Men Give Up On Women & Start Families On Their Own： The Internet Gets Big Mad
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Summary
Ben Orenstein's response to Romy Holland's tweet about not wanting to have kids sparked a firestorm of criticism. What's the deal with men who want kids but can't seem to find a partner who wants to have them too? And what does that have to do with monogamy? Plus, we talk about polyamory and why it's a bad idea.
Transcript
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I'm excited to be with you today because we're seeing a really good
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trend, but also it's complicated in that men are going baby crazy.
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They're getting baby fever, but now everyone hates them for it.
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And this kind of exploded across X earlier this week when poor, poor
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Ben Orenstein shared his sentiment in response to Romy Holland tweeting.
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I know two guys who are considering having kids be a surrogate because
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they badly want children, but haven't been able to find partners to do it with.
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They're both extremely successful and love kids.
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I don't know what's going on with dating, but I don't think it's just men
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being anti-commitment and women being too picky to which Ben responded.
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I'm giving myself about another year before searching for a partner,
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I'm still hopeful it won't be necessary, but in the end,
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I can't allow myself to miss out on raising children.
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Even having gone this long without them is agony.
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So this is the tweet that sparked the storm, which inherently-
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If I didn't have kids at this stage of my life,
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I would be living in existential agony every day.
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And that's, isn't that what women are complaining about?
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Like, I just wish I could find a man who wants to have kids.
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And here's a man who's saying that not having kids is agony.
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In a world of demographic collapse and people not having kids-
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I think I hear a lot more men who want kids struggling to find a woman who is willing to
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Well, that's what shows up in the data, for sure.
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It's not what shows up in women's complaints when they're dating.
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But in the data, when you look at polling, as we've covered extensively,
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it's men who report wanting to get married and have kids and women don't.
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And certainly also culturally, women talk about the mental load and how women fare better
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after divorces, whereas men fare worse and how marriage is just a scam for women.
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But still, I just feel like in general, it's great that men want to have kids, but
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So while a lot of people initially responded to his post saying, oh, I hope you find your
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Then the criticism came in, which is what X is great for.
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It's not as good since Elon took over because all the super liberal people went to blue sky
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and stopped, you know, all the hate went there, which is a little annoying.
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Yeah, we joked that they, because Trump trapped them in a crystal and that's blue sky.
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Nobody can hear them banging on the walls of the crystal dimension.
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So, you know, a lot of people were supportive, but then some details came out that people found
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So, one of the biggest problems that came out initially was that, in fairness, Ben is
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only, in his words, kind of committed to monogamy.
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Someone had posted, before I send your profile to a friend, and just based on the water you
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seem to be swimming in, I have to ask, are you looking for a monogamous relationship?
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Gonna add a section about this to my doc shortly.
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I guess he probably has a marriage bounty, I haven't found the doc yet.
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And then, Jesse Gannett weighed in, kind of, I gotta be blunt, as a pregnant lady who has
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Adults that don't grasp that family formation comes before keeping intimacy options open,
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To which Ben responded, strong partnerships and monogamy are not the same, and people
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Like, but I'd also point out here, this is one of these, you know, poly things that they
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always are like, and usually they're like, you can be just as committed to your partner
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If you're having to split your commitment, especially if you have kids with someone, between
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multiple families, you're not actually dedicated to that person.
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It is that once you, and this is the thing, I don't think that this should be disqualifying
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for him, because I've seen it over and over and over again.
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When people who are sort of committed to polyamory, or even quite committed to polyamory, have
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children, that commitment evaporates really quickly, especially for guys.
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Yeah, because they're, as we've covered extensively, their testosterone plummets.
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This was recently attested to, I think, a new research as well.
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It showed just how much testosterone plummets after men have kids.
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And yeah, then they just have less of a desire to go out and have, you know, a lot of additional
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I would also, though, I would say that there is a little bit of criticism that I think is
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Because if you really do want to prioritize having kids, and most women aren't really
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comfortable having kids outside of a monogamous marriage, you might need to let that go for
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a little bit and maybe renegotiate later in your marriage.
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When you got married to me, this was something we discussed.
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I think you certainly, like Ben, going into the concept of marriage, did not intend to be
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In fact, for a while before we got married, you were like, oh, Simone will be my side piece
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That was like, I really think it was something you were entertaining mentally, because I think
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it's just something that men at that age will entertain.
