The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 266. Gay Parenting： Promise and Pitfalls

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm here today with my colleague and my friend, Mr. Dave Rubin, host of The Rubin Report, a top-ranking online talk show known to many of you.

00:01:19.380 He's an author, comedian, and TV personality best known for his political and cultural commentary.

00:01:24.620 Mr. Rubin began his career, like so many people in the online world, as a stand-up comedian and continues to perform on stage in that guise throughout the U.S.

00:01:35.400 In an effort to combat big tech censorship, Rubin founded Locals.com, a subscription-based digital platform that empowers creators to be independent by giving them control over their content and data.

00:01:49.040 Something we could all use.

00:01:51.000 Dave's first book, Don't Burn This Book, Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, was a New York Times bestseller.

00:01:58.740 His second book, Don't Burn This Country, Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia, was published by Penguin Random House on April 12, 2022.

00:02:08.260 Dave and I got to know each other first when he was one of the earliest public figures to support my efforts on the fight against compelled speech in Canada and elsewhere.

00:02:19.540 And then, more deeply, when he opened for me in 125 cities during my 2018 book tour, I concentrated during that tour talking to my audiences on many issues pertaining to responsibility and meaning, including family life.

00:02:37.720 And that's what we're going to talk about today.

00:02:40.360 Today, Mr. Rubin currently resides in Miami with his husband, David Janet, and their rescue dog, Clyde.

00:02:49.360 Good to see you, Dave.

00:02:50.580 It's good to see you, my friend.

00:02:52.040 I have to say, this feels a little bizarre to me.

00:02:54.780 We've done so many of these in so many different cities and countries and different chairs and on Skype and Zoom and every which way.

00:03:02.620 And I'm usually reading your bio.

00:03:04.540 I know, I know.

00:03:05.340 This is bizarre, man.

00:03:06.200 I know, I don't usually interview you, but we talked together a couple of weeks ago.

00:03:11.460 You have big changes coming up in your life.

00:03:13.480 And we talked about having a serious conversation about that.

00:03:16.620 I know that, and please correct me if I'm saying anything that isn't accurate.

00:03:21.260 A lot of what I talked about when we were together on the 2018 tour was the responsibility or the meaning that's inherent in responsibility and the kind of meaning that sustains people through crisis and catastrophe.

00:03:34.460 And part of my, the propositions I was putting forward, I suppose, was that most of that meaning is to be found in responsibility, especially to other people.

00:03:46.560 And I talked a lot about the role of family in people's lives.

00:03:50.260 And at that point, you really hadn't been considering children, not seriously, although your partner, your husband, was more committed to that than you were.

00:04:01.400 You said, you've told me that your views changed to some degree, at least in part, as a consequence of us communicating over the course of that entire year.

00:04:11.020 So maybe you could fill people in on that front and let them know what's happening.

00:04:14.880 Yeah, sure.

00:04:15.640 Well, so David and I met 13 years ago yesterday.

00:04:19.720 And I know it was yesterday because we met on my birthday, believe it or not.

00:04:23.440 It was on my birthday.

00:04:24.540 And then I got an even weirder one for you.

00:04:26.140 It was at the Gay Pride Parade in New York City, which now they've become sort of these sort of crazy circuses.

00:04:33.700 But back then, it wasn't quite like that.

00:04:35.360 But I actually literally remember when he walked into the room and he was wearing an American flag tank top, which I'm pretty sure you can't wear to a pride parade anymore.

00:04:43.320 But in any event, we've been together for about 12 years.

00:04:46.220 We've been married for seven years.

00:04:47.580 And I'm 46 now.

00:04:49.800 So I grew up in a time when I never even, first off, I struggled with my sexuality for a long time.

00:04:56.440 Partly, we've discussed this.

00:04:57.860 I felt, you know, people, it's sort of like a Homer Simpson quote that I love.

00:05:02.160 And I know you can do the Simpsons thing all the time.

00:05:04.280 I like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming.

00:05:07.240 And I sort of thought that was what it meant, that gay, even though I was attracted to men, that gay meant something else.

00:05:13.520 Gay meant like you like the theater or you like to dance or you like Madonna or something.

00:05:17.040 And I didn't really care for any of those things.

00:05:19.160 So I really had some distance between my feelings and my attractions and sort of the way the world could map to that, so to speak.

00:05:29.100 And as a Gen Xer, there was nothing.

00:05:32.920 We never talked about gay marriage.

00:05:34.180 You didn't even talk about anything gay.

00:05:35.520 There was nothing, you know, growing up in the 90s, there was no role model to look at.

00:05:40.380 The only person that I ever saw on television that made any sense to me was in two episodes of The Golden Girls.

00:05:46.080 Blanche's brother comes out as gay and he marries a cop.

00:05:49.700 This is 1991, NBC primetime.

00:05:52.900 Obviously, gay marriage wasn't legal for another 30 years or something.

00:05:56.360 But so I had no role models.

00:05:57.840 I had no nothing.

00:05:58.480 So I sort of just never thought about getting married, having a family.

00:06:01.740 And I, truthfully, and I didn't even realize this until we were on tour, I never thought of the future.

00:06:07.060 I sort of thought of my present all the time.

00:06:09.840 And then when we were on tour, flash forward a bit, David and I got married.

00:06:15.080 And even when we got married, we never really talked about having kids or even what a family meant.

00:06:21.600 We knew we love each other and we have a great time together.

00:06:24.840 And, you know, we love the same things.

00:06:27.020 And I think in most ways, we bring out the best in each other.

00:06:30.520 Sometimes we bring out the worst in each other.

00:06:32.140 And that probably is, that's probably good.

00:06:33.620 You're married.

00:06:34.580 Exactly.

00:06:36.420 But then right around when we were on tour, so now this is 2018, David started talking about having kids.

00:06:43.740 And we were texting a lot about it while we were on tour.

00:06:46.780 And then I'm with you on, you know, on stage every night, as you said, in 125 cities for about a year and a half.

00:06:53.100 And you're constantly talking about the importance of family and the importance that for most people, and this is the way you would always say it, and it's hard to quote Jordan Peterson exactly, but something to the effect of that for most people to live a fully actualized life, that being a parent is a integral part of that.

00:07:12.620 There's almost no exceptions to that.

00:07:14.340 You would always make a point.

00:07:15.040 There are some exceptions.

00:07:16.140 You might find there.

00:07:16.760 Yeah, but you have to be exceptional to have an exception to that.

00:07:20.160 Yes.

00:07:20.420 Maybe it's a third job and career and that sort of service to the broader community, and it's a third your intimate relationship, and then it's a third children and family.

00:07:31.240 And those proportions can vary, but if you miss one of those, there's a big gap to fill, and maybe you can fill it.

00:07:37.640 If another one of your endeavors has the expansive quality necessary to occupy two-thirds of your time, more power to you, I suppose, but it's a big risk.

00:07:49.880 And so you also told me, Dave, when we were talking about this before, that you started to think about being older as well, and I suppose that with your concentration on the present and the lack of role models, that there was no real vision for what it might be like to, well, to grow old in the gay community, I suppose.

00:08:09.920 Yeah, and you know, it's funny, the gay community, I hate that phrase, I know, even as you said it, it's like, it doesn't mean anything to me.

00:08:17.900 I don't think of you as part of the straight community, you know, it's just one of these things, we say these things, we don't even know exactly why we're saying them.

00:08:24.080 But I didn't have that role model, I didn't have that, there was no map, there really wasn't.

00:08:27.720 It's a brotherhood of the marginalized.

00:08:29.640 I guess that's a group I could be part of, I suppose, in some bizarre sense.

00:08:33.620 But even that is sort of nauseating, I guess.

00:08:37.200 But so we're on tour together, and David's texting me, and we're going back, and we're talking on the phone, and we're FaceTiming, and it just keeps coming up, and you keep talking about this on stage.

00:08:46.580 And on top of everything else, I'm meeting all of the people that are attending the shows.

00:08:50.700 And you know this, the amount of people that were in new families, or that the wife was pregnant for the first time.

00:08:57.900 And I'm seeing the joy on these people's faces.

00:09:00.380 All of this is hitting me.

00:09:01.360 And then you keep saying this thing that for most people, they have to do it.

00:09:05.360 But there are these exceptions.

00:09:06.380 And I kept thinking, well, wait a minute, could I be the exception that I could live a fully actualized, best possible life without having kids, and at the same time be married to someone who wants kids?

00:09:17.300 Then what am I even married for?

00:09:19.200 Well, right, right.

00:09:20.320 Well, that does beg that question, doesn't it?

00:09:22.200 Right, so now these things are really hitting each other.

00:09:24.900 And because the map wasn't there, the roadmap just wasn't there, I started going, man, I really have to think about this now.

00:09:34.020 And I remember one night we were on, you were on stage, and you know, I had the best seat in the house every night, because I'm just off stage left.

00:09:40.820 So I'm basically watching you.

00:09:42.460 Stage right is actually better.

00:09:43.800 Stage right, I guess, yeah, I suppose.

00:09:45.700 It depends which country we were in.

00:09:47.680 But I'm, you know, I'm basically watching you from behind.

00:09:50.460 So I have sort of the back view of you to the crowd.

00:09:53.060 So I genuinely felt that every night, that I was part of the show every night in that sense, part of the audience.

00:09:58.660 And I remember you said it one more time, and I thought, all right, I have to do this.

00:10:03.140 I have to do this.

00:10:04.520 And that's why it was always incredibly honest when I would say to the crowd that being on tour with you, for every reason that they were there, that you helped these people change their lives, that you did that to me too.

00:10:15.600 But now, and I think the purpose of this conversation, which, by the way, if you would have said to me 10 years ago that I'd be having this conversation publicly, first off, that I'd be married, I wouldn't have believed you, that I'd be having kids, I wouldn't have believed you, that I would be willing to talk about this.

00:10:30.440 Or even someone that, even someone that someone else might look to, to help map it for them, I'd say you were completely insane.

00:10:38.200 This is not really something, you know, I'd rather talk about politics.

00:10:41.740 I'd rather talk about the culture wars and all of these other things.

00:10:45.080 This is a political issue too, because we're trying to sketch out a pathway, I suppose.

00:10:50.440 I mean, our culture appears to have decided that gay marriage is, well, I don't know if acceptable is the right word.

00:11:00.400 It's become part of the structure of marriage itself.

00:11:04.400 And so now the question is, okay, what does that mean?

00:11:07.920 And that certainly opens up the question on the child front, because, I mean, in some ways marriage is the union of two people, but in a possibly more fundamental way, it's the union of two people to provide the foundation for children.

00:11:26.980 And I would say that's actually paramount.

00:11:29.920 I mean, our society tends to flip that around, and we tend to think of marriage as something that, well, you find the partner right for you and you live happily ever after.

00:11:37.900 It's, well, no, not exactly.

00:11:39.740 And, but, or maybe, maybe exactly if you also understand that living happily ever after means living for other people in many ways, particularly your children.

00:11:52.900 And so, and then, of course, that complicates the issue on the gay marriage front, because, as we're going to talk about, it's also more technically difficult to have children if you're a homosexual couple.

00:12:06.760 Right.

00:12:07.100 So if you take just the marriage part first, meaning that two people are going to choose to share their life and live together, you know, share a bed, et cetera, et cetera, I would say culturally in America, we kind of move past that.

00:12:18.980 I mean, Trump ran, he's the first, first time president, he was on stage with a rainbow flag.

00:12:23.540 It was, you know, and, and nobody cared or not, I shouldn't say nobody cared, but the enough people felt, okay, you let people live the way they want to, to put this down and, and move ahead.

00:12:34.740 But you're right that marriage has to do with something else.

00:12:38.700 Otherwise, otherwise the word marriage wouldn't mean anything.

00:12:42.020 It's like, nobody really cares if you live with your friend for the rest of your life or you live with a man or a woman, you know, people, people do this all the time.

00:12:48.980 Time in life and it doesn't really matter.

00:12:50.680 So what really is the purpose of really living with somebody and really being with somebody and sharing your life with somebody is to build something lasting, something that I think something that you've learned and know and were taught and that you can hand that on to the next generation and hopefully they can attain and retain some of that.

00:13:09.160 That permanence in your life too, right?

00:13:10.720 Yeah.

00:13:10.900 That multi-generational permanence stretching indefinitely into the future.

00:13:14.820 I mean, part of what marriage does, I think technically, it's the psychological equivalent of what sex does genetically.

00:13:23.520 You know, if people mix gametes, gametes, gametes, gametes, gametes, partly because to, to ensure variability and to stop the propagation of parasites, that's why we don't clone.

00:13:39.960 But there's that mixing as well tends to ensure that deviations from genetic health are minimized.

