Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson - The Sibling Expert: Jeffrey Kluger

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Jeffrey Kluger has written for Time Magazine for over twenty years and is the author of ten books, including "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." He joins Kate and Oliver to share his extensive reporting on siblings, explain why parents really do have a favorite child, discuss why this relationship is so unique, and much more.Executive Producers: Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, and Sim SarnaProduced by Allison BresnickEditor: Josh WindischMusic by Mark HudsonThis show is brought to you by Cloud10 and powered by Simplecast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Proof of Life on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kate Hudson. And my name is Oliver Hudson. We wanted to do something that highlighted our relationship. And what it's like to be siblings. We are a sibling rivalry. No, no. Sibling revelry.

Don't do that with your mouth. Sibling revelry. That's good. This was the best. I'm so excited to share this with everyone out there. Yes, me too. We interviewed Jeffrey Kluger. Now, Jeffrey Kluger, he wrote a book called The Sibling

effect he gave a ted talk called the sibling bond and he's written numerous articles for time magazine about the science of siblings twins birth order more he's actually i believe worked at time magazine for a long time over 20 years he was cool so cool he was so chill and and you would expect him to be buttoned up just a little bit but not at all i mean real laid back real laid back and just shared so much information with us that was so interesting. I feel like we learned a lot. And I don't even want to preface this one because there's so much. The one thing that he said that I knew is true, that everyone, all parents sort of, you know,

would never admit is that there is a favorite child, according to Mr. Klug's. Oh, I mean, but they change. Parents really do have a favorite child. Yeah, it changes. It can change. But there is, you know, you do have your favorites. Yeah. It's just the way it is.

Yeah, I guess it also depends on, like, the parents' personality. Jeffrey, he also talked about his family, which is a little crazy because he has brothers, he has half-siblings, and then X-step siblings. There was a lot to sort of unpack even with him. We didn't even have enough time to cover it all. I'm not listening to you right now. I know, but we can still use this bit. Okay, okay. You know.

Just enjoy Jeffrey Kluger, Kate. Yeah, wait, I still, I have still more to say. That's good, we get into it right there. Okay, but wait. You did it. Yeah, no, it was great. Yeah. Yeah.

Perfect. How old are your kids? 16 and 18. Oh, wow. And who's your favorite? Oh, my. Mary. You got you.

I have my notes. I have read that we all. We all have a favorite as a parent. We all have a favorite, and it is a secret we will carry to our graves. That is so crazy, because I was really thinking about it. And I honestly don't think I have a favorite. I mean, there are definitely things about each one that I favor. You know, there's certain qualities that I look at and I go, oh, you know, that's a beautiful quality that my son has, that maybe my other son doesn't and then vice versa.

but I don't necessarily have... They switch off for me. Like, I will go... The science actually does show there's sort of situational favoritism. There's contextual favoritism. So you love one child more. You connect with one child more in one context and then with another child in a different context. But so you're saying that it's not a broad, it's not a broad sort of scope of, oh, I love you the most forever.

right yes unless you are my mother does exist but we want to avoid pathology so right i mean i think my mother loves me we've talked about this well we'll get to this you wrote a book called the sibling effect and you yourself have a very interesting relationship with your siblings you've got is it three brothers three full brothers yes a half brother and a half sister and i had two step sisters for a hot minute in the 1960s, and I have a half-step sister that's almost too complicated to explain, but she is out there.

This sounds like us. You are a very prolific writer. You've been working for time for many years. Right, for 23 years, yeah. Which is incredible. I was reading over your bio, and it's very similar to mine. So, you know, all of the things that you have sort of written about

and studied and accomplished. I mean, it's pretty amazing. But what is it? You're very family focused. I think it seems like your interests are in science and space and families. Right. And I think there's a lot of reason for that. First of all, I think family is, obviously, it's the primal unit. It's the unit that spawns us. It's the unit that protects us. It's the unit that gathers around us when we need one another. But the sort of polar opposite, the philosophical opposite of that is space. It couldn't be more remote. It couldn't be more alien. It couldn't be more life-threatening. I mean, space doesn't want you there. As I often write, space really wants to kill you a few so much as set foot in it. So I have this world in which I grew up with this very tight and very

close family, which sort of, I think, gave me the temperamental courage then to go out and explore something that's a whole lot scarier than just terrestrial things. I love that. Well, where did you sort of, when did you discover in yourself that you wanted to really explore this family unit and then specifically siblings? You know, at what point did that happen? It's a really good question. My brothers and I, my full brothers and I grew up.

up in a house in which there was extensive turmoil. And one of the things that the research shows is that when you have what the researchers call total immersion sibling relationships, it often comes from a trauma. There can be a sickness, there can be a death, but it's most often a divorce. And my parents were divorced and then divorced again. And I think that forged my brothers and me. We sort of, it's a little bit like when metal is annealed. It's warmed and cooled and warmed and cooled.

And it becomes both flexible and stronger at the same time. And I think my brothers and I became what I call this brawling, loving, lasting unit as a result of these experiences. And so then that your childhood sort of made you want to delve and dive. childhood made me want to delve in that. And then in 2015, there was a journal I used to read, a science journal called, I don't know, it's a psychology journal. And they had devoted an entire issue just to the studies of siblings. And I'll tell you something about Time Magazine. There is nothing scarier than walking into the room into the morning meeting at Time Magazine and pitching an interview. a story. It's like Don Draper in Madman, but 20 times worse because you're not as good looking as John Hamm. You're just a guy pitching a story. So I pitched this story on a full exploration of siblings as the relationship that people have overlooked. We all think our mothers, our fathers, our spouses, our children, our primal relationships. The siblings,

are just sort of the moons in our solar system. So I explained this story, and there was a long, terrifying silence that followed, and a woman in the room named Nancy Gibbs, who later became the editor of the magazine, said the three words that we all love to hear most, nothing but readers, meaning you put that story in, and people will eat it up. Why do you think that it's such an under-explored relationship? I'm glad you asked that question. I think it's because evolution sees siblings, sees children as sort of a fungible mass-produced product on the assembly line. Remember, we were born into a world, or at least our species was born into a world, in which the likelihood of a child living

past five years old was very low. So what you do, if you are a fecund, fertile couple, you produce a whole lot of kids because you need children to work the farm. You need children to carry on your legacy. And you accept that if you have 10 or 11 children, four may make it to adulthood. So siblings were seen as sort of a mass-produced fungible good. And as a result, as psychology evolved, and we began looking at family relationships, we did look at those relationships that seemed more singular. If you do marriage, if you do marriage right, you only have one spouse. You only have two parents. But you have, you may have dozens of siblings. So they're very interchangeable. I think, to mix my metaphor slightly, when I began looking into siblings,

