527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust

Jordan Peterson sits down with author, speaker, and founder and president of the children’s rights organization Them Before Us, Katy Faust. They discuss the ethics of surrogate pregnancies, the importance of both the mother and father in the home, the purpose of marriage being for the child — not the adults, and the abysmal outcomes of no-fault divorce in our culture. Katy Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us, a global movement defending children’s right to their mother and father. She publishes, speaks, and testifies widely on why marriage and family are matters of justice for children. Her articles have appeared in Newsweek, USA Today, The Federalist, Public Discourse, WORLD Magazine, The Daily Signal, the Washington Examiner, the American Mind, and the American Conservative. She is on the advisory board for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Katy helped design the teen edition of CanaVox, which studies sex, marriage, and relationships from a natural law perspective. Katy and co-author Stacy Manning detailed their philosophy of worldview transmission in their second book, “Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City.” She and her pastor husband are raising their four children in Seattle. This episode was filmed on February 13th, 2025. | Links | For Katy Faust: On X https://x.com/advo_katy?lang=en On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/katyfaustofficial/?hl=en Them Before Us website https://thembeforeus.com/ Them Before Us on X https://x.com/ThemBeforeUs?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Read Katy’s books on parenting: Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement (2021) https://a.co/d/4l8WVET Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City: Teaching Historical, Economic, and Biological Truth in a World of Lies (2023) https://a.co/d/8sN4Blb Pro-Child Politics: Why Every Cultural, Economic, and National Issue Is a Matter of Justice for Children (2024) https://a.co/d/7p0k6nL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile. This is a world where if you're going to put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights.

• 0:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Let's wrestle that out.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  That means that it is going to run up against all of our self-interest at some point.

• 0:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  I have a friend, and he wasn't interested in children, but his partner was interested in children, and so they had children with surrogacy.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  There's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet. It's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss their mother or father.

• 0:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Forcing children to sacrifice something so adults can have what they want. Nobody has a right to a child. Children have a right to their mother and father.

• 0:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that lands us back into the, well, is it better that the child exists or not, argument?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  It all comes down to the same thing. And the question is, what does it mean to be human?

• 0:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  I'm going to scrap this out with you.

• 1:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today and sit down and talk to Katie Faust. Katie is an author. She wrote Them Before Us, published in 2021, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, 2023, and Pro-Child Politics. Katie is the founder and president of an organization called Them Before Us, and she advocates on behalf of the intrinsic and inalienable rights of the child. Her contention, which we discussed at length in the YouTube conversation, is that family policy, educational policy,

• 1:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  economic policy, policy surrounding marriage should prioritize the natural rights of children, partly because children have inalienable natural rights, partly because they're voiceless and need to be defended, and partly because it seems self-evident that...

• 2:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Nothing that is harmful to children can be good for adults or for society. And so if you optimize your social policies in relationship to the well-being of children, you move a long ways towards optimizing your social policies for the flourishing of everyone. And so, we fought that through, I would say. Katie is not an admirer of surrogacy, for example, really regardless of the reasons. And so I pushed back on that, and we hashed that through.

• 3:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you can evaluate the consequences of that for yourself. We talked about the fact that not all families are created equal, and that love does not define the family. You could think of it as a necessary but insufficient precondition for what actually constitutes a family. And Katie comes down pretty hard on both the religious and the biological side, arguing that, and I think rightly so, that there isn't an ideal that can replace long-term, committed, monogamous, child-centered, heterosexual marriages,

• 3:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  as primarily as the foundation for successful and joyful, stable rearing of children. And if you accept the doctrine that what's good for children is good for adults and for the state, then institutions that focus on the well-being, the flourishing of children, the prioritization of children, those institutions have to be foundational and prioritized. And that's certainly one of the doctrines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which is this organization. Katie sits on its advisory board.

• 4:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And one of our fundamental principles is that healthy psyches and healthy societies are...

• 4:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Made possible by the establishment of healthy, child-centered marriages. So you'll see how we argued and how we laid out the facts and the opinions. Katie's very articulate and well-informed and she's a tough contender. And so if you're interested in how you navigate your marriage and your children, and how you might orient yourself in the world in relationship to your attitudes towards such things, then this is the podcast for you.

• 5:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  So Katie, let's talk about kids. Start by telling everybody what you do and why.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, my name is Katie Faust. I'm the founder and president of the children's rights nonprofit Them Before Us. The idea is we put them, the children, before us, the adults, in all matters of marriage and family. So what I do is I trigger people. That is what I do. When you say that children's rights to life and right to their mother and father need to come before adult desires, really what you're saying is every adult has to accommodate and sacrifice at some point. So I tell people, give me enough time and I'll piss you off too, because this is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile. This is a world where if you're going to put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  And that means that it is going to run up against all of our self-interest at some point. So I think it's a necessary message. I think that it's critical not just to, you know, national thriving, but national surviving, but it does come at an individual cost for all of us.

• 6:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  So let me ask you about that, you know, because

• 6:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  that idea of self-interest and that self-interest is, say, at odds with the long-term interest of children. Is actually predicated on a pretty narrow view of what constitutes self-interest. Because my suspicions are that in a society that's properly constituted and with a psyche that's properly integrated, the interests of children and adults truly align, but they align over the long run. And so what sacrificed isn't so much self-interest as narrow, selfish, hedonistic gratification in the moment.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Immediate interest.

• 7:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 7:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, well, that's an important thing, important point to make, because it's a big mistake that modern people make to identify their self with their hedonistic whims, because that isn't their deepest self. Their deepest self, I would say, their most profound self, their best self, is the self, it has to be the self that's aligned with children. Because, well, how could it be otherwise? I mean, if we were fundamentally at odds with our children, we'd be fundamentally at odds with ourselves. And there's no survival, and certainly no happy survival under those conditions. So, so, so let's see if we can figure out what it means to organize ourselves and our societies around the long-term interests

• 7:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  of children and make the presumption that that would be best for men and women, by far, all things considered as well. Is that reasonable?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I will say that I think that there's a lot of people that are talking about how good marriage is for men, for example. Like, thank God, there's been a resurgence of interest in, actually, this is a vehicle of maturation for men. This is a wealth-creating institution for adults. This is good for women in terms of aligning with kind of the natural design of their body. And I'm so grateful for those voices. I want to be the voice that speaks for kids. Kids don't lobby. They can't hire lawyers. They don't submit amicus briefs. They don't speak at conferences. They don't submit articles in papers and op-eds. That is what, to me, is missing, is, is representing the rights and well-being, interests and desires of children. And it's because it's so easy to steamroll their interests

• 8:41Speaker 00

  because they can't speak for themselves. They are literally just... At the mercy of whatever it is adults decide for them, whether it's in the cultural, legal, or technological space. So I, obviously, I think that what's good for kids ultimately is going to redound to the benefit of all of society. I don't think it's an accident that what's good for kids also in the long term ends up being good for men and women and all of society. But to me, the missing piece is accurately representing the interests of children in all of these conversations. So if I do my job, that's what we're going to be talking about today.

• 9:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  So why did you become obsessed, let's say, with developing yourself as an advocate for the rights of children? And then there's a question that's intelligently allied with that is that what makes you believe, what gives you the conviction, or the delusion for that matter, perhaps, that you are entitled to and able to appropriately speak for the best interests of children? Right? Because that's what your skeptics, obviously, the people who are skeptical about any mission such as yours, are going to make the case, like the postmodernist types always do, that

• 9:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  you're just masking your own self-interest with, you know, putative care for children and pushing, let's say, a conservative agenda, using, yeah, yeah, using your love for children as a camouflage. So how did you get interested in this first? Like, when did you start to become aware that this was a problem? And then I guess you need to justify your stance and say why, tell people who might be skeptical, you know, why you think that what you're doing should be regarded as credible.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Oh, I think that a lot of people are going to say, well, are you sure you're not just advancing your own religious agenda or your own self-interest in the name of child protection? And I would say, you suspect that because you are massively projecting. That is literally what progressives have been doing on every single issue for decades, is cloaking some of the most child-destroying ideologies in the name of child protection or even child rights. So I understand why that's a suspicion. It's because it's a very well-known playbook, especially on the left. Why am I doing this?

