say stealing childhood from the young by organizing and scheduling their play for them by keeping them from risk and exploration by controlling and sedating them with screens and algorithms and legal drugs practically guarantees that they will arrive at the

age of adulthood without being capable of being adults that explains so much about what we're discussing and what we're seeing on college campuses and and with individuals now who just they're

not very good at adultsing they do seem really quick to go to the drugs go to the screens

and don't seem to be able to handle conflict or adversity at all that's right and you know it misunderstands what childhood is we have the longest childhoods of any organism on the planet but other organisms have childhoods too and the other organisms that have childhoods other apes elephants dolphins we wolves what they're doing during that childhood is learning how to be their future selves learning how to be you know apes dolphins elephants wolves whatever it is

and they do that through play they do that through exploration they don't do that by being protected from all risk so what do you get like what what do you maximize if you do the things that we

lay out in what you just read well you get as close to a guarantee as you can possibly imagine

that your child will survive to the age of 18 what you do not get is an 18 year old who has

“any functionality in the world so you have to expose your child to risk you have to you know”

with every passing you know day a week a month year let them do more and more let them take more and more risk and tragedy may happen and you know every time I say that I literally get visceral chills you know we have been lucky you know I do not know how you go on if you do as 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

bread is Rose Kennedy and the Kennedy family and she 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 you're not allowed to damage your eyes your skull your neck or your back and these aren't perfect rules but the basic point is we expect you to live in such a way that things are

gonna happen and you know when they do our question is effectively what did you learn and the point is our kids are gonna be excellent at managing risk as adults because they will have seen a lot they

“will have made their errors when those errors were relatively easy to recover from and that's what”

we should be doing for everybody and it is the exact opposite of what we are doing the conventional wisdom now is creating incredibly fragile adults which as you say is what's happening in college campuses it's why we're seeing that rebellion it's effectively a tantrum a demand for others to solve the discomfort of life which is a very dangerous trend so I also do a little speech on Stanford 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 talk 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 what you're pro bullying no but I mean I might be pro bullying a little bit like you don't I mean just like a little bullying you don't have saying yeah you know like we don't we don't

have to use that word I get why you would and you'll maybe 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 we're exactly if you think they're going to learn it like do you think they wake up at their 18th birthday having been magically

this by experience this is not hard-wired you know we're not we're not moms 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 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 is being in favor of abrasion right the point is it's about the things that guarantee abrasions will happen and what you don't want is adults who don't

know how to deal with the bully who cave in the face of a bully and we're seeing an epidemic of this kind of cowardice now precisely because we have over insulated children from the bullies that would teach them how to stand up yeah it's it's like I used to be obsessed with Oprah less so these days but I used to be obsessed with her and she used to say and now I say to myself

whenever life throws some massive challenge at me the first reaction is thank you

because it's an opportunity to grow to build your superhero muscles there's there's only one way to get there and it is to go over those huge mountains right take them on one at a time and I do feel to some extent this way about my children when something negative happens in their life socially it's a great opportunity to learn and I'd much rather your point Heather to have it while they're in my home my husband and I can speak to them about it and help them navigate

it then just protect them from it and leave this new bio 18 year old out there a college to try to figure it out on his or her own absolutely and you know so Brett mentioned that we tend to ask our children after something has gone wrong what did you learn but we also ask them that when something almost goes wrong right and we you know we talk in the book about the value of close calls which is exactly the content of what we're discussing now but you know usually

if someone has narrowly escaped an injury or a social faux pas they want to move on and pulling them back to it and saying hey what do you learn we'll be met with disbelief at best but spending just a little time to figure out okay how could I you know how could I have done even better with that close call we'll help you move into the future with greater