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But then when we got serious, and when we got committed, I was like, listen, like, I'm
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not comfortable with an open relationship or a monogamous relationship.
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And then it was after I felt more secure in myself and in our relationship, there was
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Like, I'm confident enough in myself that I don't think that you're having a good relationship.
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But by that time, I was like, I don't see the point anymore.
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But the thing is, is that you knew what your priorities were.
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Your priority was having a family and having kids.
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Yeah, when we got married, I still wanted to sleep with other people.
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But you didn't, because you had something you wanted more.
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Here's him saying, I don't, I'm not willing to concede on that, which is a signal that
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he isn't as committed as he should be if he actually, if, if having, if not having kids
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But I should, other than the audience, basically, you knew that I wanted to sleep with other
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But then one day you come to me and you're like, you know what?
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And if you, if you, if that's still something that would make you happy, you can do that
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And I was like, well, I don't really want to do it anymore.
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But still, still, I think, again, you got to put your money where your mouth is.
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Still, though, I want to point out, it wasn't just-
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So you've got people like me who are like not that dedicated to the polyamorous lifestyle,
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but I want to talk because, you know, we've had them on the show and it's a pretty
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documented change of theirs, you know, like Joffrey Miller and what's her face?
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And they have things that they have like written on like the philosophy of like polyamory,
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Like if you go back to some of their earlier works, like this is, they, they weren't just
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And now they are, I think quietly and eventually likely publicly moving towards a much more
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I mean, like these things ebb and flow and that's how you should treat it.
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But anyway, there, there were plenty of people who still nevertheless were supportive.
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Captain Weak Hands said, my baby sister was born via surrogacy and we had a lasting close
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relationship, not only with the surrogate, but our family as well.
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I've yet to hear from a surrogacy critic with any lived experience.
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And then Ilaria DeMar said, my neighbor loved being a surrogate.
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I'm pretty conservative, but don't see how surrogacy is any different than infant adoption.
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The surrogate is often using someone else's eggs, wants what's wrong with gamete donation.
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Humans have been raising a non-biological offspring for a very long time.
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But then the critics came in again, Ben, a different Ben said, dude is almost ready to
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give up on his wife search and buy a baby, but he's looking for a monogamous relationship
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Being a dad is the greatest thing, but buying a baby is dark.
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Earn the love of a good woman and turn that love into kids.
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And then most, so Ben was a male critic here, but most of the critics here were actually women,
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Chimed in to say another reason why I changed my position on surrogacy.
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These people do not care about the welfare of the babies or mothers.
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I have seen nothing that suggests that he feels that way.
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Because he's saying not having kids as agony for him.
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Emma O'Connor chimes in to say, I changed my position as well.
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We're like surrogacy, surrogacy, surrogacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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However, I am very confused when it's like, but you know that there are not enough good
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Like when I was taking every guy who I thought was like mentally sane and stable and had a
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good job and would be a great dad, I would bet there are probably double the amount of
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them as there are women that would match them or at least a third.
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And we're not even in China, you know, it's like a literally fewer women.
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And then the few that exist is as to see our episode on like dating in China falling apart.
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What, what, what I, I don't have quotes from because I just didn't want to even delve into
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this, but like, there are also little sub conversations within this whole storm about
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women being like, you know, and women should have the right to abort and all this.
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And so like women are complaining about this man, quote unquote, buying a baby, but then
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they're also being like, and I have the right to kill babies whenever I want.
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And I'm just like, ah, like, I don't, you're casting judgment in a weird way.
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Another woman, Victoria wrote the problem, the problem people have is that these babies
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are created with the purpose of being adopted for money, not the adoption itself.
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So people are really uncomfortable with the idea of surrogacy and men paying for babies.
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But again, so here's, here's where men are right now.
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They're being put in this position where there aren't women who are willing to embark on a
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relationship with them, especially if they're not willing to do exactly the type of relationship
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And then when they just choose to then find a way to put money to the problem and solve
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it, you know, pay someone to help them make this happen, then they get chided for that
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Then Eric weighed in to say donating eggs is dangerous for the woman donating the donor and
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The egg removal procedure can cause ovarian scarring and leave the egg donor infertile.
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Surrogate pregnancies have three times the complication rate and can cause
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And this is something that I, as a man who would be considered considering surrogacy would
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I didn't, I didn't know this, but I asked both grok and perplexity if gestational surrogacy
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pregnancies have higher rates of complications.
