In this episode, we respond to a listener's question about whether or not women should be allowed to have kids, and why they don't want to have them. We also talk about the Omegaverse, a fictional fictional world where women can have more rights than in the real world.
00:19:28.320I'd also point out here, the fans of the show where I'm like, oh, this person is definitely gonna end up finding a good wife.
00:19:34.460They are doing really extreme stuff to make this happen for them. Like, one that I know is converting to both
00:19:41.800Catholicism and Mormonism and using both of those religions' dating markets to find, like, a broadly sane wife,
00:19:51.320and I think he'll just stick with whichever religion he finds a wife in. That is commitment in a world where so many of the women have been brainwashed into urban monoculture, and then once they are, there's just very little you can do that doesn't make them an existential risk to you going forwards in your relationship.
00:20:09.320Unless you're able to break them out and help them develop a new framework for relating to purpose in their lives, and this is where The Pragmatist's Guide to Life, I think, would be very important.
00:20:20.320But also, it's just useful because The Pragmatist's Guide to Life is a great for dating book. It's basically Simone and mine's all of our first conversations on our, like, first five dates, and the shortest of our books, and 99 cents.
00:20:33.320And those worlds are sickly and toxic, and you should be trying to break out of it. And so their fear, and what almost needs to be argued to them, is, like, actually, forget about this whole, you know, have kids things. Why do you still think Trump is bad in 2025?
00:20:50.320Well, but also, if you're wrong about something, wouldn't you want to be right? I think part of the fear is, like, maybe getting married or having kids will expose me to information that will make me change my mind about something that currently,
00:21:02.320a position I hold very strongly. If, ultimately, you don't encounter compelling evidence that that is a stance you should shift to, then you won't change your mind. Don't worry about it. Like, you're only going to change your mind and culture if you find that that's genuinely a better way to live and be, and they're better ideas.
00:21:20.320So I would also say, don't worry about that changing. If you do change those stances, it's going to be because they're better stances. But, yeah.
00:21:29.580I would also encourage these young ladies to consider other people who didn't have kids but also became less cool.
00:21:37.140Because you can also consider, like, that childless dog friend.
00:21:40.120No, no, no. This is what you're missing here, Simone. You're missing what they mean by cool. That's what you're missing.
00:21:44.960Is it that they became Trump supporters?
00:21:47.620Yes. What they mean by cool is they broke out of the urban monoculture.
00:22:03.140Similar to the first point, they cite people they know that they think got stupider after having children.
00:22:07.860So let's just take a quick look at the actual, like, what happens when you get pregnant.
00:22:15.500So several studies have documented mild cognitive impairments during pregnancy, particularly in memory, executive functioning, and attention.
00:22:25.000So meta-analysis and studies have found that pregnant women often experience declines in general cognitive functioning, like memory and executive functioning, compared to non-pregnant women.
00:22:34.540But the effects are most pronounced during the third trimester.
00:22:38.120So one meta-analysis reported significant reductions in these areas, with memory performance declining between the first and second trimesters, but stabilizing afterward.
00:22:46.480And the primary thing that's going on, aside from the fact that your body's being taxed by pretty hard work, is that you're experiencing some pretty serious hormone fluctuations, like cortisol and prolactin, that can contribute to these changes.
00:22:58.400And despite these findings, the cognitive declines are generally subtle, and they remain within the normal ranges of functioning.
00:23:06.600So it's not like you're getting lobotomized by having a pregnancy.
00:23:10.280And they're typically just something that, like, the pregnant woman or their spouse notices.
00:23:14.580And then I would point out, so, like, these are things that happen, but, like, if you're, for example, running a marathon, or, like, we talked about in a previous episode, climbing Mount Everest.
00:23:25.100Climbing Mount Everest causes permanent significant mental damage.
00:23:29.520With these pregnancy and cognitive impairments, they pass when it's over.
00:23:35.220And, of course, like, it's almost like being jet-lagged for a while.
00:23:37.880Like, okay, when you're jet-lagged, you're sleep-deprived, you know, because you were partying for a week, or because you were traveling, you're going to have some mild cognitive impairments, and they will pass.
00:23:46.760So this is one of those things that I think I was worried about this.
00:23:49.480Well, the other thing that I've noticed changed, I just think about you and the other mothers of lots of kids that I know, is you're, and we've talked about this in an unreleased podcast episode, but becoming a parent fundamentally changes your brain in the way you relate to reality.