I realized that for all of the work psychologists had done, exploring relationships, siblings were sort of the dark matter, the gravitational force that no one had looked at. It's a little bit like when Pluto was discovered. Part of the reason Pluto was discovered was because Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered it, noticed something is pulling on Neptune. There's an invisible gravitational force pulling on Neptune. Something has to be out there. And he found Pluto. And I think the more scientists looked into human relationships, the more they realized there is a dark matter gravity,

and it turned out to be siblings. We're dark matter. It makes sense. Yeah. We're dark matter gravity. So it started with Time Magazine, and then that sort of, was it so successful that you then made it into a book? That was how it happened.

It started originally with a story on time. And then there was another story that came out a study that focused specifically on birth order. And the editor of the magazine at the time, I think it was Richard Stengel, said, let's do a follow-up story on birth order. So by now I had two cover stories in time, both about siblings. And my agent said to me, my agent, a woman named Joy Harris. I, she's the only agent I've ever had. I've always said, if I go out of the business, I will go out with Joy like Thelma and Louise. We will hold hands and go over a cliff. And Joy said to me, this could be a good book. So we pitched it and Riverhead books very much liked it. Well, that's a good segue, actually, because birth order. Let's talk about birth order for a second. Because I think I feel like after reading your book and listening to your TED talk and the various articles that maybe we... We don't fit into that statistic. You don't, really.

Not really. Can you describe what the birth order statistically what that looks like? One of the interesting things about birth order is that scientists who can be very egotistical and often don't like to concede that lay people without education have come to ideas before they have. Even the scientists concede that lay people sort of got the birth order thing right, simply intuitively. Now, that doesn't mean it's true in every single case. It doesn't mean it's remotely true in every single case, but it does mean that the firstborn is born into a system that he or she is invested in preserving because it's a system in which you're special. You are the only child. You're the favored child. You get all of the attention. Then a

second child comes along and the first child suddenly has half the attention, the second child is now born into a system in which he or she wants to upset the order because the second child wants more attention. Then you get a third, then you get a fourth, then you get a fifth, and you get this exponentially increasing complexity. Maybe I maybe I have a realization, but I have a realization, maybe the reason why I didn't get along with you, for so long is because I blame you for our parents divorced because you it might be more than we're prepared to get into you I was like wait a therapist and we need jobs no I know but you came in and sort of disrupted the flow and then our parents got divorced so from an unconscious place

maybe I associated our parents divorced with you coming into this world those associations And that makes total sense. Well, it makes sense only in the way that associations are things we make, which is why, you know, if you have a, if you're feeling sick, if you're feeling nauseous and you also at that moment smell cigarette smoke, you're never going to be able to smell cigarette smoke without feeling nauseous because that connection is made in your brain. So when the second child comes along and a divorce happens, that. much more powerful, much more primal connection is made in your brain. That doesn't really mean that that's the reason the divorce happens, but it does mean that at a very early level, that idea is imprinted. It was. It wasn't your fault, but it was, I perceived it. Exactly. Right. Of course. Yes. I'm not blaming you. No, of course. I'm not blaming you. I'm just saying

that. I think I know this. I know, I'm not saying that at the time you didn't know unconsciously that you were blaming me in a sense. Of course. That's an interesting. Right. But it's your fault. Although I'm the middle and I feel like I'm the older in a sense in terms of the sibling order. Right. Well, everyone thinks you're older too. I don't know. We have a very, we have a very interesting situation in that, in that we don't, I don't know what to say. Does being the only girl maybe have something to do with it? It's a huge thing. I've always said that. if you're going to have three children, the ideal configuration is boy, girl, boy, or girl, because everyone is special. Someone is the oldest. Someone is the youngest. Someone is the single gender.

Boy, boy, girl, boy, girl. There's someone who's always stuck in a middle seat. But aren't there so many other contributing factors? I mean, as to, it's, I feel like that's just, Sort of the scratching the surface. Right. Birth order is by no means remotely destiny. I'm the number two in my family. I'm number two out of four boys. But my older brother, who is a profoundly gifted person, who we hope has a play coming to Broadway very soon. It just premiered in New Brunswick. And I'm really excited for him. But he was also growing up, I love him dearly. He was nuts. He was completely eccentric. And he knows he was completely eccentric. So I sort of became what's called the functional firstborn. You know, when it came time to taking care of family business, when it came time to taking care of our elderly mother, it was me who sort of stepped in and handled all the estate stuff and handled all the lawyer stuff, even though I'm not the firstborn.

I became functional firstborn. That happens. there's a lot of other variables that can mix up that what seems like the destiny of birth order. Yeah, I mean, clearly I'm the functioning firstborn. Yeah. Or the functioning, what did you call it? Functional firstborn. The functional firstborn.