• 10:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and also, why, how are you not falling into that yourself, right? Because...

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, we'll find out. You can let me know. We'll have a little JBP evaluation at the end of this and you can let me know. You can give me the big Caesar pass fail. So I didn't get into this by choice. Like in the, in the world of sort of Christians, and I'm like, I'll just state right up front, I am like a Bible thumping evangelical to the max. Like you want evangelical credentials, I got you. Okay. So on, on that spectrum, I think that most Christians fall into either the truth tellers that are just constantly hammering away at the truth, or the grace givers, the people that want to keep the peace and, and bring together, you know, all different kinds of people. I am a grace

• 11:43Speaker 00

  giver. I avoided this for a long time. I don't like to make waves. I like to be loved. I hate to be hated. It took me a long time to get into the public battle because honestly, I was busy with my four kids. My husband was the senior pastor of our church for a long time. Honestly, if the world wasn't crazy, I would just be reading the Bible with people and shepherding women. That is what I would be doing. But, but the marriage debate is what like flipped the switch for me. You know, I took your, I took your big five personality test and I'm like 100% on extrovert. Conscientious, no, kind of agreeable,

• 12:25Speaker 00

  85%. Like I will go along with almost anything. But when it is injustice against children, I see red. I just can't handle it. And that's what happened in the marriage debate. What I saw, especially when the gay marriage discussion came to my state, Washington state, I saw this progressive agenda being pushed on the backs of child brokenness. You know, I, when they dared to connect marriage with parenting, which it wasn't always, a lot of times they advanced to gay marriage on the total separation of the procreative aspect that has always been sort of the foundation for marriage idea, marriage policy, you know,

• 13:08Speaker 00

  social ideas about marriage through millennia. So a lot of gay marriage was disconnecting those two. This isn't about kids. Oh, there's a lot of heterosexuals that can't have kids. So, you know, so gays can be married too. So, but when they did connect it to kids, what they said, what I heard them saying is, kids don't care if they have two moms or two dads. But functionally, what that means is kids don't care if they have lost their mom or lost their dad. That's what you're talking about. When you see the picture of a child with two moms, you're looking at a picture of a child who has lost their dad. When you're looking at a child with two dads, you are looking at a little girl or a little boy who has lost their mother. Now, sometimes that happens through tragedy.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  We used to experience that kind of, especially father loss on a mass scale. For example, after wars. Before modern medicine, we used to experience mother loss at the time of birth. But thank God, due to modern warfare and modern technology, we are not seeing father and mother loss to tragedy on a mass scale like that. What we are now seeing is mother and father loss intentionally, and now due to reproductive technologies commercially. But we're not looking at it as tragic anymore. Now, we're looking at it as a step of progress. So, my husband and I had been working with kids in a variety of different ways for a couple decades at that point. And I will tell you, I had not met a kid who lost their mother or father, or who at

• 14:33Speaker 00

  minimum was not curious about the identity of that missing man and woman. But very, very often, it was the primal wound. It was the thing that you could barely touch, that you couldn't even get near, without them flinching, without them crying. You know, when we were doing the lock-ins for the kids in middle school and high school, and there's that one kid that wants to stay up at 3:00 a.m. and talk with you in the middle of the gym floor when all the other kids are sleeping, you know what they want to talk with you about? Where is my father? Why doesn't he love me? Where did he go? Where is my mother? Why did she leave me? Why did she divorce my father? Why did she move across the state? It must have been me. There must have been something wrong with me. And so, this idea that you can just casually cut out a child's mother or father, and

• 15:17Speaker 00

  it's going to not affect them at all, and that you were going to push some ever- Widening progressive goalposts on the backs of fundamental harm to children. That was sort of the tipping point on the other side of the 85% for me, where I said, "Get behind me, Satan. Now we roll."

• 15:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  When, when, when did that happen to you? What, what years was that?

• 15:40Speaker 00

  That was 2012. 2012, when I actually decided to start an anonymous blog because I am a peacekeeper and I'm a chicken and I know what these people will do to you. You know, they will make you pay. So I wasn't out there with my, with my name up front. I just thought, I just want to talk to the world about why marriage is actually about justice for children and the pain that they experience when you cut their mother or father out of their life and the harms that go along with that. Harms to their physical body, harm to their emotion, their academics, their future relationships.

• 16:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  I went to a talk by, um, oh, University of Ottawa, Janice Fiamengo, who was a English professor at the University of Ottawa and who realized, who was a progressive and who realized, while lecturing, that the things that she was saying were hurting the boys in her class. She could see it. And it, it was really at that moment that she became a serious scholar and she's become, I don't know anyone who's done a better job of taking apart the feminist narrative, especially historically than Janice Fiamengo. She's,

• 16:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  she's quite the monster. And I saw her at the University of Toronto. She did a series of lectures before she resigned to take care of her husband, her ailing husband. And she was protested madly. She was a very early person in the culture war on the academic side and she paid a big price for it. And the- Lecture I went to at the University of Toronto was interrupted by half-wit, you know, cluster B psychopathology types pulling the fire alarms and packing the audience with false tickets and then leaving. And, but one of the things that really shocked me during that display, and this was before I was in the public eye to any great degree,

• 17:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  was that the whole audience seemed absolutely convinced that fathers, for example, weren't necessary, right? That a single mother, on average, could do just as good a job as a married couple raising a child. And I knew that that was false. It's false. There are some single mothers who do a credible job, and there's some married couples who do a dismal job, but on average, children with two parents do much better. And fatherlessness is a complete bloody catastrophe across multiple dimensions. And it's been a disaster. And it's really-

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Do you mind if I jump in there?

• 18:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Because you said, parents with two kids do better. But I want to challenge that and say, it's not two parents.

• 18:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's what I'm getting at. That's what I'm going to get to. Yeah, so please, go ahead.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Well, then, well, if this isn't what you were going to get to, then please get to what you're going to get to. But I will say that there has been some increased courage and boldness from the right and the left to say, children need two parents. Like, the data is now so strong that we're not able to reject that anymore. The myth of the single mother, you know, doing just as well, that is absolutely unsubstantiated. But I will say that it is not just two parents. It's not a two-parent home that advantages children. It is two married, biological parents who advantage children. And that's a really important point. Unfortunately, I think because, go ahead.

• 19:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, let's, let's, let's wrestle that out. Because, okay, so, so-

• 19:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  I have a friend, Dave Rubin. So I'll start with Rubin. I don't think he'll mind. And Dave's gay and he's married to his husband, who's also named Dave. And Dave Rubin came along with me on my tour and I talked a lot about kids. And he wasn't interested in children, but he listened and his partner was interested in children. And so they had children with surrogacy. And I talked to Dave very forthrightly on a podcast about how insanely difficult that was. And Dave wasn't afraid to delve into the moral quandary,

• 20:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  let's say, that surrounds surrogacy, which I would like to talk to about you. And the tremendous expense and he was aware of the fact that, well, with two fathers, you don't have a mother. And so his mother and his partner's mother participated and his sisters. And they did everything they could to formulate. Remediate. Exactly that. But what was evident, this at minimum was evident. And I would like to talk to you about this because it's sort of at the core of the matter. The pathway they chose is not replicable as a basis for a stable society. It was very, very difficult for them to do what they did.

• 20:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  It cost a tremendous amount of time and money. They were insanely committed. They had the resources and they had the family support to flesh out the missing pieces, maybe, right? Maybe. Well, that's the issue, maybe. Now, you know, Dave told me that he wasn't particularly interested in contemplating a...