“grace and skill and then you know the fewer of those conversations you have to have in the future”

well but what one of the things that's annoying on a bigger level is how much abuse we're keeping on to our children and how we've settled on living in this constantly abusive way I mean it's yeah I went to this parenting seminar in New York City last year or the year before I noticed 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 kids 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 days so they can go to the perfect Ivy League college and they have to be in 10 different clubs and they have to play at least three sports and they're they're doing drugs on the weekend as an escape just to get their minds off of this hideous lifestyle forget sleep right forget any deposits into wellness going to sleep with the sundown and waking up with a

no no right so it's like I was noticing that 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 your other 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 that I should not go again if you

need a day you did take a day why don't 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

day that's the school should be better for the students in the first place that's it so what so what

do we do about that the way we've agreed to live well again back to the question of how one raises children we can speak best to the way we've raised our children and we can say in some sense what its consequences been we have been incredibly open with them about virtually every topic and in fact we've been open with them about everything there were a couple of topics we delayed slightly because we thought it would be confusing too early but sex drugs rock and roll

the whole shoot match we have talked to them about the reality of the world they are going into we've talked to them about the fact that they have not been provided the tools to navigate it and they will have to bootstrap those tools and that we are here to help them figure out how to do it but in fact being told how to do it won't work one has to actually learn that process right

“you can know how somebody climbs el capitan without being able to climb a damn thing you have to”

you have to go climb yourself to learn how it's done and it has worked very well our kids have their

one could easily forgive them for for being terrified that's not their experience because they've

“grown up looking at it and it's not going to come as a shock to them when they emerge into that world”

and you know maybe what we've done is a prototype but I would recommend that people take something like this approach because you're not doing your kids any favors by insulating them from a world that will be as bad or worse when they get to it the big reveal at the end and they say oh my gosh what what have you been hiding from me all right up next we're going to talk about marriage and how society is changing as a result of declining marriage rates in our

country bread and Heather have some ideas on that we're going to discuss them next welcome 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-gatherers guy to the 21st century and we're diving into their possible solutions to a world in disarray okay so I just

“want to pick it up back where we left off before we move on to relationships on child rearing”

and read the following from your book if your child has been made totally safe living a life with no risk then you have done a terrible job of parenting yes love that agreed then you go on to say we should create new opportunities for engagement for creation for discovery for activity that provides an alternative and this is where it took an unexpected turn for me that provides

an alternative to the boredom that leads to addiction did not see that coming I always thought

addiction was the product of family history trauma right bullying none excess of bullying something like that I never I never tied it in my mind to boredom love to have you expand on that well there are of course many factors which go into addiction and it's you know it's multi-factorial but one of them does appear to be boredom so there are and we we cite this study in the book or one of them there are some studies with rats which basically demonstrate that sure if you give

“rats I think the study I'm thinking of is with methamphetamine if you give a methamphetamine”

and you give nothing else to do they use the methamphetamine they become addicts whereas if you give the same rats methamphetamine and you enrich their environment you give them other things to do that rats like to do they are more likely to do the other things so simple model yeah the simple model of we are simply physiologically liable to become addicted if you expose us to certain drugs it's again this reductionist over

simplified view of of what we are and it says 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 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 hmm so you're doing your kit of

favor in so many ways by helping them build their life up and and letting them find ways of filling up their life but I 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 I all 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 was 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 but but 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

makes it very hard to be a utopian if you've actually had to make something work and so in some sense the place that I actually do feel sympathetic for this movement is that I do think they have been betrayed they have not been provided a world that educates them properly that exposes them to things that would make them highly capable and so in some sense their anger is understandable but their anger is so deeply misinformed about what a solution looks like that we have an obligation

not to listen we actually have to address this in a way that might work rather than give into

in her book she has a it's a very useful prescription in case you see the sudden onset of gender dysphoria in your teenage child you know it wasn't there before and one day she comes home and says oh you know I think I might be a boy and you know you have very good reason to suspect this is

“a social contagion and not actual gender dysphoria and you should read her book to find out what”

she says to do because it's very helpful and it's 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 that's just my thumbnail but you guys should write the summary of what to do if you see woqism in your child right like this that's what you're talking about like get them busy give them challenges have them way competing factors to try to make real life decisions on complex matters I I'm hearing it right now it's like well

maybe you did just write the book but you didn't title it the right the right way yeah I mean doing you're having your children and this holds for adults too engaging the physical world as

precious set you know learning how to build or make or do something the physical world where the