Then what does that make me? Just the firstborn in name? Well, you still hold the title. If you were royalty, you would still be heir to the throne. What was the most surprising statistic when you first started researching about siblings? What was the thing that really shocked you? I'm not sure shocked, but the thing that impressed me the most was that youngest siblings have an almost telepathic power to read people, to intuit people. They have what's called a theory of mind.

children who come, one of the, a wonderful story, a wonderful study that I read said that if you take a toddler and you, a caregiver, says to a toddler, let's hide this toy in a cabinet, when another adult walks in the room, the toddler will assume that the other adult knows where the toy is because to a toddler, his knowledge is all knowledge. It's only as they get a little older that they realize, oh, wait a minute. What's in my mind isn't necessarily in that person's mind. The last born gets that earlier. The last born is better at reading people. The last born is funnier. Because the last born has to use what are called low power strategies. You are the weakest chick in the playroom. You have the least physical power. So what you use is your ability to foresee an attack coming, to foresee someone angry at you, to make a person laugh because it's very hard to be, to be aggressive towards someone who's laughing. I did the Colbert report once, only once when this book came out, and he's the youngest of 11. And he said, what can you tell

me about me? I said, well, as the youngest, you're intuitive, you're insightful, you see into people what other people can't. You're extraordinarily funny, and he cut me off and said, this is a very good book. It was just a perfect Stephen Colbert response. Okay, so, but you seem to have just described me, and I'm the oldest. Yes. I feel like I'm very intuitive. I'm for sure the funniest person in the family. There's just no doubt about that. I'll give you that. I'll give you that. You know, it's, but this is what was interesting about reading your book and hearing sort of these statistics is they, they flip on their head when I sort of think about myself, you know. So where does sort of an anomaly, where might an anomaly like myself come from if there is even an answer to that? Spacing between birth order probably has a lot to do with it. Spacing has a great deal to do with it. My brothers and I, pity my poor mother in the 1950s. This is, I mean, mothers were baby making me. machines. She was 25 years old and she had four sons, four and a half years old or younger. It's a wonder she survived till 26. When people got older or when the generations matured,

there's much greater spacing. So you don't have quite the same peer group relationship. You have, there can be an element of the uncle-aunt relationship. There can be the element of the element of the older cousin, younger cousin relationship. And in a way, that sometimes makes the siblings a little bit less intimately close. But what it does do is add a mentoring dimension to it. And mentoring can be incredibly powerful. One interesting study showed that it's a Norwegian study, showed that firstborns tend to have IQs about three points higher than secondborns. and secondborns tend to have IQs about a point and a half higher than thirdborns.

That's not because something happens in the womb with the brain is just getting weaker. It's because firstborns get to be mentors. And when you mentor, you learn more. Think about it. If you understand math and there's someone in your classroom who doesn't understand it and you're tutoring that person, you're reinforcing your own talent, your own ability, your own knowledge. So mentoring can be a very powerful thing. For middle kids, it works especially well because you can be both mentee and mentor.

You wrote that regression of older, there's a regression of older sibling when the younger sibling is born. What kind of a regression might I, might I've got, did I go through? Typically, the regression will be back to the kinds of dependencies that required paternal and maternal attention. So there may be kids who are toilet trained. may begin bedwetting again. Kids who had long since gotten over fear of the dark may become fearful of the dark again. Kids who had learned not to cling to their parents when they were in public but sort of venture forth and be a little braver may cling again because what they say, what they recall

profoundly is that this got me hugged, this got me kissed, this got me attended to. And there's someone else now, some little monster in the house. house who's getting all of that attention and I want to get some of it back. The regression can be a problem simply because it makes life more difficult both for the child and for the parents, but one way to make that work or one way to overcome that is first of all to appeal to the child's pride. You know, remember how proud you felt when you were wearing just pull-ups and you could go to the potty and take care of things all by yourself. Remember how proud you felt when you could walk halfway across the mall. As long as you could see me, you were okay. And the child then

remembers that sense of being, oh yeah, I'm grown up. And they come back to those old skills that they had briefly lost. It's just interesting that when you're talking about siblings and the fact that we kind of overlooked them in terms of psychology or really studying them. And yet so much effort goes into raising your children, you know? And so much, like Oliver and I always say, like, so much of it is about focusing on them getting along. Right, right. For me, it's, you, there was, you said something, I think, on your TED talk about the fighting. The fighting is astonishing. And I forget the exact number. I wish I could look at the TED talk now. But in the four to seven age group, I think there's a fight of some kind on the order of once every 3.5 minutes.

And when I say fight, it often means an exchange of blows and not just one blow, it's a blow and a returned blow. Now, that's when the fights become physical. But screaming fights can happen 12 times, 14 times an hour. This is just what children do. They are combat machines. I spent a fair bit of the book looking at animal analogies. And sharks will literally eat each other in the womb until there's only one left and that shark gets born. Chicks will fight in the nest.

It's all about primal survival. It's all about resources. In the case of animals, there's one resource, food, nutrient. In the case of humans, there's food, there's love, there's attention, there's story time, there's hugging. We are an incredibly tactile species and need constantly to be touched. And those resources are limited for parents. What a complex animal we are. We are too complex to exist.

It's such a high-maintenance animal. I swear. We are really, if we were diagnosed, we would be clinically insane. Unfortunately, there's no higher order species diagnosing us. Right. It's true. It's like, Jesus, you humans need so much. You need so much. Yeah, we just, we need a lot. We are an eccentric species. It's amazing. I feel like, too, you know, then do you just let them go at it? I mean, is that one of the things where I read this book, once called wild things. I'm getting that wrong. But it's all about raising boys. And it talks a lot about these things about, but a tendency for boys to sort of need to fight and wrestle and fart, you know. And just do, you know, things that are very different to females. And that

doesn't end, by the way, when you're 65. I can tell you that with certainty. None of that changes. Females fart all the time. No, I think it's different. I mean, yeah, of course, but it's a different kind of. A fart? Different kind of fart. I promise you, the physiology is the same. The pride is what's different. I think it's just a different type of interest. I think we're just interested in different things. It's a different. As I always say, I tell my daughters, I cannot always be young, but I can always be immature. And I plan to be that forever. Oh, yes. It is true that boys fight. a lot, fight physically quite a lot. And intervention is important. Number one, triage. You don't want bloodshed. You don't want anyone to get hurt. Number two, it's just tiresome and it's loud and things get broken. But you do as long as it's, sometimes I look at it as kittens wrestling. You know, when kittens wrestle, when puppies wrestle, they will do one very powerful thing. They will expose their neck, the most vulnerable part of their body, because that's where the major veins are,

and that's where you would kill as a predator. And the other puppy will mouth the neck, but will not bite. And what that says is, I trust you to expose my neck, and you have to show me that you deserve that trust by mouthing but not biting in the sense that human beings do that in the sense that boys do that we learn a lot we we operate like animals do so in that wrestling that doesn't really do harm we learn trust and we also practice how to get out into the real world when you really might have to fight i love that yeah that's great it's so beautiful i like the Yeah, I like when you said that it's about, that's where you learn trust. That's where they learn how to trust each other is through that physical.