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And if there's a reporting bias at play, cause I imagine that there would be, um, and long,
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Yeah, actually multiple large studies and recent meta-analyses that, that would control for
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these things indicate that gestational carriers experience substantially like three X an increase.
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Your body is designed to hold your children, right?
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That, that, that, that, the primary theory is that this is not your genetic material and
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therefore, yeah, there, there's going to be problems.
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And studies looked at large numbers of pregnancies.
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So there was one Canadian study that reviewed over 863,000 births and they found that gestational
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surrogates have a 7.8% rate of severe maternal complications.
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It's like one out of 10, you as a surrogate are going to have a severe complication.
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I understand that people are like, that's pretty serious.
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That's pretty big, but that's one out of 10 for, you know, and then nine out of 10 bring
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a healthy baby into this world that lives an entire life, right?
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Like the, the, the denying someone of life is a big, big thing to do.
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And to say that, well, the woman risked her health so that you can, of course, that's
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a, that is a very sane trade-off one person's health for another person's life.
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That's actually, it's, so that's a really good point because another, another person was
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pointing out that like their issue with this was the adoption part.
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So Katie Faust wrote the adults intended parents, the surrogate, and if applicable,
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the sperm and egg sellers are all often very happy with the surrogacy arrangements, but
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surrogacy always asks children to sacrifice someone they need, deserve, and have the right
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to, to which this, this basically this person called Mars, the style oracle said, part of
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my calling has always been talking about my experience as an adoptee at all costs.
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Many people have no idea what the average adoptee slash surrogate child experiences, especially
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when separated from the mother, especially when separated at birth, it can leave an insane
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They proceeded to go into this whole essay on how miserable they were.
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And I just want to show you like how, how like messed up this person is, but even they
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But they wrote, even growing up with an objectively good childhood, my attachment issues were insane.
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Seven years of therapy of several modalities were able to get me to the point where my
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boyfriend at the time could go out for the night and I wouldn't be crying and calling
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him 60 times, begging him to come back because I couldn't physically get out of the fetal position
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This is her, this is the therapy that's causing this nonsense.
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I, I, as I said, like of all of the things that happened to me in my childhood, the least
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And yet there are entire communities of people who are, who will have these things like, oh,
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I had to leave my family and I felt, oh, it was so terrible.
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And I was like, there's, there's a trauma support group for everything.
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There's a trauma support group for the people who discover siblings of, you know, IVF donors
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And they're like, oh, now I'm traumatized because I'm attracted to my brother.
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It really messes with me because you get people saying this and I think it's a disgusting
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When people say a child deserves two parents, I'm like, it would be great if children got
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But there are very few people on this planet who would say, I'd rather not live.
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Well, and this person wrote, they said, do I think it would be better for me to not exist
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Well, no, I think it's fine that I'm alive still, but they're, they're glad they exist.
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And they just, they're just trying to raise awareness about this.
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This isn't, because I get this within conservative communities all the time and people act like
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they're saying something that is sane and good when they are not, they are saying something
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They are saying that certain humans should have a life denied to them if they can't live
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life within this person's preferred parameters.
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And you go out there and you think you look cool saying this.
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Well, and if we look at the research, if we look at the, you've made your life is equivalent
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And these two things are not equivalent in value at all.
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So in, in terms of men being like, listen, I'm just going to make Tao be a single father.
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And we're talking adoptees, you know, do, do have higher rates of mental health problems,
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but there's a lot of reasons why that's the case.
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You know, like the people who give children up for adoption often have a lot of issues.
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You know, maybe their mothers were on drugs or, or, you know, had alcohol problems and
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also all sorts of other things really complicated, but yeah, absolutely.
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Adoptees have higher rates of mental health problems compared to non-adopted children.
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However, children conceived via donated gametes are not equivalent to adoptees for mental health
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They basically resemble children conceived Nash naturally.
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So all these people who are trying to equate this, this guy's decision to have a child
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There is not a big negative effect for single parents.
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So obviously the highest outcomes with greatest stability come from intact marriages and that
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it really isn't, it helps a lot to have two parents.
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There's no systematic difference when it's lesbian mothers, once they control for a lot
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of factors, same for, same for gay fathers, though, the data shows that the outcomes are
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And then single fathers are better than single mothers, but they are below intact marriages.
