A Distorted Vision of the 1950s is Used to Manipulate You
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, we re-visit the 1950s and talk about all the things that were different about life in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era. We discuss the lack of black babies born out of wedlock, the rise of the BDSM community, and the growing prevalence of sexual debauchery.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
But yeah, I was like, well, of course, like the thing I can really dunk on is the experience
00:00:07.400
And I'm trying to find all the stats and I look at their marriage rates and I'm like,
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oh, okay, well, in the 1950s, 64% of black women were married, roughly comparable to
00:00:17.660
Kids born out of wedlock were half the white rate today.
00:00:25.860
Yeah, but black infants born out of wedlock soared to 77.3%.
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Like, I mean, obviously there were horrible things about like pre-civil rights.
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But okay, so like fertility is worse, out of wedlock births are worse, mental health is
00:00:45.600
And black household income is 58% of white households, which is unchanged since 1953.
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I heard her say all this and I was like, this can't actually be true, right?
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So I decided to start Googling it and oh my God, it's so much worse than I thought.
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If you look at this graph by the Washington Post, which is looking at medium household
00:01:07.720
wealth adjusted for inflation, since the 1950s, white wealth has gone up about 3x.
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Black wealth is approximately the same as it was in the 1950s.
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So also like I was looking at that, I was like, oh my God, I've just, I've been lied to
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about the 50s, I was like, oh, so much more expensive, except well, we spent like 15%
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I'm so excited to be speaking with you today because we are going to be talking about the
00:01:39.060
And obviously we enjoyed tossing rotten vegetables of the 1950s.
00:01:43.120
We point out how trad wives are both unsustainable and a progressive conspiracy.
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We point out how sexually debauched they were in the 1950s.
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We got to, we got to make a few notes on these things for people who haven't seen these
00:01:55.060
Specifically, what we mean is that the trad wife phenomenon as it is practiced today is
00:01:59.600
more of a cargo cult than representative of how people actually lived in the 1950s.
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And before, the real family format that has existed for thousands of years is what's called
00:02:08.600
the corporate family, which is more an extended family group of both people and unrelated
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The modern trad wife is more downstream of BDSM culture.
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And you don't even know Malcolm, but this is trending now online because there are these
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trad wives who are now, I don't remember what they call them, but there's this one, there's
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one woman who, who calls it the princess treatment and then, or experience or something like that.
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And then there's this other one who literally wears a BDSM collar, but calls it like, like
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she, she thinks that it's a conservative Christian thing, but she had literally bought this collar
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I think she calls it to signal her subservience to her husband, not realizing that literally
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And the internet's laughing like crazy, but anyway, yeah, it's such a thing.
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And it's, it's showing up again because it's a thing.
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Well, it's so funny because a lot of these people were so hidden from that that they don't
00:03:05.000
realize that it's like, no, these words you're using did not come from the 1950s.
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Like this is not the things that you're buying, these styles that you're adopting.
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It's just, it's not like the traditional correct way to do family.
00:03:22.960
So I think that that's always funny to get into, but continue.
00:03:25.980
So as much as we like to dunk on the 1950s, there were absolutely major elements of it
00:03:31.000
that rocked, including affordability, employment, quality of life, social stability.
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There were even some commonly highlighted shortcomings of the 1950s that are maybe not as short as
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I should also note for people who haven't seen our episode on the 1950s being debauched.
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It also was way, in many ways, way more sexually debauched than modern times.
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Where we point out the prevalence within literature of the period and was in studies run during
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the period of young male mutual masturbation and the prevalence of nudity, like, like group
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showers and stuff like that, that people don't do anymore.
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Oh, but it was like, it was no homo group showers.
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You know, it was like, people were based enough to not insinuate too much or read too much into it.
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Well, yeah, you know, they didn't see it as gay to, like, jack off your friend in the 1950s.
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And I love people were like, oh, that was like, those studies were debunked.
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And I was like, bro, if you have actually read a lot of literature from people who grew up in the
00:04:31.640
1950s that describe, like, underground culture, what it was really like, you will very frequently
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find stories of mutual masturbation among males.
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I have not read a single, like, non-gay story where that happens in modern times.
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I don't have a single friend who has admitted to me, oh, yeah, I did this thing.
00:04:49.560
Yeah, I think even our totally straight doesn't go that far.
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Anyway, I want to make the argument, basically, that, okay, yes, a lot of things about the
00:04:59.260
50s, either totally misunderstood or actually sucked, but there are a lot of things that
00:05:04.040
were great, but I have zero respect for anyone who pines after the 50s, and I will explain
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Well, because you believe it's all recreational.
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The reason she doesn't care is she thinks that you can remake everything that was good in
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Well, so let's go over what's good about the 1950s, right?
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So housing and basic goods, the cost of living was dramatically lower, and so that is a clear
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Housing was affordable, with the average home costing around $15,000 compared to over $200,000
00:05:37.200
today, plus gasoline, food, and cars were also cheaper relative to income, making it easy
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for a single income to support a family and afford a home and a car.
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I thought food was dramatically more expensive.
00:05:48.960
But actually, you know, we recently did a video on AI and social class, and in that
00:05:52.600
video, they show the, we showed this 1957 video on social class in America that shows
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the lives of a lower class American, a middle class American, and then an upper class American.
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And there's this one scene where they show the, the, the rundown lower class house.
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David's father is Michael Benton, an unskilled factory worker who has a meager education.
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Mr. Benton rents the upper floor of a two-family house in a rundown section of town.
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In the video, it's like, it looks like the houses would cost a few million in LA.
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So yeah, that like only the wealthiest could possibly live in these days.
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So I get, you know, that that has gotten, we have problems there.
00:06:50.640
Plus the median American family had 30% more purchasing power at the end of the decade than
00:06:56.560
And the dollar's buying power was much greater.
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So college tuition was low enough that student debt was basically not, it wasn't a thing.
00:07:03.900
So as much as even like the GI Bill may have helped a lot of guys, and this, this was something
00:07:08.200
that enabled people who fought in World War II to basically go to college for free.