It's not just that the person who gets hurt learns about, all right, I better not do that again because I felt pain. The person who inflicted the pain learns about remorse, learns about empathy. My oldest brother still feels pain. And he'll say he can't even think about it. at a time when he was, I don't know, seven, and my baby brother, who was three, had messed up some puzzle he was working on. And my older brother jumped on him and pummeled him, and my youngest brother didn't know what he had done wrong. And he said, what did I do? And my brother now, six decades later, says, when I think those words, what did I do, I still want to cry.

so you learn remorse you learn regret yeah yeah do you feel regret i i don't oh i know but but it's interesting so so you know even getting into our story a little bit you might have some insight you know our parents divorced when i was maybe four or five and kate was two or three um and you you talk about um in your book how you know a lot of the times siblings will come together after a divorce right maybe we were too young. I went the other way, I guess. Kate didn't she, you know, I was, did not want to be her friend. I didn't want to be her brother. She frustrated me, annoyed me. I would trip her. I would push her. All she wanted was my love. And I don't think I was emotionally capable to give it to her based on the circumstances potentially. But only, you know, in our 20s and maybe after

college is when we sort of well when you went to college i went to college and i came back and then we got closer i mean why do you think in your professional opinion do you think that we well i didn't want to accept her well i don't know i mean it may very well be what you said that at some level some level that didn't stand up to close scrutiny but you were only what four years old so you you know you weren't capable of close sure but this lasted you know but at some level years. You may have blamed her. I don't know if your parents

played you off against each other. Was their favoritism? Was there one parent pulling you and another parent pulling you Kate? Or... No. It could simply be the association that, you know, it was again, that smelling tobacco

and feeling sick. The baby came along and the parents got divorced and there must be a cause and effect. I will say this, though, about the coming back together later. My half-brother and half-sister were, they're 11 years younger than me. I saw them twice at the first part of their lives

when they were infants and then when they were toddlers. And for various pathological reasons, their mother, my father's second wife, did not want them to know that my brothers and I even existed. So they didn't know a family secret was kept for 15 years. They didn't know we existed when we finally wrote them letters at summer camp and told them that we existed. It still took another six years before we got together. But I will say this now.

I adore those two people. I adore my half-brother and sister. We found a life as adults. and my older, my baby sister especially, I've been going through some life crises lately and I can practically have a bat signal for my sister Allison. I can hit it. She's on the phone and she talks me through whatever my crisis is. That is an amazing story. How wild is that? Unreal. And I do want to say right now, by the way, because she is still among us and I have come to love her as well. So whatever she went through my stepmother, that was 45 years ago, she was an insecure person 45 years ago.

She went through whatever she went through. I call it pathological. That's I judge too harshly. She is now in her 80s and she is a wonderful and strong and delightful and loving woman. But even, you know, on that point, you know, we don't know, I mean, you might now, but we don't know what she. even went through as a child herself you know we don't know the full story a lot of the times of people who we judge right you know so there is a lot of uh sort of forgiveness i think when you can think of it that way you know how many siblings kind of do you go by jeff or jeffrey um as i've gotten

older i go by jeffrey because i'm stuffier and more full of myself okay i like jeffy um so Is there a percentage of siblings that do not talk to each other? Is there like a statistic of siblings that stay close and ones that end up going in completely different directions? I had that number in my book and I wish I remember it. It is, all I can say is, it is a regrettably significant number. People who say, I simply don't like any of my. siblings. I simply don't like this particular sibling. I haven't talked to my brother, Jerry,

in 15 years, and I will never do so again. My message in my TED talk and in my book was that, look, if relationships are irrevocably broken, they are irrevocably broken, sometimes that happens and human relationships. But if they're savable, save them. Having siblings and not making the most of them is like having 40,000 acres of fertile farmland and allowing it to sit fallow forever. There is so much that you can grow and nurture

in the soil of a sibling relationship. There's so much that you can share. The thing about siblings is, And I say this early in the book, your parents leave you too early. Your spouse comes along relatively late in your life. Your children come along later still. Your siblings are the only ones who are with you for more or less the entire ride. And when you fight during the day, if I fought with my brother Steve and we were arguing all day long,

we still had to return to the same twin beds in the same bedroom at 8.30 that night, and we either figured out the fight or we didn't, and we always did figure it out. Oh, I wish people had the foundation, a lot of people out there that have difficulty with their siblings, that they had the kind of foundation to allow them to, or at least the tools to, at least the tools to, at least, try to reconnect but the thing is it's it's not too late you know what i mean like you don't have to establish that that lifelong bond from the very very beginning i i don't think it's too late but i always tell my kids my boys when they're fighting you know and even rio my because i have two boys and then my little girl rio and she's just she's as feminine as it gets but tough as shit you know

because she has her two boys but when the boys fight i always say look you guys you're going to have friends that are going to come and go. I said, this is it. I said, you have each other. This is a forever relationship. And even though they're, you know, at the time seven and nine, and I would always sort of hammer this home for them, you know, I keep trying to hammer it home just because it is the truth. And I think that, you know, I can learn from some of my mistakes with Kate and sort of whatever the lessons that we have learned. And we will probably continue to learn as we sort of get older and grow older as siblings, you know, we definitely have had our moments of real togetherness and then real separation. I mean, Kate, when she was having, you know, her career,

her movie career was just on fire and she was with Chris and she was traveling around the world doing movies and, you know, being fabulous. I feel like I'm still traveling the world being fabulous. Yeah, but maybe that's just me. You just include me on your planes now. So, you know, but, you know, we were, we were, we did, we were not in each other's lives for a long time. Yeah, for a good, like, maybe eight years. Yeah, I mean, a long time. But we were always connected. We weren't, but we were connected, but on a, on a sibling sort of familial level, but not close.