• 21:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  What did he say? He didn't, what did he tell me? He didn't want to be wandering around Beverly Hills with a little dog in a, in a, you know, purse when he was 60. You know what I mean?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  No, I remember the conversation you guys had where he said, "I kind of feel like I'm at the end of what the maturation, the maturation that I can achieve without having children," in essence is how that conversation went. And that is true. Children do mature you in ways that other relationships and other demands do not. But children are not a function of your maturation. You should be a function of theirs. So I understand, first of all, let me say, Dave Rubin, incredibly talented, absolute champion of Western values, probably one of the most talented interviewers that I know of right now. And what he did to those children is 100% unjust. Unfortunately, he forced the smallest, the weakest, the most vulnerable to sacrifice for two grown men.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  And even though they can try to make up for it with freezers full of breast milk, nighttime nannies, and the mothers in their life, they have denied their children, not just one mother, not just two mothers, but I would argue, all three mothers, all three roles that a mother provides. Number one is the genetic mother who provides 50% of the child's biological identity, and that is a critical piece of identity consolation, consolidation and formation. It is very hard for kids to answer the question, "Who am I?" If they cannot answer the question, "Who's am I?" And unfortunately, Dave and David have severed their children from 50% of the answer to that question.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  So there's number one mother that they've cut them off of. Number two, the birth mother. This is not only the most critical, but the only relationship that children have for the first nine and a half months of their life. And the day that the child is born is the day when they're supposed to see the mother they already love for the first time, not the last. Why is it that we put children, newborns, on the chest of their mothers? It is not so they can form a bond. It is because children have an existing bond with that woman. It is her body, her smell, her voice, that soothes the baby. She is the only thing that that child knows. We have measured, and it is her presence that decreases babies' cortisol levels,

• 23:34Speaker 00

  especially in the first couple of days and weeks.

• 23:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Her presence specifically? Okay, yeah, go ahead. Random moms?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Her presence specifically. Random people, even the child's father, do not decrease cortisol levels and increase oxytocin levels in children the way that the child's own birth mother does. So that's mother number two. And then mother number three is the social mother, the woman that is providing the daily maternal love that satisfies children's souls and maximizes their development. So what surrogacy does is it splices what should be one person, mother, into three purchasable and optional women. The genetic mother, who provides the egg, the birth mother, that gestates the child, and the social mother, that provides all of that female distinct nurturing

• 24:22Speaker 00

  that will, in essence, lead the child to that place of balance, thriving, and independence later on in life. And unfortunately, Dave and his husband David have starved their children of all three of those, not because of tragedy, intentionally and commercially.

• 24:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so I'm going to scrap this out with you. And it isn't because I disagree with you, you know? It's because it's very complicated. And, okay, so I guess the most logical, perhaps, and empathetic, possibly, objection to the points that you made, which doesn't invalidate the points you made, by the way, and we can discuss them in detail, is that, well, these children that Dave has wouldn't have existed without this set of circumstances. And... From what I can observe, the boys are very well-loved. And I'm also not claiming for a moment that such arrangements can't go dreadfully wrong. And I'm perfectly aware of cases where that's been the case.

• 25:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I'm not trying to be naive about this. But I'm also trying to take into account the fact that, well, and we can also talk about this. So they, they seem to have done as good a job of this as it's possible to do. Now, that's not replicable as a pathway for most people. I don't think it's replicable, replicable as a pathway for most gay men. It's too difficult. But insofar as it could be done, they did it as well as they could. And now they have these two children, which, who are apparently thriving and who wouldn't have existed had this not occurred. And there's something to be said for the fact of their existence. And you could say, well, they've been deprived of these three dimensions of maternal care,

• 26:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  or, or those have at least been substituted. But better to be deprived across some axes, you might say, than not to exist at all. And so, well, I'll throw that at you. And I'm not sure that's exactly fair, but it's harsh in the other direction.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Oh, please, give me all. I would rather have you ask me the hard questions because everybody in the audience is thinking that too. Do you know how? Because one of the things we do at Them Before Us is we catalog the stories of children who have lost their mother or father to a variety of different adult interests. Not due to tragedy, but because some adult wanted it that way, on some level. What I call desire-based maternal or paternal losses. And so, one major category of that is children created through reproductive technologies. Sperm and egg, quote unquote, donation, which is a misnomer. Nobody's, this isn't a benevolent nonprofit. Nobody's donating their egg or sperm. Everybody is buying or selling, or children created through surrogacy. And so, you can imagine that many of the kids get these kinds of objections,

• 27:09Speaker 00

  where they talk about how they're troubled by the fact that they have dozens or hundreds of half siblings because their father was a serial sperm donator. Or maybe their mother donated her eggs to somebody. And so then they have questions like, who is my mother? Very normal questions, very human child, the kind of questions that every human child asks at some point. Who is my mother? Who are the people that are responsible for me? This is questions that adoptees have overwhelmingly. These are questions that children created through sperm and egg donation have. Unfortunately, many of them, when they voiced their concerns, when they voiced their loss, when they voiced their pain, what they hear is, would you rather be dead? So I think that this is pretty manipulative. I think it's a manipulative tactic to say, you do not get to ask the questions

• 27:54Speaker 00

  or feel the kind of loss that every other human child has experienced throughout history. Because otherwise, you wouldn't exist. So I say, look, there's other situations where we can be.

• 28:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  For sure.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Well, let me just say, we can be grateful for, recognize the dignity and the worth of these individual little lives, Dave and David's two children, that they are precious, worthy of life and protection. And I would actually said that means that we require that we be critical of the circumstances of their conception. The exact same way we would handle a child conceived through rape. Your life is altogether good. But I can be critical of the circumstances of your conception because you were brought about in a way that actually did not respect and protect your fundamental rights as a human.

• 28:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  What about surrogacy in general? Like, you have people who are buried, who fulfill the other criteria that you described, who are infertile and who turn to surrogacy as a, well, as a, as the pathway forward that's presented to them because of their lack of options. What's your? And I know what we're trying to do here. You see, we're trying to draw this fine line between social policy that's replicable and iterable and productive en masse and the particular interests of particular people, you know? And It's, well, that's a tight, that's a very difficult balance to attain.

• 29:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And something can certainly be good for people at an individual level and not good at an iterating and social level. And we have to always consider that when we act, you know? That's what, isn't that Kant's maxim? Act as if your action becomes a universal principle? And there's something to that that's very profound as a general ethical maxim. So let's talk about surrogacy in general.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't necessarily think that there is a delicate nuanced line. And can it be iterated? And if you are going to do one thing that is going to be extrapolated for the general population, I'm kind of a simpleton in that I'm not, I'm not a thought leader. I read the thought leaders. I listen to you and John Anderson and I love Carl Truman, but I'm a translator. I listen to what you guys say. I, I respect the policymakers, but I want to translate it down to something that is accessible and applicable for everybody. And I will tell you, I can use the same metric and rubric, and I think this is great for personal decisions and policy decisions. And that one rubric is adults should sacrifice so kids don't have to. We should not force children to do hard things on behalf of adults.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  And ultimately, any form of surrogacy is forcing children to sacrifice something so adults can have what they want. Nobody has a right to a child. Children have a right to their mother and father.

• 30:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's, that's, that's an interesting point. Let's see if we can take that apart a little bit. So you're, you're contrasting two, two hypothetical rights and you're giving one clear primacy. Okay. So let's see if we can, let's see if we can sort that out. So you said adults don't have a right to children.