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For those who aren't familiar with it, it almost wasn't necessary because school was just
00:07:15.760
Another element was that employment was, it was cush.
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Like there was this really short-lived period where it just like getting a job seemed incredibly
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And it was at the time, unemployment was super low, about 4.5%.
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And, and low in a way that was like legitimately low.
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Cause I think now people are juicing the numbers in all sorts of ways, pretending the people who
00:07:38.740
are one, not counting unemployed people who've given up and all these other factors.
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So yeah, actually low unemployment and there were tons of jobs in manufacturing and industry.
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You didn't need a high school diploma to have a job.
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The GI Bill that I mentioned earlier helped millions of veterans access higher education
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So there was both, both economic growth and social mobility and incomes went up.
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Average family incomes rose from 3,300 in 1950s to 5,400 by the end of that decade.
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So 1950 to 1959, it went up from 3,300 to 5,400.
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Keep in mind that, you know, wages have been stagnant.
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And then of course, you know, housing and education, childcare, a whole bunch of other
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And then there was also union powers of labor unions.
00:08:29.620
I think we're a little more common than you didn't have, you know, Amazon constantly
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The economic argument for the 1950s, I've always found to be uniquely stupid.
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Yeah, because I mean, boomers did absolutely get, and like the greatest generation got
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The only reason why the 1950s appeared so wealthy in the United States is because the
00:08:52.980
other world center of economic production had been completely devastated by a world war.
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Imagine if the U.S. went around and destroyed every factory in China and every factory in
00:09:13.000
And over the next 10 years was like, isn't it great how much money you could earn at an
00:09:18.780
And it's like, well, no, you know, that's not exactly a replicable scenario was in the
00:09:24.740
And that wasn't caused by the culture of the 1950s.
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Calling out trad-wise as a cargo cult phenomenon is such an apt comparison.
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Because what created the economic benefits that made the, if you're not familiar with the
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cargo cults, these were Aboriginal people in islands who during the war had troops stationed
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So they had so much wealth from their perspective, like food and material supplies and technology.
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During that period, they tried to bring it back by reenacting scenes that they remember
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So they'll build like planes out of like sticks and runways, and then do all the things like
00:10:07.060
their religious ceremonies of the signs that they would make to call down the planes.
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The cargo cult has its temples almost everywhere nearby.
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Its altar is standing 9,000 feet above sea level.
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The dummy plane is at the edge of the landing strip.
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The natives of the Rozo and Mikao tribes are waiting for some plane to land on their strip,
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You know, we laugh at these Aboriginals doing this, and then we see, you know, conservative
00:10:51.360
influencers doing the exact same thing to recreate the economic situations created by that exact
00:11:03.640
Maybe this is why many of them are also so pro-Russia.
00:11:09.740
And so you could say, well, if unions were stronger, you know, we'd have all this.
00:11:16.760
Unions worked in the 1950s because we didn't have any competition.
00:11:23.760
Like, yeah, people didn't have the option to just turn to something else because the union
00:11:30.180
If unions get stronger in the United States, we simply get out-competed by countries with
00:11:37.860
I mean, I think that's why a lot of companies were like, okay, screw you.
00:11:46.960
I love it when people are like, oh, well, we had such good jobs because of the unions.
00:11:50.240
And I'm like, yeah, but you don't have those jobs anymore.
00:11:55.380
This is really happening in Hollywood right now where the union, the writers union or
00:12:00.620
something decided to make some big, stupid push.
00:12:03.660
Basically everything in Hollywood is unionized.
00:12:07.420
It is riddled with unions and that has ossified and made the industry so financially unviable
00:12:16.540
and bogged down that it's, they're just completely being trounced now.
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The companies are just leaving Hollywood and they're not doing business in Hollywood anymore.
00:12:30.220
Even the creative types, because they're just like, we can't deal with this anymore.
00:12:33.080
So I don't think that, no, you can't bring back the economic prosperity.
00:12:37.200
Unions worked in Hollywood when Hollywood had a natural monopoly, i.e.
00:12:40.260
it wasn't easy to produce films in a disparate region of locations.
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So unions only work when you have a captive market.
00:12:51.060
When you don't have a captive market, unions have the opposite effect.
00:12:55.380
None of this changes the fact that for the people at the time, it felt pretty freaking
00:13:01.940
But I'm going to actually point out, I mean, I go into the actual economics of the food,
00:13:06.180
because my understanding is that if you actually look at cost of living of today versus the
00:13:10.120
1950s, it was, it was actually lower today than in the 1950s for your average person.
00:13:22.100
We get to do it my way because this isn't, get out of my office.
00:13:29.520
But it's another element of this that was, I mean, it was obviously tied to economic growth
00:13:34.700
and whatnot, but quality of life and social stability were both better.
00:13:38.060
And this is one of those things where I think it should start to become apparent that you
00:13:41.000
can totally recreate this on a family or personal cultural level.
00:13:43.780
But there was a perception of positive change, which we should totally have now.
00:13:49.600
The 1950s saw widespread adoption of new technologies, televisions, cars, home appliances, and these rapidly
00:13:57.820
She grew up in France doing laundry with like washboards, you know, and then she just
00:14:04.040
was so freaking amazed when she got a washing machine.
00:14:06.800
She just thought it was the coolest thing in the entire world.
00:14:10.380
And I don't think people realize just, you know, how amazing that was for people, but
00:14:14.280
also like how low tech their lives were even in the fifties when, I don't know, when a washing
00:14:19.180
machine is the thing that is the highlight of your year to really crave to go back to that
00:14:24.080
period, but there was more, more community, relatively speaking in social cohesion.
00:14:28.220
There was a strong emphasis, emphasis on social and community life.
00:14:32.420
And this was the era of sending your kids out to play all afternoon until it was dinnertime
00:14:36.740
or the sunset, and then expecting them to come home and everything would be okay.
00:14:40.440
And then of course there was that economic optimism, but also mental health and wellbeing
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It was normal to start a successful middle-class life out of high school.