We were not close then. I mean, circumstantially. This past holiday season, Oliver and I did have a moment. that made me reflect just as a parent where we realized that our parents have done well with us, meaning that we will carry the traditions of our family and the importance of that unit as siblings, as an extension of our parents forever, whether that be through our own immediate families, but always stay connected to each other. and it's an amazing thing to realize when your parents are still alive and healthy and vibrant

to know that like oh okay so that's how you that's that's our job as parents is to make sure that our children kind of carry these I guess it's as as people would say you care you carry the stories the folklore of your family and it goes past down through generation generation if you do it right then those stories last forever exactly and I think my parents, my mom especially, my father was more or less an absentee father, but my mom stressed to us again and again, exactly what you were talking about, the unbreakability of the sibling unit, the fact that these are people who your friends will come and go. Your siblings are an unbreakable force. I tell my children that all the time. I tell them when they're fighting. I say

Girlies, I want you in 70 years when you're both in your 80s to still say, this is my best friend. This is the girl. This is the woman who was always at my side when I needed her the most. And I've seen that in them. Often when they were growing up, I still see it in them. I think it's vitally important. I think, again, it helped in my situation when my brother's. and I went through a difficult time with a difficult divorce together.

And I think it's also important to remember that the things that drive us crazy about our siblings do not have to be destructive things. They can be things that I'm the windbag in my family. I'm the bombastic man in my family. My brother Gary is the profane man. My brother Steve is the drama queen. My brother, Bruce, is the showman. We drive one another crazy. But as someone, one of the greatest lines I ever read, and I wish I knew where I read it,

was about how families function at Thanksgiving. And somebody said, look, when you come home, of course your family is going to push all your buttons. They're the people who installed them. They know how your buttons work. When just recently, not to ring the tone down, but just in July, our mother passed away. She was 88, so it was, you know, it was timely. And my three brothers and I went to Baltimore. And we knew that under the stress of that situation, every one of us was going to give voice to and permission for our own worst behavior.

So my family just accepted the fact that I was going to be casting about orders and I was going to be telling people what to do and they were perfectly free to ignore me. And my brother, Steve, was going to be doing the opening scene from Gypsy to some dramatic moment that was completely unsuited to the moment. And that's, it's just what we were going to do because in a tough time, we went back to who we were. Yeah, I mean, that's just so beautiful that you. you the even just the expression alone that you're able to even you know freely freely able to express yourselves and especially in a moment like that i think the problem too i think the problem too is you have a lot of these sibling relationships that are non-existent now because of just petty bullshit that can so easily be resolved but there's pride and there's ego involved

and there there's just so much you know scar tissue that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that that doesn't have to be there, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And if one person would just sort of reach out and say, you know what? Fuck it. Okay. We've been holding on to this bullshit for way too long. And really, it is not worth us not knowing each other.

You know, I think we need more of that. People who are going to have the ability and the balls and the courage to just reach out and to sort of rekindle a relationship that is necessary, you know. And that's a special. because the rewards are so rich if you have it's hard to say you're wrong it's hard to say I played a role in this problem but I apologize for that role I can't undo that role I can learn from that role I played and now let's see if we can tap this resource of our relationship again it's a wonderful thing to be able to do I have I have a question about twins there's a

study about twins in space. Do you have anything to say about the? Mark. Mark and Scott, Kelly. Mark and Scott. Yeah, Mark and Scott. Well, my half brother and sister are fraternal twins. And they have a bond that is self-evidently closer than any other sibling bond I've ever seen. They grew up. They're not the same gender. They certainly weren't from, they're not identical, obviously. but they grew up, they came into the world at precisely the same instant. They developed in precisely the same womb. They went through their developmental stages in precisely the same way. They have an intuitive sense about one another and a profound love with its foundations

100,000 feet below sea level. That's how powerfully connected they are. And I think it has to do with the way they came up together. In the case of identical twins, I do believe, you know, people talk about a certain telepathy between identical twins. I don't believe in that. But I do believe that when your genome is the same, so much of your software, your behavioral software, the geography, the topography of your brain is the same, that you do think very similarly. that you do act very similarly, and you are acted upon by the world as two parts of a whole. So it's impossible for us not to internalize how the world sees us.

So if the world sees Mark and Scott Kelly when they were little and they say, I don't know which one's Mark, I don't know which one, Scott. You're both the same guy. You will begin internalizing that. Now, kids will eventually try to differentiate. They do want to be different. do want to have an identity, but they nonetheless know that they have a unique, indistinguishable relationship from one another. I really would think that if you were an identical twin that you would have, especially

probably in your teens, that you would have this intense desire to individuate from your or not. Could you imagine looking at yourself? No. But it seems like most twins want to sort of stay connected. rather than individuate. I do think both of those things are true. I think twins realize that they're in a unique situation, and it's a rare situation, and it's

one that's worth preserving and treasuring. But again, especially in junior high and high school, you want to develop your own identity. Even within families, you see a certain de-identification that goes down through a family unit. So say if there are five children in a family unit, the oldest child is the scholar. The second child is going to be the academic slacker, but maybe the athletic, the athletic achiever. The third one is going to be the science nerd. The fourth one is going to be the drama star, because every child who comes, you know, the image I use is it's a little bit like the way leaves will naturally form on trees so that they're never directly beneath one another because one leaf directly beneath another leaf isn't going to get sun so it will die.

So trees evolve so that the leaves spiral a little bit so that everyone gets sun. The way you get sun as a member of a large family is by stepping out of the shadow of the child above you by finding your own area. If we're going to go with the leaf metaphor, then the middle child syndrome is real because the middle child is getting the least amount of sun. Yes. And that's unfortunate. And middle child syndrome is a very real thing. It is true. Although, again, it does help to be the only girl. But as I wrote in the book, middle child is like spending your entire life in the center seat of a 24-hour flight in coach. It sucks. There's just no way it's good.