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But here's the thing is that Ben, the original Ben of the, of this thread in the storm wants
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And he says that even if he does take this path of having a child via gestational surrogacy,
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he is going to hopefully find a life partner eventually and raise the child with them.
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In the interim, he plans on having a lot of help.
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He wants to have just even for starters, a full-time live-in nanny, which of course made
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everyone freak out even more because he doesn't plan on raising the child all by himself.
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But then of course, if he said he was going to raise a child all by himself within a nanny,
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people would be like, the child needs more support than that.
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And I think this is the thing is we have a decent number of MGTOW people in this, in this
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Many, many of whom have, we know for a fact had the kids on their own.
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Many of whom are planning to have kids on their own and don't wait for approval from
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Like no matter what you do, you are going to be defenestrated.
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And this whole Twitter storm around Ben absolutely shows that.
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We've had fans of the show reach out to us about their journey on this.
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And we're going to go over one because he goes over all the finances of doing it and
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In fact, let's, let's just dive into that because I think he created a really cool guide.
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So one, we have obviously like the, the, the coolest audience ever.
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And one of our audience members, he goes by Revy.
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He's a MGTOW and he created after going through the process himself, he now has a newborn or
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maybe a little bit older than that now who he had through surrogacy.
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We're going to, he created a surrogacy guide, a Google doc, which we will share.
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I'll, I'll put it in the description of this video and on the sub-second Patreon, it is
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called a Revy's surrogacy guide for single men.
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I think he plans on having more kids and he goes over the whole process of how to do it.
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And actually affordably, this is, we've, we've done a lot of looking into surrogacy.
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We have friends who are trying to go through the surrogacy process.
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This is the best guide that I have seen because we've also like really, we've had friends
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who've struggled desperately, spent tens of thousands of dollars just in their search
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for a surrogate in the U S and Revy's just nailed it.
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And now we're sharing Revy's guide with our friends personally.
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No, we need to make this a thing in the community.
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So he, he, he writes at the very beginning, my kid is born.
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I'm planning to have at least two more like good for you, Revy.
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I think, you know, as a single dad, three kids, it's going to get harder, you know,
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if you're a single dad, but if you space it out, the kids can help and they'll appreciate
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The thing is, is I think in previous generations, if you, as a single dad told your kid, look,
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I'm sorry, I just couldn't find a woman sane enough to be your mom.
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A lot of kids would be like, well, then you didn't try hard enough or, you know, whatever.
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I think a lot of boys growing up in today's environment, you know, when they get to middle
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school and they get to high school, they're like, dad, I hear you like.
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Well, and we have, we've, we've, yeah, we've plenty of, of parents of, of teen kids, men
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and, and women, young men and women who are both like, I can't be bothered to date.
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So I appreciate that Revy starts off his guy, just saying, listen, for single men that don't
00:21:29.660
want kids, they don't want kids, but for the ones that do want kids, there's a way to do
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it without the, any of the downsides of dating slash marriage and no risk of having kids taken
00:21:41.080
So he goes through the process and he, he says, assuming you don't want international
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$65,000 for the whole process as of 2025, that is a fraction of what we've seen through,
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like we'll say mainstream leading American surrogacy agencies, by the way, which are at
00:22:03.740
So Revy's already saving a lot of money for people.
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He says, add an extra 10,000 for travel expenses, some optional legal expenses, some optional medical
00:22:15.340
If anyone asks, you just took a one week vacation followed by a one month vacation a
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That is incredible because he's also apparently then doing this kind of on the down low.
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As we can see from this Twitter storm with Ben, like Ben got defenestrated.
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Revy didn't, you know, he's just quietly building his family and maybe kind of what's going on
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with male single fatherhood is it's a bad toupee problem.
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So what happened most recently in terms of public discourse about surrogacy was Wired
00:22:47.580
released to this article that just really threw surrogacy under the bus as, as a, a thing
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to do because it was about this really prominent venture capitalist named Cindy Bai in Silicon
00:23:02.980
Valley, who hired two surrogates to carry children for her.
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And sadly, she lost one of, one of her babies during the pregnancy.
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One of her surrogates experienced a stillbirth at 29 weeks.
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And Cindy just went after this woman publicly online legally is just trying to destroy her.
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And this is a woman who chose to become a surrogate in the United States to pay off debts.