00:14:48.480
Whereas now we infantilize people like crazy, but yeah, I mean, in that social class video
00:14:54.020
that I just referenced earlier, the middle-class character in the video just gets a white
00:15:00.080
I mean, can you imagine that happening commonly now?
00:15:02.380
I mean, it's going to come back to that soon, which is great.
00:15:10.240
I think that's a better way to deal with mental health.
00:15:12.380
I can give you a video clip of, there's literally one of those, another one of those 1950s
00:15:16.720
instructional videos where an instructor is connecting emotions to fire, which is just
00:15:24.000
Before men learned how to control fire and put it to work, it was man's greatest enemy.
00:15:30.780
In much the same way, your emotions can be your own greatest enemy.
00:15:36.000
Or under control, your emotions can make you healthier and happier and improve the lives
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Because when you become stirred up, when your emotions control your actions, it affects
00:15:56.600
And it did feel a lot more stable and predictable for people.
00:15:59.700
And there were stronger community support networks.
00:16:09.080
In 1950s, what it had in clothing, which by the way, you can still wear if you want,
00:16:16.440
If you have ever seen pictures of food from the 1950s-
00:16:28.580
It's been a while since we've watched Idiocracy.
00:16:30.540
But when you look at clothing from Idiocracy, it might as well just be clothing from today.
00:16:35.940
Like, we were watching our Walmart this morning.
00:16:37.840
Isn't this literally just what you saw this morning at Walmart?
00:16:46.800
And we were like, well, why don't you dress like everyone else?
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Doesn't this look like the clothing that was on the racks?
00:16:56.680
Okay, I'm going to send you pictures of 1950s food.
00:16:58.600
By the way, people may not know this, but I used to always wear a suit and tie.
00:17:03.480
And people could say, why did you stop always wearing a suit and tie?
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Like, I look like a kid when I wear a suit and tie.
00:17:14.960
Many of our viewers, you know, they take us out to be-
00:17:19.200
And this is the first time in my life where I've really been surprised by this.
00:17:21.660
I think, like, older relative to them than we are,
00:17:24.880
I think many of them perceive themselves as younger than they actually are.
00:17:28.960
I remember one of them was, like, on our episode on 4chan,
00:17:32.660
they were like, oh, this is such, like, a boomer's take on 4chan.
00:17:35.860
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on here.
00:17:37.940
Like, my generation was the generation that was using 4chan
00:17:41.480
as it was becoming culturally relevant and a thing.
00:17:51.580
4chan is my generation, my college, my high school.
00:17:59.040
Well, anyway, now you're sounding like a boomer.
00:18:02.360
But, like, I just sent you a picture of 1950s party food.
00:18:05.340
And what we're looking at is a spread of, like, sliced bread,
00:18:13.260
There are two cheese sandwiches, and then there's a weird vat of red stuff
00:18:20.960
Then I sent a picture of a very basic modern charcuterie board,
00:18:25.080
which includes dragon fruit, sliced pear, pomegranate, fig jam
00:18:30.700
with toasted pita bread slices, a container of mixed nuts and dried berries,
00:18:36.940
grapes, skewered, like, oh, and star fruit, of course.
00:18:40.360
So there's all these exotic fruits that have been imported from all around the world.
00:18:43.860
I mean, a lot of them are things that you might be surprised used to be rarer,
00:18:53.400
You know, even the ability to transport things that you do get, like apples,
00:18:57.620
you wouldn't get those all year round in the 1950s.
00:19:00.360
Oh, but here, let me show you a great example of apples in 1950s cuisine.
00:19:06.320
I don't know if it's dessert or if it's a savory dish.
00:19:14.380
There's maybe cottage cheese in the center of the bunt-shaped jello thing.
00:19:18.100
And then some apple, tastefully arranged around the side.
00:19:22.400
But if you haven't, if your appetite isn't completely surging now,
00:19:26.740
let me show you this amazing 1950s casserole highlighting the beauty of the hot dog.
00:19:33.600
What we're basically looking at is some kind of...
00:19:39.960
It looks kind of like an ode to brutalist architecture with coleslaw on top.
00:19:44.100
You can't see, because they're watching this on audio, they cut hot dogs in half and then put them on like the outside of a cake of some sort?
00:19:56.180
So it's like, I think it's a casserole, but it's like a tall casserole with coleslaw on top.
00:20:02.840
What I mean is even the simplest of dishes, they seem to have been unable to cook.
00:20:09.540
You know what I mean is like, you're like, well, certainly at least they can make good steak or a good burger.
00:20:17.540
Because I've seen pictures of burgers and steaks from the 1950s, and they look terrible.
00:20:25.860
And people are like, why was food so bad in the 1950s?
00:20:33.160
So they were overusing it in areas they probably shouldn't have been.
00:20:37.600
Also, they didn't have cold chain supply chains where you have refrigerated trucks and then refrigerated warehouses.
00:20:44.460
And so it was really hard to have things like frozen meat or other things or fruits or flowers from far away, fish being taken over.
00:20:53.260
So when you had vegetables, it was quite often canned vegetables or canned meat.
00:20:57.060
Canning was way more common for the major source of the food you were eating.
00:21:02.620
And then, of course, there was less globalization.
00:21:04.640
So you weren't getting these foreign things imported from far away.
00:21:07.480
I mean, you had apples because they were domestically produced.
00:21:12.520
You often couldn't get – I mean, even my dad grew up after the 1950s.
00:21:18.700
You know, many stories about him first encountering things like sushi or curry or –
00:21:24.260
In media, you'll often see jokes about how bad white people food is.
00:21:28.260
And I think within modern times, we can look at this and say, oh, what a silly little racist joke.
00:21:34.740
But in actuality, when you go to these historic examples and you look at these pictures, you're like, oh, wow.
00:21:40.780
Before we started adopting ingredients in cooking techniques from other cultures, this food does actually look pretty awful.
00:21:57.080
It's got heat, but it's also got the sweetness and it's going to kind of glaze.
00:22:01.040
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:22:14.240
Uncle Roger knows fresh chili, chili oil, chili flake.
00:22:20.460
Is this how you trick white people to eating chili?
