Gay Parenting: Promise and Pitfalls | Dave Rubin | EP 266

If you would have said to me 10 years ago that I'd be having this conversation publicly, first off, that I knew that I'd be married, I wouldn't have believed you. That I'd have kids, I wouldn't have believed you. That I would be willing to talk about this, or even someone that someone else might look to to help map it for them, I'd say you were completely insane.

Um, this is not really something, you know? I'd rather talk about politics. I'd rather talk about the culture wars and all of these other things. This is a political party because we're trying to sketch out a pathway, I suppose. I mean, our culture appears to have decided that gay marriage is, well, I don't know if "acceptable" is the right word. It's become part of the structure of marriage itself. And so now the question is, okay what does that mean?

[Music]

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. He's an author, comedian, and TV personality, best known for his political and cultural commentary. 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. 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. Something we could all use.

Dave's first book, "Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason," was a New York Times bestseller. 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. Dave and I got to know each other first when he was one of the earliest public figures to support my efforts in the fight against compelled speech in Canada and elsewhere, and then more deeply when he opened for me in 125 cities during my 2018 book tour. I concentrated during that tour on talking to my audiences about many issues pertaining to responsibility and meaning, including family life, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

Mr. Rubin currently resides in Miami with his husband, David Janet, and their rescue dog Clyde. Good to see you, Dave.

"It's good to see you, my friend. I have to say this feels a little bizarre to me. We've done so many of these in so many different cities and countries, and different chairs, and on Skype and Zoom in every which way. And I'm usually reading your bio."

"I know, I know, this is bizarre. I know I don't usually interview you, but we talked together a couple of weeks ago. You have big changes coming up in your life, and we talked about having a serious conversation about that."

"I know that. Please correct me if I'm saying anything that isn't accurate. 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."

"And part of my propositions I was putting forward, I suppose, was that most of that meaning is to be found in responsibility, especially to other people. And I talked a lot about the role of family in people's lives. 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. 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. So maybe you could fill people in on that front and let them know what's happening."

"Yeah, sure. Well, so David and I met 13 years ago yesterday, and I know it was yesterday because we met on my birthday, believe it or not. It was on my birthday. And then I got an even weirder one for you. It was at the gay pride parade in New York City, which now they've become sort of these crazy circuses. But back then it wasn't quite like that. 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. But in any event, we've been together for about 12 years. We've been married for seven years, and I'm 46 now."

"So I grew up in a time when I never even, first off, I struggled with my sexuality for a long time. Partly, we've discussed this. I felt, you know, people, it's sort of like a Homer Simpson quote that I love, and I know you can do the Simpsons thing all the time. I like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming, and I sort of thought that was what it meant, that gay, even though I was attracted to men, that gay meant something else. Gay men like you, like the theater, or you like to dance, or you like Madonna or something, and I didn't really care for any of those things. 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."

"And as a Gen Xer, um, there was nothing. We never talked about gay marriage. You didn't even talk about anything gay. There was nothing. You know, growing up in the 90s, there were no role models to look at. The only person that I ever saw on television that made any sense to me was in two episodes of The Golden Girls, Blanche's brother comes out as gay and he marries a cop. This is 1991 NBC prime time. Obviously gay marriage wasn't legal for another 30 years or something. But so I had no role models, I had nothing. So I sort of just never thought about getting married or having a family, truthfully. And I didn't even realize this until we were on tour—I never thought of the future. I sort of thought of my present all the time."

"And then when we were on tour—flash forward a bit—David and I got married. Even when we got married, we never really talked about having kids or even what a family meant. We knew we loved each other and we have a great time together, and you know, we love the same things, and I think in most ways we bring out the best in each other. Um, sometimes we bring out the worst in each other, and that probably—that's probably good."

"You're married."

"Exactly. Um, but then, right around when we were on tour—so now this is 2018—David started talking about having kids, and we were texting a lot about it while we were on tour. 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, 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—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 an integral part of that. There are almost no exceptions to that. You would always make a point there are some exceptions you might..."

"Yeah, but you have to be exceptional to have an exception to that."

"So yes, 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. Um, 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, you know, 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."

"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 then 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."

"Yeah, and you know, it's funny, I—I hate that phrase, the gay community. I know even as you said it, it's like it doesn't mean anything to me. 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. But I didn't have that role model. I didn't have that. There was no map, there really—brotherhood of the marginalized? Yes, that's a group I could be part of, I suppose, in some bizarre sense. Um, but even that is sort of nauseating, I guess."

"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, and on top of everything else, I'm meeting all of the people that are attending the shows. And you know this—the amount of people that were in new families, or that the wife was pregnant for the first time, and I'm seeing the joy on these people's faces—all of this is hitting me. And then you keep saying this thing that for most people they have to do it, but there are these exceptions."

"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? Then what am I even married for?"

"Right, right. Well that does beg that question, right? So now these things are really hitting each other. And because I had nev—because the map wasn't there, the road map just wasn't there, I started going, man, I really have to think about this now. 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. So I'm basically watching you from behind. So I have sort of the back view of you to the crowd. So I genuinely felt that every night that I was part of the show, every night in that sense part of the audience."

"And I remember you said it one more time and I thought, all right, I have to do this. I have to do this. 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."

"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 knew 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, or even someone that someone else might look to to help map it for them, I'd say you were completely insane."

"Um, this is not really something, you know, I'd rather talk about politics, I'd rather talk about the culture wars and all of these other things. This is a political party because we're trying to sketch out a pathway."

"I suppose I mean—our culture appears to have decided that gay marriage is, well, I don't know if acceptable is the right word. It's become part of the structure of marriage itself. And so now the question is, okay what does that mean? 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, right?"