“results aren't negotiable you can't you can't claim that you did it if you didn't you can't claim”

that you won if you didn't you either summited or the cake the cake is edible or the eggplant grew or the table is made you know whatever it is doing something that has a physical manifestation in the world will create strength and ability and then also you know travel just just as you just said and this is this has been a drum beat of ours forever and it's what we used to do with our undergraduate students and also with our own children is exposing people to ways of being to

places in the world that they have not here to for imagine 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 no you know no matter how good the information was that they thought they had about what being in Keto or Panama City or the Amazon rainforest or Galapagos was going to be there's no there's no replacement for being there so experience reveals your biases and it reveals the holes in your thinking and it informs you and enables you to become a much more complete and frankly compassionate human being and you grow in the process to say it it nails

so many different things it's like you you was 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 you know the new people and finding out who you are

“okay let's talk about relationships because that's the foundation of children I think it's the”

foundation of happiness I think it's the reason we're here right there are relationships and in particular are love relationships and are romantic relationships you know before there were the little Bretton heathers there was the original Bretton heather who found one another managed to fall in love and navigate a successful relationship through this crazy crazy world and one of the ways you posit one can do that and really should do that is via a monogamous relationship you said it

okay when I was on NBC we did a segment on thrupples okay and then quads people were living in a relationship with three people or four people and it was fascinating it wasn't something I would endorse but it was fascinating but you say that's that's probably not the route to happiness via if you look at evolutionary history yeah the puzzle is a complex one because we can tell the fact that males and females in our species are different sizes tells us that there's a long history of

at least mild polygony in our species but it is also true mild what polygony well what your listeners are more likely to understand is polygony okay got it an individual male having multiple wives but it is also true that the later we go in human history the more change has come to that system and effectively our cultural software layer has overwritten what is in the ancestral genetic layer so most people alive today come from from populations that are monogamous and there's

a reason for that which is that monogamous cultures have certain advantages in an era of growth and expansion they bring all adults who are capable of contributing to child rearing into that process and that makes for it increases the rate at which a population can capture a land mass or a resource and it also makes for a fairer safer more productive society it distributes opportunity more evenly it makes people less warlike it makes people more prone to cooperation and these are all

major advantages and that's before you ever get to the question of personal satisfaction and I think

about having that one person in your life who you absolutely bond with you have an understanding of who

they are and they have an understanding of who you are in a way that no one can match and they're capable of providing a reality check and just simply being non-negotiably there that it's hard to describe this to people who haven't yet experienced it it's hard to give them a sense for why it is so different from having maybe casual relationships with more people or bonds with more people involved but there really is no substitute and if there's one thing I would wish for younger people

that would upgrade the quality of their lives and make the 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 a this is probably a sexist question but the advent of birth control and so on led a lot of women to believe that they had reached sexual liberation and that they could now behave as men did and have multiple partners and emotionless if that's

possible sex and I don't think women are built for that in the way men are and maybe that's a sexist comment but I it's something I happen to believe and I don't know what what does evolution tell us on that front we 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 union 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 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 filled in human children are extremely expensive to raise and they are much better raised by a team so that is the reason that women are wired to be very reluctant about behavior that could saddle them with a child and no help in raising it and that creates the dynamics that we all know exist wishing them away does not cause them to go away but I guess the last thing I would say is what people don't realize is that yes men do

men are wired to be ever aware of the possibility of sex without commitment that is an ancient

“pattern but it is not the only thing that men are wired for men because the way most men”

have reproduced in history is through investing in a particular woman and her offspring that that pattern causes them to be choosy and careful in a very symmetrical way to the way women behave generally and the mistake was on the invention of birth control which has many very positive consequences it has liberated women to plan when to have their families to enter lines of work they couldn't have otherwise entered such a very positive but it resulted in sexual chaos because somehow

women thought that they would only be equal when they behaved like men at their worst rather than a system in which we all recognized what a gift birth control is and treated it with respect and used it to renegotiate our relationships in the mode where males and females are both very careful. I love that I will share a personal story with you on that on your point your

penultimate point there when my husband and I were first getting together I mean I was a suitable

time in another relationship I'll just leave it at that and we had a 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 mean ladies you can feel my heart's spooning right it was like”

I was in love with him from that minute forward because he was expressing exactly what you're saying Brad he was this evolved incredibly great guy who was putting it on the table saying yeah I want you and I want to build a family with you and if that's not your goal if you're somebody who just wants to be the career woman I 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

excuse me we asked him if he would be the gosh what's the word for the the officiant at our wedding and so he came up into the Sierra Nevada and officiated at our wedding we've been together for many years and Bob knew us Dr. Trivers knew us as undergrad and as you know burgeoning evolutionary biologists and so he agreed to do this wedding ceremony for us in the in the mountains

but he insisted the day before on basically interviewing us as clergy might have and one of you