00:13:51.140 And so the same thing happens on the psychological front, I would say, is that each person has their own idiosyncrasies and some of those lead them down the garden path to terrible places.

00:14:01.740 But if you're with someone else and you have to negotiate with them constantly, then that opens up the possibility of you mutually modifying each other's personalities so that you both become healthier and that your joint existence is a kind of, can be a paragon of sorts.

00:14:17.540 And then that's what the child interacts with, is that united front of the two parents.

00:14:22.800 Right.

00:14:23.140 And so you get that longevity of view, which I think helps to mature you, but you also get the opportunity to become more fully fledged as a psychological being.

00:14:33.960 And then I think that's furthered as well.

00:14:35.800 I've often thought and said this, and I do believe it's true.

00:14:38.400 It's very, very difficult to mature until you have children.

00:14:41.960 And there are other ways of maturing, but it's hard.

00:14:45.740 And the reason it's hard, I think, is because you're not mature until someone else is more important than you.

00:14:54.020 And it's possible that that would happen with your wife, your husband, but not like with children.

00:15:00.800 Well, I've been thinking about that.

00:15:02.480 So, you know, we're about to have our first child in a month, and I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

00:15:06.080 Like, it's just something that's constantly stirring in my head that I feel like I've sort of gotten to the end of where I can get mature in my maturation process.

00:15:17.000 Not that I can't change or get better at this or that or something, but I do feel like I'm at the end of one phase right now.

00:15:23.180 I really, I very much feel that.

00:15:25.740 And I think I'm feeling it more and more each day as we get closer to August 22nd, which is the due date.

00:15:32.060 But, you know, the first part, you know, you can take, whether it's a straight relationship or a gay relationship, the dance that a couple can do and the way that they can mature each other and love each other and all of those things, that's one thing.

00:15:45.980 But the peace with the kids, with building this sustainable thing, it's not something that has been proven in society yet, really.

00:15:54.360 You know, there obviously are gay couples with kids.

00:15:57.140 Yeah.

00:15:57.280 And this has been happening for decades, but it really is sort of unseen at the moment, which is why we wanted to have this conversation.

00:16:05.380 And I was like, boy, I don't even know that, in some ways, I don't know that I'm the person that's supposed to have this conversation, but maybe that's exactly why I'm supposed to have this conversation.

00:16:14.000 Well, we're both exploring it, you know, and trying to figure it out.

00:16:15.320 I mean, talk, maybe we can talk about exactly how it came to be that you'll have a baby in your household in six weeks.

00:16:26.280 Talk about what you had to do to make that happen and why you made the decisions that you made and what advantages and hazards come along with that.

00:16:39.220 Sure.

00:16:39.660 So first, technically, because there are biological differences between men and women, I don't want to get us canceled on YouTube, but it actually is true, Jordan.

00:16:48.120 And, you know, we could not biologically have kids.

00:16:51.560 So, you know, just ourselves.

00:16:53.520 So we talked about adoption for a little bit.

00:16:56.660 We did.

00:16:57.280 We both felt that the genetic component of this was important to us.

00:17:01.320 So for a little while, we debated going with my sister's egg.

00:17:07.160 We thought we'd have two kids.

00:17:08.380 That was the general thought process in the beginning.

00:17:11.080 And we thought we could take some of my sister's eggs.

00:17:14.260 And she's a mother now.

00:17:15.240 She's actually pregnant with her third.

00:17:16.540 But that we could get her eggs.

00:17:18.820 And then we would take David's sperm.

00:17:20.440 And then we would have two children from that.

00:17:22.900 After a long time of talking about a year, debating that back and forth and going through all that, there were a lot of ethical and moral issues.

00:17:29.440 And my sister then would sort of would be the biological mother of my children.

00:17:34.360 I mean, there were all sorts of things that we were about to traverse.

00:17:37.140 Right.

00:17:37.260 And that's all uncharted territory, right?

00:17:39.280 All sorts.

00:17:40.240 You think you know how that might go.

00:17:42.140 And you think you know how it might go if you have goodwill.

00:17:44.700 But that does not mean that you know how it will go.

00:17:47.240 And I have to say, even that conversation, having that conversation with my sister, who was interested in, you know, when we came to her, she was sort of flattered and honored that we were even considering it.

00:17:57.220 But then, you know, we said, why don't you sit with this for a little bit?

00:18:00.380 And then suddenly she had a lot of those questions.

00:18:02.060 And she was concerned if, you know, she shows up to the birthday party and then feels this odd jealousy.

00:18:06.620 Or what if she suddenly wasn't happy with the way that we were parenting?

00:18:10.440 That's a big one.

00:18:11.380 Or a litany of other things.

00:18:12.480 So even going through that, and this obviously is not the way that we ultimately went about it.

00:18:16.860 Even that was sort of a maturation process and like, you know, what are we really trying to do here?

00:18:21.720 So anyway, ultimately, we decided to find an egg donor.

00:18:25.080 I mean, basically, it sounds sort of glib or something, but it's sort of like Tinder.

00:18:29.700 I mean, there are these websites that exist where the egg donors are on the site.

00:18:33.920 And we tried to find a girl.

00:18:36.200 I didn't really care that much about the pedigree in terms of did they go to an Ivy League school or anything like that.

00:18:41.360 We wanted to find a girl who obviously was physically healthy, most importantly, that, you know, that didn't have major issues in terms of genetics and all that sort of stuff.

00:18:51.520 We thought that sort of looked like the type of girl that we might be with.

00:18:55.540 So I didn't want, you know, a six foot five Swedish woman, let's say.

00:19:00.460 And so we have one egg donor, meaning there were multiple eggs.

00:19:04.020 And we fertilized one with David's sperm and one with my sperm.

00:19:07.740 And we'll have two kids right now.

00:19:09.160 We have two surrogates that are pregnant.

00:19:10.980 And even talking about this, it's like, man, I get this is this is all kind of crazy stuff.

00:19:15.180 Putting aside, putting aside gay or straight related to all of this, the whole surrogacy thing is, is it's fascinating that there are, first off, women who are willing to donate their eggs.

00:19:25.820 And, you know, I hear a lot of people and we talked about this.

00:19:28.640 There's this criticism of somehow that you're buying the egg and you're renting the woman, meaning the surrogate.

00:19:35.100 Yeah.

00:19:35.860 And of course, there is a financial component to it.

00:19:37.900 There is.

00:19:38.380 I'm not denying that there is.

00:19:39.460 I can tell you, having gone through this process and we had a previous surrogate who had two miscarriages, they were also, you know, we were doing a lot of this during COVID.

00:19:48.940 And during COVID, there were all sorts, the miscarriage numbers were through the roof.

00:19:53.020 There were all sorts of weird things.

00:19:54.300 The quality of the eggs wasn't great.

00:19:56.420 They don't know exactly.

00:19:57.340 They'll have to study this for years in terms of what actually happened.

00:19:59.780 But I can tell you that the women who offer to be the surrogates and who are offering their eggs, they are not doing this for the money.

00:20:10.780 There's all sorts of other ways that you can make money, that anyone can make money.

00:20:14.700 They are doing it.

00:20:15.500 They talk about that they have this ability and this gift that they can do.

00:20:19.760 A lot of them, there are some that won't do it for same-sex couples because of their own ethical or religious views.

00:20:25.880 The surrogates that we found, they actually, one of them had a gay brother.

00:20:30.480 I mean, there were all sorts of things that they feel that they can help other people have a family and what a better gift there is.

00:20:36.860 But all of that aside, all of the science and genetics and all that, it leads us to this thing, which I think is the heart of what we're trying to talk about here, which is, so we're going to be a family with two fathers and no mothers.

00:20:49.620 And what does that really look like?

00:20:51.600 You know, it's very easy to just say, okay, gay people should have kids or gay people should get married and gay people should have kids.

00:20:57.200 It's easy to say a lot of things.

00:20:58.260 It's easy to say an awful lot of things.

00:20:59.660 As you said, it's not that easy for a gay couple to have kids.

00:21:02.320 Right.

00:21:02.580 It's very complicated.

00:21:03.360 So putting aside the, if you're going to go through the surrogacy route, putting aside all the finances and all of that stuff that eliminates an awful lot of people from even being able to do it.

00:21:11.380 Fortunately, we're able to do it.

00:21:13.780 But now it gets us to the real part here, which is that now we're going to live in a household with two fathers.

00:21:21.620 There's going to be no mother involved.

00:21:23.720 And what does that really mean?

00:21:25.580 And I understand some of the reservations.

00:21:27.940 Well, so we do know that children who are breastfed do better.

00:21:34.780 Yep.

00:21:34.960 But I believe that one year of breastfeeding is equivalent to, I think breastfed kids have a five point IQ advantage and one point IQ is worth one year of education.

00:21:45.820 I have two freezers in my garage, two industrial freezers full of breast milk.

00:21:50.300 Right.

00:21:50.720 David has done all the research on this.

00:21:52.860 Right.

00:21:53.160 So another complication, but okay.

00:21:55.100 And so we don't have data.

00:21:56.980 We don't really have data on motherless children raised by fathers from infancy, right?

00:22:03.420 Because it's pretty rare.

00:22:04.300 I don't know if there's literature pertaining to that at all.

00:22:07.840 We do have a literature on mother-headed families without fathers.

00:22:14.400 And the data there are crystal clear.

00:22:16.860 It's not good to be fatherless.

00:22:19.660 Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some women who are struggling mightily as single mothers who don't do an outstanding job.

00:22:25.580 But what it absolutely and 100% means that on average, that's suboptimal and badly suboptimal.

00:22:34.500 And so it seems to me that the minimal stable requirement for ensuring the psychological health and financial viability of a child is something like a nuclear family structure.

00:22:50.500 Yes.

00:22:50.800 Minimally, right?

00:22:51.660 So you need a mother and a father, or at least you need two people, one who plays a maternal role and one who plays a paternal role, or that they split those.

00:23:00.120 Two seems to be better than one.

00:23:01.800 Now, how much of that's linked to sex, we also don't know.

00:23:05.960 You know, it seems that the feminine role is more accepting slash nurturing.

00:23:15.180 You see that with the proclivity of women to be more agreeable temperamentally.

00:23:20.480 That kicks in at puberty.

00:23:21.580 And so I think that you have to be accepting and nurturing, especially in your attitude towards infants before they're mobile.

00:23:34.780 So say before six months, before nine months, an infant does no wrong.

00:23:39.780 It's 100% acceptance.

00:23:42.380 The problem with that is that that's not true as the child develops because it has to switch to more of an encouraging role.

00:23:50.600 It's like out of your dependency into the world.

00:23:53.500 And the paternal spirit encourages that development.

00:23:57.720 Now, mothers can do that too.

00:23:59.080 But roughly speaking, women tend to do the nurturing thing more and men do the encouraging thing more.

00:24:05.280 So now the question is, how do you mediate?

00:24:08.200 How do you manage to fulfill both those roles in the absence of a heterosexual arrangement?

00:24:15.900 Right.

00:24:16.380 So now naturally we understand that there are men who are more nurturing and women who aren't as nurturing and all of those things.

00:24:22.640 Now, you know David pretty well.

00:24:24.180 And we've been out to dinner with Tammy many times.

00:24:25.940 And you know him.

00:24:26.960 He is incredibly warm and nurturing and loving and deeply cares about all of those things.

00:24:32.380 And I'm telling you, he is reading about skin-to-skin contact every day and all of the breast milk stuff and everything.

00:24:37.900 And I know he will have a huge percentage of the stuff that a mother would bring.

00:24:44.620 But I also know it's not all of it.

00:24:46.300 And he knows it's not all of it.

00:24:47.380 Well, also the other thing too is that you guys have to do that consciously.

00:24:51.000 Yes.

00:24:51.300 With research in hand and to build up that proclivity that would be there more automatically, arguably, with a mother and all the psychological and hormonal transformations she undergoes and that transition into breast milk production and all of that, which is a fundamental transformation in a woman's biology and her psyche.

00:25:13.180 Now, you and David have ample resources at hand financially and intellectually that enable you to traverse this pathway as well as anyone is likely to do it.

00:25:25.280 But it is very interesting and salutary to hear you also talk about the complications.

00:25:31.980 So on the feminine side, let's say, you think you have the nurturance angle well covered.

00:25:39.840 You talked to me a little bit about having women around in your infant and child's life as well.

00:25:46.020 Yeah.

00:25:46.200 So David's mom is going to be living with us for a few months at the start, as well as his sister, who's taken care of young babies already.

00:25:53.820 But now I understand that they're not the biological mother, but they will be there.

00:25:57.620 You know, we're going to have night nurses also for a few months to help the babies get on a normal sleep schedule.