"And I would say that's actually paramount. 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. It's, well no, not exactly. Yeah, and but maybe, maybe exactly if you also understand that living happily ever after means living for other people in many ways, particularly your children."

"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. Right? 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, etc., I would say culturally in America we kind of moved past that."

"I mean, Trump ran—he's the first-time president—he was on stage with a rainbow flag. It was, you know, and nobody cared. No, I shouldn't say nobody cared, but enough people felt okay. You let people live the way they want to to put this down and move ahead."

"But you're right that marriage has to do with something else. Otherwise, the word marriage wouldn't mean anything. 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 do this all the time in life and it doesn't really matter. 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 we're taught, and that you can hand that on to the next generation, and hopefully they can attain and retain some of that permanence in your life too, right? Yeah, multi-generational, permanent stretching indefinitely into the future."

"I mean, part of what marriage does, I think technically, it's the psychological equivalent of what sex does genetically. You know, if people mix comedies, to meets gametes, games, gametes—partly because to ensure variability and to stop the propagation of parasites—that's why we don't clone. But there's that mixing as well tends to ensure that deviations from genetic health are minimized. And so the same thing happens on the psychological affront, I would say, is that each person has their own idiosyncrasies and some of those lead them down the garden path to terrible places. 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 paragon, of sorts."

"And then that's what the child interacts with, is that united front of the two parents, right? 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. And then I think that's furthered as well."

"I've often thought and said this, and I do believe it's true. It's very, very difficult to mature until you have children. And there are other ways of maturing, but it's hard. And the reason it's hard, I think, is because you're not mature until someone else is more important than you. And it's possible that that would happen with your wife or your husband, but not like with children."

"Well, I've been thinking about that. So you know, we're about to have our first child in a month and I've been thinking about that a lot lately. 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. 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. I really—I very much feel that, and I think I'm feeling it more and more each day as we get closer to August 22nd, which is the due date."

"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 those things—that's one thing. But the peace with the kids, with building this sustainable thing, it's not something that has been proven in society yet, really. You know, there obviously are gay couples with kids; 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."

"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 it. Maybe we can talk about exactly how it came to be that you'll have a baby in your household in six weeks, 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."

"Sure, so first technically, because there are biological differences between men and women, I don't want to get us cancelled on YouTube, but it actually is true, Jordan—you know, we could not biologically have kids, so you know, just ourselves. So we just—we talked about adoption for a little bit. We did. We both felt that the genetic component of this was important to us, so for a little while we debated going with my sister's egg. We thought we'd have two kids—that was the general thought process in the beginning, and we thought we could take some of my sister's eggs, and she's a mother now. She's actually pregnant with her third, but that we could get her eggs and then we would take David's sperm, and then we would have two children from that.

"After a long time of talking about that, back and forth and going through all that, there were a lot of ethical and moral issues, and my sister then would sort of would be the biological mother of my children. I mean, there were all sorts of things that we were about to traverse, right? And that's all uncharted territory, right? All sorts of things. Yeah, you think you know how that might go, and you think you know how it might go if you have goodwill, but that does not mean that you know how it will go. 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. But then, you know, we said why don't you stay with this for a little bit and then suddenly she had a lot of those questions, and she was concerned if, you know, she shows up to the birthday party and then feels this odd jealousy. Or what if she suddenly wasn't happy with the way that we were parenting or—"

"That's a big one."

"Or a litany of other things. So even going through that—and this obviously is not the way that we ultimately went about it—was sort of a maturation process. Like you know, what are we really trying to do here? So anyway, ultimately we decided to find an egg donor. I mean, basically, it sounds sort of glib or something, but it's sort of like Tinder. I mean, there are these websites that exist where the egg donors are on the site and you try—we tried to find a girl. 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. We wanted to find a girl who obviously was physically healthy, most importantly. Um, that, you know, didn't have major issues in terms of genetics and all that sort of stuff that we thought, that sort of looked like the type of girl that we might be with. So I didn't want, you know, a six-foot-five Swedish woman, let's say."

"And so we have one egg donor, meaning there were multiple eggs, and we fertilized one with David's sperm and one with my sperm, and we'll have two kids. Right now we have two surrogates that are pregnant, and even talking about this, it's like, man, I get this. This is all kind of crazy stuff. Putting aside gay or straight, related to all of this, the whole surrogacy thing is fascinating that there are, first off, women who are willing to donate their eggs. And you know, I hear a lot of people—we talked about this—there's this criticism of somehow that you're buying the egg and you're renting the woman."

"Yeah, the surrogate."

"And of course, there is a financial component to it. There is, I'm not denying that there is. 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, and during COVID, the miscarriage numbers were through the roof. There were all sorts of weird things; the quality of the eggs wasn't great. They don't know exactly—they'll have to study this for years in terms of what actually happened. 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. There are all sorts of other ways that you can make money—anyone can make money—they are doing it—they talk about that they have this ability and this gift that they can do."

"A lot of them, there are some that won't do it for same-sex couples because of their own ethical or religious views. The surrogates that we found, they actually—one of them had a gay brother. 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. But all of that aside, all 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. And what does that really look like? 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 just say—it's easy to say an awful lot—but as you said, it's not that easy for a gay couple to have kids. Right? So very complicated."

"So, putting aside if you're going to go to the surrogacy route, putting aside all the finances and all that stuff, that eliminates an awful lot of people from even being able to do it. Fortunately, we're able to do it. Okay, 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. There's going to be no mother involved, and what does that really mean? And I understand some of the reservations."