00:24:01.560When I say a parent, I don't mean one kid.
00:24:02.880I mean, like, a real parent, like, three, four kids.
00:24:04.760No, the changes really seem to take place, and we were talking about this on the Discord, it's three-plus kids is when you get the pretty big changes.
00:24:12.440Research has very concretely shown that during pregnancy, even a first pregnancy, the brain experiences reductions in gray matter volume, particularly in areas associated with social cognition, like understanding emotions and intentions of others.
00:24:27.240So that happens the first time around, too.
00:24:31.480Like, these are actual changes, but they're not so much more efficient.
00:24:34.760And they're better equipped, not worse.
00:24:37.140Like, they assume that these changes mean that women are dumber, which fundamentally haven't been shown.
00:24:41.660It's changing the way they socially relate to things, the way they relate to the world.
00:24:47.960Understanding that the, like, the brain is shifting gears and preparing for different types of terrain.
00:24:53.680So, yeah, the biggest change I have noticed in women who have, like, a real number of kids, like three-plus, is that they typically lose almost all of their anxiety and almost all of their borderline, like, personality features.
00:25:30.420Women who don't have that, they're in this state of constant, I'd almost say, mental collapse after especially a certain age, which is why they need all these therapists and everything like that.
00:25:44.800And you're perfectly happy with your life, you know?
00:25:47.880No, way happier than I was before I met you and before I had kids, like, incrementally.
00:25:53.540Like, I was definitely happier after we got together, and then I got even happier after having one kid, and then way happier now after, like, four.
00:26:02.800Well, and it's because it's how your brain is structured.
00:26:05.680But, you know, I remember before we had our first kid reading this one book about specifically what happens to women during breastfeeding.
00:26:14.620And I described it as, like, the bobinification of women.
00:26:19.300Like, it did have some, like, mild kind of drugging effects.
00:26:24.920Like, it made kind of women blissed out and happy.
00:26:27.520But kind of, I mentally equated the effects to, like, to cannabis consumption of just kind of blissing people out and making them comfortable with the fact that they're, like, being a cow.
00:26:41.160As you know, I'm not very into breastfeeding.
00:26:42.740But, yeah, I mean, that's, that, that is the thing.
00:26:53.060So there, there are, there are things that, yeah, maybe could kind of do that.
00:26:56.120But I would also point out, and here's the thing, is there is research indicating that having children actually, especially as someone who's not doing it in a really resource-constrained way, will stave off cognitive decline later in life.
00:27:10.320So women with two to three children tend to have better late-life cognitive performance compared to childless women.
00:27:17.440Having two or more children has been associated with modestly lower dementia risk compared to being childless.
00:27:23.120And this pattern is observed in both men and women, but is particularly notable among women.
00:27:28.280And then research using brain imaging has found that women with two or three children tend to have younger brain age compared to childless women, which correlates with better cognitive performance.
00:27:39.200So that, I think, you know, you have to look at the big picture.
00:27:45.100And while there are certainly, like, short-term.
00:28:39.800And there's research that indicates that women who have children have lower cognitive or lower dementia risk later in life and improve cognitive performance.
00:28:51.060So, again, I think this is really huge, especially the research that found that women who have two to three children tend to have a younger brain age as gauged through brain imaging is super interesting to me.
00:29:03.660One thing that's also interesting to me, which shows the nuance of this argument that I'm not just, like, universally, like, yes, have kids no matter the resources, is that often this research that found that women had lower risk of dementia and better cognitive performance later in life found that that was primarily for women with two to three children.
00:29:22.660And that women who had more than three children were more likely to show signs of, like, either no improvement.
00:29:30.340And I think that's because, and the researchers theorized, that's because these women were in lower socioeconomic stratas of society and more resource constrained.
00:29:39.860So these people were living with stress their entire lives.
00:29:43.100So I was going to go through, I thought you'd find this interesting.
00:29:45.660I collected a number of stats on how pregnancy changes the body and in positive ways.
00:29:50.620We were going to do an episode on just this, but I can quickly run through it.
00:29:53.280We should do a separate episode on just this, by the way.
00:29:55.980A 2017 study involving 1.5 million Swedes found that people with one or more child, regardless of gender, tend to outlive child-free counterparts.