00:26:02.980 But these are all the pieces that we're trying to put together.

00:26:05.420 But can we just back up for one second?

00:26:06.800 Because I think before we go too deep into just the parental part of this, there was another thing that came up when we sort of roughly sketched out this conversation over dinner that I think is important, which is that if you weren't to allow gay people to either get married and enter relationships that will last the test of time or have children to really last the generations, then what are we reducing these people to?

00:26:28.840 And I think that's a huge part of this for me, that I think had the world not shifted to be a little bit kinder, had I not maybe been on tour with you and come to some of these realizations or found someone in the world that I wanted to put their needs above my own, that I could have been left to a life that would have been sort of purely narcissistic or self-destructive or anything.

00:26:51.980 Well, I don't see how that, in some sense, I don't see how there can be any alternative to that if there isn't another pathway forward.

00:27:00.260 Yes. And so that's the, to me, that's like the unknown road that I'm going down right now, that I want, I'm choosing to go down that unknown road of, oh, it can be better than that. Right? I don't, as I said, I don't have, I have, we have two or three couples that are gay parents that are doing some version of this, but we don't have that model.

00:27:20.280 But then when, you know, we lived in West Hollywood, West Hollywood is the gayest place on earth, you know, rainbow crosswalks and the whole thing. And to me, I would see these guys that were, you know, 65, 70 years old, that all they had basically was that they worked out, they spray tanned and got hair plugs, they had their little dogs and they partied on the weekends and probably chased the same sexual escapades that they were chasing 40 years ago.

00:27:45.820 Right, so it was sustained adolescence.

00:27:47.560 Yeah. And it's not, it's not a full life. And I actually, it's like, it feels, I have like almost like a visceral feeling when I talk about it, because I know that that could have been me. So when I see these people that either at this point are against gay marriage, but, but in general, there are, there don't seem to be that many voices publicly about that.

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00:30:53.500 So here's a rough question.

00:30:55.400 So do you think both the flamboyance, now I want to get into this in some detail,

00:31:00.940 but the flamboyance that's been historically associated with the male headers, homosexual community, community, sorry about that,

00:31:08.340 and the promiscuity, do you think, to what degree do you think that both of those are a consequence

00:31:17.100 of not having a more integrated and conservative path potentially open in front of people?

00:31:23.720 Well, I think it's a huge amount that probably will never be fully explained.

00:31:28.900 If people don't have an ability, look, what was the gay rights movement for in the 70s in New York City and Stonewall and all of those things?

00:31:38.240 It was, these people just wanted, well, they wanted to be able to get married.

00:31:41.640 That was part of it.

00:31:42.480 But it was also that they wanted to be able to go to a bar that wasn't underground, that wasn't hidden,

00:31:46.860 that wasn't, you know, this seedy thing.

00:31:48.820 But that's what they had to do because they were getting raided by the police, and this was going on, obviously, in other countries,

00:31:53.380 and it was going on for decades before that.

00:31:55.500 But they wanted some sense of normalcy.

00:31:57.580 If you don't leave people some little seeds of normalcy, then they will do all sorts of things.

00:32:03.660 So the flamboyant part, there's two parts you're asking about.

00:32:06.080 So the flamboyant part, I'm just not built that way.

00:32:09.040 I'm not.

00:32:09.680 Sometimes I used to, you know, I used to, when I was first sort of coming out or coming to grips with myself,

00:32:13.800 I actually liked guys that were kind of flamboyant because I, in my, to me, it was like, oh, they're so who they are.

00:32:22.180 Like they had just let go of every sort of normal cliche or something like that.

00:32:26.640 They're so who they are.

00:32:27.520 Right, so you saw in that kind of existential courage.

00:32:29.560 Yeah, and yet, yet they always really like, generally gays, they like straight acting.

00:32:34.760 That's a, that's a real thing with, with gays.

00:32:36.920 They like straight acting.

00:32:38.080 So guys always liked me because I, I didn't seem gay, whatever that meant.

00:32:42.220 And I thought it sort of meant that I was broken in a weird way because it made me feel like a sort of like double freak in an odd sense.

00:32:49.080 Right, right.

00:32:49.640 Because I was struggling.

00:32:50.820 Too queer for the straight community and too straight for the queer community.

00:32:54.100 Well said, man.

00:32:55.680 And, and so I was sort of grappling with that.

00:32:58.720 So there was this, there's the flamboyant part.

00:33:00.720 And then, and then you're asking about the, the sex side of it.

00:33:03.120 It's like, if you don't leave people with some ability to say, oh, you can be in a lasting relationship.

00:33:07.480 This is why marriage equality was so important.

00:33:09.700 Now, this is a sidebar, but I would never force a church or a mosque or a synagogue to perform a wedding that was against its beliefs.

00:33:16.460 But from a secular perspective, to whatever respect we remain secular in this country, if you don't give people the same opportunity to be in a relationship and then learn all of the things that you talked about before,

00:33:29.960 how you go through that churning with your partner and hopefully make each other better and sometimes make each other worse and all that stuff.

00:33:35.680 What will you leave them with?

00:33:36.760 You will leave them with their carnal desires.

00:33:39.020 And I definitely could have gone down that road.

00:33:41.840 Well, you also might leave them with a defiant, with a defiant, um, rebelliousness, right?

00:33:49.100 Because who knows what happens if you're not allowed, so to speak, to be who you are, then it strikes me as highly probable that an excessive amount of rebelliousness is going to start to look attractive, right?

00:34:04.020 And maybe to be indistinguishable from courage.

00:34:06.120 I would say it's got to be the case that the hope, so to speak, of the more enlightened conservative types who were willing to open the door to gay marriage was that by bringing those relationships inside the traditional fold, that things would normalize, right?

00:34:23.800 And that there would be a promotion of something like stable, mature, responsible, long-term monogamy.

00:34:29.200 Well, I think maybe I'm trying to prove that.

00:34:30.940 I'm not, I'm not trying to prove it like I'm setting out to prove it, but I suppose de facto because of my life, I'm trying to prove that.

00:34:38.240 I mean, in a weird way, although I'm probably the unlikeliest of conservatives in that sense, it's like, what life am I trying to live?

00:34:45.560 I'm trying to live a life that is somewhat conservative in nature, in that sense, meaning that I believe that family is important and probably the most important thing after the individual.

00:34:56.020 That's how societies are built.

00:34:57.820 I fundamentally believe that.

00:34:59.300 So it's weird.

00:35:01.140 It's like my worldview, because otherwise, what are you saying to people?

00:35:05.320 So, okay, okay, you're gay.

00:35:06.680 So you can either just endlessly have sex or endlessly disregard every norm known to man and just have nothing other than wake up and just live life how you want.

00:35:18.440 What other way is there to integrate into society, to really integrate into society?

00:35:23.500 I mean, to me, this is it.

00:35:25.400 Well, I think that's why the culture did take the decision that it took, which was to open the doors, let's say.

00:35:30.980 Now, we talked about that.

00:35:32.260 I want to get into that, too, because we have this notion that's rife in our culture, let's say, that's insisted upon that all families are equal.

00:35:44.180 And I understand the emphasis on that from the, let's call it the tolerance perspective.

00:35:52.680 But I think that it's badly flawed in one manner.

00:35:56.620 And I think this will be the hardest thing probably for us to discuss is that you can't flatten out distinctions without a tremendous loss.

00:36:07.340 And I don't think it's possible to dispense with the ideal of heterosexual monogamy.

00:36:14.560 Now, as the ideal.

00:36:16.100 Yes.

00:36:16.200 That's so if we think, well, there's an ideal individual who's responsible and mature and far-seeing and honest, an honest trader, a good player, an honorable person, honorable, decent person.

00:36:27.600 And then there's the minimal requirement for a family that's ideal.

00:36:31.880 And that's something approximating heterosexual, long-term heterosexual monogamy.

00:36:36.200 And maybe you have two decent people united together, and then there's a firm platform for children.

00:36:42.060 Now, the problem with that as an ideal is that we all fall short of the ideal.

00:36:47.380 And so half, 40% of people are going to get divorced.

00:36:51.980 And of the people who don't get divorced, a good percentage of them are in pretty damn miserable marriages.

00:36:57.600 Now, that doesn't condemn marriage, but it does show how difficult attaining that ideal is.

00:37:02.480 And then there's going to be people who lose their partners and raise children alone.

00:37:06.580 And there are going to be people who raise children alone by happenstance or choice.

00:37:12.480 And it doesn't seem reasonable to, what would you say, put them outside the bounds of civilized society.

00:37:23.460 Let's say that.

00:37:24.580 By the same token, it doesn't seem reasonable to dispense with the ideal.

00:37:28.520 Yes.

00:37:28.620 So maybe we need something like, well, we know what the ideal is.

00:37:31.720 It's a divine ideal in some sense, in that none of us can live up to it.

00:37:36.560 But then there has to be a space around that ideal where the individual differences and flaws and peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of people aren't treated so harshly that that becomes counterproductive in and of itself.

00:37:53.480 It's damning with faint praise.

00:37:55.060 But I don't see...

00:37:55.880 No, that's it.

00:37:56.660 That's it.

00:37:57.520 That's it.

00:37:58.160 That's the meat of this more than anything else.

00:38:01.320 Of course there's an ideal.

00:38:03.060 Of course there is an ideal.

00:38:05.020 There has to be an ideal.

00:38:06.520 And if we believe...

00:38:06.980 Well, there's nothing to aim at if there's not an ideal.

00:38:09.020 Because if the ideal isn't two people, male and female, in a heterosexual relationship, then what is it?

00:38:16.020 Is it four people?

00:38:17.580 Is it eight people?

00:38:18.620 Is it one person?

00:38:20.060 Like, instantly you go from that kind of narrow ideal to an intense multiplicity.

00:38:24.880 And we've certainly seen the problems that are associated with that.

00:38:28.180 And so you can't just blow out the confines of the ideal without destabilizing, well, maybe you destabilize society at the level of the family.

00:38:35.420 And that seems to me to be a really bad idea.

00:38:37.440 Well, it's a really bad idea.

00:38:38.920 And I think we're seeing some of the repercussions of that right now, right?

00:38:42.220 I mean, we've seen the excesses of what the woke or the progressives or whatever that is that are now destabilizing everything.

00:38:49.840 This is why I've said this.

00:38:50.880 I've gotten into trouble for saying it a few times.

00:38:52.540 But I'm sympathetic to conservatives who go, boy, you know, we let gay marriage happen and look what's happened since.

00:39:00.260 Now we're into all this gender stuff and they're literally teaching gender theory to five-year-olds who know nothing about gender or sex or anything else.

00:39:08.240 But the issue really is, okay, so if we have the ideal, really what we're talking about here is what do we do with these marginal cases?

00:39:14.820 The marginal cases meaning, okay, so now they're-

00:39:16.660 The old postmodern question.

00:39:17.580 Right.

00:39:17.940 So what do we really do with that?

00:39:19.580 So now, okay, so there are going to be gay couples who want to approximate to that ideal.

00:39:25.680 So what does a society do?

00:39:27.760 Does a society try to help them get there?

00:39:31.120 Or does a society just never talk about it, push them to the margins or-

00:39:36.280 And push it underground.

00:39:37.600 Right.

00:39:38.440 So what we're trying to do right here is unearth that a little bit.

00:39:42.700 So I don't deny the importance of a mother by no stretch.

00:39:46.740 As I said, we're going to try to have as many strong female role models as possible.

00:39:50.700 But I don't think it will replicate a mother.

00:39:53.400 By the way, when you talk about-

00:39:54.600 Children are pretty good at bonding with adults who aren't their biological relatives.

00:39:58.920 What children don't like is instability in their primary caregiver.

00:40:03.380 They really hate having primary caregivers swap because their primary caregiver is their whole world.

00:40:08.860 And so basically, if you substitute one for another, say, six months into the child's life,

00:40:16.520 then it's as if everything the child knows has been flipped upside down.

00:40:20.120 So they don't like that.

00:40:21.180 They're perfectly capable of bonding with multiple people, though.

00:40:24.180 And there doesn't seem to be any developmental downside to that.

00:40:27.140 In fact, perhaps quite the contrary.

00:40:28.900 You know, I don't think it's so bad for a child to have a variety of role models to choose from.

00:40:33.340 And I certainly don't think it's impossible for you to replicate both the masculine and the feminine influences in your children's life.

00:40:41.900 I would just say, well, it's difficult.

00:40:44.200 It might be more difficult even if you're a homosexual couple.

00:40:47.340 But it's difficult if you're-

00:40:48.960 It's difficult enough if you're a heterosexual.

00:40:50.420 And there are plenty of heterosexual couples.