"Well, yeah. Well, so we do know we do know that children who are breastfed do better. Yep, I believe that. One year of breastfeeding is equivalent to, I think breastfed kids have a five-point IQ advantage, and one point of IQ is worth one year of education. I have two freezers in my garage—two industrial freezers full of breast milk right."

"That's right. Has done all the research on this."

"Right. So another complication, but okay. And so—and we don't have data—we don't really have data on motherless children raised by fathers from infancy, right? Because it's pretty rare. I don't know if there's literature pertaining to that at all. We do have a literature on mother-headed families without fathers, and the data there are crystal clear: it's not good to be fatherless. 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. But what it absolutely and 100% means that on average, that's sub-optimal and badly sub-optimal."

"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 minimally, right? 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 two seems to be better than one. Now how much of that's linked to sex we also don't know."

"Let’s see. It seems that the feminine role is more nurturing. You see that with the proclivity of women to be more agreeable temperamentally. That kicks in at puberty. And so I think that you have to be accepting and nurturing especially in your attitude towards infants before they're mobile. So, say before six months, before nine months, an infant does no wrong. It's 100% acceptance. 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. It's like out of your dependency into the world—and the paternal spirit encourages that development."

"Now mothers can do that too, but roughly speaking, women tend to do the nurturing thing more, and men do the encouraging thing more. So now the question is, how do you mediate? How do you manage to fulfill both those roles in the absence of a heterosexual arrangement?"

"Right, 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. Now, you know David pretty well and we've been out to dinner with Tammy many times. Yeah, and you know him—he is incredibly warm and nurturing and loving and deeply cares about all those things, and I'm telling you, he is reading about skin-to-skin contact every day. Yeah, and all of the breast milk stuff and everything and I know he will have a huge percentage of the stuff that a mother would bring, but I also know it's not all of it. Well, he knows the other thing too is that you guys have to do that consciously, right?"

"Yes, right—with research in hand—and to build up that proclivity that would be there more automatically, arguably, with the 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. 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, but it is very interesting and salutary to hear you also talk about the complications."

"So, on the feminine side, let's say—do you think you have the nurturance angle well covered? You talk to me a little bit about having women around in your infant and child's life as well."

"Yeah, 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. But now I understand that they're not the biological mother, but they will be there. You know, we're going to have night nurses also for a few months to help the babies get a normal sleep schedule. But these are all the pieces that we're trying to put together. But can we just back up for one second? 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? 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. You know, I used to live, well, I don't see how that—in some sense, I don't see how that can be—there can be any alternatives to that, if there isn't another pathway forward."

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

"And it's not—as good as adolescence."

"Yeah, and it's not a full life. And I actually feel—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 in general there are there don't seem to be that many voices publicly about that anymore."

"So here's a rough question—so do you think both the flamboyance now—I want to get into this in some detail—but the flamboyance that's been historically associated with the male homosexual community—do you think to what degree do you think that both of those are a consequence of not having a more integrated and conservative path potentially open in front of people?"

"I think it's a huge amount that probably will never be fully explained 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? It was these people just wanted—well, they wanted to be able to get married, that was part of it, but it was also that they wanted to be able to go to a bar that wasn't underground, that wasn't hidden, that wasn't, you know, this seedy thing. 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, and it was going on for decades before that, but they wanted some sense of normalcy. If you don't leave people some little seeds of normalcy, then they will do all sorts of things."

"So the flamboyant part—there's two parts you're asking about. So the flamboyant part, I'm just not built that way. I'm not—sometimes I used to, you know, I used to, when I was first sort of coming out or coming to grips with myself, 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. They had just let go of every sort of normal cliché or something like that. They're so, right? They are on that kind of existential courage."

"Yeah, and yet—they always really like, generally, gays—they like straight-acting. That's a real thing with gays—they like straight-acting. So guys always liked me because I didn't seem gay, whatever that meant. 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."

"Right, right, because I was struggling here for the straight community and too straight for the queer community."

"Well said, man. Uh, and so I was sort of grappling with that. So there was this—there's the flamboyant part—and then you're asking about the sex side of it. It's like if you don't leave people with some ability to say, oh, you can be in a lasting relationship, this is why marriage equality was so important."

"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. But from a secular perspective—to whatever—uh, 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 the things that you talked about before, 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—what will you leave them with? You will leave them with their carnal desires, and I definitely could have gone down that road with a—and I definitely didn't go down that road."

"Um, rebelliousness, right? 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? And maybe to be indistinguishable from courage. 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 and that there would be a promotion of something like stable, mature, responsible long-term monogamy."

"Well, I think maybe I'm trying to prove that. Yeah, 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. 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? 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— that's how societies are built. I fundamentally believe that."

"So it's weird. It's like my worldview, because otherwise what are you saying to people? So, okay, okay, you're gay. 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. What other way is there to integrate into society, to really integrate into society? I mean, to me this, this is it."

"Well, I think that's why the culture did take the decision that it took, which was to open the doors, let's say. Now, we talked about that. I want to get into that too because the cl—we have this notion that's rife in our culture, let's say, that's insisted upon, that all families are equally are equal. And I understand the emphasis on that from the, let's call it the tolerance perspective, but I think that it's badly flawed in one manner, 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."

"And I don't think it's possible to dispense with the ideal of heterosexual monogamy now as the ideal. Yes, 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, uh, an honorable person, honorable decent person—and then there's the minimal requirement for a family that's ideal, and that's something approximating heterosexual long-term heterosexual monogamy. And maybe you have two decent people united together, and then there's a firm platform for children."