• 31:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  But children have a right to-

• 31:17Speaker 00

  They don't have a right to acquire a child. You have a right to your own biological child. I mean, when you leave the hospital, you don't want to just leave with any baby. You want your baby. And you have a fundamental, natural, pre-political right to that baby. But you don't have a right to acquire a child that then has to lose their genuine right to their mother or father so that they can be taken home by you. So, there is not a nebulous right-

• 31:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why, no, okay, okay. That, that, fine. So, but if I said, "Well, if I can acquire that economically, if I have the means at my disposal, then why doesn't that translate into a right?" Now, your, your argument, I think, is that because it comes at the expense of the child, and then that lands us back into the, "Well, is it better that the child exists or not?" argument, right? That lands us back in that domain. So, that, that, so you think that it isn't appropriate for someone to acquire that right? Why, exactly? Let's, let's go into that more. It's because it violates the child's pre-political right to biological parentage.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, first, let me say, I think that there's an abuse of the word "rights" in our world, you know? And it's very much like a Mr. Incredibles thing. When everything's a right, nothing is a right. And unfortunately, it seems like whatever adults really, really, really, really want is conveniently framed as a right. But if you're looking at things from a natural law perspective, not, not necessarily what we would even consider to be a civil law, because civil laws can be out of step with natural laws. And again, I'm not a natural lawyer. Thank God, one of the most well-renowned natural law scholars, Robert George, wrote the foreword for our first book, "Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement." So, they, there is natural law precedence for this.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  But, like I said, I'm a translator, and so I don't, I don't think in these kind of first-principle ways. I will tell you how to determine whether or not something is a natural right, based on sort of my simplified understanding of natural rights. And then we'll be able to figure out pretty easily whether or not you have a right to acquire a surrogate-born child even though you're purchasing egg and- Renting the womb and taking the children to cross borders without any kind of background check, even though you've got a criminal history and you're a known pedophile, which has happened in surrogacy cases. So let's figure out to what children and adults have a natural right. So when I, my understanding of natural rights and my co-author Stacy Manning and I kind of detailed this out in our first book, there's three rules that make something a genuine natural right.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Number one, it needs to exist pre-government, right? And that's kind of what our country was founded on, is this idea that government doesn't give you rights, they just recognize and protect rights. So a genuine natural right exists pre-government. So like your right to life, your right to life existed before the government, government's not there to give it to you, they're there to protect it. Number two, nobody has to provide it for you. So if it has to be like dug up from the ground, bottled, labeled, shipped and put on a shelf, it's not a natural right. You might even need it to survive, but it's not necessarily a natural right. Number three, a natural right is given in equal distribution. So if there's a differentiation in terms of the level of attainment or achievement,

• 34:34Speaker 00

  a GED versus a PhD or a dorm versus Mar-a-Lago, it's not a natural right. If it's a genuine natural right, you have it in equal measure. Everybody gets exactly one life, everybody has the same ability, should have the same ability to defend themselves, should have the same ability to speak, and all of us, regardless of the technological tinkering that was done in some laboratory somewhere, have exactly two parents, one mother and one father. So children have a fundamental natural right to the two people responsible for their existence. Do adults have a right to acquire a child that is not biologically theirs?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  No, they don't, because that violates the fundamental natural rights of kids.

• 35:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's, let me ask you this, that these natural rights of the child, why, let's see if we can investigate why those are important or even crucially important, and that will also help us set them against the hypothetical rights of adults. Now...

• 35:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, you can imagine, you could make a case, I suppose, that maternal longing is something that existed before the government, like it's an intrinsic part of human nature, and the government's there to ensure that its manifestation is made, is realized, and you can imagine an argument for surrogacy on that basis. But your claim is that you're violating something more fundamental, which is the child's right to parents. Okay, so let's take that apart. Okay, and I'll do that as critically as I can.

• 36:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  As far as I can tell, and we have to look at the nuances of this, children are pretty good at bonding with multiple people. They're not good at bonding with multiple people sequentially if the previous person they bonded with disappears. So, for example, you could bring a nanny into your house, and the child could bond very nicely with that nanny, but you can't, it's hard on the child to replace the nanny, let's say. Especially when the children are under three. But children can bond with multiple people, and we know that partly too, because our past was in all, well, self-evidently tribal, and many people participated in the raising of a child.

• 37:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, that doesn't mean that the mother and father don't have some primacy, but it means that many people can participate. And so you could imagine, well, the argument would go that these relationships are, the maternal and paternal relationships, are substitutable, as they are to some degree. Your argument is that they're not as substitutable as people would like to presume, and in that substitution, something of transcendent value is lost. Well, here's a possible example on the biological side. You know that... Babies and mothers swap DNA. And they do that at a level

• 37:52Speaker 00

  That's called microchimerism.

• 37:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  That level that's so profound that like a baby will donate stem cells to its mother so that the mother heals better during pregnancy. Right. And the mother will here's something very interesting, too. So a mother's breasts can detect calcium shortage on the part of the babies. And mothers who detect calcium shortages will extract calcium from their own bones to fortify their milk, to fortify their children. And so there are a lot of biological nuances in the maternal infant relationship that we don't understand. We understand too, for example, that babies

• 38:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  who are born by C-section often have impaired immunological systems because they didn't pass through the vaginal canal. I mean, there are a lot of things going on biologically that are complex and sophisticated beyond belief, but also beyond our understanding. And these are the sorts of things that you're pointing to that a child is deprived of. But and fair enough, but it's it's also harsh. Perhaps necessarily harsh, but definitely harsh to say to someone who's 35 and desperate for a child and who has the means to pursue surrogacy that that is off the table by fiat, despite the fact

• 39:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  that the technology is there and the the opportunity is at hand. So I know we're going over the same territory to some degree, but

• 39:26Speaker 00

  That's okay. Well, let me ask you, if you don't mind. What are the studies that we have on maternal loss and the impact that it has on kids? What are the studies that you know of of kids that grow up without their mothers and how they fare?

• 39:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I know that the that period of time, especially between zero and nine months is critical for

• 39:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's foundationally critical. And that if those relationships are disrupted, it produces wounds that are deep and potentially irreparable.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  The reason I asked you that is you couldn't think of any off the top of your head, right?

• 40:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not specifically, no, not any more specifically than what I just laid out.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Right, and that's because mother loss, it used to be that if the mother was gone, the baby's dead.

• 40:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, yes.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Mother loss, the mother loss is so antithetical to our species, right, that that mother and child are bonded so tightly, both in the ways that you're talking about in terms of like responsiveness of of breast milk formulation. I mean, I always joke that mother's breast milk will change whether or not she's nursing a boy or a girl. So mom's boobs know male and female when a lot of Yale University professors do not. Okay, I mean, like, mother-infant bond and reciprocity between the two of them is is primal. I mean, that's really the only word that you can have for it. And so we don't have a lot of studies of mother loss in children because it goes against the grain of what it means to be human.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  And now we think we are just going to casually say, you know what, we can intentionally and commercially sever that bond between mother and child because we have the means to do it. And who am I to say that a woman who's 35 that has the means to desperately wants to be a mother who is going to take home her own genetic child? Who am I to say that she shouldn't do that? Well, I'm here to say, as best as I can, that I am representing the interest of that child. And the interest of that child is to not be intentionally separated from the only person they know the day that they are born. And I would say that the best example, the best proof that we have of the harms of that is adopted kids. And I say this as an adoptive mother.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  I say it as a woman who is the former assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world, somebody that understands that adoption is an institution centered around the well-being of children, and it is an act of justice for children who have lost their parents. So I'm not anti-adoption. I am telling you that adopted children have more externalizing disorders than the general population, even though they are raised by Homes that are statistically more stable, wealthier, and adults who spend more time and money on them than the average population. So why is that? It looks as though disruption of that primal bond with the birth mother has some kind of lifelong consequences and fallout.

• 42:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, there's another explanation too there. Because there's also the high likelihood that children who end up in a position to be adopted come from families with genetic histories that predispose them to disruption. And so, that, well, those are the two possible sources of the outcomes that you described. How much is attributable one to the other? That's a very complicated thing to sort out. But I don't think it bears directly on your, it doesn't bear necessarily directly on your fundamental argument that there's additional consequences. Well, and we do know, to be more precise in responding to your question about studies,

• 43:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  well, we actually do know the studies, there are studies that have been done on maternal disruption. First of all, we know that prior to the 20th century, the one-year mortality rate for children who had no mother in orphanages was 100%. They all died. And that was changed by a woman nurse, a female nurse, and a researcher whose name I can't remember. Her name was Fat Anna. And she had a ward in Germany where the children didn't die. And, or at least all of them didn't die. And the investigator, whose name I can't remember, went to Germany to see what was going on there. And the only difference he could see in the ward

• 44:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  was that the nurse would take the babies out of their crib and... Carry them around on her hip for some amount of time every day. And that amount of direct contact was enough to entice them into life. And then there's an immense literature that was founded most profoundly by this animal researcher named Jaak Panksepp, who looked at the effects of maternal deprivation, mostly on animal behavior, and it's cataclysmic.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Right. Well, and that's where most of what we have in terms of maternal harms is in rat populations. Why is that? It's because it's absolutely unethical to test this on human children. Because even brief maternal deprivation, we know, based on those rat studies, can permanently alter the structure of a child's brain. So like when we start tinkering with the maternal-child bond, because some adults are sad, or maybe they have an identity that leads them to a place where they do not have an egg or a womb between them. So then we're going to just bypass and ignore everything that we know about the nature of the human child and maternal deprivation and the harms that go along with maternal loss.