00:40:53.080 So where both partners are essentially feminine in their temperament,

00:40:57.060 or both partners are essentially masculine.

00:40:58.900 Now, we don't know enough about that to differentiate it right down to the ultimate degree.

00:41:04.880 But the problem that you guys will face isn't of a categorically different type necessarily than the problem that many couples face.

00:41:13.220 Absolutely.

00:41:13.740 And there are also, when you talk about the ideal and then the way that everyone fits into that ideal or tries to get to that ideal,

00:41:20.240 there are parents who obviously abuse their kids or abuse each other and alcoholics and all those things.

00:41:24.760 I'm in no way comparing being a gay parent to that.

00:41:27.140 But the point is that there is an ideal situation, and then there's what society will allow.

00:41:32.320 And then there's reality.

00:41:33.120 So it's like, okay, so should society stop people who are alcoholics from having kids or stop people who-

00:41:38.620 Or license parents after intensive training.

00:41:41.680 Right.

00:41:42.020 Well, that's the road that this really would go down.

00:41:44.540 Yeah, well, we already kind of decided that too,

00:41:46.600 because one of the things the state doesn't do is determine who's a fit parent, right?

00:41:52.440 And we've decided-

00:41:53.040 Right, we love rules.

00:41:53.740 Well, it's very strange in some sense, because it's the most important thing you'll ever do.

00:41:58.300 And yet, while you're not compelled to have an education, for example, around parenting issues before you become a parent,

00:42:04.920 and we've decided everywhere in the world, I would say, maybe without exception,

00:42:10.540 that that's one place the government doesn't go.

00:42:13.880 And that's a very interesting decision for everyone to have made.

00:42:17.120 It's quite surprising in some fundamental sense.

00:42:20.220 I guess we know that in that situation in particular, a variety of approaches might be the best.

00:42:29.140 So it has to be.

00:42:29.920 Something like that.

00:42:30.860 Well, so I guess my question for you as I traverse this is, so if we acknowledge that ideal situation,

00:42:39.340 and again, just using the word ideal, I know that there's a certain set of people that will watch that,

00:42:43.080 go and see Ruben saying his relationship, or he is less than, which is not-

00:42:47.160 Yeah, well, who isn't?

00:42:47.700 And besides that, you don't want to dispense with the bloody ideal just because it's difficult to attain.

00:42:52.940 Right.

00:42:53.400 And just because we all are flawed in our own way.

00:42:59.380 I mean, really, who, I think you said this to me at dinner, but it's like,

00:43:01.720 who amongst us is walking around as the ideal partner, the ideal person, the ideal everything,

00:43:08.000 the ideal father and all of those?

00:43:09.040 The ideal anything, for that matter.

00:43:10.540 Yeah.

00:43:10.660 And virtually nobody is doing that.

00:43:12.520 Well, if they are, then the ideal isn't high enough because an ideal should be something

00:43:16.040 that beckons to you from the distance, right?

00:43:18.100 It's not something that's right there in front of you for you to grip.

00:43:20.720 That's not much of an ideal.

00:43:22.060 Well, we'd have a lot more people who are acting that way if it was that easy to grip,

00:43:25.340 I suppose, right?

00:43:26.280 Like, there's not a lot of people doing it.

00:43:28.160 So I think what I'm trying to figure out here is how does that, how does this life,

00:43:34.440 I think, fit into whatever's coming in this new world?

00:43:40.760 You know, we seem to be entering a new world right now.

00:43:43.360 We're watching an old world go away and we're entering this new world.

00:43:46.380 I'm sort of part of this new conservative world and kind of where does it all fit?

00:43:53.760 Well, so here's a question that's relevant to that.

00:43:56.820 So it's a good politically incorrect question.

00:43:58.700 And so in some sense, the more traditional community has opened itself up to the possibility

00:44:05.020 of including gay marriage in the purview of the acceptable and traditional.

00:44:11.340 Yeah.

00:44:11.680 Okay, so what responsibilities come along for people who are homosexual in relationship to

00:44:19.260 the expansion of that right?

00:44:21.560 What do you think about that?

00:44:22.940 I mean, I know what you've done.

00:44:24.200 Yeah.

00:44:24.440 Well, I think it's a respect for that.

00:44:26.340 It's an acknowledgement that something is good there and that we have to, we have to

00:44:31.760 be tolerant of the questions.

00:44:33.440 I guess that's it.

00:44:34.660 We have to, when I see this now suddenly, like, you know, when, when we announced that

00:44:38.260 we were having kids, there was some pushback online from more religious people on the right.

00:44:43.920 By the way, 99% of it was all anonymous people.

00:44:46.820 It was virtually nobody that, well, certainly nobody that I knew.

00:44:50.840 There were one or two people that had blue checks on Twitter, but it was all these people,

00:44:54.100 you know, talking about the sanctity of marriage and all of these things.

00:44:58.320 But I'm willing to have that conversation.

00:45:00.520 I accept that this is, yeah, I genuinely accept that this is, this is a little bit weird.

00:45:06.440 This is a little bit, you know, but it's like, if we don't have these conversations,

00:45:09.540 then, then the thing that we're pulling apart by pulling apart marriage and the family,

00:45:13.780 just by saying it is anything and everything at the exact same time, that is far more dangerous.

00:45:19.040 You bet, you bet.

00:45:19.780 That's far more dangerous.

00:45:20.880 So that's why, even as I'm sitting here now, I'm sort of like, ah, I partly don't want to

00:45:26.060 have this conversation because it's like, I don't know the answers to all of these things,

00:45:30.100 but I know that we have to be able to do it.

00:45:33.060 You're supposed to talk when you don't know the answers, because then maybe you can think

00:45:36.700 it through and you can exchange views with other people and you can, you can, you can

00:45:40.660 expand your knowledge in that domain of ignorance.

00:45:43.480 I want to go back to something you said, you decided, the two of you decided that genetic

00:45:49.020 similarity was an important, was an important factor to take into account.

00:45:55.080 Yeah.

00:45:55.380 Now, obviously that's, issue doesn't arise in the case of fertile heterosexual couples.

00:46:01.280 It does if they have to adopt or if they decide to adopt instead.

00:46:04.920 But, um, and we know that people, there is a preference, quite a marked preference, although

00:46:12.700 this might not be so clear with adoption.

00:46:15.140 If you have a step parent and you're a child who's not biologically related to the step parent,

00:46:22.020 you're at way higher risk for abuse, like way, way higher.

00:46:25.760 I don't remember how many fold higher, but it's, it's a tremendous amount.

00:46:29.240 I think it's the single most predictive risk factor.

00:46:32.080 I suppose that would probably scrap with alcohol use, but, so people are more positively inclined

00:46:40.020 to their genetic relatives.

00:46:42.800 Now, the exact details of that aren't clear.

00:46:47.320 And it's not surprising if you think like a biologist that that would be the case, but,

00:46:51.780 but this had to be a conscious decision on your part and it wasn't a decision that you

00:46:56.700 guys necessarily had to take.

00:46:58.140 So why did you decide that that was important?

00:47:01.300 Yeah.

00:47:02.080 Yeah, man, it's, it's one of those things.

00:47:05.380 Well, you know, I also, I had heard you talk about this, this part of growing, of, of

00:47:10.460 parenting and seeing yourself in this child and.

00:47:15.400 You see your relatives too.

00:47:17.100 You see everything, I suppose.

00:47:19.260 I think, I don't know that I have a good answer for this actually.

00:47:23.620 But you both decided.

00:47:24.580 We both, we knew it.

00:47:25.660 We knew it.

00:47:26.760 We knew it when we decided we didn't want to adopt that.

00:47:29.120 We just knew, I don't know what, I don't even know how to describe it.

00:47:31.800 Yeah.

00:47:31.960 There was something important when we had that conversation.

00:47:34.080 Okay.

00:47:34.240 Are we going to adopt?

00:47:35.080 And we really did think about it.

00:47:36.300 And it would have been way easier.

00:47:38.000 It would have been way less expensive and all of those things.

00:47:40.780 Yeah.

00:47:40.940 It's a strange thing that that can't be articulated.

00:47:43.140 I don't know, I don't know that I can articulate it properly.

00:47:45.740 Well, you might ask yourself on, on, on the similar front is like, well, there's lots of

00:47:50.400 unwanted babies in the world.

00:47:52.120 And so why isn't the ethical thing when you're a heterosexual couple just to adopt an unwanted

00:47:57.740 baby?

00:47:59.920 Why bring another baby into the world when there's a baby that could use a home?

00:48:04.100 And the answer is that isn't what people do.

00:48:07.320 And then the question might be, well, why, and you can come up with a biological rationale,

00:48:12.400 but that doesn't mean that there's a conceptual, a conceptual answer handy.

00:48:17.400 Like, why do you want your own kids?

00:48:19.600 And the answer to that is something like, well, that's what everyone has always done since

00:48:22.780 the beginning of time.

00:48:23.880 It's something like that.

00:48:25.040 Right.

00:48:25.220 But it's not really an answer.

00:48:26.860 No, no.

00:48:27.220 Well, it's not a well, this is part of partly why conservatives are set back on their heels

00:48:32.660 so frequently when they're questioned by radicals, because they'll, radicals will do something

00:48:36.800 like, well, justify marriage and the conservative thinks, well, we all agreed about that like

00:48:44.460 50,000 years ago.

00:48:46.920 And so I don't actually have a fully fleshed out, explicit rationale and, and defense for

00:48:53.660 the institution of marriage.

00:48:55.100 I thought that was self-evident.

00:48:56.820 And I would say the preference for your own biological children has that self-evidence

00:49:02.660 about it.

00:49:03.080 And there is a cruelty about that in some real sense, right?

00:49:05.780 But I suppose that's the cruelty of specifically loving some people more than you're capable

00:49:11.200 of loving everyone else.

00:49:12.560 So maybe we just have to accept that some things are self-evident rather than endlessly wonder

00:49:18.440 why they're self-evident, right?

00:49:19.340 Well, that's what a conservative would say.

00:49:20.960 Well, then I suppose I became the most unlikely conservative of all.

00:49:24.680 In some ways, it doesn't really matter, but I know that it is.

00:49:29.040 I know that it was when we sat there and had that conversation.

00:49:32.320 When push came to shove.

00:49:33.060 When push came to shove, we said, no, we want to have, if we're having two kids, let's

00:49:38.140 have one from each of us biologically.

00:49:39.880 Some of it is, look, look, it's, I really love Tammy.

00:49:42.740 Yeah.

00:49:43.360 And it's quite something to see her echoed in the kids.

00:49:45.980 Yeah.

00:49:46.360 You know, my son, it's turned out that Michaela perhaps looks more like me and Julian looks

00:49:51.540 more like Tammy, but I can see Tammy in him and I'm pretty happy about that, you know?

00:49:56.400 And so, and I suspect, hopefully, she feels the same way on the other side.

00:50:01.560 So that love for the person is also echoed in their replication in the children.

00:50:07.240 And then there's more than that too, because like when my son was really little, he really,

00:50:12.080 like an infant, just a newborn infant, he would have facial expressions that I could see were

00:50:16.780 my dad.

00:50:17.880 It's like, oh man, he looks exactly like dad.

00:50:20.220 He has exactly the same facial expression.

00:50:21.880 And so that echoing of other people that you love, that's not nothing, you know?

00:50:27.380 And that doesn't mean that if you adopt a child, you can't come to love that child as

00:50:30.740 if they're your own.

00:50:32.000 Clearly, that's possible, but that doesn't mean it's optimal and it doesn't mean it's

00:50:35.920 easy and without pitfalls.

00:50:37.400 And I think the data on step parents makes that really clear.

00:50:41.180 It's just, part of the reason, we talked about this a little bit too, part of the reason

00:50:45.500 that heterosexual monogamy is the ideal is because it's also got, you can't beat it

00:50:51.780 in terms of efficient, right?

00:50:53.600 You said how difficult it was to produce a child.

00:50:56.320 It's not that difficult at all if you're two heated up 15-year-olds in the back of your

00:51:01.720 father's car and you're alone, right?

00:51:02.980 It's pretty much good at work.

00:51:04.120 Yeah, exactly.

00:51:05.020 It's like, it's as easy as falling off the bed.

00:51:08.380 Too easy in some sense, perhaps.

00:51:10.000 But that also indicates that ease and efficiency also is a solid reason why a certain kind

00:51:18.420 of ideal exists.

00:51:19.400 You guys had to jump through hoops and not everyone could do that.

00:51:22.840 They don't have the resources.

00:51:24.700 And so that's another obstacle.

00:51:27.300 It's a lot.

00:51:28.220 And again, without that map, without that, you know, that's the interesting thing for me.