"Now, the problem with that as an ideal is that we all fall short of the ideal, and so, right, half—40% of people are going to get divorced, and of the people who don't get divorced, a good percentage of them are in pretty damn miserable marriages. Now that doesn't condemn marriage, but it does show how difficult attaining that ideal is. And then there's going to be people who lose their partners and raise children alone, and they're going to be people who raise children alone by happenstance or choice, and they— it doesn't seem reasonable to, what would you say, um, put them outside the bounds of civilized society, let's say."

"That by the same token, it doesn't seem reasonable to dispense with the ideal."

"Yeah, so maybe we need something like—we know what the ideal is, it's a divine ideal in some sense, in that none of us can live up to it. 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."

"It's damning with faint praise, but I don't see—no, that's it. That's it. That's the meat of this more than anything else. That there is, of course, there's an ideal, of course, there is an ideal. There has to be an ideal, and if, well there's nothing to aim at if there's not an ideal. Because if there isn't, if the ideal isn't two people, male and female, in a heterosexual relationship, then what is it? Is it four people? Is it eight people? Is it one person? Like instantly you go from that kind of narrow ideal to an intense multiplicity, and we've certainly seen the problems that are associated with that. 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, and that seems to me to be a really bad idea."

"Well, it's a really bad idea, and I think we're seeing some of the repercussions of that right now, right? I mean, we've seen the excesses of what the woke or the progressives or whatever that is that are now destabilizing everything. This is why I've said this; I've gotten into trouble for saying it a few times, but I'm sympathetic to conservatives who go, boy, you know, we let gay marriage happen and look what's happened since. 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. But the issue really is—so okay, so if we have the ideal, really what we're talking about here is what do we do with these marginal cases?"

"The marginal cases meaning, okay, so now this modern question, right? So what do we really do with that? So now, okay, so there are going to be gay couples who want to approximate to that ideal. So what does a society do? Does a society try to help them get there, or does society just never talk about it, push them to the margins or—and push it underground, right?"

"So what we're trying to do right here is unearth that a little bit, so I don't deny the importance of a mother by no stretch. As I said, we're going to try to have as many strong female role models as possible, but I don't think it will replicate a mother. By the way, when you talk, children are pretty good at bonding with adults who aren't their biological relatives. What children don't like is instability in their primary caregiver. They really hate having primary caregivers swap because their primary caregiver is their whole world, and so basically, if you substitute one for another, say six months into the child's life, then it's as if everything the child knows has been flipped upside down. So they don't like that. They're perfectly capable of bonding with multiple people though and there doesn't seem to be any developmental downside to that—in fact, perhaps quite the contrary."

"You know, I don't think it's so bad for a child to have a variety of role models to choose from, 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. I would just say, well, it's difficult—might be more difficult, even if you're a homosexual couple, but it's difficult if you're—it's difficult, and there are plenty of heterosexual couples. So where both partners are essentially feminine in their temperamental, both partners are essentially masculine. Now, we don't know enough about that to differentiate it right down to the ultimate degree, but the problem that you guys will face isn't of a categorically different type necessarily than the problem that many couples face."

"Absolutely. 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, there are parents who obviously abuse their kids or abuse each other and alcoholics and all these things. I'm in no way comparing being a gay parent to that, but the point is that there is an ideal situation and then there's what society—and then there's reality. So it's like, okay, so should society stop people who are alcoholics from having kids, or stop people who are— or license parents after intensive training?"

"Right, well, that's the road that this really would go down."

"Yeah, well we've already kind of decided that too because one of the things the state doesn't do is determine who’s a fit parent, right? And we love rules. Well, it's very strange in some sense because it's the most important thing you'll ever do, and yet while you're not compelled to have an education, for example, around parenting issues before you become a parent, and we've decided everywhere in the world, I would say maybe without exception, that that's one place the government doesn't go. And that's a very interesting decision for everyone to have made. It's quite surprising in some fundamental sense."

"I guess we know that in that situation in particular, a variety of approaches might be the best. So something like that, well, so I guess my question for you as I traverse this is, if we acknowledge that that ideal situation—and again, just using the word ideal, I know that there's a certain set of people that will watch that and go and see Reuben's saying his relationship or he's less than—"

"It isn't, right?"

"Well, that's the key part of dispensing the bloody ideal just because it's difficult to attain, right? And just because—we all are—we all—all are flawed in our own way. I mean, really, who—I think you said this to me at dinner, but it's like who amongst us is walking around as the ideal partner, the ideal person, the ideal—the ideal everything? The ideal father, ideal anything?"

"Yeah, yeah, virtually nobody is doing that. Well, if they are, then the ideal isn't high enough. Because an ideal should be something that beckons to you from the distance, right? It's not something that's right there in front of you for you to grip—that's not much of an ideal."

"Well, if we'd have a lot more people who were acting that way, if it was that easy, I suppose. Right? Like there's not a lot of people doing it. So I think what I'm trying to figure out here is how does that—how does this life I think fit into whatever's coming in this new world? You know, we seem to be entering a new world right now. We're watching an old world go away, and we're entering this new world. I'm sort of part of this new conservative world, and kind of where does it all fit?"

"Well, so here's a question that's relevant to that. So it's a good politically incorrect question, and so in some sense, the more traditional community has opened itself up to the possibility of including gay marriage in the purview of the acceptable and traditional, yeah? Okay, so what responsibilities come along for people who are homosexual in relationship to the expansion of that? Right? What do you think about that? I mean, I know what you've done."

"Well, I think it's a respect for that. It's an acknowledgement that something is good there and that we have to—we have to be tolerant of the questions, I guess that's it. When I see this now, suddenly, like, you know when we announced that we were having kids, there was some pushback online from more religious people on the right, by the way—99% of it was all anonymous people; it was virtually nobody—certainly nobody that I knew. There were one or two people that had blue checks on Twitter, but it was all these people, you know, talking about the sanctity of marriage and all of these things."