• 45:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, maybe also everything that we know about the mother. Like, you described yourself earlier as an evangelical Christian, and I've spent a lot of time looking at the imagery of Mary, right? If you think Mary is the archetypal female, but you can make that case, that's a reasonable case to make. But the thing about Mary is that Mary isn't an individual. Mary is mother and infant. And I think that the human female nervous system is actually adapted to the mother-infant dyad and not to the best interests of the mother. Because women are differentially sensitive to negative emotion, which makes them suffer more.

• 46:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so you have to ask why? And one answer to that, and it's not the only answer, but one answer, and I'm sure at least it's partly true, is that... Women sacrifice their own emotional stability and happiness to be there as alarm systems for their infants, and that's how tightly wired they are together. And so it could easily be that the proper image of woman, in for a penny and in for a pound, let's say, the proper image of woman, isn't individual woman, the way it is individual man, it's woman plus infant. And that, now, you agree with that, do you?

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  I agree. I mean, just because I'm a mom and I'm an observer of reality, and I'm around a lot of women and children and husbands and children, all of which, I mean, mothers and fathers, offer distinct and complimentary benefits to children. Neither of them are replaceable. Kids need a mom and a dad. And you know, it's so interesting, because then, I'm sure, some of the objections that we're getting from some of the people that are listening to this, they'll say, well, and you know, Dave Rubin said this in your conversation with him too, that his husband, David, is very nurturing and very empathetic.

• 47:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, which is true.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  And that he's going, yeah, sure. Well, you know, one of the other categories of children whose stories we try to catalog at Them Before Us is children with same-sex parents. Our website, thembeforeus.com, probably has the largest story bank of kids with LGBT parents. And for a while, I had a very active group chat of kids with two moms or two dads, who could just talk amongst themselves. Because I'll tell you, if there's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet, it's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss their mother or father, but cannot say that out loud because they are accused of being bigots and homophobes, even by people in their own family. So the place where they can talk to each other is sort of in these anonymous spaces. And there were a lot of

• 48:02Speaker 00

  those kids who would openly admit, I mean, most of them had two moms, there was, there was only one that had two dads at one point, and they didn't, they didn't stay too long. But many of them would say, look, I had a fem mom and I had a butch mom. I mean, those words, their words, not mine. You know, the butch mom worked on cars, shaved her head, was stockier. And the fem mom, longer hair, kind of slim, worked in the kitchen. And I asked them, I said, did any of those butch moms meet your need for a father? And they're like, no, she was my butch mom. And I loved her, I appreciated her, I respected her, but I craved male love.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  So this is not the kind of thing where a man can put on sort of a feminine presence. Kids actually want, crave, need, deserve, and have a right to their mother and their father. They don't want somebody that acts masculine or acts feminine, at least from the kids that I know. And obviously, I probably have a slanted sampling because the kids that are coming to me, many of which are going to come after this interview too. We get tons of letters and testimonies from kids who cannot say this kind of thing out loud anywhere else.

• 49:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that? Because you clearly have a sample bias problem. That doesn't mean that the problems that your people are communicating aren't real, but it doesn't allow you to specify. Because what you'd really want is a random sample of children with two moms and two dads. And that's going to be a small sample to begin with. And you'd want to see if their attitudes towards their parents and their life differed in any important way from the norm, or maybe even differed in any important way from the experiences of the adoptive kids that you described. Because maybe that would be a more appropriate control group. And like, that's a pretty tough study to do, and maybe one's been done. I don't know of one.

• 50:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But you have your chat groups.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  They're incredibly rare. Yeah, a quick note on same-sex parented studies. It's very rare to have high-quality studies. Interestingly, up until about 2005, there was a consensus among the social scientist community that children made raised by their married biological mother and father fared best in a low-conflict marriage. I mean, like, that is what they tended to say in unison. And then strangely, in the lead-up to Obergefell, in those 10 years, there was an explosion of studies that said that kids with two moms or two dads fared no different, or even better than kids raised by heterosexual parents.

• 50:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then when you look. Look at it, right, those 79 studies or whatever, many of which used the same data set and then reinterpreted and spun it to create multiple different studies. When you look at them, they all had very serious methodological problems. Like you said, not randomly derived. They were volunteered, recruited. There weren't adequate controls. They were very small sample sizes. They weren't longitudinal. They couldn't replicate them. And most of them had to do with the self reporting of adults. Like, there was even a study that came out last year in Italy, you know, gay fathers' children, you know, did just as well as heterosexual parents. But you look at it, and it's like, gay fathers report that their children under 10 love having gay dads. I'm like, what you're saying is heterosexual parents are more honest about their shortcomings than gay

• 51:28Speaker 00

  fathers are. That's what you're talking about there. So it is going to be a long time. Well, first of all, there hasn't been a whole lot of studies since Obergefell, since gay marriage was legalized, because it was very obvious that there was a political push towards advancing those kinds of studies in the lead up to the Supreme Court's decision.

• 51:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and you can imagine how difficult it would be to even to publish a study that showed negative results, man. I mean, your career as an academic would be over. The research journal that published it would be pilloried, like, there'd be homophobic hell to pay on every bloody dimension. And so, and that would be assuming you could get it funded. What's that?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Yes, that's Mark Rignaros did that. He published the study in 2012. And he did, he used the gold standard of, you know, social science. He got randomly derived participants. He asked the children themselves as adults what their outcomes were. Were they more likely to be sexually abused? Were they more likely to suffer emotional distress or depression? Were they more likely to be on welfare benefits? And the, you know, the no difference study actually turned out to be a massive difference. And he almost lost his job. They came after his credentials. They made his life a living hell. And since then, just like you said, there's been a queering of family studies. And so now you don't get funded unless there is a pre-political conclusion.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  That you've already assigned to, subscribed to, and are advancing through that study. So, wouldn't it be nice if we had good data? That would be great. We don't. There's very few studies that apply that gold standard of sociological, social science methodology. Paul Solins did do it, where he evaluated some government data. And, no surprise, those no differences ended up being major differences, especially as it related to things like daily fearfulness, daily crying, higher levels of emotional distress, much higher levels of children who had educational, you know, IEPs, that kind of thing. And why are we surprised by this? You know, anytime sociologists are not studying same-sex parenting, anytime they're doing

• 53:40Speaker 00

  any other kind of family structure study, they generally agree that biological parents advantage children in terms of they are more connected, more invested, and more protective of children. They generally agree that men and women offer distinct and complementary benefits to child-rearing. They generally agree that losing a parent to death, divorce, abandonment, results in child harms. They generally agree that an unrelated adult increases the child's risk of abuse and neglect.

• 54:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  By a lot.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  But then suddenly, when they're...

• 54:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  By a lot.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  By a lot.

• 54:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, step-parent presence is unbelievably, unbelievably, an unbelievably massive risk factor. It's really quite terrifying.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  They have a, we have a name for it. It's called the Cinderella Effect. Like, that's how well-established it is. You know, and Wilson and Daley, you know, the Canadian sociologists.

• 54:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, they're great, too, Wilson and Daley. Very, very solid researchers.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  They're so good.

• 54:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, what did they find? That rates of fatal beatings in kindergarteners in Canada between the ages, between the years of like 1979 and 1990, 150 times greater at the hands of a stepfather. And so, I just am like, okay, look, we know that the most dangerous place a child can find themselves in America today is in the home of an unrelated man left to care for the child himself. And so, but now somehow we're normalizing all of these other modern family forms where there's always an unrelated adult in the home, where the child's always being deprived of a biological parent, where they're very often missing the maternal or paternal love that maximizes child development. And somehow we're supposed to believe that these kids

• 55:21Speaker 00

  fare no different. I mean, unfortunately, it's just one more example of why we cannot trust the institutions. They've been captured by this woke ideology and it's kids that are suffering.