00:22:23.380
You give them fresh chili, they go, no, no, no, I don't actually like chili.
00:22:29.540
Other things that we might consider a normal part of daily life.
00:22:38.060
And this is something that some viewers of this podcast have brought up to me multiple times.
00:22:41.980
It's just like the aesthetic standards we hold to our interior decoration and to our food are just so insanely high now.
00:22:48.480
So I'm going to send you two pictures of just one is a sort of a standard 1950s birthday party.
00:22:53.800
The kids are wearing like clearly homemade paper hats.
00:22:56.900
It looks like they're made from like a newspaper or something.
00:23:00.200
There's like a plastic tablecloth and paper cups and a chip bowl or whatever.
00:23:05.700
And like someone's grandmother's in a corner smiling, you know, looking like she's just the best host ever.
00:23:11.160
Like clearly this is an impressive party for a middle class family.
00:23:14.620
And then I'm also sending a picture of Shirley Temple's birthday party.
00:23:24.100
It looks like the standard of what I would get from my local grocery store.
00:23:29.580
Let me actually show you the standards of our local area.
00:23:33.260
So I'm just going to show you a picture of the cake counter from Wegmans, which is a local grocery store here.
00:23:40.580
Now we're looking at perfectly executed fruit tarts, cakes, you know, elaborately made cakes to look like cups of hot chocolate.
00:23:53.040
I just chose a random local bakery in Collegeville in this case.
00:24:12.860
This cake ain't got nothing on Shirley Temple's cake.
00:24:15.000
We're now looking at a lopsided recreation of the, of the sleeping beauty cake from the Disney movie.
00:24:19.860
That has like all these crazy stacked layers held up by a broom.
00:24:24.560
Our standards today for food are incredibly high and incredibly luxury.
00:24:29.780
Well, I mean, I'd even say in women, I think many people who haven't watched 1950s movies forget that women of the 1950s are just not very attractive.
00:24:38.740
Well, movie stars look great, but also they're highly airbrushed.
00:24:42.160
People weren't, people weren't nearly as overweight and obese.
00:24:44.580
So I would actually argue that like women were more attractive because they were not as unhealthy.
00:24:48.860
Many people would call 1950s movie stars pretty mid by modern standards.
00:24:56.180
Yes, but the average person, like when I look at vintage colorized footage of the 1950s.
00:25:04.820
I mean, what we have now is a bunch of twos and threes compared to that moving around on the streets and what was strolling on the streets in the fifties and sixties, which a bunch of fives and sixes.
00:25:16.680
And a lot of that was the clothing, but also I need to point out that in the 1950s, people spent nine to 14% of their annual income just to buy fewer than 25 garments per year.
00:25:43.860
But yeah, people look good because they spent a lot.
00:25:46.040
And I think this is one of those things where people are like, oh man, like the 1950s was so affordable.
00:25:50.720
You want to guess what percentage of annual income we spend on our clothing now, Malcolm?
00:26:08.000
If you look at families who are being intentional about it, I'd be almost certain our family spends less than 0.5%.
00:26:16.800
I just bought probably all of our kids' clothing for the next foreseeable future because on Prime Day, a bunch of Amazon Basics and kid sizes came out in like our family uniforms.
00:26:40.020
Yeah, if we could just get that in Coors Light, it would be perfect.
00:26:46.660
But yeah, one of the arguments that I do want to make here is that as much as people butthurt about the 50s being affordable, we actually spent a lot more in the 50s on certain things and we spend a lot less now.
00:26:58.400
But here's the thing that got me when I was doing research for this episode.
00:27:01.780
I'd also point out that travel was basically impossible in the 1950s for people spent, you know, even with it being more expensive in the 1950s, they spent a smaller percent of their budget on it simply because it was inaccessible for most people.
00:27:22.320
Airfare, if you did do it, was 6% of annual income.
00:27:28.340
And recent surveys indicate that the average American family spends about 10% of their annual income on travel, with some families spending up to 15%, whereas a typical two-week family vacation by car in the 1950s would cost around $300 to $400, and that was like only 7% to 10% of annual income for a middle-class family taking a single significant trip a year.
00:27:50.220
And families who traveled less or took shorter trips would only spend 2% to 5%.
00:27:58.120
They would get in a car and they'd drive for like 14 hours to like at some ocean house.
00:28:03.100
Yeah, your family used to drive from Texas to the Jersey Shore every summer, right?
00:28:10.320
I can imagine miserable when you don't – keep in mind, they didn't have phones to read in the car.
00:28:15.060
They didn't have – you couldn't read a book because you'd get car sick.
00:28:18.080
You would, as they call it these days, raw-dog it.
00:28:24.540
That's – yeah, without – this was before air conditioning.
00:28:28.260
This was when you had to roll down your windows with a crank.
00:28:30.840
I remember how much it transformed travel to have screens in front of you.
00:28:38.420
I mean, throughout my entire childhood, there were no – there were no screens.
00:28:42.900
But so, yeah, I mean, so if we want to talk about affordability, it is true too, like to the point of housing, that housing costs were more.
00:28:52.620
And we can't fix that because, okay, in the 1950s, American families spent, we'll say, 17% to 22% of their annual income on housing.
00:28:59.840
And now the percentage of income spent on housing has risen to 25% to 30% for most American households.
00:29:05.840
But given that 9% to 14% of income was spent on clothing in the 50s, whereas 3% is spent today, that alone in savings costs the cover – sorry, covers the cost of increased housing.
00:29:18.580
Like, it's super unfair that people are like, oh, it was too expensive because now we're spending so much less on other things.
00:29:26.500
And if people are like, well, why do clothes cost so much less today?
00:29:30.260
It's in part because we did do the outsourcing thing.
00:29:38.020
Yeah, I want a starving child in China making my shirts, not some starving child in America.
00:29:45.500
Yeah, well, America has better, you know, support services for the starving children.
00:29:49.760
There's SNAP and EBT and, like, all those, you know, and free healthcare in most states for children at low incomes, whereas in China, you know,
00:29:58.800
And also, like, there's a lot of other sort of misleading things.