I know, but Jeffrey, doesn't that depend on the parents? Like, if you are conscious of that and you, you know what I mean? And you parent accordingly. I mean, can you not flip that? You can flip that script. And it is, I promise you, it's not destined. but there is a sense of you will never be the oldest, you'll never be the baby. You will always be in the middle.

And I don't know if you're not that if you really understand it. Right. It's like I would never know what it's like to be the oldest child or the baby. Right. I know that I relate very well to middle children. All my women were older. We're the oldest. Oldest, yeah.

Yeah, I think we do tend to be drawn to people who. who are temperamentally similar to us. The downside for middle children is that statistics show that they do tend to have slightly less intense connections with their nuclear family, and they do tend to take a little bit longer to find their direction in life. The upside of a middle child is that they tend to have bigger, richer, denser and more robust social circles and support systems outside of the home because they come into the world feeling like I don't quite get everything I need at home, so I'm going to go out in

the world and build it for myself. And that's not such a bad thing. Do you think, though, that because you were the middle child, you know, your way of standing out was sort of your work ethic and going after what it is you loved and sort of your pursuit of that was so focused I felt like I had to scream to be heard amongst all of the boys and I had I had on top of it it was boys and I was the middle so like our parents would say they'd hear me sometimes and I'd give these long monologues of like fairness I basically like delivered my greatest performance to nobody paying attention and then as a I got older, I guess with that, I just became a very independent and work-minded, whatever that

concoction was. Well, and that can often, I mean, the attempt to compensate for what you feel is either a shortcoming in yourself or a short-changing from the world can be a very powerful thing. You know, if you felt that you weren't getting attention or you weren't getting fairness from within the family, then damn it, you're going to go out and get it from the world. Or when I was a student, I was a terrible slacker. I was, I could have been an A student. I barely coasted by with low B's. I did that straight through law school. And when I finally got out into the working world and thought, now I got to hold down a job, I became, I developed sort of an Uber work ethic. I became a, I developed a consuming work ethic, sort of like the person who has always been an overweight child

and then loses weight and is forever a little bit neurotic about food, always afraid of being one slippery slope away from going down that hill again. So I think when you feel that you haven't gotten the attention that you could have or should have gotten at home, you'll overcompensate or at least compensate and continue to do that to make sure that throughout your life you get what you didn't get early. It's so surprising, Jeffrey, based on the work that you've done, I would have never guessed that that was your experience in school growing up. It's a great also lesson to kids that do struggle in school. Yeah, yeah. That it can, your brain can shift into, you know, maybe

the years also became overachieving or in some sense, you know, you became a little obsessive, right, about Well, and also at some level you think, oh, shit, it's up to me now. No one's going to bail me out anymore. No parent is going to write a note that says, Jeffrey got a D on his test because he was throwing up last night. No one's going to do that. When you have a job, it's your job. I think mom, yeah. Right. She wrote me a night the other day. To CBS. Right, to CBS. To CBS.

This is Goldie. Oliver has a tummy ache and won't be coming to work today. But what about sibling competition and how that works, even from, you know, from youth, from toddler and beyond? How does that sort of stack up and how does that resentment either build or not build? I mean, how does, you know, what's your take on that? It's hard because a lot of it depends on whether you are trying to achieve in the same field or whether you are not trying to achieve in the same field. If you want to be the greatest lawyer who ever practiced law and you want to be the greatest doctor who ever practice medicine and someone else wants to be the greatest writer who ever wrote a novel, nobody is, I mean, if one person is succeeding more than another, then there will be some envy. But if you're in different fields, it's at least, there's at least your own silos.

My brothers and I are all writers. So at some point, somebody is always pissed off at someone else. Someone is always jealous of someone else. Who gets the most jealous? I know. I will not be allowed to come home for Thanksgiving 2020 if I say that. But what you're saying, though, is. is that it is it's natural it's completely natural my brother steve was was it is natural truly no i know i know i mean

this is sort of there's inside not there's inside stuff because every person that we have onto this podcast they never say that they're ever envious yeah every every sibling combination i'm like is there envy there? Is there any sort of jealousy or sort of God I wish? And everyone's like, no, no, no. And meanwhile, I'm very open with sort of my envy of sort of Kate's career and how successful she's been and the opportunities and the experiences she's had, you know, not to take anything away from what I've done, but I'm staying, you know, there is competition there. Absolutely, there's competition. In 1986, my older brother had a wonderful play called Bullpen. The entire play, as in the name suggests, took place in the bullpen of Fenway Park in Boston. And the play opened on the

Harvard campus at Boston. My youngest brother, who had had a play off Broadway a couple of years, a couple of years earlier, was up at Boston and he was helping out. And there was a showcase in front of the theater that had a terrible poster. And Bruce opened up the showcase and he said, I'm going to make this gorgeous. And he was working. on it and helping my older brother, Steve, make his play perfect. And then he suddenly stopped and said, but this should be my evening and it's not. It's his evening. And he was willing to say, I want this to be about me.

And it's not about me. You know, when my older brother was the first one to publish a novel and I smiled that sort of rectangular Rickus of a smile when I first saw it that kind of said, I'm so very happy for you. I can't wait to read this because I knew now the stakes are higher for me. I got to write myself a novel at some point. Otherwise, I am not keeping pace with Steve. Now, what would you say the remedy is for something like that so it doesn't turn into true resentment and damage the relationship? Transparency? There are two things, and they both sound like bromids, and I hope they don't.

One of them is humility. One of them is simply being able to say, you know, I caught a break. When I wrote Apollo 13 and then that was made into a movie, you know, clearly there was some sibling competition in that. But the fact was, I just grew up as a space junkie. And I just happened to have written Jim Lovell, the commander of the mission, a letter right at the time that a magazine I was working for went briefly out of business. We later got our jobs back. But we went briefly out of business. I thought, well, maybe this is my time to write a book. I happened to write Jim a letter. He happened to have written back and said, I just retired, so I'm actually interested in

working on this book with you. It just happened that both Ron Howard and Tom Hanks were fascinated by this story. So all of these amazing things came together, but it was all serendipity. It was all just a series of tumblers falling together. And if there were moments during that year or two when Apollo 13 was ubiquitous, I could say to my brothers and mean it, I got lucky. I've never had another movie since. So, you know, it just, I've written tons of books, but no more movies yet. So having that humility is a very important thing.