00:51:33.600 It's like, as I've sort of shifted politically, as you know about, and so much of my life has

00:51:38.540 been about politics and talking about what I think for a living.

00:51:40.740 And then suddenly, man, all of my political thoughts, all of the stuff that I talk about

00:51:45.700 all the time and government and all these things, now it's really like, it's all sitting

00:51:49.420 right in front of me right now.

00:51:50.680 The difference between your own personal morality and the way government is and our role in all

00:51:56.700 of these things.

00:51:59.580 It's like, I'm trying to do, I'm trying, it's the self-evident part of this.

00:52:04.660 I'm trying to do what I know is right.

00:52:06.440 Right, right, right.

00:52:07.260 I'm trying to do what I know is right.

00:52:08.600 And that's not always explicitly, explicitly explainable.

00:52:12.640 And maybe right isn't the word.

00:52:13.740 I'm trying to do what I know.

00:52:15.380 No, I think right isn't.

00:52:16.440 I'm trying to do what I know I'm supposed to do.

00:52:18.340 How about that?

00:52:19.720 Yeah, well, that would be good.

00:52:20.820 That would be good to try to figure out what that is and to walk that path.

00:52:24.040 That's a good thing if you can manage it.

00:52:25.880 Another thing we talked about a little bit in relation, decided to discuss today in relationship

00:52:30.440 to the ideal was this is also an extremely contentious issue in case we haven't covered

00:52:35.140 enough contentious issues already.

00:52:38.440 As the, and this goes back to the issue of the conservatives who took issue with gay

00:52:44.460 marriage.

00:52:45.200 It's like, okay, we're trying, we're starting to break down the categorical boundaries here.

00:52:49.560 Where is that going to go?

00:52:51.140 Well, we've seen where it goes, at least to some degree.

00:52:54.020 And as I said, I'm sympathetic to this.

00:52:55.660 I really am sympathetic to this argument.

00:52:57.620 I see it.

00:52:58.240 I see it.

00:52:58.700 I see what they were worried about.

00:53:00.120 And unfortunately, the left, you tweeted out something a couple of weeks ago.

00:53:04.680 You know, I was never a conservative until the liberals decided there were no rules.

00:53:08.160 I'm paraphrasing you roughly, but I'm sympathetic to that.

00:53:11.680 So much of all of the things that we knew, we no longer know at a societal level, apparently.

00:53:17.660 And that's because of the-

00:53:18.400 Yeah, like the distinction between a man and a woman.

00:53:20.360 Well, we could talk about that in relationship, again, to use this hated phrase, to the LGBT

00:53:25.320 T plus community.

00:53:27.340 Yeah.

00:53:27.880 First of all, the notion that that's an integral community is foolish, especially as you add

00:53:32.280 more and more letters.

00:53:34.280 I have no innate knowledge of what it is, more innate knowledge of what it is to be like

00:53:38.980 to be trans than you do.

00:53:40.600 I happen, I am male.

00:53:42.160 I am a cisgendered male.

00:53:43.620 I am a man born in a man's body.

00:53:45.360 I happen to be attracted to men.

00:53:47.180 You are a man born in a man's body.

00:53:48.740 You happen to be attracted to women.

00:53:50.300 I have no more in common with a trans person than you do.

00:53:54.380 The fact of marginalization, the arguable fact of marginalization.

00:53:56.780 But that is not a unifying force.

00:53:59.040 That is not something to put on a flag and say, now we are all together because of this

00:54:03.940 thing.

00:54:04.340 Well, the question is, can you see, that's the theory in some sense, is that the marginalized

00:54:08.380 have more in common than what differentiates them.

00:54:12.120 Yeah, I don't buy that.

00:54:13.480 Well, there's a quasi-ethnocentrism and even a racism that's associated with that, right?

00:54:18.900 The different are categorically different, and they're all different in the same way.

00:54:23.000 Well, that's the next step.

00:54:25.060 But the rubbers really hit the road in a terrible way recently because, you can tell me what

00:54:29.900 you think about this.

00:54:31.300 I followed Ken Zucker's work on trans kids.

00:54:36.000 Now, Zucker worked at a place called CAMH in Toronto, a major mental health institution.

00:54:42.460 And he was a mainline scientific researcher, not a political type at all.

00:54:47.860 Really a dedicated clinician and researcher.

00:54:50.760 And he ran a gender dysphoria treatment clinic, probably the clinic.

00:54:56.160 And he was the editor of the main journals where research on that sort of topic was published.

00:55:02.500 And what Zucker, his treatment program for kids with gender dysphoria was quite straightforward.

00:55:09.600 He observed, as a consequence of his careful research, that about 85% of kids who manifest extreme gender dysphoria,

00:55:19.880 so the sense of discomfort in their own body and a desire to be the opposite sex,

00:55:26.660 80 to 85% of them would desist on their own by the age of 18 or 19.

00:55:31.580 And so his hypothesis was, leave them the hell alone because you do the least harm that way.

00:55:38.960 And most of them will settle into their bodies as they mature, knowing that puberty in particular,

00:55:44.820 especially for kids, you could imagine a male who has a more feminine temperament

00:55:48.760 and who's also perhaps higher in openness, so has a more mutable identity, more creative,

00:55:53.320 is going to be, especially if high in neuroticism as well, is going to be uncomfortable around puberty.

00:56:01.760 Everyone's uncomfortable around puberty.

00:56:03.440 We should make that straight.

00:56:05.360 And so you just leave those, you leave the kids alone.

00:56:08.120 But what he also showed, and this is the killer fact as far as I'm concerned,

00:56:13.840 is that a very large proportion of kids with gender dysphoria grow up and are homosexual.

00:56:21.280 And so what that means, what that certainly means, is that the vast majority,

00:56:28.040 and it might be as high as 80% of the kids who are being convinced now that they inhabit the wrong bodies

00:56:33.540 and are being surgically mutilated in a permanent and terrible manner,

00:56:40.800 the overwhelming majority of them are gay.

00:56:43.980 Well, think how twisted this is.

00:56:46.060 Well-

00:56:46.440 So I know you know this, but so think about it this way.

00:56:49.000 So as I said before, I seem to be, people always say to me, I'm more straight acting.

00:56:53.700 I seem to be more, you wouldn't just meet me on the street and automatically go, okay, this guy is gay, right?

00:56:58.240 So when I was five or seven, when I was growing up or I'm 10 years old,

00:57:02.060 I was playing with G.I. Joe and Transformers, and I liked war and battle and all of those boy thought of things.

00:57:08.320 Now, there are plenty of gay kids that are growing up that like Barbie,

00:57:11.700 or they like dressing up or whatever that might be.

00:57:15.020 In today's world, the teacher at the school or the administrator or the gender expert or whatever

00:57:21.500 would probably be coaching them towards saying that they were trans,

00:57:25.860 where they would have left someone like me alone.

00:57:28.120 They would be nothing to think about.

00:57:29.440 So in an odd sense, the trans movement is extremely anti-gay.

00:57:37.060 That's something that these people really have to grapple with.

00:57:40.060 There are gay people who are very effeminate, but they still happen to be men.

00:57:43.940 I mean, there is, by the way, a growing movement in, again, that gay community phrase of gay people

00:57:50.260 who really are pushing back on this.

00:57:52.520 They're really realizing how rapid-

00:57:54.160 Well, it's the worst possible outcome in some sense.

00:57:57.040 Well, because it's also making, it's making, right, because it's making gay people all seem like extremists.

00:58:02.200 It goes back to what we started with.

00:58:03.360 So when Stonewall happened and the fight for equality, the fight for equality is just,

00:58:08.000 the fight for equality is always just so black people can vote, so women can vote,

00:58:12.360 in my estimation, so that gay people can get married.

00:58:14.800 The fight for equality is good, and it's a true liberal thing to fight for.

00:58:19.380 Once you go from that, the activists still needed more.

00:58:23.020 And what did they turn that to?

00:58:24.460 They turned that to the kids.

00:58:27.160 The average person who was protesting at Stonewall, if you would have said to them,

00:58:31.760 you know, the average person that was 35 years old that was at a bar at Stonewall,

00:58:34.800 I want to be able to go to a bar that has windows maybe that aren't blocked out,

00:58:38.240 that isn't underground, and all of these things, and be in a relationship that I don't have to hide,

00:58:42.860 whatever.

00:58:43.800 Actually, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, this is going to be about sending your kid to school

00:58:48.280 where they're going to privately discuss sex with teachers.

00:58:50.860 As a pro-eroma to hormonal transformation and surgery.

00:58:55.360 Right.

00:58:55.780 And more than that, to make, and here's another perverse element of this,

00:58:59.580 so many legislatures around the world now have banned so-called conversion therapy.

00:59:04.240 And to me, this has been a catastrophe.

00:59:06.280 Now, I know that there was a small percentage,

00:59:09.300 mostly of fundamentalist Christian therapist types in the U.S.

00:59:13.060 who were offering their services to homosexual people who were unhappy with their sexual orientation.

00:59:20.100 And so, you could have a discussion about whether that's ever appropriate or not,

00:59:23.960 although I would say that's bloody well between the person and their therapist,

00:59:27.540 as far as I'm concerned.

00:59:28.700 But now that's illegal, and it's illegal to the point where you are required

00:59:33.560 by the conditions of your psychological association,

00:59:38.340 your professional associations, American Psychological Association, let's say,

00:59:42.020 to affirm the stated identity of your client, which is completely insane.

00:59:47.400 Which is, and also very different.

00:59:48.540 Affirming the stated identity of the client is very different than affirming

00:59:52.700 that someone happens to be attracted to the same sex, right?

00:59:56.040 Those are very different things.

00:59:57.860 Well, even in that case, you're not, as a therapist,

01:00:01.600 your role isn't to affirm or to deny.

01:00:04.460 It's to listen, right?

01:00:06.540 And to explore.

01:00:07.940 That's your purpose.

01:00:09.800 In all your years of clinical therapy and all the patients that you ever saw,

01:00:13.400 I'm sure you saw dozens, if not hundreds, of gay patients,

01:00:16.400 did you ever meet a gay man who successfully de-gayed

01:00:20.940 and then went on to live a completely functioning life?

01:00:24.220 No.

01:00:25.180 I did have a client who was questioning,

01:00:30.100 who went the heterosexual route.

01:00:32.980 Yeah.

01:00:33.200 He was questioning under some duress because he was the target of somewhat unwanted amorous

01:00:39.800 affections by a fairly persistent gay gentleman who,

01:00:44.540 and this person was, I would say, easily swayed and confused.

01:00:48.940 But that was the closest I'd ever seen to the situation that you're describing.

01:00:53.820 Now, this conversion therapy issue is so,

01:00:57.420 now you, as a therapist, you're ethically and legally bound not to question the identity of your,

01:01:03.020 the stated identity of your client,

01:01:04.940 which to me is preposterous because all you ever do as a therapist is question identity.

01:01:09.960 That's the whole bloody,

01:01:11.420 that's the whole enterprise.

01:01:14.100 And you don't do it affirming or denying.

01:01:16.180 You really don't.

01:01:16.800 You do it as a, as a questioner and a strategist.

01:01:20.260 But then we have the other conversion therapy,

01:01:22.380 which is surgical conversion.

01:01:24.320 And that's not only legal, but opposing it has become a crime.

01:01:28.740 And so that's a form of insanity that,

01:01:31.920 that I just can, I can just barely wrap my head around.

01:01:35.180 So, so what do we do going back to the,

01:01:37.260 to the conservatives that were worried?

01:01:39.060 Yeah.

01:01:39.340 That this is where we were going to end up.

01:01:41.340 In some sense, I should probably be their greatest hero because it's like,

01:01:46.100 oh, here's someone who wanted to enter civilized society,

01:01:49.860 wanted to affirm most of the long fought, time tested ideals,

01:01:55.740 wanted to enter the world with those things, help defend that world.

01:02:00.580 It happens to be a little different than, than we would think, right?

01:02:04.480 Okay.

01:02:04.740 It's, it's two guys.

01:02:05.840 I can't deny it.

01:02:06.940 I should sort of be a hero to them.

01:02:09.120 It's, it's not the ideal one that they went for,

01:02:11.320 but it's approximately close enough that this,

01:02:13.400 this should be pretty good.

01:02:14.480 I suppose that will be my challenge in life.

01:02:16.580 Well, I think, but I also think that's probably true.

01:02:19.340 My suspicions are that when we release this discussion,

01:02:22.540 that the overwhelming majority of people will be sympathetic to your situation and

01:02:27.920 unwilling to, to render harsh judgment.

01:02:31.260 And maybe that does exclude, and we should get to this too,

01:02:34.060 some of the more fundamentalist religious types.

01:02:37.800 But you also said earlier that as far as you're concerned,

01:02:41.100 they also have a point.