00:30:06.580Adoptive parents saw even larger longevity benefits.
00:30:09.780Adopting one child added three years to your lifespan.
00:30:12.300Adopting two to three children added five.
00:30:14.200Women who had their first child after the age of 25 were more likely to live to the age of 90 compared to those who had their first child earlier.
00:30:20.620Women who had their last child after 33 had twice the odds of living to the top fifth percentile.
00:30:26.560Now, I would assume that this is probably a health correlatory issue here.
00:30:32.400The often cited research when a mother forgets something is real, but it's actually fantastic.
00:30:36.560Research has found that having kids makes women's brains bigger in certain areas, particularly those related to motivation, reward, and emotional processing and reason and judgment.
00:30:44.980A pretty good compensation for occasionally leaving the keys in the fridge.
00:30:49.820Studies have shown increased acute pain tolerance during pregnancy in both animals and humans.
00:30:55.100And a first-of-its-kind study has revealed that the architecture of women's brains changes strikidly during their first pregnancy in ways that last for at least two years.
00:31:04.920In particular, gray matter shrinks in areas involved responding to social signals.
00:31:09.640We found most pregnancy-related gray matter volume reductions persisted six years after partition, but you get benefits in other areas, particularly emotional processing, multitasking, and efficiency, and long-term cognitive benefits.
00:31:24.640One study suggests that parenting multiple children over a lifespan, they'd benefit brain health, particularly in later life.
00:31:31.800I think that if there were a vitamin or a supplement or a pill that you could market to people that said, this will increase your acute pain tolerance and also make you a little bit less concerned about social stuff as a woman, a single child as a woman would be like, what?
00:31:51.600Basically, what we're actually seeing here is a transformation, and we've talked about this in another episode, I don't know if it'll go live before this one, of a female's brain, because this happens to men as well.
00:32:01.580Like, when you get over three kids, your brain seems to significantly transform in how you're relating to things.
00:32:05.960And it would have made sense biologically that this transformation would make sense, would be selected for, which is women stop caring about what other people think of them as much.
00:32:33.340And as we know now, all those things that were like, oh, a woman is less satisfied if she's married, but you need the husband out of the room for this to be recorded.
00:32:41.520Well, it turned out that what that was asking is not like a husband had left the room.
00:32:59.840And I think it's important for us to point out that, yes, pregnancy can increase the risk of certain health conditions, like hypertension, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia.
00:33:07.680But it also prevents certain health conditions, a lot.
00:33:11.220For example, I have pretty bad, well, I came into my pregnancies, my childbearing years, having pretty severe osteoporosis.
00:33:19.400And this is a result of having an eating disorder in my youth.
00:33:23.180And this is a common thing for young women who had eating disorders and lived for a long time with low birth rate or had hypothalamic amenorrhea.
00:33:30.160I took Fosamax to attempt to ameliorate this and took regular DEXA scans to check my bone density in response to the Fosamax dosage.
00:33:39.960Didn't really do a whole lot of good, to be honest with you.
00:33:42.360Plus, it has a lot of risks associated with, like, you have to tell your dentist even when you get, you know, dental cleaning and you're on Fosamax.
00:33:48.800So I had to stop taking it because you're not supposed to take it while you're pregnant because typically this is for, like, very old women who have osteoporosis, not women who are going through pregnancies.
00:33:59.940Was really worried about things like pregnancy and breastfeeding because these things are known to leach calcium from your bones.
00:34:06.500Well, it looks like the body kind of has some, you know, measures to make up for that.
00:34:10.940So, though, yes, it can leach calcium from your bones and a lot of other things, pregnancy can leach a lot from your body, it seems to also sort of reopen your body to restoring itself much more effectively.
00:34:23.640Kind of like bringing back adolescence.
00:34:28.080In fact, most of the areas in which I had severe osteoporosis in my lumbar spine around my hips has now changed to just osteopenia, which is a much like it's not great bone density, but it is actively improved.
00:34:40.100And I am no longer in super dire straits in several parts of my body, which is huge.
00:34:46.760So, like, again, like, to Malcolm's point, pregnancy can also help.
00:35:01.780They're, like, she seems like a sweet person, honestly.
00:35:04.560The fundy bloggers love to rag on them.
00:35:06.340But anyway, it appears that now she doesn't appear to be drawing this connection, but she's been having kids pretty much constantly for, like, the past nine years or something like that.