00:30:03.900
Like, technically, gasoline and cars were less expensive in the 50s, but it's not the full picture because overall,
00:30:11.120
transportation today doesn't meaningfully cost more.
00:30:14.860
In the 50s, American families spent around 15% of their household income on transportation, which included cars and public transport.
00:30:21.040
But in recent years, families spend 15% to 18%, so only as much as 2% want more of their household income on transportation.
00:30:28.680
Plus, you don't need any more to drive to rent a movie or get daily groceries or talk with your friends because now you have, we have bigger refrigeration units.
00:30:37.220
We have deep freezers if we want them that are more widely available.
00:30:41.700
Like, it used to be that to do anything, to see a friend, to talk to a friend, you had to drive somewhere, especially if you weren't in a city.
00:30:50.580
So, yeah, I just don't think things are being adequately presented.
00:30:54.900
And also, to your point about food, if you still prepare it yourself, especially in 1950s style, like if you're eating canned vegetables and hot dog towers.
00:31:03.580
I'd also point out that people romanticize the gender relationship in the 1950s.
00:31:09.620
They're like, oh, as a man, you know, it was so great, you know, when women, okay, so first of all, in the 1950s, women spanking their wives was pretty normalized.
00:31:18.320
Can you imagine having to spank your wife, like, outside of a sexual context?
00:31:25.920
Like, you have what, you treat your wife like an additional child?
00:31:31.480
Like, do you actually want to imagine that it actually happened that much?
00:31:35.160
I feel like it happened in the media is, like, a cute thing.
00:31:39.080
So, clearly, it was happening in people's houses.
00:31:40.820
It was not treated as, like, oh, my God, I can't believe he did that.
00:31:43.360
It was like, that's a normal part of being married.
00:31:51.260
And then women, you know, you had this big problem in the 1950s with all these housewives being on all these drugs.
00:31:59.400
So, what, I've got this drugged up, childlike wife who I need to spank to get in line.
00:32:06.800
I prefer that my wife just does this stuff herself.
00:32:09.520
And I think that people also, as men, over-romanticize the concept of the wife just staying at home and doing all the childcare.
00:32:19.180
I really prefer sharing childcare duties with my wife because I really like being around my kids.
00:32:25.040
I know you'd be missing out if you were being a trad wife dad.
00:32:29.260
And most of the families we know who are really, you know, prenatalist, the men of the houses love spending time with their kids.
00:32:42.460
Think about the world that we're entering today where you have more work from home, you have more gig work, you have more.
00:32:49.820
Even if you're earning less and your earnings are not as stable, consider what your life would be like if you went every day to work at a factory all day long.
00:32:59.940
And then you came home and you had a wife and some kids and that was your interaction with them.
00:33:06.980
And then on weekends you'd go to, I don't know, barbecues or something, which I wouldn't like doing anyway.
00:33:15.600
It's so funny, parties, like children's parties today, because I go to them and other people in the comments, please tell me if this is your experience.
00:33:23.980
All the parents just stand around looking awkwardly at their phones or something.
00:33:27.660
And I remember when I was a kid and you had the children play stuff, the parents would do it so the parents could interact.
00:33:37.180
The day it's, and I want Simone to go with me to one.
00:33:40.360
Simone never goes to any of this stuff because that's my responsibility.
00:33:42.800
But I want her to go just for anthropological reasons, to just be like, take a separate car, just be there for 30 minutes so you can see what it's like.
00:33:52.620
I do kind of, I should witness this because I find it hard to believe.
00:33:55.440
And people are going to be like, oh, that's horrible.
00:33:57.040
But, you know, the reality is I don't want to talk to these people.
00:34:02.640
I've got friends online who I'm better matched for.
00:34:09.100
Yeah, but still, my point remains that you can, if you want to, recreate this life.
00:34:15.300
Like, education, sure, it's unsustainably expensive now, but it also can be circumvented with AI.
00:34:20.340
And we talked about this at length in the AI and social class episode that we released.
00:34:27.060
AI is going to wipe away the need for a university degree.
00:34:30.460
So we're getting back to that 50s, you can start right out of high school or even before scenario.
00:34:35.880
And we're about to hit an age of major wealth opportunity for those who are willing to work for it, which is exactly how it was in the 50s.
00:34:42.680
You still had to work for it to have upward social mobility.
00:34:46.460
So don't think that people weren't working their butts off to get anywhere in the 50s because they absolutely were.
00:34:52.360
And then this quality of life thing, this, this, this, oh, well, the 50s were this time of optimism and there was all this techno optimism and everything.
00:34:59.980
We, you can absolutely unplug from negative media channels and you'll see things are actually getting better.
00:35:05.580
And they're way better than they were in the 50s.
00:35:09.220
And with, with mental health too, you can opt into better mental health.
00:35:12.900
Stability and predictably, if you thoughtfully own your objective function, like, you know what your values in your life plan are and you live within your means, you can have a stable and predictable life.
00:35:21.500
It's all these people who are trying to opt into a clearly unsustainable culture that they don't even own.
00:35:27.780
Like they haven't thoughtfully chosen it for themselves who are living precariously.
00:35:40.060
Well, you actually have options for that today.
00:35:47.840
If it was in the Bay area, my God, what would it cost?
00:35:55.940
But out here, it was less than half a million when we got it.
00:36:00.240
You know, so like, great house and everything like that.
00:36:06.560
You, you, I mean, and now you might have to go further rural than we went, or you go to a developing country, which you couldn't easily do or live in the 1950s and you can today.
00:36:16.820
So yeah, I mean, you can live the 1950s fantasy.
00:36:20.180
You just have to be intentional about it and be willing to break with mainstream norms, which shouldn't be hard given how toxic they are.
00:36:26.900
But I mean, even better than that, you can literally live the techno-optimist 1950s future.
00:36:32.160
So you can live the fantasy that people had in the 1950s.
00:36:36.140
Like, you can have more sustainable marriages in which most, like, both partners contribute professionally.
00:36:40.960
And even the kids, you can have greater social mobility because if, well, at least if you ride the AI wave properly and you can have way more luxury given modern tech.