01:02:42.380 There is a point there.

01:02:43.920 Okay. So what's the point?

01:02:44.520 Well, there has to be a point there because look,

01:02:46.600 gay marriage was legalized,

01:02:48.240 I think at a federal level in the United States in 2015, if I'm not mistaken.

01:02:52.240 So that we're now seven years off of that.

01:02:54.540 And look at all of the craziness that has happened since.

01:02:57.760 I am not directly connecting it to that.

01:03:00.320 But when you change fundamental structures,

01:03:03.780 some weird things are going to happen.

01:03:06.340 This is again, where I would lay most of the blame here.

01:03:08.920 I would lay on the sort of liberal establishment where nobody was willing to defend anything.

01:03:14.840 And it's why the progressives basically were able to destroy everything.

01:03:18.320 The problem maybe comes is, so we had this implicit ideal, which we've already discussed,

01:03:22.100 which is heterosexual monogamy, long term, faithful, all of that goodwill,

01:03:28.760 that impossible ideal that people strive towards.

01:03:31.120 And there's a real boundary there, right?

01:03:32.720 Like a real boundary.

01:03:33.640 It's a man and a woman.

01:03:35.340 It's one man and one woman.

01:03:37.180 They're bound together over the course of their life.

01:03:39.680 The community supports that.

01:03:41.060 Like it's a pretty definable box.

01:03:43.380 And then you say, well, we'll let the walls down.

01:03:47.120 And so we include single mothers and we include gay couples.

01:03:49.520 And it's like, yeah, but the wall's gone now.

01:03:52.720 So what else do you include?

01:03:54.760 And the answer is, well, we don't know.

01:03:58.240 And that's actually not a very good answer.

01:04:00.500 Right.

01:04:00.700 Because what happens is anyone who knocks can now come in.

01:04:05.560 And you think, well, that's great because we're being tolerant.

01:04:07.940 But the problem is, well, what happens when all the people in the room who are now invited in

01:04:13.020 actually do not agree at all?

01:04:17.220 That any of this was ever good in the first place.

01:04:19.520 That's sort of where we're at.

01:04:21.040 What should be done?

01:04:21.740 Because you can imagine now, if you're dealing with a 10-year-old boy who's, or 11-year-old

01:04:29.840 boy, let's say, a little closer to puberty, who's ambivalent about his sexual attraction

01:04:35.200 and his sexual identity, but also has a more feminine temperament, which is not rare, by

01:04:41.380 the way, because there's a lot of overlap between masculine and feminine temperaments.

01:04:44.620 And now you have to decide, well, is this boy likely to be gay or is he trans?

01:04:51.540 And that's a hell of a decision to have to make, especially when you can't actually have

01:04:55.540 a real discussion about it.

01:04:56.640 You can't include the parents.

01:04:58.080 The parents can't.

01:04:59.240 And the clinician isn't allowed to say what they think or ask, in essence.

01:05:04.300 And then especially when it's accompanied by the pressure, which is a complete bloody

01:05:08.160 lie, that, well, if you don't let this kid transition right now, all you're going to do

01:05:13.000 is cause him more damage.

01:05:15.740 You're going to increase the risk of suicide, which, by the way, I think is a claim that

01:05:18.920 there is absolutely zero evidence for.

01:05:21.360 Zero evidence for.

01:05:22.700 We just don't have, even as the American Psychological Association admitted, we have no good long-term

01:05:27.760 follow-up data on the mental health of people who've transitioned over a reasonable period

01:05:32.300 of time.

01:05:32.760 It just doesn't exist.

01:05:33.840 For obvious reasons, it's only just started to happen.

01:05:36.520 Right, so probably in 10 years, we'll have some beginnings of evidence of it.

01:05:40.160 And I have a feeling-

01:05:41.180 Assuming that we're in a situation where such evidence could be collected and discussed

01:05:46.300 in anything approaching a rational and truly empirical fashion.

01:05:50.440 Well, as you know, you know, Deborah So, Dr. Deborah So, who's a sex researcher, I mean,

01:05:53.580 she was bringing up a lot of these issues and basically just pushed out of the field altogether.

01:05:57.440 Well, and increasingly, the scientific journals, the scientific journals won't publish that

01:06:01.420 sort of study.

01:06:02.080 And look, they cut Zucker off at the knees, man.

01:06:05.180 They threw him out of CAMH.

01:06:06.700 He was the world's preeminent researcher in the field of gender dysphoria.

01:06:10.400 And he, like I said, he wasn't a political guy, which is partly why they could go after

01:06:14.140 him so easily.

01:06:15.100 So he sued the Toronto Star.

01:06:16.780 He sued the University of Toronto newspaper.

01:06:19.920 And he sued CAMH.

01:06:21.180 He won all three lawsuits.

01:06:23.560 So then he has to spend most of his life suing places of journalism instead of doing the

01:06:27.560 work that he wants to do.

01:06:28.060 And he was seriously cancelled, right?

01:06:29.640 And that's devastating for someone.

01:06:31.920 It's, I would say it's equivalent, being cancelled in a serious sense is roughly equivalent

01:06:36.160 to having a near fatal illness.

01:06:37.840 It is no bloody joke.

01:06:39.680 And so, yeah, so I don't know if we'll ever be able to gather the information we need to

01:06:43.400 gather about such things.

01:06:44.580 So it seems to me what we're talking about here is with that ideal, then what is, what

01:06:49.180 are the levers that we have for sort of judicious gatekeeping?

01:06:52.680 So that the single mother who really is doing her best will be welcomed into society or that

01:06:58.900 the gay couple who wants to be part of what the ideal is will be welcomed in.

01:07:03.580 I don't know what all the firewalls are on that.

01:07:05.960 I think that's partly what the problem is, right?

01:07:07.920 We don't have firewalls.

01:07:09.400 Liberals put tolerance above everything in their hierarchy.

01:07:12.700 Tolerance is the most important thing.

01:07:14.560 Okay, we've tolerated everything.

01:07:16.100 Now everyone's in the house.

01:07:17.740 Between tolerance and carelessness is a very difficult one to establish.

01:07:21.400 And if you are careless, especially in your conceptualization and perhaps in your actions,

01:07:26.220 the best mask for that carelessness is to proclaim yourself to be tolerant.

01:07:30.060 Oh, everything goes.

01:07:31.960 It's like, well, that's because you have zero discipline and no ordered conceptualization

01:07:39.300 of the world whatsoever because of your lack of discipline.

01:07:42.240 Now you're going to pass it all off as a moral virtue.

01:07:45.260 And, well, we're definitely seeing the consequences of that, especially in the trans issue.

01:07:48.960 But, I mean, it's completely burst forth.

01:07:51.560 So that's why when people say the LGBTQI, I don't even know what, I'm not exactly sure

01:07:56.180 what the Q is.

01:07:56.720 I have no idea what the I is.

01:07:58.420 As I said, the T's, as our friend Douglas Murray wrote in his last book, you know, when

01:08:03.740 he wrote his chapter on the gays, the L's and the G's, the lesbians and the gays, he

01:08:08.400 separated that from the T chapter very effectively.

01:08:12.100 These things have nothing to do with each other.

01:08:14.100 And the more that we conflate these things, the more that we're going to be unable to

01:08:17.680 have any level of this conversation in a functional manner.

01:08:20.920 Well, and the conflation is dangerous because the assumption is that, you know, the workers,

01:08:26.500 the students made the same erroneous assumption back in the 1960s when they allied themselves

01:08:31.520 with such people as the Hells Angels, for example, the student radicals.

01:08:35.020 It's like, well, we're all marginalized.

01:08:36.220 We all have that Marxist oppression in common, and that unites us.

01:08:42.080 And unite means that we're aiming for the same thing.

01:08:44.760 It's like, well, we found out at Eltemont that the Hells Angels weren't exactly aiming

01:08:48.720 at the same thing, or maybe they were, you know, in some nefarious manner.

01:08:53.560 So the mere fact that, and it's also clearly the case that the more people that you aggregate

01:08:59.080 on the margins and then attempt to bring into the center, the less likely you're going

01:09:03.520 to get some homogenous viewpoint.

01:09:05.380 And you might think, well, we don't need a homogenous viewpoint, but we certainly do

01:09:09.040 if it comes to such things as surgical transformation of children who are more likely to be gay.

01:09:14.060 So then what do you think that, what do you think my role in that could be, or people

01:09:18.100 like me that are watching this?

01:09:19.120 This conversation, right?

01:09:20.560 Because this is uncharted territory.

01:09:22.500 Like, you literally are in uncharted territory.

01:09:25.040 And your attitude is something like, well, I'm already deviating a lot from the norm.

01:09:31.580 And so maybe I should not deviate any more than I absolutely have to.

01:09:37.960 And I would also say that should apply to everyone.

01:09:40.140 It's like, everyone's got their idiosyncrasies, and thank God for that.

01:09:43.560 And we definitely need creative people.

01:09:45.100 And we even need some creative weirdos, you know, because God only knows when they'll come

01:09:48.840 in handy.

01:09:49.700 But the rule of thumb should still be, to the degree that you're able to uphold the norms

01:09:55.280 and ideals of the collective society, you have a moral obligation to do that.

01:09:59.600 You know, I wrote in my first book, and I think it was an idea I sort of morphed off

01:10:03.940 something.

01:10:04.200 Peter Thiel once said to me that straight people spread the genes and gay people spread the

01:10:10.340 memes, meaning it's obvious.

01:10:12.100 The genes part is obvious how straight people multiply.

01:10:15.020 But gay people, why did so much culture and art and music and so many interesting things

01:10:20.600 about societies, wherever gay people are, why are the artists always living around the

01:10:24.940 gay people?

01:10:25.380 Why is that the place where all the kind of weirdos and marginal people are?

01:10:30.120 And then that creativity is burst forth from that.

01:10:32.780 So how do you combine those things?

01:10:34.160 How do you take that?

01:10:34.920 Some of it might be, you know.

01:10:36.420 So we know that that intense creativity is a trait, right?

01:10:41.280 It's a temperamental trait.

01:10:42.320 So you can be very intelligent.

01:10:43.660 You can have a high IQ and be low in creativity.

01:10:46.980 Intelligence is a good predictor of creativity, but they are somewhat separable.

01:10:50.680 So then the question is, well, what is creativity?

01:10:55.360 And some of it is mutable identity.

01:10:57.840 Like a creative person, the more creative you are, the less you're the same from moment

01:11:01.780 to moment, hour to hour, and day to day.

01:11:04.100 Well, almost by definition, right?

01:11:05.500 You're a shapeshifter and a changer, a trickster.

01:11:08.180 And the boundaries of conception that bound you are much looser if you're creative.

01:11:17.340 And so it's possible that, like, it's very difficult to account for homosexuality from

01:11:21.800 a biological perspective, right?

01:11:23.280 Because you would assume that if anything was going to disappear in the course of sequential

01:11:28.800 reproduction, the inability to reproduce would be at the top of the list.

01:11:32.700 Politician, but it doesn't really add up.

01:11:34.140 Right, right, well, clearly, clearly, clearly.

01:11:35.740 And so what that has to mean, it has to mean something like there are reproductive benefits

01:11:40.920 to some of the factors that tilt towards homosexuality that are so powerful that they

01:11:46.020 counterbalance the negative consequence of being unable to reproduce.

01:11:50.940 And it might be that a fair bit of that manifests itself on the creativity side, you know, because

01:11:58.260 and I would say that the kids who are most likely to be, we studied at Harvard, I never

01:12:03.820 did publish this for a variety of reasons.

01:12:07.560 When cutting and piercing first became popular, I was very curious about whether or not that

01:12:13.780 was a marker for psychopathology, right?

01:12:15.880 For the proclivity towards mental illness.

01:12:18.660 And before it became popular, it was a subculture thing, right?

01:12:22.020 It was carnies and circus types, like marginal people, prisoners.

01:12:26.440 It was a real subculture art form, piercing and body modification.

01:12:31.260 And then all of a sudden it went mainstream.

01:12:33.020 And the question is, well, who was on the forefront of its introduction to popular culture?

01:12:39.260 So we studied a whole bunch of people.

01:12:40.880 This was very early on in that process to try to find out if they showed signs of mental

01:12:46.180 illness or if it was a consequence of temperamental variability.

01:12:49.480 And what we saw was that there was no sign whatsoever that it was associated with mental

01:12:53.440 illness.

01:12:54.020 It all loaded on openness.

01:12:55.540 So if you were more creative, more mutable, more able to shift shape, let's say, and perhaps

01:13:03.160 more likely to, and I don't know, I don't think there's any data on this, if people who

01:13:08.460 are high in openness are more likely to show some signs of same-sex, similar attraction.