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And part of the stress that she went through, like throughout this pregnancy, was she changed
00:23:35.100
You know, she was having trouble with medical insurance because you know, the, the surrogacy
00:23:46.280
So when, when you hear about surrogacy and when you hear about parents going through surrogacy,
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you hear these nightmares, you don't hear about the revvies.
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And that's why it's my brother and his wife, this is, you know, pretty public knowledge.
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They sold and built one of the largest IVF clinics in the United States.
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My little brother, mind you, just to rub in the salt here.
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I haven't built a giant international company yet.
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And so they work a lot with surrogates and they know a lot of surrogates and they're like,
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you know, we've got surrogates where it's like their ninth time or whatever.
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Like this doesn't, there's a limit to the number of times.
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I can't remember how many times, but they're like, it's, it's often repeat people.
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This is not a lot of people having negative experiences and the surrogates have a lot
00:24:26.980
You know, we've had friends who've tried to get this and no surrogate has chosen them,
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Like they're just like, yeah, I'm not interested.
00:24:34.680
Surrogates are, are almost always mothers who typically are married.
00:24:39.460
So they just, you know, they, they have very stable lives.
00:24:42.380
It was unusual that the surrogate in the Cindy by case who experienced the stillbirth and was
00:24:53.080
And they consider it a service that really, you know, helps other people.
00:24:58.840
So the process and basic thing that he goes through is if you decide to do surrogacy,
00:25:05.500
you refer to as an intended parent, you pick an agency.
00:25:08.800
This is a business that takes your money and then manages all the details of the surrogacy
00:25:13.400
They have a medical clinic that they work with a roster of egg donors and a roster of surrogates.
00:25:19.560
He says, at least for foreign countries, you're pretty much guaranteed eights, nines, and tens,
00:25:27.140
So I found someone who was a 10 based on education and career and a seven based on looks.
00:25:32.120
There are some fives in there, but there's no reason to pick them.
00:25:35.360
Obviously, he says, including this comment, since this is super important to you, white
00:25:40.860
nationalists, racists, most large surrogacy agencies have a ton of European donors.
00:25:45.820
Since they're typically located in large international cities, there's lots of wealthy
00:25:51.380
Also, white people tend to make up the majority of upper class in Latin American countries.
00:25:55.480
So even if they're nominally Hispanic, they're ethnically white.
00:25:59.020
You can also pick frozen eggs in the US or whatever country with frozen egg banks and
00:26:05.800
I love that he, cause you know, there, there is that subset.
00:26:07.760
It's like, wow, you gotta, you gotta work it for everyone.
00:26:12.840
See, that's the next step flying to deposit, to deposit for YouTube.
00:26:18.240
If anyone asks, you're just taking a one week vacation, then there's egg extraction, IVF
00:26:23.060
surrogate match and implantation takes about three months followed by a nine month pregnancy.
00:26:27.360
You don't actually have to do anything at this stage.
00:26:29.680
And that's key because a lot of people will get this impression that you're supposed to like
00:26:32.980
communicate with and micromanage your surrogate, which is what Cindy Bai did, for example.
00:26:37.160
And that's probably the worst thing you can do.
00:26:42.400
If you want, you can pay a few thousand dollars extra to do a genetic test to make sure the
00:26:50.700
By the way, massive genetic testing now, which really changes a lot of the science around this.
00:26:54.780
Also in China, for the first time, a child was going to have an extra pair of chromosomes.
00:27:00.080
So it was going to have Down syndrome and they were able to remove this extra pair of chromosomes.
00:27:04.640
And so far, everything's proceeding perfectly healthily.
00:27:07.620
And what this means, you know, as this technology proliferates, because, you know, you have access
00:27:14.380
If you have a child with Down syndrome now, that is a choice.
00:27:19.060
Well, I mean, but also if you're doing IVF, typically, you know, you can screen for that
00:27:25.460
I mean, even from a Catholic perspective, because the Catholic would say, oh, yeah, I'm not going
00:27:30.960
I don't need to know this stuff because I'm going to use every embryo I create anyway.
00:27:36.240
But here, if the child has Down syndrome, you can un-Down syndrome them.
00:27:39.940
The point here being is that you, and you'll have to explain that to your kid.
00:27:44.060
You'll be like, I could have had you without Down syndrome, but my vanity, the aesthetics
00:27:50.100
of your births, and doing it the quote-unquote natural way.
00:27:53.140
Yeah, I chose to have you in a way that will shorten your lifespan.