00:36:50.540
Plus, we need to really be grateful for all the medical advancements that were not available in the 1950s.
00:36:56.160
Like, keep in mind, the first kidney transplant was in the 50s.
00:36:59.100
That was experimental and they were not, like, organ transplants in general were not widespread.
00:37:06.180
We didn't have modern chemotherapy or targeted therapies, no gene therapy, no IVF.
00:37:11.320
So, you know, we would be childless and miserable.
00:37:14.200
No statins, no cardiovascular medications that are anywhere close to what we have now.
00:37:25.460
So, like, you couldn't have a really simple surgery where they just kind of went in with a tiny precision cut.
00:37:34.560
And I just, I can't emphasize enough, like, also, like, just advanced antibiotics.
00:37:40.960
You know, you only had some really simple stuff.
00:37:42.800
So, I just, it's so bizarre to me that people crave this when you can have it.
00:37:51.900
And yet you're, here you are bitching about it?
00:37:55.960
What gets me is I think it's the culture of the 1950s that people want, even that, even the thing that people think was really working wasn't.
00:38:06.320
They think, oh, well, we had economic stability, which we only had because the rest of the world was destroyed at that time, which changed our economy.
00:38:12.660
And so, you can't really pine for it for those reasons.
00:38:15.760
That's pining for something that you cannot recreate.
00:38:18.300
Or they pine for it for, oh, well, you know, women back then, you know, really knew their place in a relationship.
00:38:23.900
And I'm like, or you can find a woman who is in a modern context who is willing to build the type of relationship that you want to build, right?
00:38:36.260
They're absolutely, Simone wasn't like, when I found, because there were a number of women I considered marrying before Simone.
00:38:42.780
And not one of them did I have the issue of them being like progressive brain-minded or like, and they were all like progressive to some extent, right?
00:38:50.140
Like, because back then I was a progressive, right?
00:38:51.880
Most highly educated women are progressive and you pretty much exclusively looked.
00:38:56.580
None of them were like, oh, I'm against, you know, women having a different role than men, or I would expect X or Y.
00:39:04.180
Like, I think what people don't, what often men don't think about is many of the ways in which relationship norms have become more flexible benefit both parties.
00:39:18.380
I mean, imagine if we were super rigid about it, you would have to do our taxes and finances.
00:39:27.120
You wouldn't, you would have had to muck out the sink this morning.
00:39:31.460
Like I'm used to mucking out drains, but the smell of this, I like almost vomited.
00:39:38.940
It was, I don't know what was going on with it, but it was not good.
00:39:43.140
I know that thing, clean it out like a ramrod because it basically was family motto.
00:39:50.000
It was on a thing my family used to run called Crazy Water Crystals on the radio station.
00:39:55.720
They'd say they'll clean you out like a ramrod.
00:40:06.480
They had some kind of like retreat thing and product out of.
00:40:09.900
I love that my family, actually, that'd be a fun thing to bring back Crazy Water.
00:40:12.840
I think that that would do well with modern branding.
00:40:15.240
There's literally, like we bought for your brother for his birthday.
00:40:18.180
You can literally find on eBay, Crazy Water Crystals memorabilia, like little pamphlets about it.
00:40:27.400
Well, because they owned almost the entire town.
00:40:29.740
So they created basically a resort town, like an Aspen before an Aspen.
00:40:34.380
And they, because you could commute to it from Dallas, this was before Plains.
00:40:38.440
And they owned almost everything in the town is my understanding.
00:40:41.500
And so it was like, imagine, imagine of a Malcolm world, like a Hershey Park or something like that.
00:40:48.440
Come and enjoy yourself at the wonderful crazy town for crazy people.
00:40:52.760
I was looking up pictures of the town, if you're watching this on audio, and the banner over the main street when you enter town says,
00:40:58.860
Welcome to the home of crazy was crazy in giant, wacky yellow font.
00:41:04.540
And the big company looming in the background that the family owned was Crazy Well Water Company.
00:41:11.060
And so I think, you know, I've mentioned before, like the backwoods culture or tradition that my family comes from really didn't like attempting to look, you know, pretentious or overly high status or overly like normalized.
00:41:24.960
And vulgarity was seen as authenticating, like showing that you don't think that you're better than people.
00:41:30.680
And this is very much the 1950s way of doing that, or the 1950s way of being Malcolm.
00:41:38.600
The mineral water there just gave you massive diarrhea.
00:41:43.560
That's where Cleans You Out Like a Ramrod came from.
00:41:47.020
Like you just, I don't know, you took it and it was like a major, it just, everything came out.
00:41:56.760
That's the way you communicate with Texas audience, rural Texas audience.
00:42:03.160
But I mean, yeah, the thing is too, I love retrofuturism.
00:42:09.580
I mean, I was just talking with you yesterday about how I loved the fact that I heard our
00:42:16.180
And I was just too exhausted from cleaning up after dinner and everything and making dinner
00:42:20.640
to go down and figure it out what was going on.
00:42:25.440
I could just like get on my phone and drop in on the Alexa device.
00:42:28.380
It was in their room playing them like sleep noises and just be like, okay, guys, what's
00:42:34.040
And then, you know, so we negotiated what they wanted hugs.
00:42:43.380
There's all these videos you can watch about the retrofuturistic house, the house of the
00:42:48.140
There were so many of those videos in the 1950s, you know, advertising various things and
00:42:53.480
And while there's not an exact translation and Elon Musk loves to quote his son, Saxon,
00:43:00.420
who once said, why does the future not look like the future?
00:43:06.400
Like, it's not an exact, we don't have flying cars, but that's because.
00:43:13.420
You don't understand the air traffic control problems you would have with that, that it's
00:43:18.740
And so, yeah, I just, it really, it bothers me.
00:43:22.320
But I'm also, so I'm bothered by the fact that people aren't just living the type of
00:43:27.340
And this is also a really common complaint that we have about culture in general.