01:13:14.740 Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

01:13:16.140 Yeah, it sort of sounds right.

01:13:17.080 Well, their conceptual boundaries are, the boundaries are thinner and more porous.

01:13:21.460 So it could easily be the case.

01:13:22.980 So it could be, if there is an overlap there with creativity, that would explain the genetic

01:13:28.340 tilt that would keep homosexuality in the population.

01:13:31.560 But it would also explain what does, especially on the male homosexual front, there does seem

01:13:36.140 to be an axis of creativity there.

01:13:39.140 And so it is the case that, well, certainly at least by stereotypical reputation, there is

01:13:45.600 a higher proportion of gay people among the creative types than you would expect.

01:13:50.540 So to go into really dangerous territory then, if we haven't done it so far, I mean, does what

01:13:54.980 you're saying right there sort of show you why they're going after kids right now?

01:13:58.980 So the idea is they're going after kids because they're grooming them.

01:14:01.860 And I think a lot of people think that means they're grooming them for sex.

01:14:05.020 I'm not exactly sure that's right.

01:14:06.440 I think they're grooming them for something more perverse in a way, which is that if you

01:14:10.880 can get these kids at five or six years old who know nothing about sex or gender identity

01:14:16.380 or anything, I was just at my seven-year-old niece's birthday party at an arts place, the

01:14:22.360 idea that you would talk to any of these kids, whether you were their uncle or a teacher

01:14:26.760 or anything else about sex or gender is crazy.

01:14:29.200 It's completely insane.

01:14:30.480 So it's something like they're not grooming them to molest them exactly, although obviously

01:14:36.300 that exists.

01:14:37.260 It's they're actually grooming them because their minds are so malleable and open at that

01:14:40.960 point and they're so sort of not fixed to any worldview or anything that it's like,

01:14:46.400 man, once they can get you at that age, everything's gone, everything, or everything's on the table.

01:14:51.840 I think you can make a psychological case for this.

01:14:55.500 It's like, well, imagine that you're deviant and you're guilty about it.

01:15:00.280 And the guilt is going to be heavy and oppressive, just as the guilt is whenever we deviate

01:15:06.180 from the norm or the ideal.

01:15:08.060 And so one response to that is to straighten yourself up and tilt yourself back towards

01:15:12.460 the ideal or the norm.

01:15:14.040 And another is to, what do they call that?

01:15:16.140 There's a specific overcompensation, to overcompensate.

01:15:20.900 Say, well, not only is this not deviant, but it's a positive good.

01:15:25.820 And you kind of said that a little bit when you talked about being attracted to the more

01:15:30.360 flamboyant types when you were young, right?

01:15:32.140 And so if it's a positive good, then, well, why not demonstrate that by insisting that children

01:15:41.540 are allowed or encouraged to go down that path?

01:15:44.860 Now, but I think that's also a twist.

01:15:47.020 But there's a twist in that too.

01:15:48.920 And the terrible twist there is that, and this is one of the things that's pathologizing our

01:15:53.980 culture in general, is that it's really, really easy to fly the tolerance flag as a marker for

01:16:01.320 your stellar reputation.

01:16:03.100 So there isn't anything more valuable that any of us owns than our reputation.

01:16:07.000 It marks our utility as an interactive partner.

01:16:10.960 So reputation is everything.

01:16:13.020 And so if you can, what, and the problem, and you build reputation generally through personal

01:16:18.420 interaction over the long run, that's stable, productive, reliable, honest, generous, all

01:16:23.680 the virtues, right?

01:16:25.460 Then you trust someone and you'll interact with them.

01:16:28.480 The problem with reputation is that it can be gamed.

01:16:32.420 Narcissists game it.

01:16:33.700 Machiavellians game it.

01:16:35.920 Psychopaths game it.

01:16:37.400 And they can be expert at it and can fool you into thinking they're competent when all they

01:16:44.280 are is confident.

01:16:45.180 And so because reputation can be gamed, you can claim moral virtue, let's say, because

01:16:51.940 you're tolerant and you can ratchet up the reputation points.

01:16:56.560 Like, I'll give you an example.

01:16:57.940 Well, it's the flag, right?

01:16:58.940 It's the gay pride flag.

01:17:00.720 That's it.

01:17:01.380 That's it.

01:17:02.040 It's unearned.

01:17:03.560 Well, first off, that they've combined this with pride, which actually makes no sense.

01:17:07.220 I mean, I'm not any prouder.

01:17:09.240 I'm not proud to be gay.

01:17:10.760 It's not a, I'm not shamed of it anymore.

01:17:13.140 I spent a lot of years shamed of it, deeply shamed of it.

01:17:15.720 And that caused all sorts of problems.

01:17:17.180 Well, it's nothing to be proud of.

01:17:18.540 It's not something to be proud of.

01:17:19.520 It makes no sense.

01:17:20.440 I'm proud of the work that I've done in the world that I think I've put something good

01:17:24.420 and I've fought for some level of truth.

01:17:26.160 And I've helped amplify incredible people like this Canadian psychology professor who

01:17:31.320 was, you know, seven years ago up in Canada.

01:17:33.820 And I put him on my show and then he became Jordan Peterson.

01:17:36.400 And like, I'm proud of that, but I'm not proud.

01:17:39.180 Well, that's not even pride, I wouldn't say.

01:17:41.200 That's the sense of a job well done in a valuable domain, right?

01:17:46.160 So I would call that pride well.

01:17:47.440 I'll take that, yeah.

01:17:47.660 Yeah, but it's important to get the words right, isn't it?

01:17:50.380 Because pride has been historically-

01:17:51.740 Be precise with your speech.

01:17:52.640 Being regarded as a sin, because pride means an overweening self-confidence that's not justified

01:18:00.220 by the accomplishment.

01:18:01.720 And the fact that we do have Pride Day and Pride Week and Pride Month now, which really

01:18:06.000 is pushing things a little bit too far, I would say, is, well, what-

01:18:09.960 So the flag gets to exactly what you were saying, right?

01:18:12.200 It's this thing that actually represents nothing, right?

01:18:15.580 Represents tolerance.

01:18:16.600 I'm hyper-tolerant, therefore I have a stellar reputation.

01:18:19.740 It's the collapse of reputation into a single dimension, where carelessness and tolerance

01:18:26.340 can easily be confused.

01:18:27.860 And so it's a game that particularly narcissistic people will play, because, well, that is the

01:18:32.520 game that narcissists play, period, which is to elevate their reputational status without

01:18:36.640 doing any of the work.

01:18:38.000 And we've set up a society now where the most effective way of doing that is by claiming

01:18:43.200 a universal tolerance.

01:18:45.060 And if you have to sacrifice children to that, oh, well.

01:18:48.380 I saw this woman who worked for Disney, I don't remember what she was in charge of,

01:18:52.760 who said she had a-

01:18:53.880 Oh, the polysexual daughter.

01:18:55.460 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:55.700 She had a, what would you call that?

01:18:57.780 Pansexual, I think she said.

01:18:58.820 Yeah, pansexual and a trans kid.

01:19:00.480 It's like, okay, what are the odds of that?

01:19:03.760 Let's say it's one in a thousand per child.

01:19:05.820 So it's one in a million odds that you're telling the truth.

01:19:09.700 One in a million, perhaps, especially on the pansexual front, because what the hell does

01:19:14.340 that mean, since we only invented the term like three weeks ago, and what's the probability

01:19:19.520 both those kids turned up in your family, and that has nothing to do with your narcissism

01:19:24.400 and willingness to exploit your children?

01:19:26.420 It's like, well, it's one in a million.

01:19:28.120 Okay, that's, it's one in 20 is enough to draw a scientific conclusion.

01:19:32.860 And boy, you're not just an accountant at Disney.

01:19:34.540 You're someone that works in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office at Disney.

01:19:38.180 Boy, this is a heck of a coincidence.

01:19:39.480 Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

01:19:40.700 It's a real coincidence.

01:19:42.000 It's a real coincidence.

01:19:42.540 But look at the way Disney folded to this.

01:19:44.500 Yeah.

01:19:44.780 Look at the way Disney folded to this.

01:19:46.220 I just did a show in Orlando.

01:19:48.080 It was the last show on my tour.

01:19:50.060 And we purposely went to Orlando to end the tour.

01:19:52.580 And Governor DeSantis, you know, they associate he's the biggest homophobe in America and don't

01:19:56.080 say gay, even though the bill has nothing to do with being gay.

01:19:59.540 And DeSantis has been nothing other than kind to me and sent us, he and his wife sent us

01:20:04.420 two baby onesies, you know, for our, for our kids.

01:20:07.620 I mean, these are good, decent people.

01:20:09.040 He is fighting indoctrination in schools.

01:20:11.940 But after the Orlando show, when I do the meet and greet, I met about, there were about

01:20:15.480 a thousand people there.

01:20:16.760 We did a meet and greet for about 200 people.

01:20:18.320 I met probably 25, maybe 40 people who were Disney employees, who every single one of them

01:20:23.920 told me they're completely against this.

01:20:25.520 And they, and that virtually everyone that they know at the company is completely against

01:20:28.880 this, but the inmates are running the asylum.

01:20:30.960 So that video that you saw that Chris Rufo was the one who found it and leaked it where

01:20:35.260 they're basically all, you know, getting the, the CEO of Disney, Bob Chapek, they're basically

01:20:39.880 getting him to bow.

01:20:40.980 Yeah.

01:20:41.320 He did that town hall, which was a huge mistake.

01:20:43.820 It was horrible.

01:20:44.460 It was just completely idiotic management decision.

01:20:47.160 But then he kowtowed.

01:20:48.380 We haven't been sensitive enough.

01:20:49.920 It's like, since when do you let the whiny stock boys make the executive decisions?

01:20:54.560 And what, you know, Jordan, what was one of the first things that sort of put you on the

01:20:58.740 map in the big sense?

01:20:59.480 You were always talking about Pinocchio, right?

01:21:01.160 Because it's the perfect, the story is the perfect story of the, of the child and the

01:21:05.840 whole thing.

01:21:06.560 Well, now Disney is saying they're purposely conflating all of these stories when they're

01:21:10.860 putting movies out.

01:21:11.600 They're telling you that they're doing it.

01:21:12.960 And these people are proudly telling you.

01:21:14.580 Yeah.

01:21:14.700 Well, they got walled pretty hard on the Buzz Lightyear front last, in the last month.

01:21:18.100 It did not do well.

01:21:18.860 Yeah.

01:21:18.980 Well, that's the thing is, you know, it's very difficult to turn stories in the free market

01:21:23.800 into propaganda because people just say, well, I'm not watching that.

01:21:27.680 So what do you do with that?

01:21:28.500 So they put a, I guess they put a same sex kiss in Lightyear.

01:21:31.740 Yeah.

01:21:32.060 So what do you do with that on a, on a marginal side?

01:21:34.720 So if you want to say, okay, it's okay to be gay, but then you also don't want to indoctrinate.

01:21:39.200 Now, what do you do?

01:21:39.840 This is tough.

01:21:40.560 Look, that's part of the battle that we're having in the school systems right now, because

01:21:44.220 you go, and this is part of this slippery slope that we discussed.

01:21:46.740 It's like, it's unacceptable.

01:21:49.920 It's tolerated.

01:21:51.840 It's equal.

01:21:53.420 It's celebrated.

01:21:55.140 Okay.

01:21:55.380 There may not be any border between, once it's not forbidden, maybe it's mandatory to

01:22:03.540 celebrate it.

01:22:04.660 Now, we don't know, right?

01:22:05.960 We don't know.

01:22:07.440 Now.

01:22:07.840 Well, I'm trying to prove that.

01:22:09.020 I know.

01:22:09.400 I know you are.

01:22:10.020 I know you are.

01:22:10.600 Well, let's just go for equal even, not celebrate equal.

01:22:14.400 Yeah.

01:22:14.520 But we don't know what to do about that, because now we have children, they're nine

01:22:19.820 years old, and they're being exposed to a diverse range of literatures.

01:22:23.480 Well, what proportion of those should be gay-themed?

01:22:27.380 Right.

01:22:27.600 Well, the answer is, we don't know.

01:22:29.660 Right.

01:22:29.800 Should it be exactly proportional to the amount of gay people?

01:22:31.920 Does that make any sense?

01:22:32.760 Yeah.

01:22:32.800 So, okay, so it'll be 9% of the literature they read will be gay-themed.

01:22:35.940 Right.

01:22:36.340 I mean, that's a hell of a way of, and it's also a hell of a way of categorizing

01:22:40.260 literature, which is, you know, what the literary critics do now, but that's, no one has ever

01:22:44.600 categorized literature like that in the history of humanity.