• 55:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  What, let's move to practicalities, if that's okay. And if there's other particular areas of concern that we should delve into, divorce, for example, I'd be happy to do that. I would like to talk to you about divorce, actually. But tell me about your practical strategies. What exactly does your organization do? How widespread is it? What effect have you had? What are your plans? Flesh that out and maybe in a way too that enables people to determine if they would like to help or whether they could help and if so, how. So tell me, tell me more about your organization, about what you're up to.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  What I'm up to is a global takeover. That is what I'm up to.

• 56:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  You and Klaus Schwab?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  I do. That's right. Me and Klaus can go toe to toe, baby.

• 56:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, do you have a naked cat? Do you have a naked cat that you like carry around?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  No, no. But I do have cats. I've got multiple cats.

• 56:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay. Well, that's close enough. That's close.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think that's offset by the fact that you have children, though.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  I do have children. Thank God. Great children.

• 56:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so global takeover.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, global takeover is what we're after. In fact, that's one of the reasons. That was the first thing I said to John Anderson when he invited me to join the advisory board. And he, you guys hadn't even named it yet, but he's like, we're doing this thing. I was like, what are you doing? And he kind of described it. I'm like, ah, the righteous inverse of the world economic form. Please let me in. So I love it. Like, let's do that same global influence, but not top-down elitism, bottom-up personal responsibility. But it Does need to be global. This movement to protect kids has to go into every country of the world. Because children in every country are their rights are under threat from the same cultural, legal and technological forces that are seeking to deconstruct their fundamental rights

• 57:30Speaker 00

  and relegate them to the status of accessory, to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship, to the detriment of their identity formation, to the detriment of their safety and security, the investment, connection, protection that all children deserve. So how do we do it? What does the global takeover look like? And it has to be two things. We want to change hearts and we want to change laws. It has to be both. So last year, we did, you know, 100 interviews, published on dozens of platforms, making the case that all adults need to sacrifice for children because the only alternative is for children to sacrifice for adults. And that is an injustice.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Anytime you have the weak sacrificing for the strong, that's all the evidence that you need, that something unjust is taking place. That is never the pattern of justice. It always needs to be the strong sacrificing for the weak. So you want to talk practicality? That is it.

• 58:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  You'd think that would be an argument that would be music to the ears of the typical leftist, right? Because that is, in principle, the fundamental, the fundamental orienting point of someone who stands for the oppressed and the poor, which is, in principle, the classic leftist stance. And it's also the case that you are, in a way, objecting to the commodification of children, which you would also assume would be an attractive principle to those on the left, who are anti corporate commodification. Although that seems to be a commitment that's honored mostly in the breach when it comes to, let's say, pharmaceutical companies

• 59:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  and reproductive.

• 59:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Freedom, right? Because that that freedom comes with commodification, as we've seen in the case of Planned Parenthood, for example.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that there again, you get into the waters of mislabeling adult desires as rights. A right to choose, a right to reproductive freedom, a right to parenthood. All of those things really just mean, I'm going to cut the child's mother or father out of their life, or I'm going to snuff out a child's right to life. So it's very important that we properly define rights. Children's right to life, children's right to their mother and father. You could add to that children's right to innocence, not to have their, you know, not not to be

• 59:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Prematurity.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  adulterated by

• 59:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  sexualized or whatever. Certainly a right to an intact, unmedicalized body, not to have their healthy organs amputated or chemically sterilized through transgender treatments. I mean, the truth is that if you prioritize kids, if you defend their life, family, mind and body, you kind of win the culture war. You get the right answer to all of the major issues that we're facing, especially culturally, especially whenever it intersects with the primary question of what it means to be human. If you can elevate and exalt the rights of children, you get the right personal decisions and you get the right policy decisions. So we are absolutely out there to change hearts, but we also want to change laws. So many of these child commodifying,

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  child victimizing ideas, technologies and laws go completely unchallenged. There is nobody to speak up on behalf of children. And maybe, very likely, I'm not the most qualified person to do this, but nobody was doing it. And so that's, that's what we aim to do, is we aim to represent children well, give them a voice when it comes to battling back bad legislation. We're at the place this year where we're able to propose some policy recommendations, especially for state level lawmakers who want to claw back some of the lost territory when it comes to losing the marriage and family battle, you know, state after state and nation after nation.

• 1:01:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Así que usted dijo que si priorizas los derechos naturales de los niños, obtienes victoria en la dirección adecuada en la guerra cultural. Y eso pondría fin a la haitiana haitiana, por el beneficio de la ganancia hedonista, que es realmente, en muchos sentidos, como veo la pesadilla del poder LGBTQ. Es la adquisición de poder para priorizar la identidad sexual y la gratificación sexual. Sin embargo, toda la estructura de identidad está predica en la identidad sexual.

• 1:02:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y eso está obviamente asociado con el sexo, y está asociado con el sexo libre, que, por supuesto, no existe y es ciertamente algo que está en los mejores intereses de los niños. Pero también me parece que no solo, digamos, priorizando los derechos de los niños, así que los intereses de los niños, los intereses naturales de los niños, no solo se limpia la guerra cultural correctamente, sino que en realidad sirve, esto vuelve a la comienzo de nuestra discusión, los intereses de los futuros, los intereses sofisticados de los hombres y mujeres mejor. Y así, así que vamos a caminar por esa ruta un poco, porque esto se refiere a algunos de los temas que se discutirán en la conferencia de arte

• 1:02:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  el 17 de febrero al 19 de Londres, que usted va a hacer y yo voy a hacer. Usted está en el Consejo de Asesorías de eso, como señaló antes, y gracias por eso.

• 1:02:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mi esposa va a hacer un panel allí. No sé si usted está involucrado en ese panel. Pero si no lo es, bueno, usted va a estar involucrado en empresas similares en algún momento. Y usted hace eso todo por su cuenta de todos modos. Pero vean, vimos un documental de uno de los que va a participar sobre la ausencia involuntaria de niños. Y él presentó, el director, el escritor de este documental, presentó algunos hechos muy claros. Y así uno de ellos, tal vez el más claro, es que... The typical 30-year-old woman in the West is now childless. Half, more than half are childless. Okay.

• 1:03:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  And we already know that 1 in 3 couples at the age of 30 have fertility problems. And so that is defined as being unable to conceive within a year of attempting it, trying to conceive. Okay, so by 30, it's 1 in 3. His data indicate that 50% of the women who don't have children at the age of 30 will never have a child. So that's 1 in 4 women is now destined to childlessness. And that 90% of those eventually childless women will regret it. And so we've doomed 1 in 4 women to the last,

• 1:04:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  to a solitary existence for the last 5 decades of their life. And I can't imagine what kind of cataclysm that's going to be when those women are 70 and older, because they'll have no one to speak for them, right? When they're most vulnerable and least economically productive. So you know, of course, in Canada, that we've turned to government-assisted suicide as a, as a partial solution to that problem. And I think that's the 5th leading cause of death in Canada now. It's something like that, tens of thousands of people. And we're expanding that, of course, to people who are in economic distress, people who are in, who are having psychological problems like depression.

• 1:05:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Virtually everybody who's seriously depressed is suicidal, by the way, because they believe themselves to be a burden. And so, okay, so anyways, the, the issue here, I think, at hand is the degree to which the interests of children and the interests of, the true interests of men and women align. So we know that men...