00:43:31.200
Like people get really mad about, oh, like there's this culture and I don't like that
00:43:36.040
they're winning or whatever, but they don't just, the point about culture is if you see
00:43:43.540
Take the parts you like it, incorporate it into your culture and live it and thrive.
00:43:47.780
This is, I think, a problem with, you know, the people who fantasize about the 1950s again,
00:43:53.040
they're like, well, you know, dating would have been easier for me in the 1950s or something
00:43:58.040
And I'm like, it reminds me of the communists who are like, I want communism.
00:44:02.280
And I'm like, you understand that if this was a communist system, you would be the underclass.
00:44:12.780
It'd be Trump head of the communist, you know, dictatorship.
00:44:15.940
You know, this doesn't put you in a better position vis-a-vis where you are now.
00:44:20.940
You just imagine yourself as somebody who has a position of power within this new ecosystem.
00:44:26.540
And I think when people reflect back on the 1950s, they don't realize if you're watching
00:44:31.400
this show, you probably would have been one of the nerds playing like Dungeons and Dragons.
00:44:36.260
I don't think that existed yet, but you know what I mean?
00:44:39.140
You wouldn't have been, you know, captain of the football team.
00:44:47.700
You know, they were playing with their own difficulties within that time period as we
00:44:54.960
Although, I mean, again, there's, there's a lot of, it's a lot of bad stuff that I thought
00:44:59.980
was really, really, I mean, and it was like, for example, this is, it's just, you might
00:45:04.380
want to cut this out, but I was like, well, of course, like the thing I can really
00:45:07.940
dunk on is the experience of black Americans in the 1950s.
00:45:12.860
And I'm trying to find all the stats and I look at their marriage rates and I'm like,
00:45:16.800
Well, in the 1950s, 64% of black women were married, roughly comparable to white women.
00:45:23.260
Marriage rates were higher before the 1960s was 61% of black adults married in 1960.
00:45:27.460
And their kids born out of wedlock were, we were half the white rate today.
00:45:33.140
By 2008, only 32% of black adults were married, a 44% decline from 1960.
00:45:38.380
And there was a much smaller drop among white adults.
00:45:44.320
And also fertility and out of wedlock births way worse after the 1950s.
00:45:48.800
In the 1950s, only 4% of us births overall were out of wedlock.
00:45:52.000
And for black infants, the rate was approximately 70 to 25% in the early, 17 to 25% in the early
00:46:00.120
I went back and double checked the amount of black births in the Americas in the 1950s,
00:46:06.620
where they were born out of wedlock was less than 5%.
00:46:10.000
By 2023, 24% of all US births were out of wedlock.
00:46:14.260
But black infants soared to, born out of wedlock, soared to 77.3% up from 25% in 1965.
00:46:23.420
So, I mean, and also like in the 1950s, mental health stigma was severe, but also like people
00:46:33.800
Which is actually mentally healthier than making it a thing.
00:46:36.980
And I mean, I think some of that still kind of lingers in black culture today.
00:46:40.080
Like, I actually think black culture today is more resilient to the mental health toxicity
00:46:48.400
White urbanized female, yeah, gynocracy culture today.
00:46:53.560
And there's, there's this YouTube shorts channel called Subway Takes, where this guy talks about
00:46:58.780
like, white people need to stop, like, calling people autistic and just like, sort of medicalizing
00:47:05.420
And he, he describes like an autistic, like if, if there were like a black dude, like a
00:47:10.820
black or a black household with someone who's autistic, they'd just be like, I don't know,
00:47:16.280
Like, but like he's, he's, he's doing him, you know, like he's just, they just leave it
00:47:21.880
And when I, when I think about all the autism, autism interventions we've, we've had for our
00:47:27.020
kids so far, I mean, I kind of feel like just helping them deal with life in a,
00:47:32.360
in a more normal way is, is just as effective as like the really expensive therapies we've
00:47:38.220
Interesting point, which is the integration of, and, and sort of destruction of black culture
00:47:46.260
So it can be completely subsumed by the urban monoculture.
00:47:50.660
It's really broken the idea of a unique black American identity.
00:47:55.740
No, speaking of Subway Takes, I'll share this with you too.
00:47:57.920
There's another one where this, this woman is, it's a black woman and she's like, no,
00:48:24.420
Rip the bandaid off, especially for a restaurant.
00:48:30.260
You were saying that the black excellence, the segregation is to get the.
00:48:43.020
Black people spend over a trillion dollars a year.
00:48:45.120
I would love for the government to force us to spend it on our own people.
00:48:51.640
Like it's sort of this, this, this desire to bring back black exceptionalism as well.
00:48:57.920
This like forced integration that, and therefore cultural erasure, homogenization, like, okay.
00:49:04.440
So now like is, is, is black culture better off now?
00:49:09.080
Like, I mean, it's obviously there were horrible things about, about like pre-civil rights, the
00:49:21.680
So like fertility is worse out of, out of wedlock births are worse.
00:49:25.640
And, you know, having two parents really does make a difference in kids' outcomes.
00:49:30.740
Mental health is worse, even if it's not as bad as, as white mental health, even today.
00:49:36.280
The, the, the black, in the 1950s, the black white wealth gap narrowed after world war II.
00:49:41.460
So it, it actually improved a lot in the fifties.
00:49:47.700
And, and, and black household income is 58% of white households, which is unchanged
00:49:54.520
So despite all the improvements, like black families aren't more wealthy.
00:49:58.980
The, the, the black people have it so much better than in 1950.
00:50:01.300
That is wild to hear that the, actually the, the wealth gap has not improved since 1950.
00:50:06.000
It actually, I like, I heard her say all this and I was like, this can't actually be true.
00:50:12.160
So I decided to start Googling it and oh my God, it's so much worse than I thought.
00:50:17.700
If you look at this graph by the Washington Post, which is looking at medium household wealth
00:50:23.300
adjusted for inflation since the 1950s, white wealth has gone up about three X black wealth, median adjusted
00:50:31.980
household for what household is approximately the same as it was in the 1950s.
00:50:37.800
Then look at this graph, which is median net worth adjusted by household.