The other thing is being truly, openly, generous with the successes of your other brothers. When I went out and saw my brother Steve's musical in regional theater in New Brunswick a few months ago and last year in Kansas City, I literally mean I smiled the entire performance. I looked like an idiot. I looked like somebody who was on Thorazine. I just, because I couldn't stop smiling. I was just so happy for him because this was a labor of love for him. And he had worked hard on this.

And I think the more you can say, God, I love my sibling. And God, I love when my sibling is happy, the better, the less competition you can feel. Yeah, that's true. That's great. Sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. Yeah, I should probably watch some of your work. Yeah, she's never seen a thing that I've done, which might be a good thing because she can't dislike it. I'm just kidding.

I've seen it. No, but it's true. You sort of fake it to you make it. Like I've had moments with my siblings where there's been an accomplishment and I have that initial feeling of like... The rectangle smile. Yeah, of just like, uh, and then I'm like, you know what? Just smile and fake it for a second. and after about 30 seconds, I actually start to feel pride.

In some way, actually, that's what social media is good for. It's bad for a lot of things. But when I could post, take a picture of my brother Steve's play, and before the jealousy could overtake me, I could post it and say, God, I'm proud of what I'm about to see. And my brother, hashtag Steve Kluger, is the most talented guy I know. post that it's out there i can't pull it back and you can do it impulsively and in that sense social media helps isn't that interesting yeah no i know it's a good lesson this is a great

moment for me because i guess i'm going to do that no because i feel like i've been validated a little bit here i mean like the competitive spirit the competitive nature between siblings is real the frustration and the envy and the jealousy is real. We just can't let it get to that resentment place. It doesn't exist for everybody. I mean, I don't feel that way. Well, because you're at the top. I mean, Jesus.

No, but I mean, I'll look at your, you know, your ability to, hmm. No, I look at your wit and your zimuth. sense of humor and you're, I do, I honestly do usually feel a great sense of pride when it comes to Oliver's abilities and accomplishments. And then massive disappointment when he's not doing those things. Well, that's interesting is, you know, I, I don't know which brother I'm like in your family, but I'm the one who sort of, I sort of get by with a little wit and charm and things seem to work out. But if I dedicated myself and really sort of, you know, took some of that ambition and turned it into drive, I think I could be pretty, pretty great, you know. I definitely

have the most talent in the family. I have the most talent, you know, I have the most talent. There's no doubt. It's just untapped, you know. We interviewed Lisa and Laura Ling, and they had a really interesting story about how they grew up and they basically raised each other so you know i wanted to know sort of what your thoughts might be about that their parents were in the picture physically but they really truly had to rely on each other so that sibling bond sort of morphed into mother-daughter i mean potential best friends so you know how to that stand? If there was an age gap, say there's a five-year age gap, very often the older child really will feel a maternal or paternal sense and say, I got to look after this baby

because, you know, five years may not be much, but when you're seven and two, it is. When you're 10 and five, it's huge. So the older child may really feel a premature, a precocious paternalism, parentalism, and the younger child will certainly cleave to that. If they're closer in age, then it becomes a collaborative exercise. And I think that was very much the way it was for my brothers and me. My, as I say, we were very close in age. My father was out of the picture. My mom, I don't want to speak of her badly, but she as a suburban mom in the 19, 50s and 60s, she had one of those suburban mom prescription drug issues where, you know, not street drugs, all the barbiturates that poor suburban moms were getting prescribed.

So she wasn't always emotionally present. So my brothers and I were looking after each other and we were taking each other to school and we were intervening if there was a problem. And we were mediating when there were fights, and we looked after one another and made sure there was food in the house. In that sense, I think, in that crucible, I think we grew a lot closer. Now, that's not the ideal way to grow close. Obviously, you want a house with two functioning parents and with a functioning relationship. But it says something else about the human condition. that you can take calamity and you can say we are nimble enough, we're robust enough,

we are resourceful enough that we can turn this very bad thing into a very good thing by drawing together and looking after each other. Can siblings be too close? Yes, they can be too close. Did you watch Game of Thrones? Sorry, that's true. I actually think my youngest brother, Bruce, and I were a little bit too close. close when we first moved to New York. We were just a couple of years apart, and we were very,

very dependent on each other. We both had girlfriends at the time, and we were cycling through girlfriends, and all of the girls and women we were seen said, I'd like to spend a little bit more time with you and not with your brother. And I think I refracted a lot of myself through my brother, Bruce, and I think he refracted himself through me. And I think when we finally had strong female partners who said, let's back away just a little bit, I think that helped us become more independent and sort of breathe on our own. We still remain very close. We still do to this day.

But we were able at least to find ourselves a little bit. Wow. Yeah. I would imagine that's what a lot of twins might go through as well. where there needs to be an individuation process, you know. That's exactly right. Especially when you're in relationships. It must be an actual issue if you're an only child and you fall in love with someone who has four siblings.

Right. And you don't really understand that dynamic in any way. Yeah. That must definitely be challenging. Thrown into a, thrown into the fire. Yeah, thrown into the fire. Now, one of the things that was in. interesting in the book. I did write about only children, and my book required me to hold two

seemingly contradictory thoughts in my mind at the same time. One of them was, if you have siblings, these will be the most important people in your lives, the most socializing people in your life, the people with whom you will dress rehearse for life, the people with whom you will test drive life. And at the same time, if you have no siblings, you're going to do just fine because you will find those relationships elsewhere. You'll find them with cousins. You'll find them with school friends. You also, by living in a home with just parents, with just adults, tend to develop more sophisticated senses of humor, a greater sense of how the world works, a greater vocabulary, a greater sense of self-containment, of being able to sit quietly with yourself.