• 1:05:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are likely, they have a proclivity for antisocial behavior and substance abuse. And that tends to ameliorate around the age of 25 or 26. They desist, most of them, and the reason for that is they take on responsible jobs or they get married. So men grow up when they get married and well, they grow up because, well, they have to civilize themselves enough so a woman can stand having them around, but also in preparation for having children. And then, what do you think that having children? What do you think that having children does for women? And why do you think that we lie about all of that to young women all the time, constantly?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  So much in there to unpack. First of all, we certainly are seeing an increase in infertility struggles. Obviously, a lot of that is environmental, but a lot of it is because women are squandering their primary childbearing years, doing other things. I mean, you are hyper fertile in your twenties and somewhat in your early thirties, but not so much in your late thirties and definitely not in your forties. I mean, once you get to be 35 and you're pregnant, that's a geriatric pregnancy, baby. I mean, you've got a really narrow window to have children. And so, especially if you want more than one, you have to get started sooner. So a lot of, I think that a lot of the infertility crisis that we're seeing is actually just a marriage formation crisis. And because people are starting too late.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I tell young women, when I speak to them, you really can have it all. I mean, I have the most blessed, incredible, rich life. I mean, I have an incredible career where I'm doing what I feel called to do, even though obviously there's a cost and it's uncomfortable and all of that. But I also have four incredible kids who are 21, 19, 17, and 15.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  And I tell women, you can have it all, but you can't have it all at once. And you better have marriage and kids first. Do that first. Now, sometimes you don't get to choose. I know a lot of wonderful women that are those 30-year-old women who don't have kids yet, who desperately want to and wish that they were married and wanted to be married when they were 22. But I also know women who could have been married when they were 22, or 25, or 27, or 35, and put it off because the world was telling them, you have plenty of time. Or actually, really quality means getting your master's degree or making partner at the law firm. And then you discover woefully too late that you were lied to. And now you have a life of emptiness and solitude ahead.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  And it is incredibly dark. And some of those women, I pray, find fellowship, community, and family in a body of believers at church. But you are shortchanging women, especially the ones that long for it, of something that really will make them, bring them alive, and bring them long-term joy, protection, investment, connection, in a way that somebody that you're paying to care for you is never going to be able to provide. Ultimately, like all of the different questions, you know, you talked about made. We're talking about the population crisis. We're talking about, you know, all of these reproductive technologies and these different forms of family. Ultimately, they all have the same source. It's the same question. It all comes down to the same thing.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  And the question is, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human? And honestly, like a word for the Christians out there, you are the ones with the right answer to this. I mean, the humanists did not get it right. The postmodernists did not get it right. The evolutionists don't get it right. You, the ones that understand the Imago Dei. You, the one that understands who gives and who takes life. You, who understands that we are made in the image of God, male and female. He created them. You, who understand that Job, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were all set apart in the womb. You, who understand that Christ came incarnate as a child, as an infant, and said, let the little children come to And if you want to attain the kingdom of heaven,

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  you have to become like one of these you who understand that God has devised serious corporal punishment if you cause one of these little ones to stumble. You are the ones, Christians, who have the right answer to what it means to be human. And the world is desperate for us to take that truth into all these conversations about marriage, family formation, death with dignity, abortion, IVF, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, marriage, transgenderism. Every single thing, every hot button topic, everything that gets you canceled on Facebook and everything that gets you banned from Thanksgiving dinner ultimately comes down to what does it mean to be human? And that is a life-saving answer. That is a child protective answer. It's a civilizational defending answer.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  So you need to increase your knowledge and then increase your voice in the public sphere? It probably is the thing that is going to save the nation.

• 1:10:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  So one of the things that we're wrestling with at Ark is identity in a digital age. And that's the topic that you just very eloquently expanded upon from a religious perspective. And we're trying to do some of this in the most practical possible manner. And so one of the questions that my wife is trying to address at the moment is, while she's trying to investigate the nature of femininity and not from the postmodernist or feminist perspective, let's say, what does it mean to be female? And how is that distinct from being male? And this is a very complicated problem.

• 1:11:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  And one of the ways to make that practical is to lay out something approximating a timeline. Like the timeline, as you've pointed out, there's an implicit timeline for women in modern society now. And the implicit timeline for...

• 1:11:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ambitious women, let's say, is: Establish yourself as an independent creature between 20 and 30, so that you don't have to depend on a man. Prioritize your education and your career, which is a very weird thing for lefty progressives to be telling young women, since in principle, they're opposed to the corporate kleptocracy, and yet insist at the same time that women should bow down to it and serve it during their youthful years, which is a paradox I just can't reconcile. But the problem with that, as you've pointed to already, and as we've discussed, is that the window of reproductive opportunity for women is actually pretty damn short.

• 1:12:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's about, it's a maximum of 20 years, and practically, it's less than that. I would say optimally, it's more like 10. And then I've thought, I've kind of tried to think that through arithmetically too, because what that means for the typical woman, I think, and this is for the typical, high-functioning, attractive woman, is that she probably only has the opportunity to assess about five partners. You know, if it takes you, if people are actually interested in you, which is not a given, how long does it take to investigate a relative stranger to determine whether or not they're a suitable partner,

• 1:12:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  assuming that's what they want? And I think you're fortunate if you do that five times in 10 years. Like, that's a stretch goal. And so, you have to solve that problem pretty early, and maybe we need to be more pointed. It's like, you know, the Victorians believed that a woman should be married by 22? Something like that? I think that was threshold for old maid. It was something pretty young.

• 1:13:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  That has a harshness about it, let's say. But so does being involuntarily childless at 35, by the way. Right, which is the fate of one in four women now. So it's also the case, interestingly, that women live about seven years longer than men. You know, and so you could imagine you could just have that seven years for your little kids. Because that's, you can have, you can do a pretty good job with little kids. Making them their priority for seven years. So if you're thinking this through, if you were setting up an optimal life course for a young woman in an advisory capacity, like, how do you view the role of a young woman in her,

• 1:14:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  let's say, from 15 to 19, and then from 20 to 25? Let's break it into five-year periods and tell me what you think.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got a couple of those in my house. Well, passing through my house. I've got a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old daughter. And, you know, what we tell them is, especially during the teen years, your job is friendship. Like, I think we have a marriage crisis in this country because we have a dating crisis. And we have a dating crisis because we have a friendship crisis. It is very hard for young people these days to have, to form and maintain healthy peer relationships. Obviously, because the digital space has taken over a lot of their peer-to-peer communications. And so you really do have to train your kids to maximize and develop their same-sex friendships during the teen years. A lot of that is going to be modeling. Are you modeling good same-sex friendships in terms of vulnerability,

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  but good boundaries, where you need it with different people? Are you being, are you showing them the transparency, how you need one another, how you rejoice when they rejoice and mourn when they mourn? I mean, you become what you behold, okay? For better or worse. And so model great friendships, obviously. I am of the persuasion, I am not one of the kind of kissed-dating-goodbye Christians, courtship-only. I actually do think that there is a role for dating in high school and college. Because I do think that you need to appropriately practice. Interacting with the opposite sex. So I've told my daughters, you know, when they're juniors and seniors, that if a boy has the guts to say, do you want to go out and get coffee?

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  You should say, yeah, I'd love to. You need to reward him for having the courage to ask you in person to do that. You don't have to say yes. And of course, you never need to do it if you feel creeped out or anything like that. But there is a, you know, you talk about men being civilized. And I would say, the proper understanding of that is that women civilize the men. It is women that have the civilizing effect on men. And, and you know, the example I always use is, when I see, when I'm walking down the street in Seattle, and I see three men coming towards me on the sidewalk, I don't care how big they are, what race they are, I will cross to the other side of the street. I'm not going to walk past them. But if I see those three men walking hand in hand with their girlfriend or wives, I'm not going to cross the street. Okay, there's just something

• 1:16:21Speaker 00

  in me that knows that male behavior has changed, because they are now united, and they've bonded themselves to a woman in some way. Okay. So I tell my girls, you have an incredible power on men to elevate their behavior, their choices, their decisions, by how we respond to them. Okay, it is the soft power that shapes the world, right? That's what women really are, the soft power that shapes the world, not the dominant naggy power, the soft, beautiful, alluring power that changes the world. So I do think that there's a role of dating, and I do think that we should encourage healthy dating, not drunkenness, not permanent friend zone, not jumping in and hooking up, a slow, careful

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  dating relationship, where there's parental involvement, where you can evaluate especially worldview alignment. And then when you get into college, I mean, I told my 19 year old, who is an incredible soccer player, and just, oh my gosh, all of my kids are incredible. My 19 year old was looking for a college, she considered one that had a 75% female to male ratio. And I said, you won't even apply to that college. Absolutely not. Like, this is your primary age, the primary window for you to find somebody who is like minded, join your life to them in a cornerstone kind of marriage, not a cap Stone marriage, where you figure it all out and then put the cherry on the top marriage. No, we're going to be strategic about who you're exposed to between the ages of 18 and 22.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  This is your chance. And I do, and I think parents have a huge role to play in encouraging early family formation, early marriage, proper dating. You can't control everything, you shouldn't try to control everything. But the messages that you send, the signals that you send, the environments you put your kid in, it can lead them to the place where they are not involuntarily single when they're 30.