00:35:16.400And before this, she had pretty severe multiple MS, I want to say, or one of those.
00:35:22.620I'll change it in post if it's something else.
00:35:24.280But it's a neurodegenerative disease that we know from research pregnancy stops.
00:35:29.560And so, one of the fears that some of the people who watch her have is if she stops having kids, she's going to immediately die.
00:35:52.580And so, it's just, like, I think the research says, for, like, in terms of just aging people, I think a lot of young women are really concerned about advanced or premature aging.
00:36:01.100So, and it is true that several studies suggest pregnancy can accelerate biological aging.
00:36:05.320For example, markers of cellular aging, such as telomere length and pregnancies may be, sorry, such as telomere length and epigenetic shocks indicate women who experience multiple pregnancies could age biologically faster.
00:36:18.500But this effect has been observed mostly in young, high-fertility women and is linked to the physical stress of pregnancy.
00:36:25.880And a lot of these effects also seem to sometimes reverse or recover after pregnancy, like we've been discussing.
00:36:30.560But I just want to give some perspective to this because, basically, what we're looking at is a stressful event having an effect on the body.
00:36:37.720Oh, like, wow, being physically demanding on your body has effects.
00:36:41.580But keep in mind, so, for comparison, alcohol, all right?
00:36:45.860Most young people like to drink a little.
00:36:48.840Drinking more than 100 grams of alcohol per week, which is about seven drinks, is also linked to shorter life expectancy and increased risks of cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke and heart failure.
00:36:58.580Even one drink per day could slightly reduce your lifespan compared to a complete abstinence.
00:37:13.900Well, keep in mind, chronic jet lag from frequent time zone changes can disrupt circadian rhythms, which are crucial for regulating biological processes.
00:37:22.760And the disruption can be associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and even cancer over time.
00:37:31.100Plus, really, really frequent flyers, even, like, especially airline pilots, also accumulate radiation levels comparable to those who work at nuclear power plants, which has been linked to, obviously, like, severe cancers like melanoma and breast cancer and flight crews.
00:37:46.860I'm just saying, like, a lot of the parentless life isn't without its perils as well.
00:37:52.320Drinking and traveling and having fun can also accelerate aging.
00:37:56.360But we also know, as I said, that the people without kids die earlier.
00:38:00.900But I point out here, and I think that this is a really big point, which is that you, and it's one that you made really well there, which is that everything you decide to do is a trade-off in terms of your life.
00:38:56.720Even if it turned out that every kid you had lowered your lifespan by two years, you're trading those two years for somebody else's 90 years.
00:39:06.000Ooh, there's also the point, and this is something that we have spoken with each other a lot in the past.
00:39:12.640But in terms of, like, how to make a life feel long versus feel short, and a monotonous uniform life where not a whole lot changes.
00:39:21.140Like, you kind of do the same thing every year.
00:39:22.520Like, you take a trip and you work and you take, you know, whatever.
00:39:24.920Where it's all just kind of the fun same thing that doesn't change a whole lot can just suddenly, like, collapse and seem like it just was over in a second.
00:39:32.600Yeah, but these people, they don't even want to live that long.
00:39:34.380I mean, like, this is the other thing, right?
00:39:35.960Like, a lot of these people plan to, like, off themselves when they reach a certain age.
00:39:39.920Like, who actually wants to be 90 anyway?
00:39:46.440And if it gives me cancer when I'm 80, I don't care who the hell wants to be 90 anyway.
00:39:51.760So with a heidi-lidi-lidi and a heidi-lidi-lidi...
00:39:54.960Well, but there is a pretty significant group of people who don't want to die and who want to be young forever.
00:40:00.260My argument, though, is that if you want to feel like you had a really, really long life, a really big way to do that is to have lots of really, you know, striking changes in your life.
00:40:11.600And nothing makes every day feel new, like being with a person who's constantly growing and changing and evolving and getting older.
00:40:17.960It just makes it feel like one year was multiple lifetimes because of just all the new things that are happening and developing.
00:40:24.600So let's get back, though, to the grievances and concerns.
00:40:27.760And another one, which I don't think you can answer to at all, but I can, is that pregnancy is scary and painful.
00:40:34.340And I would argue that it is only scary and painful if you make it so.