01:22:47.820 The literature that we have conserved is only the literature that, for one reason or another,

01:22:53.940 people have been interested enough in to remember, and we don't even know why.

01:22:57.980 I mean, we've been able to model out some of the underlying archetypal themes, but if you

01:23:02.880 subjugate literature to statistics predicated on ideology, all that happens, you don't

01:23:09.580 enlighten anyone, you don't make anything more equal, you just destroy literature.

01:23:13.360 And you get a real taste of that very quickly when you see how appalling, at a narrative

01:23:18.460 level, most woke propaganda is.

01:23:21.020 And so, in a free market, that's probably going to take care of itself.

01:23:24.520 But I don't know what to do with it conceptually, because the problem really is a difficult one.

01:23:32.140 It's like, well, if it's not forbidden, and now it's tolerated, but it's not tolerated,

01:23:35.900 now it's equal.

01:23:37.580 All right?

01:23:38.220 Right.

01:23:38.520 And that...

01:23:38.740 What do you teach kids?

01:23:40.200 And I think the answer is going to be, you don't teach them about sex at all.

01:23:46.620 That might be one answer.

01:23:48.000 And then the conservatives were kind of right about that when they opposed sex education

01:23:51.480 to begin with.

01:23:52.340 And so that's pretty terrifying.

01:23:55.000 Or, you take your kids the hell out of the public school, which seems to be what people

01:23:59.280 are doing, and then there's a diverse range of solutions, and you let the market sort

01:24:03.300 it out.

01:24:03.880 But I also think this is a major catastrophe, because I'm convinced that the biggest predictor

01:24:09.900 of the wealth of a society is interpersonal trust.

01:24:13.880 It's the only genuine natural resource, is interpersonal trust.

01:24:17.720 And in a society where the default presupposition in a trade is trust, everyone's going to be rich

01:24:23.760 soon, regardless even whether they have any natural resources.

01:24:26.800 The Japanese don't have any natural resources, but they have a very honest society, and they're

01:24:32.360 rich, and the honesty is a huge part of why.

01:24:36.020 What happens when you start distrusting fundamental institutions?

01:24:39.480 Well, everyone's skeptical about everyone else, and that's a horrible cognitive and emotional

01:24:45.040 burden.

01:24:45.880 And then what's a marker for that emergent distrust?

01:24:49.100 How about, I don't trust my children in the hands of the agents of the state.

01:24:54.680 I think, Jesus, dismal.

01:24:56.920 And we're running down that road.

01:24:58.460 Oh, man, we're running down that road.

01:24:59.960 So the question really is, so anyone watching this probably saying, hey, we're there already.

01:25:04.280 We're two-thirds of the way to the bottomless pit, even though it's bottomless.

01:25:08.820 So the question is, well, how do you get out of that?

01:25:11.480 I guess societally, maybe there is no real way.

01:25:14.560 There is no grand experiment to get us societally out of that in a country, from an American perspective,

01:25:19.360 350 million people, with 50 states and all the religions.

01:25:23.020 I mean, America has a weird version of this because of the way we are fundamentally created

01:25:27.320 in that, you know, from every walk of life, from every corner of the earth, people came

01:25:31.400 here to make a better life.

01:25:32.800 So it's a little bit easier if you were to look at Japan and say, okay, here's a homogenous

01:25:36.940 society.

01:25:38.140 Well, one of the questions, this might seem only obliquely related, but when the people

01:25:43.880 who, your country is founded on the notion that there are self-evident truths.

01:25:51.160 Now, as far as I can tell, we find these truths to be self-evident.

01:25:54.180 Right, exactly.

01:25:55.040 So the question is, why were they self-evident?

01:25:57.560 And I would say the reason they were self-evident was because the political narrative and the

01:26:03.040 political philosophy, including the small-L liberal philosophy, was embedded inside a bedrock,

01:26:08.520 essentially, of Judeo-Christian presumptions.

01:26:10.620 And that was so pervasive that the idea that that would disappear was incomprehensible because

01:26:18.880 those things were taken as, well, of course, that's the way things are.

01:26:22.200 It's self-evident.

01:26:23.860 Well, when that self-evidence starts to dissolve, that's the death of God, the Nietzschean death

01:26:27.980 of God, then all of these, all of what unites a society starts to disappear right down to

01:26:35.580 the conceptual level, even down to the point where you can't tell the difference between

01:26:38.880 a man and a woman.

01:26:39.440 Exactly. So, Jordan, if you took, if you now, now maybe we're getting to the answer to the

01:26:43.160 previous question, which is, so now if you say to a six-year-old, you're biologically not what

01:26:48.080 you are, maybe those self-evident truths at every other level will dissolve and dissolve

01:26:54.580 pretty damn quickly.

01:26:55.900 Well, I think, well, I think that will speed that along. It's also a reflection of the fact

01:27:00.020 that that's happened. I mean, when Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he believed that

01:27:05.000 all our conceptual categories would fall. And I think one of the conceptual categories

01:27:11.220 that is falling, even on the scientific front, is belief in the reality of the objective world.

01:27:16.960 That's maybe a transcendent belief too. We don't know. Could easily be. And so, what I've been

01:27:23.520 trying to do about this, in the deepest sense, is to try to understand consciously the psychological

01:27:30.480 substructure of that which produces self-evidence. And I did that, I've been doing that partly because

01:27:37.400 because that was what Carl Jung recommended. He thought that was what we were going to have to

01:27:43.720 do over the next hundred years, let's say, is become conscious of the religious bed, the necessary

01:27:49.700 religious bedrock of our society. That's a complicated thing to do, consciously.

01:27:53.960 Well, it's sort of like whether you believe you believe or not, you still believe.

01:27:57.460 Yeah, well, that's right. That's it, right?

01:27:59.520 Or you're fragmented and disunited. You know, and so I've been trying to delve as deeply as possible

01:28:06.760 into this underlying substructure of so-called self-evidence. And for what that's worth, I mean,

01:28:14.560 people seem to be responding to it very positively, at least insofar as I can determine that by the

01:28:19.840 reaction to my books and my lectures. But it's a hell of a job to undertake. It's sort of like,

01:28:24.500 it's sort of like trying to come up with an explanation for why you and Dave decided that you

01:28:29.380 wanted to have genetic relatives for your children. Or it's sort of like, why am I right this very

01:28:35.000 moment? Having a conversation that if you would have said to me 10 years ago, I'm having, I would

01:28:39.960 have said, there's no way in high hell I would ever be having that conversation. I'm the last

01:28:43.720 suited person on earth to have that conversation with the 20 years of my life that I spent struggling

01:28:48.740 with my sexuality and doing drugs and all of the self-destructive things that I did that I,

01:28:54.200 thank God, got out of in large part because of you, in large part because of David and in something

01:28:58.880 that was sparked in me somehow, right? Well, so what do you think, what do you think it was,

01:29:03.840 what do you think it was that rescued you from that self-destructive and shallow hedonism?

01:29:09.960 Like, why, why, why did you, how did you manage to, okay, why do you think that the notion that you

01:29:19.060 overcame it is the right notion, right? Because you're making the case that your current mode of

01:29:23.600 existence is preferable practically and ethically to that. And so why do you think-

01:29:28.560 It was falling in love. It was falling in love. That probably sounds like the most cheesy thing

01:29:31.960 that you could ever say, or maybe it sounds like the best thing you could ever say.

01:29:33.540 Well, maybe not. I mean, love is supposed to be the universal redemptive force.

01:29:36.940 So then that's it. Then that's it. At some point, you know, I had had all sorts of relationships or

01:29:41.880 one night stands or God only knows what I was doing for a long time. And then at some point

01:29:45.560 when David and I started dating a little bit more and being together a little bit more,

01:29:49.120 and then at some point, like it just hit me one day. I remember we were sitting there,

01:29:51.900 we were sitting at a Mexican restaurant on 83rd and Amsterdam that we had been to a million times.

01:29:55.940 And I was like, I love him. I can't believe it. And then I thought, well, if this mean,

01:30:00.640 like there's something here, there's some, that thought just hit me. It was just,

01:30:03.680 it was just there and it was there. And then I was like, well, I damn well better be better than I

01:30:07.440 am. Cause I knew I was still broken still.

01:30:09.620 So why did you, why did you think that?

01:30:11.480 Because, because I loved him and I wanted him to be around someone that was probably better than me

01:30:15.980 or something like that.

01:30:17.040 Right, right, right. Well, that's, that's a good definition of love, right?

01:30:19.840 That wouldn't, if you love someone, wouldn't you try to offer them the best version of yourself?

01:30:24.600 And that's also why, so when, when we were on tour and I'm watching you 125 nights in a row,

01:30:30.180 talk about this, this incredible innate need for almost everyone to be a parent,

01:30:35.720 watching you do that. And I'm going, man, this guy's changing everybody's life that these thousands

01:30:41.000 of people that are coming to this thing. And I'm talking to him on the side about how he wants kids.

01:30:45.080 And I'm looking at myself going, no, I'm the outlier in this thing. I'm the outlier.

01:30:49.760 My partner wants kids, wants, wants us to live a life together, wants us to live as full a thing

01:30:54.340 as humanly possible. The same thing that our parents did before us and our grandparents did

01:30:59.760 and everybody all down the chain. And I'm on tour with this guy who's saying the things that I'm

01:31:04.520 literally seeing people's lives just absolute open up in the best possible sense and put down all of

01:31:10.940 their crap and all that stuff. But I'm the exception to all of that. And that seemed crazy.

01:31:15.340 There's pride. That's pride, man. Yeah. And the question too is, do you really want to be the

01:31:22.100 exception? No, I didn't want to be the exception. That's a brutal place to be. I mean, sometimes

01:31:27.160 you're cursed, you know, maybe you're even a spectacular genius of Nietzschean proportions

01:31:31.860 and you're the exception. It isn't clear that you'd wish that sort of fate on your worst enemy.

01:31:37.440 But when I said to you before that like, so I'm 46 now, I'm ready for the next phase. I've done

01:31:44.060 everything I can do at this phase, at this phase of life. Like, yes, could I have more nights out

01:31:49.440 drinking? And I'll still have those nights out occasionally or whatever. Is there anything

01:31:53.600 else that I can do? I've done everything I can do. I know there is some piece of the thing

01:31:58.960 that I just know it. It's again, it's like, I can't tell you how I know it. I just know there's

01:32:03.260 some piece now that is supposed to put this full puzzle together and it's pretty damn close.

01:32:08.080 And as I said to you, when we had dinner a couple of weeks ago, you know, it's like,

01:32:11.420 I don't know how many people would be able to walk into parenthood, regardless of whether they were

01:32:14.800 gay or straight or anything else that have put enough of the pieces together in a way that I have

01:32:20.060 that, that we're financially comfortable and we're in a loving relationship and have loving families

01:32:26.120 behind us. And, and that I'm a full person and that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

01:32:30.300 You know what I mean? I wake up with a passion and a desire. You know, I've had, I've had my moral

01:32:35.160 qualms about the suitability of, let's say, gay relationships and gay marriages, puzzling that

01:32:41.100 out, knowing that, especially on the side of male homosexuality, that as long as there's been

01:32:46.520 recorded history, there's some percentage, two to 3%, perhaps of males who have a strong homosexual

01:32:52.840 proclivity. It's less clear on the female side, I would say. And so there's no denying that as a

01:32:59.080 reality. And then, you know, I really, I like you and admire you. And I've certainly feel the

01:33:05.280 same way about Douglas Murray. So I've had very close friends who were gay and many students as

01:33:09.820 well. And so, you know, that's, that's, that's a case in point. But then I also found talking to

01:33:18.080 you on the tour, I thought, well, my, my personal sense was, well, if you want to have kids, that's a

01:33:26.340 good thing. And, and so I would be fully supportive of that. And, and so congratulations, Dave.

01:33:32.900 Yeah. And that's, that's the same smile and, and consistent beauty that you have always shown to me

01:33:41.000 and shown to, to everybody, to everyone that's walked into this thing. And, and, well, I hope that

01:33:48.440 it changes you even more for the better. That's very likely. And I would say one of the things that's

01:33:55.520 so remarkable about having children is if you're careful and you want it, you can have the best

01:34:02.940 relationship that you've ever had in your life. It's right there. That's what the kid wants.

01:34:09.140 You could have that. So have it, man.

01:34:16.320 Good talk to you, Dave.

01:34:17.940 Yeah, Jordan. There aren't words. There aren't words. A lot of talking, but there aren't words for

01:34:24.180 what we did here. Hey, thank you, my friend. You bet, man. I'm looking forward to seeing your kids.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 30, 2022

266. Gay Parenting： Promise and Pitfalls ｜ Dave Rubin

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