"But I'm willing to have that conversation. I accept that this is—you know, I genuinely accept that this is a little bit weird, this is a little bit, you know—but it's like if we don't have these conversations, then the thing that we're pulling apart by pulling apart marriage and the family just by saying it is anything and everything at the exact same time, right? Well, that is far more dangerous. That's far more dangerous."

"So that's why even as I'm sitting here now, I'm sort of like, ah, I partly don't want to have this conversation because it's like I don't know the answers to all of these things. But I know that we have to be able to do it. You're supposed to talk when you don't know the answers because then maybe you can think it through and you can exchange views with other people and you can expand your knowledge in that domain of ignorance."

"I want to go back to something you said. You decided, the two of you decided that genetic similarity was an important factor to take into account. Yeah, now obviously that issue doesn't arise in the case of fertile heterosexual couples; it does if they have to adopt or if they decide to adopt instead. And we know that people—there is a preference, quite a marked preference—although this might not be so clear with adoption. If you have a stepparent and you're a child who's not biologically related to the stepparent, you're at way higher risk for abuse, like way, way higher. I don't remember how many-fold higher, but it's a tremendous amount. I think it's the single most predictive risk factor, I suppose, that would probably scrap with alcohol use."

"But so people are more positively inclined to their genetic relatives. Now, the exact details of that aren't clear, and it's not surprising if you think like a biologist that that would be the case. But this had to be a conscious decision on your part and it wasn't a decision that you guys necessarily had to take. So why did you decide that that was important?"

"Yeah man, it's—it’s one of those things. Well, you know, I also had heard you talk about this, this part of growing—of parenting, and seeing yourself in this child and seeing your relatives too. You see everything, I suppose. I think—I don't know that I have a good answer for this, actually, but you both decided."

"We knew it—we knew it when we decided we didn't want to adopt, that we just knew. I don't even know how to describe it. Yeah, there was something important when we had that conversation, okay, are we going to adopt? And we really did think about it."

"It would have been way easier. It would have been way less expensive and all of those things. Yeah, it's a strange thing that can't be articulated. I don't know, I don't know that I can articulate. Well you might ask yourself on the similar front, it's like, well, there's lots of unwanted babies in the world, and so why isn't the ethical thing when you're a heterosexual couple just to adopt an unwanted baby? Why bring another baby into the world when there's a baby that could use a home? And the answer is that isn't what people do. And then the question might be, well why? And you can come up with a biological rationale, but that doesn't mean that there's a conceptual answer handy—like why do you want your own kids? And the answer to that is something like, well that's what everyone has always done since the beginning of time. It's something like that, right? But it's not really an answer."

"No, no, well, or take—this is part of partly why conservatives are set back on their heels so frequently when they're questioned by radicals. Because the radicals will do something like, well justify marriage, and the conservative thinks, well we all agreed about that like 50,000 years ago and so I don't actually have a fully fleshed out explicit rationale and defense for the institution of marriage. I thought that was self-evident."

"And I would say the preference for your own biological children has that self-evidence about it. There is a cruelty about that in some real sense, right? But I suppose that's the cruelty of specifically loving some people more than you're capable of loving everyone else. So maybe we just have to accept that some things are self-evident rather than endlessly wonder why they're selfish."

"Well that's what a right conservative would say. Well then I suppose I became the most unlikely conservative of all of that in some ways. It doesn't really matter, but I know that it is—I know that it was when we sat there and had that conversation when push came to shove, we said no, we want to have—if we're having two kids, let's have one from each of us. Some of it is, look, look, it's—I really love Tammy, yeah? And it's quite something to see your echoed in the kids, yeah? You know, my son, it's turned out that Mikayla perhaps looks more like me, and Julian looks more like Tammy, but I can see Tammy in him, and I'm pretty happy about that, you know?"

"And so, and I suspect, hopefully she feels the same way on the other side. So that love for the person is also echoed in their replication in the children. And then there's more than that too because like when my son was really little, he really—like a newborn infant, he would have facial expressions that I could see were my dad's. It's like oh man, he looks exactly like that, he has exactly the same facial expression."

"And so that echoing of other people that you love, that's not nothing, you know? And that doesn't mean that if you adopt a child you can't come to love that child as if they're your own—clearly that's possible. But that doesn't mean it's optimal, and it doesn't mean it's easy and without pitfalls, and I think the data on stepparents makes that really clear."

"It's just part of the reason we talked about this a little bit too. Part of the reason that heterosexual monogamy is the ideal is because it's also got—you can't beat it in terms of efficiency, right? You said how difficult it was to produce a child. It's not that difficult at all if you're two heated-up fifteen-year-olds in the back of your father's car."

"And you're pretty much. Yeah, exactly, it's like as easy as falling off the bed, too easy in some sense perhaps. But that also indicates that ease and efficiency also is a solid reason why a certain kind of ideal exists. You guys had to jump through hoops, and not everyone could do that."

"They don't have the resources and so that's another obstacle. It's a lot, and again without that map—without that—you know, that's the interesting thing for me. It's like as I've sort of shifted politically, as you know about—and so much my life has been about politics and talking about what I think for a living—and then suddenly, man, all of my political thoughts, all of the stuff that I talk about—all the time and government—all these things, now it's really like it's all sitting right in front of me right now."