00:40:38.900Anything can be made scary and painful.
00:41:23.480That was what hurt the very most in the entire process of getting and recovering from a C-section was, oh, I twisted my neck a little bit trying to see a surgery, to see the gore.
00:41:34.500So I think that that's another really important point, is that in a world of modern medicine, it doesn't really hurt that much.
00:41:41.580If you are afraid of pain, you can just get the epidural.
00:41:48.640Okay, so another big concern is if they have kids, they won't be able to devote enough time to their kids because they're focused on their career and they feel like it's not fair to their children.
00:41:58.000They comment – the comment was paired with them saying they don't really value having kids that much and that they give up their career, which was a career-advancing science they valued so much.
00:42:12.340Basically, the concern is that they really, really value their careers and they're not going to give them up to raise kids, but they feel guilty that the kids are not going to get what they need because they're so busy focused on their careers.
00:42:22.560So this needs to be disintermediated as a question?
00:42:25.840And specifically the point that they were making, which is a logical point, which is to say that I do more for the human race.
00:42:32.060I do more net good through promoting science or through moving science forwards in my profession than I would do having kids.
00:42:41.120And the core argument against that – and if you want to be logical about this, be like, yes, and how many people who have scientific competency are still having kids?
00:42:51.400If you are one of those rare, rare humans that shows a natural talent for the sciences, that category of humans is the category that is disappearing fastest.
00:43:02.460And anyone who is interested in participating in a pronatalist family or a lifestyle could end up having a huge impact on the future of civilization.
00:43:11.540If you have, as I said, eight kids and they have eight kids and they do that for 11 generations, that's more descendants than there are humans on Earth today.
00:43:17.880Yeah, just to like re-more this in reality, so many people that we know and I'm sure that you can find in your own life have chosen their career paths or found what is within the bounds of their reach as a person based on the people they grew up around.
00:43:34.600And just being a career-oriented woman, a marine biologist, a nuclear scientist, whatever it is that you care about that's your career, just exposing your kids to that is increasing the odds that people in the workforce will end up doing that as well.
00:43:49.500And you value that, including your kids' friends.
00:43:51.780Like just having, oh, well, my friend's mom worked for the CIA, I could do that too.
00:43:55.660And this is shown in studies kind of obliquely.
00:43:58.720Like there's some research that has shown that children of parents who used government assistance were way more likely themselves to use government assistance just because they kind of know.
00:44:08.880Yeah, like because they know how to navigate that system.
00:44:15.140You can do the same in the opposite direction of like, oh, you can show people how to have successful careers in an area, a domain that you think should be given more attention, and you can create that.
00:44:27.100But more importantly, I want to point out that let's say that the big concern is, oh, these kids aren't getting the helicopter parenting, the high-touch parenting that they deserve.
00:44:35.540Okay, that's not actually necessarily so good for kids.
00:44:39.380And also, it can be very helpful for a mother to have a career.
00:44:42.600So, daughters of working mothers tend to pursue higher education, are more likely to hold supervisory roles in their careers, and earn higher income compared to daughters with stay-at-home mothers.
00:44:53.200Also, sons of working mothers are more likely to contribute to household chores and childcare, promoting gender equity in future households.
00:45:02.500And working mothers often serve as role models for achievement and independence, like I was saying, which can help children, especially daughters, aspire to professional careers and success.
00:45:11.620So, it's, even if you didn't necessarily have a super engaging career as a mother, it might be worth it to kind of take one on just to increase outcomes for your daughter or to show your sons how to be really supportive to any, you know, women that they marry in their lives.
00:45:30.820Like, if you care about feminism, if you care about female achievement in the workplace, you shouldn't give up your career.
00:45:37.740So, let's see what are the other complaints.
00:45:41.020But I think this one here is really about, if somebody's in this mindset, you're likely just not going to be able to convince them.
00:45:47.360Like, if they're in this mindset, they can either accept reality that certain traits are heredible, right, or not.
00:45:53.320This, like, religion of blank slate-ism, I don't pass anything on to the next generation, it's very difficult to convince them of this stuff.
00:46:02.220But I would, you know, if I was talking to someone about this, and I was like, it's so weird that, like, you identify as a scientist, yet you deny, like, scientific reality.
00:46:11.340So, it's clear you're not a scientist.
00:46:15.760You're, like, a nun of this weird religion and not actually promoting scientific ideology.