So being an only child is not, as psychologists used to think, a state of likely pathology because you'll grow up selfish and you'll grow up narcissistic. It's simply not the case. But isn't there sort of a personality with only children? Because I know that all of my friends, I have a lot of close friends that are only children. And there is a similarity to their, the way that they are in relationships with their friends. How so? I'm interested in. I think that their attachments are sometimes very intense. I do think a lot depends on how they grew up. If they grew up with a big cousin circle, if they grew up with a big friendship circle, if they grew up with a big friendship circle, if they grew up with parents who took care to make sure that they were in sports teams or

art clubs or debate societies so that their schedules were filled, not so much the overfilling of schedules that parents in the 2000s have done, that the child must be constantly working. But if parents take care to make sure that their only children are continually in a full immersion environment of other children. I do think that helps a lot. I obviously don't know the history of your friends. They may have been that way and they may still feel very needy, but it's also possible that they grew up feeling a little bit lonelier and a little bit more bereft.

And thus, when they find a friend like you, they think, I got to hold tight to this person. I mean, even just, but even, I mean, look, I can't generalize this, but, you know, having three kids, I feel like as an only child, you would have to grow up a little more lonely. I mean, I look at my kids playing together or my two boys still sleep in the same room together, and they're laughing and they have inside jokes and there's such a connection there that goes beyond anything that my wife and I even know because they have their own little world, you know, and I think that is so special and important in sort of in their development, becoming who they are as adults.

Or if you're an only child, you have more opportunity to be innovative and internalize and imaginative. Right, right. I have a dear friend from Baltimore where I grew up who is an only child, and he has an only child. And he said what he admires about his son, his son is a wonderful guitarist. And he said he admires the fact that his son could. sit quietly, completely absorbed for long periods of time in learning to master this instrument. Now, I don't think that comes from loneliness. I don't think that comes from a lack of alternative sources.

He could have been online on a computer. He could have been watching TV. Instead, he had the quiet self-containment to decide, I'm going to practice this very difficult thing and become expert at it. Jeffrey, I need quiet self-containment. Well, I think maybe that promotes... I need that in my life right now. It promotes self-sustainability.

I mean, if you think about it. One thing I did want to say about the need for self-containment is the other side of that can be that when you grow up in a family of a lot of kids, you need the constant stimulation. You know, I work for Time Magazine. We just moved to beautiful new offices on Brian Park. And when I first looked at the floor plan, I saw that my desk, my area of my work area, was all the way by the southern wall.

And I thought, oh, my God, we're going to be all alone there. And I'm going to feel very isolated. And then I realized that since, Once I am at the edge of the office, in order to get anywhere in the office, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to a meeting room, I have to move through an entire population of people. And I love that because that 100-yard walk to the bathroom means I have five opportunities to encounter people and say something dumb or something goofy or check in on something that has to be done or just compliment someone on a piece of a story she had just written that

I loved. And I like the fact that physically I'm required to interact a lot. And I wonder if I were an only child, if I wouldn't have that constant need for reaching out. Yeah, no, that's a great perspective. It's so true. If you were to pass on like the pearl of wisdom, if you only had like one thing to say to your daughters about their relationship, you know, if it was your last opportunity to say something to your girls about that, what would that be? What would that sound like? I think it would be, and I feel this will just sound like a hallmark card, no slur on hallmark, but treasure each other. You are people from the same testes You are people from the same environment.

You are people who share this great commingling of genes, this great commingling of experiences. Nobody in the world can read you and intuit you the way your sister can read you and intuit you. Cherish that, love that, be there for each other that way. My hope is that they both live to be at least 105, And at their hundred and third and hundred and fifth birthdays, they're still there blowing out one another's candles and still quarreling. But that's okay as long as they're still together. Your relationship with your sister is something that no one else in the world has. Cherish it because it's breakable, but it's also infinitely preservable. Beautiful. Oh, Jeffrey. That's great. But I have one more question. Do you think there is life on other planets?

Yes, yes. Thank you for asking me. I believe here is my quick answer to that. There are two schools of thought. The life is hard thought and the life is easy thought. There are lots of people. Paul Davies from the University of California, I think UCal wrote a book called The Erie Silence, and he believes that it is mathematically so improbable that human beings that life would have evolved that we really might be the only thing. I strongly believe in the life. Life is easy theory, and the life is easy theory requires three things. Chemistry, energy, and time. We've got a universe full of chemistry. We've got a universe full of energy in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum and heat from suns, and we got 13.8 billion years that the universe has been around. If we are alone, the universe has a lot of wasted space in it. Mm-hmm.

I love that answer that's right life is easy baby that's the name of this podcast episode life there's easy life is easy there's sibling there's alien siblings out there's alien siblings absolutely but by the way you never know one day there might be an alien 23 and me and we could be related to some other crazy alien that's right Jeffrey Kluger could be an alien himself oh now the story is out now I I have to confess that. I'm going into witness protection now. Thank you, Jeffrey.

This has been really, really fun. And because I'll leave with this, this is the basis of our podcast. I mean, you are the sort of premier pinnacle guest in a sense because we are exploring sibling relationships. This is our sort of, you know, our hypotheses of what we're supposed to be doing. No. What is it? It's okay. What is it?

I don't know. This is the foundation of what our podcast is. Yeah. That's better English. Let me just say in return that extended interviews aren't, they can be hard, they can be easy. I have had so much fun with you guys. Oh, good. You're terrific at doing this.

I could have done this for another hour and a half. I had a really good time with you. Sibling Revelry is executive produced by Kate Hudson, Oliver. Hudson and Sim Sarna. Supervising producer is Allison Bresnick. Editor is Josh Windish. Music by Mark Hudson, aka Uncle Mark. I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians.

artists and activists, to bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. The moment is a space for the conversations we've been having us, father and daughter, for years. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Introducing IVF disrupted, the kind body story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. It grew like a tech startup, while kind. Kind Body did help women start families. It also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients. You think you're finally, like, in the right hands.

You're just not. Listen to IvyF Disrupted, the Kind Body Story, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slimmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike.

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