"The difference between your own personal morality and the way government is and our role in all of these things. Um, I, it's like I'm trying to do—I'm trying—is just the self-evident part of this, I'm trying to do what I know is right, right, right? Trying to do whatever I do that's right that’s always explicitly explainable, and maybe right isn't the word I'm trying to do what I know. No, I'm trying to do, I'm trying to do what I'm trying to do what I know I'm supposed to do, how about that?"

"Yeah, well that would be good. That would be good to try to figure out what that is and to walk that path. That's a good thing if you can manage it. Another thing we talked about a little bit in relation—decided to discuss today—in relationship to the ideal was this is also an extremely contentious issue, in case we haven't covered enough contentious issues already, um, as the—and this goes back to the issue of the conservatives who took issue with gay marriage."

"It's like, okay, we're trying—starting to break down the categorical boundaries here—where is that going to go? Well, we've seen where it goes, at least to some degree, and as I said, I'm sympathetic to this. I really am sympathetic to this argument. I see it, I see it. I see what they were worried about, and unfortunately, the left, you tweeted out something a couple weeks ago. You know, I was never a conservative until the liberals decided there were no rules. Yeah, I'm paraphrasing you roughly, but I'm sympathetic to that so much of all of the things that we knew we no longer know at a societal level, apparently. And be—and that's between a man and a woman."

"Well, we—we could talk about that in relationship again to use this hated phrase to the LGBTQ+ community. Yeah, first of all, the notion that that's an integral community is foolish. Efficiently, as you add more and more letters, I have no innate knowledge of what it is—more innate knowledge of what it is to be like to be trans than you do. I happen—I'm male. I'm a cisgendered male. I am a man born in a man's body. I happen to be attracted to men. You are a man born in a man's body. You happen to be attracted to women, but I have no more in common with a trans person."

"Yeah, thank you—fact of marginalization the arguable factor, but that is not—that is not a unifying force. That is not something to put on a flag and say, now we are all together because of this. Well, the question is—can you see that? The theory in some sense is that the marginalized have more in common than that, what differentiates them, and I—I don't buy that."

"Well, there's a quasi-ethnocentrism, and even a racism that's associated with that, right? The different are categorically different, and they're all—and different in the same way. Well, that's the next step, but—but the rubbers really hit the road in a terrible way recently because you tell me what you think about this."

"I followed Ken Zucker's work on the trans—on trans kids. Now, Zucker worked at a place called CAMH in Toronto, a major mental health institution, and he was a mainline scientific researcher, not a political type at all, really a dedicated clinician and researcher. And he ran a gender dysphoria treatment clinic—probably the clinic—and he was the editor of the main journals where research on that sort of topic was published. And what Zucker—his treatment program for kids with gender dysphoria was quite straightforward."

"He observed as a consequence of his careful research that about 85% of kids who manifest extreme gender dysphoria—so the sense of discomfort in their own body and a desire to be the opposite sex—80 to 85% of them would desist on their own by the age of 18 or 19. And so his hypothesis was leave them the hell alone because you do the least harm that way, and most of them will settle into their bodies as they mature. Knowing that puberty in particular, especially for kids, you could imagine a male who has a more feminine temperament and who's also perhaps higher in openness, has got a more mutable identity, more creative, is going to be—and is going to be especially if higher neuroticism as well—is going to be uncomfortable around puberty.

"Everyone's uncomfortable around puberty. We should make that straight. And so you just leave those—you leave the kids alone. But what he also showed—and this is the killer fact as far as I'm concerned—is that a very large proportion of kids with gender dysphoria grow up and are homosexual. Yes. And so what that means—what that certainly means is that the vast majority—it might be as high as 80% of the kids who are being convinced now that they inhabit the wrong bodies and are being surgically mutilated on a—in a permanent and terrible manner—the overwhelming majority of them are gay."

"Well, so think how twisted this is. Well, just so I know, you know this, but so think about it this way, so as I said before, I seem to be—people always say to me I'm more straight-acting. I seem to be more—you wouldn't just meet me on the street. No, I'm not like okay this guy is gay. Right? So when I was five or seven as I was growing up, or I'm 10 years old, I was playing with G.I. Joe and Transformers and I liked war and battle and all of those boy-thought of things. Now there are plenty of gay kids that are growing up that like Barbie, or they like, you know, dressing up or whatever that might be. In today's world, the teacher at the school or the administrator or the gender expert or whatever would probably be coaching them towards saying that they were trans, where they would have left someone like me alone. There would be nothing to think about."

"So in an odd sense, the trans movement is extremely anti-gay. That’s something that these people really have to grapple with. There are gay people who are very effeminate, but they still happen to be men. I mean, there is, by the way, a growing movement in again that gay community phrase of gay people who really are pushing back on this. They're really realizing, well, it's the worst part—the worst possible outcome in some sense."

"Well, because it's also making—it's making gay people all seem like extremists. It goes back to what we started with. So when Stonewall happened and the fight for equality, the fight for equality is always just so black people can vote, so women can vote, in my estimation, so that gay people can get married. The fight for equality is good, and it's a true liberal thing to fight for. Once you go from that, the activists still needed more. And what did they turn that to? They turned that to the kids."

"The average person who was protesting at Stonewall, if you would have said to them, you know, the average person that was 35 years old at a bar, it said, well I want to be able to go to a bar that has windows, maybe that aren't blocked out, that isn't underground, and all of these things, and be in a relationship that I don't have to hide. Whatever actually, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, this is going to be about sending your kid to school where they're going to privately discuss sex with teachers, hormonal transformation, and surgery."