00:46:21.660If what you cared about was that, for example, female scientists exist in the future, if it turns out that we have created a world where being a scientist, it's completely incompatible with being a mother, then we are not going to get people who are both scientists and mothers in the future.
00:46:49.380A big issue is they feel like they're not even ready to start thinking about it.
00:46:53.660But I think that's just a sign of, like, not mentally having their life together.
00:46:57.480You know, there are many things that people are not ready to start thinking about, but they should think about their inherent values, their retirement, their finances, their personal health.
00:47:06.760And, yes, they should think about kids.
00:47:08.140But I think this is just, like, part of a list of things that people are, like, very avoidant in thinking about.
00:47:13.180And kids are just one of those things.
00:47:14.900You know, like, finances are another thing.
00:48:25.480Yeah, I mean, I don't know what to tell you, but, like, there's the ticking clock there, buddy.
00:48:29.360Yeah, like, this is a train hurtling straight toward you, and you're going to have to deal with this and many other things that aren't necessarily easy to navigate.
00:48:38.340Another big concern is that they weren't necessarily thrilled with how their parents parented them, and they fear that they will not be good parents.
00:48:45.740My most common thought and response to this is, if you're worried about being a good parent, like, if you're like, oh, well, my kids get something, you know, good enough,
00:48:54.240you're one of the few that actually is going to make sure they get good enough.
00:48:57.580The really bad parents are typically like, I'm the best parent, I'm a wonderful mother, I'm perfect, or they're not thinking about it at all.
00:49:06.260And if you're worried about being a good parent, you probably are going to do a pretty good job.
00:49:09.960Oh, God, that's a big red flag for me, because I'm the greatest and best parent ever born.
00:49:24.800You are this beautiful, warm force in their lives, and I think you're totally just the same.
00:49:30.200I don't know, they say they love mommy more whenever they're the only one around.
00:49:33.680No, they just play, they play us off each other.
00:49:35.480It's always, well, daddy said, I'm going to ask daddy.
00:49:38.660But, you know, that's because they're doing their job.
00:49:41.080You know, you've got to play both sides.
00:49:42.880And then there's, of course, the classic, life is just suffering.
00:49:48.340But, again, and we've had, you can watch all our episodes on antenatalism, whatever, but this is just not true.
00:49:55.500Surveys suggest that the majority of people report being relatively happy.
00:50:00.180For instance, a study in the U.S. found that about 31% of adults describe themselves as very happy, 57% as pretty happy, and only 12% as not happy at all.
00:50:12.340Also, research shows that happiness can coexist with suffering when individuals find meaning or purpose in their struggles.
00:50:18.780This aligns with the idea that enduring challenges can foster a deeper sense of fulfillment.
00:50:23.260And so I would also say that, especially if you're raising your children with a strong culture, a good religion, you know.
00:50:29.580No, but also, I'd ask them, like, first, you know, if somebody poses BS, it's like, why?
00:50:44.320Why are, if you really believe this, these people don't really believe this, first of all.
00:50:49.300They are taking, like, a nihilistic, edgy philosophy where, because within the urban monoculture, you achieve social status through self-flagellation and nihilism.
00:50:58.520You know, it's hard to attack someone, it's hard to make fun of somebody who's being nihilistic, right?
00:51:05.020Like, it's, like, dark and edgy, you know.
00:51:07.300This is the female version of being that, like, male alpha broodlord who comes out dressed in, like, the trench coat and the, you know.
00:52:53.000I mean, like, even I, as, as a kid was afraid of going on, like, antidepressants.
00:52:57.180And I never ultimately did because I was like, well, but if I don't have, like, my severe OCD tendencies, who am I even, you know, like, I don't want to not be that, even if it was damaging to me because I was starving myself to death at the time, right?
00:53:11.540So I see that fear and I understand it, but it's also illogical.
00:53:15.240And no matter what, you are going to change in life.
00:53:17.220You're not going to be the person you are now.
00:53:20.500Two, I think there's, there's this fear specifically of pregnancy, like from a sort of medical standpoint, like it will take away my youth.
00:53:31.480I think that pregnancy should be seen more as like choosing to run a marathon, like choosing to become a marathon runner and not so much as like, like undergoing gender transition.
00:53:44.380I think that, like, that's kind of how people look at it.