00:27:57.700
That kind of thing changes a lot of the moral arguments.
00:28:05.780
So, next up, he, obviously, so he's saying you need to genetic testing.
00:28:09.500
We would encourage polygenic risk for selection, because if you're going to, you know,
00:28:12.500
in for time and for a dollar, especially if you're saving this much money by doing it
00:28:15.300
in a place like Mexico, like he did, I think this is, you know, a great way to go.
00:28:18.620
Then he says, approaching nine months, you go on a one- to two-month vacation to the
00:28:22.460
country, be there for the birth of your child, and handle the legal paperwork, getting the
00:28:26.620
U.S. citizenship for your child, finalizing the birth certificate while raising your child,
00:28:30.980
and then you fly back to the U.S. two weeks later.
00:28:33.720
Why it's better to do this in a foreign country?
00:28:36.720
In the U.S., it's $150,000 or more, which is totally what reflects what we've seen and
00:28:41.740
what we know from Malcolm's family connections in the industry.
00:28:45.020
If you're willing to do a little extra paperwork and traveling, you can save $75,000.
00:28:54.080
Surrogacy agencies in the U.S. just don't have their acts together.
00:29:01.840
This is actually a really important point, is that Miles' brother and sister pointed out
00:29:05.560
that they found many surrogacy agencies, because they ran one, did not rigorously background
00:29:11.060
So women might attest to something that wasn't true at all, and no one checked.
00:29:20.060
But they found that basically other people just didn't.
00:29:22.640
So you don't really know what you're getting in the U.S., which is really scary.
00:29:26.440
Mostly because of the supply-demand balance in the U.S., there are more intended parents,
00:29:31.700
so you get the wait list and less screening for surrogates.
00:29:34.280
Overseas, there are more surrogates, so there's no wait list, and surrogate screening and requirements
00:29:42.280
So you're getting better quality, basically, and lower cost.
00:29:46.200
He continues, depending on the country, your kid gets an extra passport.
00:29:49.760
They will get their passport from the foreign country through birth soil.
00:29:56.000
It will also significantly reduce your timeline to citizenship if you want to pursue it.
00:30:02.020
That's really cool, and I'd never thought about that.
00:30:08.240
Most non-Western countries have a parallel public health care and private health care
00:30:15.860
The private health care system is as good or better than the U.S. system, and even uninsured
00:30:20.720
costs are a fraction of the U.S. insured co-pay.
00:30:24.300
And that was a key plot point of the whole Cindy Bay debacle with her surrogacy that Wired covered
00:30:30.060
is that the health insurance that the surrogate had fell through, and then there was this
00:30:35.740
concern about who's going to pay for health care bills now that she has to switch, and
00:30:40.440
oh my gosh, what's going to happen, and she wasn't getting really good health care, and
00:30:44.380
In a country like Mexico, you can just afford it.
00:30:50.420
If you are capable of working remotely or you have parental leave, I would recommend
00:30:54.260
staying in the foreign country longer to take advantage of cheap but high-quality private
00:30:58.260
health care and child care, maybe even indefinitely, at least for the first few months.
00:31:03.240
It's not like you're going to have time to work anyway.
00:31:07.200
We worked through all of our newborn phases, but also we're on number five.
00:31:11.240
For this specific country, at the moment of writing this, it's Colombia, Mexico, or Argentina.
00:31:16.160
Previously, it was Ukraine, India, and Thailand.
00:31:18.340
Expect the country to change depending on the political situation of the world.
00:31:22.780
When one country bans it, another country legalizes it.
00:31:34.040
Legal safety worries about the egg donor or surrogate claiming child support.
00:31:37.780
All the egg donor knows is that they donated eggs.
00:31:42.280
They will not even know the child exists, as in they're not told their eggs resulted in
00:31:47.080
As for the surrogate, they will know that the child is born, obviously.
00:31:51.060
You're allowed to talk with them for whatever, but you don't have to.
00:31:54.200
If you want, you can cut the surrogate off completely after the child is born.
00:31:58.040
You also don't have to reveal anything about yourself.
00:32:01.580
All communication is facilitated by the agency to ensure that neither of you does anything
00:32:06.800
If she tries to threaten you, the agency will just tell her, yeah, we're not going to pass
00:32:11.900
Surrogate mother's name will not be on the birth certificate.
00:32:14.020
The result is the birth certificate with only one name, yours.