• 1:18:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  So let's talk about dating a bit more because you talked about the civilizing effect of women and the role of the alluring quality of women and beauty in that. And there's definitely, that's the calling aspect, but there's a conscience aspect too that I think is worth highlighting that's relevant to young women. So there has been a series of recent studies on the personalities of people who prefer short-term mating strategies. And so that would be hookup culture. And that's a variant of a widespread biological strategy for reproduction that varies on one

• 1:18:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  dimension, which is investment versus no investment, right? Human beings are high-investment reproducers. But some human beings prefer a relatively low-investment, high-investment strategy. And those are people who...

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Keep your daughters away from them.

• 1:19:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's right, but I want to explain why.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Keep your daughters away, please.

• 1:19:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  We know why now. We know why, because the personality structure of men who prefer hookup culture has been delineated. So the men who prefer no-investment sex are...

• 1:19:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Machiavellian, so they use their language to manipulate. They're psychopathic, so they're predatory parasites. They're narcissistic, so they crave unearned social status and to cap it all off, they're sadistic. Right, so one of the things that the sexual revolution did, free love. One of the things that the free love revolution did was hand women over to psychopaths. Right, this is not good. So, so the other thing, I'm curious about this with your daughters. Well, the other thing that women do for men is put limits on their psychopathy and their narcissism. Well, that's part of that civilizing process.

• 1:20:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  But the limits aren't so much, they're partly that beauty and that alluring quality, but they're also partly hell no, right? Because one of the things I've discussed with my wife, for example, you tell me what you think about this. I think almost all the status that women have granted to them from men, like, let's say, at least in the domain of romantic entanglement and reproduction, comes from the woman's ability to say no. The ability to stay, say no is actually a status marker, and that's especially true if the person who's pursuing you is relatively high-status male. Because what you, and women, you know, they're, they're hypergamous.

• 1:20:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  They tend to mate up, across and up hierarchies. And so then you ask, well, what status does a woman have if she's pursuing a high-status male? And the answer is, she has whatever status is granted to her by her ability to read, to what? To stand inviolate against his advances. That's a marker of her status. And so there's a limit setting there too, that's crucial. And it's certainly something that men, there's no doubt that that's one of the ways that men test women. You know, now you could say, well, if I say no, and that might especially be true at a college that's 75% girls and 25% boys. If I say no, I'll never see him again.

• 1:21:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  But the right attitude towards that is, if you say no and you see him again, you should be, never see him again, you should be glad he's gone.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 1:21:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, a few things. Another thing that the sexual revolution did, not just handing women over to the worst of all men, but it made women, it made young girls very hungry for any kind of male attention because it disproportionately starved them of the paternal love that was supposed to satisfy that longing for male attention. And so, you know, through the course of the, you know, the last couple decades where we decided to abandon the traditional notions of sex only within marriage with men to children generally being bored to a household where they were going to have daily contact with both their mother and their father, is now we have girls who grew up without their father or with a revolving door of different men coming in and out of their mothers' lives. On average, as you know, these girls will start their periods a year, a whole year earlier than their counterparts.

• 1:22:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. So their, their bodies are literally signaling, I, I need to search for a man. And so now, not only are there more men that are predatory for girls, but now there's more girls that, you know, we call this father hunger in our work, mother hunger or father hunger. Like, maybe you've got, you know, two moms or two dads who love you, or a single mom who's providing for you materially, but they do not meet your need for male or female love. And so you hunger for it. And this is why you see incredibly high rates of teen pregnancy among girls who are fatherless, right? Because they didn't have that daily male love that they longed for, but they found it. Maybe they only found it for five minutes on a Friday night, but they found it. And so I think the sexual

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  revolution has been bad for women. Of course, my argument is it has been especially bad for children, you know, perpetuating terrible cycles. A note on Tammy's podcast, if you have not watched it, you should go subscribe. She has done some really fantastic interviews on this topic of, you know, a proper understanding of what it means to be a woman, female. The interviews she's done on the effects of birth control on women's brains, I have sent out to tons of people. So it's very worthy of your time and attention for that. In terms of my daughters and limits and elevating the behavior of the men around them, I will tell you that both of them got a lot of attention from guys. Most of the guys were not worthy of a lot of their time and attention.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  But I will say that there were a few times where they said no, I mean, and I'm not talking about a major sexual advance, I'm just saying, no, you can't have my attention. No, I won't be your girlfriend. No, I won't continue to be your girlfriend if you continue to do these kinds of things. And then they watched the men, the young men, the 16-year-old, 17-year-old reform. Because the girl has something they want, even if it's just attention, even if it's just saying, she is my girlfriend.

• 1:24:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, there's nothing just about attention. There's nothing but attention, right? Attention is everything.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I just think that, you know, my daughters have seen the incredible power of no.

• 1:24:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 00

  And I will tell young girls, because I, you know, I've been involved in youth ministry for decades, I was running the youth ministry at our church until about a year ago. And I tell girls, like, if there's a guy that you really like, and if you want him to pursue you, you say no to pretty much everything. No, I won't hold your hand. No, I mean, be kind, right? Yeah, you can go on a date, but if it has to do with a physical advance, the more you say no, the more your desirability goes up. If you want him to move on, give him what he wants physically.

• 1:25:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, give him what his whims want. Give him what his whims want.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:25:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Because you're serving the lowest part of him, right? And I don't mean that, I don't mean that in some sexually prudish element. I'm saying that sexual desire itself is a short-term gratification-seeking mechanism, so to speak. And it has to be integrated into a personality that's forward-looking and future-oriented and social. And if the relationship degenerates to the immediately sexual, then it serves no one's medium-to-long-term interests, certainly not society's interests, certainly not children's interests, not least because it tends to culminate in abortion.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  That's right. Yep, that's exactly right. Kids lose, kids lose. Anytime sex is happening outside of... Long-term committed heterosexual permanent unions, kids will always pay the price for that. I think that that's one of the reasons why we are where we are in terms of marriage and family, is we have pretended like there's no cost. But there is a cost. There's always a cost to kids. We've said, if the adults are happy, the kids will be happy. We've said, biology doesn't matter, love makes a family. But that's not true. There's all, somebody is always going to pay the price. It's just the kids who pay it because they can't defend their own rights.

• 1:26:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, well, thank you very much for talking to me today, Katie, and for helping us get to the bottom of the, what? The metaphysics of the rights of children, I suppose, and to place them in relationship to the rights and needs and wants of adults. And those aren't the same thing at all. I understand that the conversations that you had at ARC, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, we had a convention there recently, will be available to everyone. And so if those of you who are watching and listening found this conversation useful and compelling and helped you further your ideas about the roles of men and women and mothers and fathers and children

• 1:27:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  in, in, in, in families and in broader society, then you can check out Katie's contribution to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Convention. At that establishment, we've made focus on family, long-term, monogamous, committed, heterosexual, married, child-centered couples focus, because we do think that, well, that's best for children, it's best for mature adults. It's, and it, it's a relationship that provides the foundation for a productive and abundant society. And so. Well, there's something in that to annoy almost everyone, but it still happens to be the truth, as far as we can tell.

• 1:28:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you very much for talking to me today. We'll continue on the Daily Wire side. I think I'll talk to you about divorce and family policy and the costs to marriage under the current legal circumstances. Maybe we'll talk about no-fault divorce, for example. For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. To the Daily Wire for making this podcast possible, that's much appreciated. To the film crews here in Calgary, Alberta, and in Washington, DC, thank you for your contribution. And on to the Daily Wire side.