00:50:45.540
And this time it more than triples for white wealth and black wealth again, goes up by significantly
00:50:54.920
I then thought to myself, well, okay, maybe when in relation to whites, blacks were better
00:51:01.980
And in relation to their relationships or probability of being born out of wedlock, but certainly
00:51:10.520
And so then I decided to go back and say, okay, so what was the actual rates of racial
00:51:15.540
And throughout the 1950s, there were six people killed by lynchings.
00:51:24.160
And so then I was like, okay, well, what if we then move that to all forms of racial violence
00:51:28.960
against black communities over the course of the entire 1950s?
00:51:32.560
You then get 24 victims, which while a tragedy is significantly less than I had been led to
00:51:38.800
believe by popular media, the same AI that gave me that 25 number for the 1950s, when I asked it
00:51:45.460
how many blacks had been killed in the past 10 years due to racial violence, it gave me a number
00:51:51.260
of 50 to 100 anti-black hate crime homicides over the last decade, which, okay, it may be that it is
00:52:00.060
more sensitive, what counts as an anti-black murder today than back then.
00:52:06.460
But I think it at least challenges this preconception we have that hate crime has gone significantly
00:52:13.520
down or racial inequality has gone significantly down over the last 50 years.
00:52:19.620
And what I find funny is that I'm sure some people will take this to be a racist point
00:52:24.200
for us to be saying, actually, racism hasn't gone down as much as is publicly perceived, which
00:52:32.560
Also, to put that in context for you, if you take that higher 25 number there, if I contrast
00:52:39.080
that with the number of kids, and I send my kids to a public school every weekday, the
00:52:44.500
number of kids who have died in school shootings in the past 10 years, that number is 188 children
00:52:51.480
have been killed in school shootings in the last 10 years, so since 2024.
00:52:55.680
No, but like, but like, culturally, all these things are worse.
00:52:59.260
And this is after, you know, really after like a lot of white colonization, to be honest with
00:53:06.140
So also, like, I was looking at that, I was like, oh my god, I've just, I've been lied to
00:53:08.900
about the 50s, like, oh, so much more expensive, except, well, we spent like 15% of our income
00:53:15.660
But I mean, when I talk about the colonization, this is important to know, like within the
00:53:19.880
BLM movement, when they said they were fighting for like black values being normalized, and
00:53:25.520
they listed among them, non-standard marriage structures, like polyamory and everything like
00:53:31.500
When, if you go back to 1950s, black communities were more pro that stuff than white communities
00:53:39.600
When I said that stuff, I was referring to marriage and traditional family structures.
00:53:45.040
Black culture was more pro traditional family structures than white culture was in the 1950s.
00:53:51.320
Right, you know, so they're using the black communities corpse as a skin suit to push values
00:53:59.360
that are antithetical to the historic nature of these communities, I think shows how much
00:54:05.480
it has been sort of slain and puppeted by the very people who deteriorated it in the first
00:54:13.260
It, it, so yeah, I just, again, take what you like from any period of time, from any culture,
00:54:24.120
Like if you want it, take it and, and, and, and don't believe the 1950s propaganda, good
00:54:33.020
Like if people are talking about the fifties being great.
00:54:45.100
It's like, oh, in the 1950s, women cooked for their husbands and they came home to a
00:54:50.200
It's like, yeah, but what did that meal look like?
00:54:53.340
I might not be so excited if I knew I had to eat shrimp inside of some weird jello thing.
00:55:00.940
You know, we're talking about like, yeah, you had a job, but these were large, like a huge,
00:55:07.760
So these are jobs that were, were so rough that remember like Ayla writing about her
00:55:11.620
experience working at a factory before she sort of found her career was so miserable
00:55:17.380
at her factory job that, you know, she, she would like drink herself to, into a stupor
00:55:22.860
every night, you know, it was deeply unhealthy.
00:55:24.560
And now it makes sense why everyone thinks there's this like fantasy of like, oh, you work
00:55:29.120
all day and then you come home to your beautiful wife who gives you a kiss on the cheek and,
00:55:33.660
you know, takes your shoes off and you put on your slippers and you kick up your feet
00:55:37.300
and you, you drink your cocktail as she's making dinner while your kids prattle around.
00:55:44.400
Cause you are miserable in your fricking factory job, which is just so boring.
00:55:49.540
And you're not listening to podcasts while you're working on the factory line at all.
00:55:58.520
And like, thank God you're blitzed because now you need to eat your green jello with infused
00:56:24.180
But if you're like, what was, how bad was 1950s food?
00:56:28.400
The food that in America that we eat on holidays, because it's traditional, it often
00:56:34.800
That's often like honey would have been like the peak of food back then.
00:56:41.040
And I find it to be quite boring for me or like Turkey.
00:56:45.400
And you eat that today and you're like, this is disgusting.
00:56:56.860
At least the British had it right with like beef Wellington on Christmas.
00:57:03.000
You know what I'd love to try is beef Wellington with wasabi instead of foie gras.
00:57:11.420
Lightly, like just a little bit inside the pastry crust.
00:57:14.540
I think it could be pretty good, but it's hard to get good wasabi.
00:57:26.200
That's like even that sort of crumbly wasabi you get at Japanese restaurants.
00:57:32.920
I don't know why you can't get like restaurant counterfeit wasabi.
00:57:50.700
I wouldn't even go with a, how much worse was it?
00:58:00.320
So we're doing one taquito, guacamole and rendang reheated sauteed.
00:58:15.980
Cause I, oh, I can also make some with MSG, sea salt and corn tortillas if you want.
00:58:24.580
Cause I don't, and I heating the oven right now doesn't sound appealing.
00:58:32.660
You're such a diligent worker on behalf of the family, making me food every night, my meal
00:58:42.080
I don't understand how other people eat three effing meals in a day.
00:58:56.620
Because I'm eating constantly in this pregnancy.
00:59:01.220
I mean, you do need to eat with this pregnancy and yeah, but I mean, I'm a guy, right?
00:59:10.620
You must be stoic and minimalist and I don't, I don't know what, whatever it is guys do.
00:59:32.700
It's a star that looks big because it's so close.