00:32:20.000
Surrogate is required to already have at least one child as well as a husband.
00:32:26.600
Again, much better to do it in Mexico, at least for now.
00:32:30.800
No, I think it's, by the way, I think it's technically illegal to do it in Mexico.
00:32:33.320
Oh, if you're an American citizen, that's why you have to hide a lot of this.
00:32:37.480
I don't, I don't know because he worked with an agency, so I don't think so.
00:32:41.000
And he can suggest agencies, people DM us if you want his email, also his emails in the
00:32:46.760
So he might change it if he gets flooded, but you can DM us partly to make sure she has
00:32:50.580
a track record of giving birth successfully, partly because she loves the child she already
00:32:54.600
So it reduces the probability she'll develop an attachment to the child.
00:32:57.860
No, this is not a requirement for surrogates in the U.S.
00:33:02.900
Again, U.S. risky, don't do surrogates in the U.S.
00:33:09.320
Surrogates go through a ton of health screening, once when being accepted as a surrogate and
00:33:15.540
Note that surrogate in the U.S., surrogates in the U.S. are only screened once they are
00:33:19.480
matched as a result of the supply-demand imbalance.
00:33:21.760
Again, I'm like, oh my gosh, screw surrogacy in the U.S.
00:33:26.600
And then he has additional tips on like, well, should you have a kid through surrogacy?
00:33:31.160
So Simone, how much does it cost the total to do it in Mexico?
00:33:38.280
My own opinion is that the cost of surrogacy is very little.
00:33:41.700
Obviously, $70,000 is a lot of money by itself.
00:33:45.020
That was when he said it basically illegal fees was $10,000 and then the surrogacy itself
00:33:56.300
I'm just like so shocked because I was like, that's what it is in the U.S.
00:33:58.820
So direct cost of raising a child, $300,000, although obviously there are minimalist methods.
00:34:04.880
Colleges around $200,000, although obviously there are alternatives.
00:34:09.200
Reduction in income from spending time at home or public school, $200,000.
00:34:13.080
Reduction in income from spending time at home, homeschool, a million dollars.
00:34:17.200
Assuming homeschool and saving for college, the total cost is $1.5 million.
00:34:24.620
He's basically saying like surrogacy versus, you know, like, I don't know, getting a baby
00:34:30.280
But I mean, that also has its own risks and expenses, as any MGTOW will tell you.
00:34:34.580
So, I mean, as Revy points out, surrogacy is a really smart way to go, especially if you're
00:34:40.680
And he also points out that like, if you're rich, basically like, there's no reason not
00:34:44.660
to do this, like if you care even marginally about kids.
00:34:49.060
And he has a dish, there's a ton more in this guide.
00:34:52.180
He's got sort of thoughts on raising kids, how to decide if you want kids, you know,
00:34:57.400
sort of thought experiments, things to consider, you know, he even has a section on pragmatic
00:35:10.500
But yeah, I mean, in general, here's where I stand.
00:35:12.320
Like, it's very clear from this Twitter storm that men going their own way and having kids
00:35:19.640
But also, men going their own way who want to have kids who are conscientious enough to
00:35:24.100
go through this process and raise kids on their own are going to do a bang up job on
00:35:28.940
Way better, I think, than probably, you know, a lot of single women, because I think a lot
00:35:32.280
of single women really take this for granted and like expect, they expect kind of the state
00:35:38.000
and their family and their friends to kind of come in and just swoop in and save
00:35:44.840
And so they are forced to be more conscientious.
00:35:49.540
There are better forcing functions, I think, with equally competent people.
00:35:53.300
Like if I were me, Simone the female raising a single child, I think I'd be a worse parent
00:35:58.920
than if I were me, Simon the man raising a single child.
00:36:09.280
And don't tweet about it if you don't want to get hate, because poor Ben, man.
00:36:16.320
Well, the thing that I love, it's become popular online these days for when like attractive
00:36:27.700
And then they've also started putting a picture of Nick Fuentes pointing to a giant clock to
00:36:41.520
You see, our parasites come out looking like us.
00:36:45.100
One of my gay college friends recently had a newborn just around the time that like one
00:36:54.880
Like, I can't tell if he has a partner or if he's being a single.