"Right? And more than that, to make—and here's another perverse element of this: so many legislatures around the world now have banned so-called conversion therapy, and to me this has been a catastrophe. Now I know that there is a small percentage, mostly of fundamentalist Christian therapist types in the U.S., who were offering their services to homosexual people who were unhappy with their sexual orientation. And so you could have a discussion about whether that's ever appropriate or not, although I would say that's bloody well between the person and their therapist."

"But now that's illegal, and it's illegal to the point where you are required by the conditions of your psychological association—your professional associations—American Psychological Association, let's say, to affirm the stated identity of your client, which is completely—and also very different. Affirming the stated identity of their client is very different than affirming that someone happens to be attracted to the same sex. Right? Those are very different things."

"Then affirming the gender identity if you're not as a therapist, your role isn't to affirm or to deny. It's to listen and to explore—that's your—that's your whole bloody—that's the whole enterprise. And you don't do it affirming or denying, you really don't. You do it as a—as a questioner and a strategist. But then we have the other conversion therapy, which is surgical conversion, and that's not only legal, but opposing it has become a crime."

"And so that's a form of insanity that I just can—I can just barely wrap my head around. So, so what do we do? Going back to the conservatives that were worried, yeah, that this is where we were going to end up. I should probably be their greatest hero because it's like, oh, here's someone who wanted to enter civilized society, wanted to affirm most of the long-fought time-tested ideals, wanted to enter the world with those things, help defend that world. Um, it happens to be a little different than we would think, right? Okay, it's two guys. I can't deny it. I should sort of be a hero to them. It's not the ideal one that they went for, but it's approximately close enough that this should be pretty good, I suppose. That will be my challenge in life."

"Well, maybe that! But I also think that's probably true. My suspicions are that when we release this discussion, that the overwhelming majority of people will be sympathetic to your situation and I'm willing to render harsh judgment, and maybe that does exclude, and we should get to this too, some of the more fundamentalist religious types. But you also said earlier that as far as you're concerned they also have a point. There is a point!"

"Okay, so what's the point?"

"Well, there has to be a point there because look, gay marriage was legalized, I think at a federal level, in the United States in 2015 if I'm not mistaken. So that we're now seven years off of that, and look at all of the craziness that has happened since. I am not directly connecting it to that but when you change fundamental structures, some weird things are going to happen. This is again where I would lay most of the blame here—I would lay on the sort of liberal establishment where nobody was willing to defend anything, and it's why the progressives basically were able to destroy everything."

"The problem maybe comes is—so we had this implicit idea, which we've already discussed—which is heterosexual monogamy. Long-term, faithful—all that good will—that impossible ideal that people strive towards, and there's a real boundary there, right? Like a real boundary—it's a man and a woman, it's one man and one woman. They're bound together over the course of their life. The community supports that. Like it's a pretty definable box, and then you say, well, we'll let the walls down. And so we include single mothers and we include gay couples, and it's like, yeah, but the wall's gone now, so what else do you include?"

"And the answer is, well we don't know. And that's actually not a very good answer, right? Because what happens is anyone who knocks can now come in and you think, well that's great because we're being tolerant. But the problem is, well, what happens when all the people in the room who are now invited in actually do not agree at all, and so that any of this was ever good in the first place?"

"That's sort of—that's what should be done because you can imagine now if you're dealing with a 10-year-old boy who's—or 11-year-old boy, let's say—a little closer to puberty, who's ambivalent about his sexual attraction and his sexual identity, but also has a more feminine temperament—which is not rare, by the way, because there's a lot of overlap between masculine and feminine temperaments—and now you have to decide, well, is this boy likely to be gay or is he trans? And that's a hell of a decision to have to make, especially when you can't actually have a real discussion about it."

"The parents can't, and the clinician isn't allowed to say what they think, or ask in essence, yeah. So—and then, and then especially when it's accompanied by the pressure, which is a complete bloody lie, that well if you don't let this kid transition right now, all you're going to do is cause him more damage. You're going to increase the risk of suicide, which by the way, I think is a claim that there is absolutely zero evidence for—zero evidence for."

"We just don't have—even as the American Psychological Association admitted, we have no good long-term follow-up data on the mental health of people who've transitioned over a reasonable period of time. It just doesn't exist for obvious reasons. It's only just started to happen, right? So probably in 10 years we'll have some beginnings of evidence of it, and I have—assuming, assuming that we're in a situation where such evidence could be collected and discussed in anything approaching a rational and truly empirical fashion."

"Well as you know, you know Deborah—so Dr. Deborah So, who's a sex researcher, I mean she was bringing up a lot of these issues and basically just pushed out of the field together. Well, increasingly the scientific journals—the scientific journals won't publish that sort of study. And look, they cut Zucker off at the knees, man. They threw him out of CAMH. He was the world's preeminent researcher in the field of gender dysphoria, and he, like I said, wasn't a political guy, which is partly why they could go after him so easily. So he sued the Toronto Star, he sued the University of Toronto newspaper, and he sued CAMH. He won all three lawsuits."

"So then he has to spend most of his life suing places of journalism instead of doing the work he was doing. He was seriously cancelled, right? And that's a devastating for someone. I would say it's equivalent—being cancelled in a serious sense is roughly equivalent to having a near-fatal illness. It is no bloody joke. And so, yeah, so I don't know if we'll ever be able to gather the information we need to gather about such things."

"So it seems to me what we're talking about here is with that ideal then, what are the levers that we have for sort of judicious gatekeeping? So that the single mother who really is doing her best will be welcomed into society or that the gay couple who wants to be part of what the ideal is will be welcomed in. I don't know what all the firewalls are on that. I think that's partly what the problem is, right? We don't have firewalls. Liberals put tolerance above everything in their hierarchy—tolerance is the most important thing."