00:53:46.980Like, oh, there's surgeries and, and, you know, hormone changes.
00:53:51.300And it's, you know, like, it's going to change me forever in, in like a bad way.
00:55:21.020So the pregnancy stuff, the medical concerns, that's basically just myths that need to be busted.
00:55:25.800The identity changes, like, like grow a pair of balls and figure out that like, that's a good thing.
00:55:31.280And then in terms of the career stuff, you don't have to give up your career.
00:55:36.320It's good for your kids to be ambitious and a woman and to have a career and then to also raise kids.
00:55:44.020And you will not be the first person to make it work with childcare.
00:55:48.900It's not going to be easy, but nothing in life is, you know?
00:55:52.660And in the end, you either get a career that was, you know, ambitious and great and wonderful and a retirement that feels empty and kind of meaningless.
00:56:02.120As you discover that, you know, once you retire and leave the office, no one cares and no one follows up with you and you don't have anything else in your life, aside from some hobbies, which kind of get stale quickly.
00:56:11.480Or you have a successful career and then, you know, retirement or next state, like post-work stage of your life, where you have this amazing family that you get to help support and watch grow and flourish and mentor.
00:56:26.000You can probably live longer because of it.
00:56:27.380So, I think that the two answers to this question I'd have fall in two buckets.
00:56:34.140Bucket number one is, like, the real thing that's most likely to convince them.
00:56:38.080The real thing that's most likely to convince them is for you to read or listen to The Pragmatist Guide to Life.
00:56:42.660Go through the logical structures there and use these on your early dates to build sort of a logical structure for your interactions for their – so that they can begin to build, like, a framework for how they're relating to reality.
00:56:55.160And then once they have a solid framework, you can begin to use logical arguments on them instead of these, like, weaker arguments.
00:57:04.800But then the secondary thing is, is I don't even know, like, if this conversation frame is worth having if a person isn't going to grab onto that.
00:57:16.820Like, the reality of this generation is a lot of people are just going to be washed out of the gene pool.
00:57:22.160And they're just – a lot of men who try and did their best are going to be washed out of the gene pool who may have, like, sanity and everything.
00:58:41.500I think that we as a society have been, like, brainwashed into wanting friends by, like, the power of friendship in media and everything like that.
00:58:48.600That's – that's the nefarious Jewish stuff going on here, right?
00:59:23.540By the way, if you're confused about what we're talking about here, what we argue in that episode is that Jewish culture is much more oriented around having large friend networks than traditional American Christian culture.
00:59:33.860One of the weird follow-ups from that episode that I've been thinking a lot about is when a Christian invites me to a religious celebration like Christmas or something versus when a Jew does it.
00:59:46.940When a Jew does it, my assumption is that they want to talk to me, like that they find me –
00:59:53.340Yeah, it'll be an engaging conversation.
01:01:00.560Like, yeah, the extrovert's vision of what introverts do on holidays is like sit at home, like crying into a bowl of microwave Campbell soup.
01:01:12.320And, like, what's actually happening is they're, like, at home binging on anime and video games.
01:01:37.140You told me about how you used to, on Christmas in D.C. when you were alone and not with your family, go and look at all of the families through the windows.
01:01:45.540If someone, like, saw me walking, I would, like, walk around the really nice neighborhoods in D.C. on Thanksgiving, like, looking into the windows, seeing all the happy families.
01:01:54.400And I would just sit there and be so happy.
01:02:01.240And then I would go home and, like, make my own little dinner in my own little way all by myself and be so happy because it was so quiet on campus.
01:02:14.760But I think introverts, unite, find that woman that you will never need to talk to anyone else again because you will be talking to her multiplicatively throughout your life.
01:02:26.740Keep in mind, not just all the little quirks about her that you are compromising on.
01:02:33.280Your kids are going to have those, too.
01:03:14.900So, Toasty shows me his bag of rocks at the end of the evening, our dear Torsten, nominative determinism here, and he has a name for all of them, and he's showing me, and he's like, this is my, of course, he's the pizza rock.
01:03:29.500You know the pizza rock, right, that he and Titan, but it's the pizza rock.
01:03:33.600I'm like, oh, the pizza rock, and this is the black and white rock.
01:03:37.760Oh, the black and white rock, and this is the rolling bowling rock.
01:03:43.420He has just names for all of them, and this is a spiky rock.