00:37:01.660
Like, I'm realizing that single dads who have their kids through surrogacy, they're doing
00:37:10.880
And I kind of wonder if we're seeing a silent revolution of single men, gay or otherwise,
00:37:17.820
having kids, and who are just going to, like, take over the world.
00:37:27.860
I lived sometimes with my dad, sometimes with my mom.
00:37:29.860
I'd always, like, living with a single dad is actually pretty effing dope.
00:37:35.060
Because they parent very differently than single moms do.
00:37:38.420
They actually don't really care what you do that much.
00:37:41.420
They're just like, yeah, do whatever you want to do.
00:37:47.940
Also, like, that's where we, I think, also, as is pointed out in the data, men parent more
00:37:56.560
Like, I think society has pushed everyone toward high-touch helicopter parenting.
00:38:01.120
So now, probably the kind of parenting that you're getting from a man or single dad, whatever,
00:38:06.000
married or otherwise, is more akin to what you would get from a full-time housewife in
00:38:14.660
They nurture more than they ever have before just because of high societal standards.
00:38:19.520
But they are, by the nature of their gender, on average, more likely to be more chill, which
00:38:27.960
I mean, like, if I were born to a single parent now and I had to choose, like, MGTOW dad
00:38:34.960
versus MGTOW mom, I would probably choose MGTOW dad.
00:38:41.080
So, not that we, we know, we know MGTOW moms who are absolutely crushing it as well, but
00:38:49.480
For dinner tonight, do you have more of the sauce that we need to cook down for the
00:39:03.340
Is beef lo mein too hard for you to make tonight?
00:39:12.520
I just have to remember to soak the noodles first.
00:39:14.440
It's so weird to soak the noodles in cold water for 10 minutes and then boil them.
00:39:20.940
I'm going to, I'm just going to like, I'm going to have soy sauce and I'm going to double
00:39:25.920
No, what I would do is have soy sauce and then add in hoisin sauce because the oyster
00:39:32.220
sauce might end up tasting too fishy and hoisin sauce...
00:39:34.060
Okay, so then instead of, okay, yeah, instead of doubling oyster sauce, I'll do oyster sauce
00:39:42.660
Well, maybe two thirds or half the amount of hoisin because hoisin has a stronger taste
00:39:58.000
Yeah, I really appreciate that somebody did this.
00:40:03.600
Well, and also the additional kids he's going to have, hopefully, God willing.
00:40:09.300
I mean, but he seems to really just act together.
00:40:16.220
Revy does, but I'm telling you what, when your kids get a little bit older, like...
00:40:20.740
One year, they're fantastic because then you're not worried about them dying anymore.
00:40:23.120
Like, year two or three, they have, like, personalities and stuff.
00:40:33.920
Okay, so here's what I wanted to ask you in sort of the pre-part of this episode, okay?
00:40:39.740
Kid names that we're thinking about for our next kid so our fans can give us some advice.
00:40:44.000
Because we're actually struggling with this one.
00:40:45.680
And maybe you guys will be like, oh, this is the...
00:40:52.640
We were going to do Rex Dyson, but it turns out that that's way too basic.
00:40:56.540
Well, you're afraid because you met another kid in our generation called Rex.
00:41:04.040
Well, no, there's also a kid named Tex at Octavian School, but I don't really care as much because it's a cool name.
00:41:09.420
Whereas Rex, as someone pointed out to us, sounds like a millennial trendy name, whereas Tex is more timeless.
00:41:19.880
So there are lots of reasons why we like Tex for reasons that are timeless, and it's not seen as a trendy millennial name.
00:41:32.540
Tacticus is a famous Roman who wrote sort of the Western version of Shenzhou's Art of War.
00:41:45.440
But there were some other options I had for middle names I don't remember for Tacticus.
00:41:57.600
You always, you recommended Igneous many times, but I like it.
00:42:07.260
Artanus was the first name we wanted for a kid, but I moved away from it because, I don't know.
00:42:14.120
You guys can tell us if you think Artanus is a bad name.
00:42:19.640
The next girl that we're having, and I'm very convinced on this, Cryptea.
00:42:25.280
You know, the Spartan practice of going out and having to live on your own.
00:42:36.800
Yeah, Cryptea is a pretty good name for a girl.
00:42:44.360
Cryptea is exactly what Wednesday's little sister would be named.
00:42:50.160
And then, yeah, are there any other names that you're, like, really liking right now?
00:42:58.980
Well, you guys can let us know among these, and we might share some others with you, because