“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 but for him that was you know a key part of what the marriage ceremony was about wow you know what so how how is it gotten so turned on its head we you know mentioned birth control and it was sort of women's liberation which we've talked about the benefits I'm sure but how is everything gotten so weird we're

now promiscuity somehow a sign of your fierceness and I know I said this yesterday I feel like

typical I really feel uncomfortable saying this stuff but I have to be honest because I know I

speak for a lot of people I'm uncomfortable with the the asses everywhere the Kardashian but it's like it's own your face it's nothing left to the imagination it just feels vulgar to me I don't know I feel like our sexual relationships are in our love relationships have gotten

“really confused they absolutely have and I think one of the things that we argue is that there's been”

a takeover of language which is part of what's confusing people so the idea that asses everywhere as you say Megan is about some sort of sex positivity sorry I actually think it's quite the opposite that sex negativity that is treating sex like it's nothing and you know just as we all know that junk food is bad for us junk sex is bad for us too and you can be wildly enthusiastic about sex

and know that it's amazing and know what enriching and you know passionate experience it brings

and still not want to engage and rather explicitly not want to engage in cheap junk sex everywhere right and we don't see that message anywhere near as much it was like you know back in the 50s you'd be totally shamed if you wanted to have pre-marital sex and then like everything we totally over-corrected to where now somehow your your fears again it's that word if you've lost count of your partners and you're living in a thrupple and monogamy is a joke to you

and by the way so it's 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 now they have a serious problem that I think many of them are just not aware of right because they don't understand that there is some sort of alternative to the world they've been handed but they

need to discover and figure out how how to make it work and this is not simple because let's say for example that you correctly understand that there's something wrong with these new sophistications and that it doesn't result in sexual satisfaction for anyone as far as I can tell so you decide you're going to not do that well suddenly you're in competition for attention with all sorts of people who haven't decided that and you're I don't know that phones ring anymore so much but your phone's not

“going to ring if that's what they do and so it's going to seem like you've made an error when in fact”

one needs to recognize you know if we go back to the idea that men have two different ways of reproducing and one involves no commitment if you are trying to compete for attention and you get attention of men by behaving in this incredibly provocative way it works but it's not the right kind of attention because men are wired to view women who behave that way differently than they view women who behave in a cheesy way and so the way to do this if you are a young person and you're

trying to figure out how to navigate this part of your life I think the thing to shoot for is a culture in which people who get it opt out of these false sophistications and begin to generate some new set of rules about how they will behave towards each other and you know what it's not going to be as exciting on a nightly basis but will it result in you being satisfied years down the road the chances are much much greater okay but I'll challenge you on that I actually think

it is more satisfying in a nightly basis because the chase is fun and you know extending the

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 the all wisdom is very closely related to delayed gratification and so the

point is the sex you ultimately have at the end of that chase is a whole different sport yes and

you also point out in the book that difference between hotness and beauty and I thought that was a great point till it's 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 you know what what we argue in the book is that hotness tends to be associated with appealing to that less interesting short-term male strategy and beauty which fades much more slowly tends to be about appealing to that longer-term male

strategy that is a mirror for the longer-term females' strategy so of course Doug should still be

“chasing you and you should also still be chasing him you know that one of the things about monogamy”

is that we are you know it's not just mammal competition of female choice it's also female competition let's be good about it but and and male choice and so we've got choice by both partners and you know not ever sinking into the sense of well this is what I've gotten I'll have it forever

and I guess I don't have to work at it anymore we should we should always be working at it and

“always excited by it as well. I said to my one friend she was annoyed with her husband they hadn't”

been connecting in a while and 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 you can do it with his shirt off. Just watch him just watch him he's in so good looking it's gonna light a fire you're not gonna give it damn that he chose silver instead of white or whatever it was there's some through some evolution in that too you too

are amazing well this was so fun I love the book I love everything you stand for and I hope you'll

come back good luck with all of it thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show no BS no agenda and no fear