"Okay, we've tolerated everything now—now everyone's in the house—between tolerance and carelessness is a very difficult one to establish. And if you are careless, especially in your conceptualization and perhaps in your actions, the best mask for that carelessness is to proclaim yourself to be tolerant. Oh, everything goes. It's like, well, that's because you have zero discipline. And you're—and your—and no ordered conceptualization of the world whatsoever."

"Because of your lack of discipline, now you're going to pass all off as a moral virtue, and well we're definitely seeing the consequences of that, especially in the trans issue. I mean, it's completely burst forth. So that's why when people say the LGBTQI—I don't even know what I'm—I'm not exactly sure what the Q is. I have no idea what the I is. As I said, the T is—as our friend Douglas Murray wrote in his last book, you know, when he wrote his chapter on the gays—the L's and the and the G's—the lesbians and the gays, he separated that from the T chapter very effectively. These things have nothing to do with each other, and the more that we conflate these things, the more that we're going to be unable to have any level of this conversation in a functional manner."

"Well, and the conflation is dangerous because the assumption is that you know, the workers, the students made the same erroneous assumption back in the 1960s when they allied themselves with such people as the Hell's Angels, for example, the student radicals. It's like, well, we're all marginalized, we all have that Marxist oppression in common, and that unites us. And unite means that we're aiming for the same thing. It's like, well we found out at Altamont that the Hell's Angels weren't exactly aiming at the same thing or— or maybe they were, you know, in some nefarious manner."

"So the mere fact that—and it's also clearly the case that the more people that you aggregate on the margins and then attempt to bring into the center, the less likely you're going to get some homogeneous viewpoint. And you might think, well, we don't need a homogeneous viewpoint, but we certainly do if it comes to such things as surgical transformation of children who are more likely to be gay. So then what do you think that—what do you think my role in that could be or people like this conversation, right? Because this is uncharted territory, like you literally are in uncharted territory."

"And your attitude is something like, well, I'm already deviating a lot from the norm, and so maybe I should not deviate any more than I absolutely have to. And I would also say that should apply to everyone. Yeah, everyone's got their idiosyncrasies, and thank God for that, and we definitely need creative people and we even need some creative weirdos, you know, because God only knows when they'll come in handy."

"But the rule of thumb should still be, to the degree that you're able to uphold the norms and ideals of the collective society, you have a moral obligation to do that. You know, I wrote in my first book, and I think it was an idea I sort of morphed off saying Peter Thiel once said to me that, uh, that straight people spread the genes and gay people spread the memes, meaning it's obvious—the genes part is obvious how straight people multiply. But gay people—why did so much culture and art and music and so many interesting things about societies wherever gay people are—why are the artists always living around the gay people? Why? Why is that the place where all the kind of weirdos and marginal people are and then that creativity is burst forth from that?"

"So how do you combine those things? How do you take that? It might be, you know, so we know that that intense creativity is a trait, right? It's a temperamental trait. So you can be very intelligent, you can have a high IQ and be low in creativity. Intelligence is a good predictor of creativity, but they are somewhat separable. So then the question is, well, what does what is creativity? And some of it is mutable identity—like a creative person, the more creative you are, the less you're the same from moment to moment, hour to hour, and day to day. But almost by definition, right? You're a shape-shifter and a changer, a trickster, and the boundaries of conception that bound you are much looser if you're creative."

"And so it's possible that—like, it's very difficult to account for homosexuality from a biological perspective, right? Because you would assume that if anything was going to be disappear in the course of sequential reproduction, the inability to reproduce would be at the time of mathematician, right? Clearly, clearly. And so what that has to mean—it has to mean something like there are reproductive benefits to some of the factors that tilt towards homosexuality that are so powerful that they counterbalance the negative consequence of being unable to reproduce, and it might be it might be that a fair bit of that manifests itself on the creativity side."

"You know, because creative—and I would say that the kids who are most likely to be—we studied at Harvard. I never did publish this for a variety of reasons. When cutting and piercing first became popular, I was very curious about whether or not that was a marker for psychopathology—for for the proclivity towards mental illness. And before it became popular, it was a subculture thing, right? It was carnies and circus types, like marginal people, prisoners. It was a real subculture art form, piercing and body modification, and then all of a sudden it went mainstream. And the question is, well, who were was on the forefront of its introduction to popular culture? So we studied a whole bunch of people. This was very early on in that process to try to find out if they showed signs of mental illness or if it was a consequence of temperamental variability."

"And what we saw was that there was no sign whatsoever that it was associated with mental illness; it all loaded on openness. So if you were more creative, more mutable, more able to shift shape, let's say, and perhaps more likely to—and I don't know, I don't think there's any data on this—if people who are high in openness are more likely to show some signs of same-sex similar attraction, wouldn't surprise me at least because it sort of sounds right. Well, their conceptual boundaries are that the boundaries are thinner and more porous, so it could easily be the case. So it could be."

"They—if there is an overlap there with creativity, that would explain the genetic tilt that would keep homosexuality in the population, but it would also explain what does—especially on the male homosexual front, there does seem to be an axis of creativity there."

"And so it is the case that—well certainly at least by stereotypical reputation—there is a higher proportion of gay people among the creative types than you would expect. So, so to go into really dangerous territory then, if we haven't done it so far. I mean, does what you're saying right there sort of show you why they're going after kids right now?"

"So the idea is they're going after kids because they're grooming them. And I think a lot of people think that means they're grooming them for sex. I'm not exactly sure that's right. I think they're grooming them for something more perverse in a way. If you want to hear the rest of my conversation with Mr. Dave Rubin, please go to dailywireplus.com and become a member today. Thanks."