Most Should Not Get Married Or Have Kids
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
35
sentences flagged
Toxicity
30
sentences flagged
Hate speech
40
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, we answer a listener request about the fertility crisis, and how to deal with it. We talk about the pros and cons of pro-marriage and pro-family policies, and why you should have more kids.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
This big Ponzi scheme we like to call the American economy isn't just going to make it without a bunch of kids cranked out en masse to keep the wheels spinning, right?
00:00:08.480
Well, friends, I've got news for you here, too.
00:00:10.780
You do not approach the net neutral in taxes, paid versus consumed, unless you are in the top 10% of income for 40-plus years.
00:00:27.760
And Lee Flynn has said this as well, that we should offer money.
00:00:29.840
for people to sterilize themselves yeah let's move to what do we call this like dark pranatalism
0.68
00:00:35.620
twist elitist pranatalism we've always been accused of elitism you know oh the collins
0.76
00:00:41.180
just they want people to have kids but only the right people and they want everyone to think that
00:00:45.320
we're like white people or like christian people but we're like no just like competent happy people
00:00:51.820
but wow i mean yeah i like that it's always really fun when something fundamentally changes
00:00:57.600
our view of something so for context today's episode is actually one that i had not planned
00:01:03.380
on releasing to the general public we had planned on doing this as a paid private episode and
00:01:08.400
throughout most of it what you will see is us being rather snarky and dismissive of the ideas
00:01:14.320
being presented because we're like well what's the alternative what's the alternative what's the
00:01:18.200
alternative and at the end of it i was convinced i think this person makes a pretty good argument
00:01:23.760
And so this has been a major sea change in how I see reality, which is to say it could be actively harmful and selfish to fight for the vast majority of people to get married and have kids.
00:01:40.420
Because the vast majority of people make bad partners, they make bad parents, they make bad children, and they would live a worse life if they were married and had kids.
00:01:54.480
Whereas the virtuous thing is to just replace them.
00:02:03.740
I'm excited to be speaking with you today because today we're doing a listener request.
00:02:08.860
so those are always really exciting we have a lot of people with excellent taste and i do we
00:02:14.540
do we yeah we do yeah we do i actually quite like our fans they're i like you guys because
00:02:20.440
you typically are living productive lives and doing interesting stuff which is neat
00:02:25.120
like smart people who always give us new ideas and and the number of you who have found partners
00:02:30.880
and started making kids since we started this podcast is astonishing it makes us really happy
00:02:35.680
yeah so if you're still looking don't give up there's a lot of hope and you could be next
00:02:39.880
and i promise you guys it gets better as they get a bit older
00:02:42.240
oh yeah because yeah malcolm has been reading my old diaries from
0.85
00:02:46.640
early in our pre-married and newlywed days and apparently it sucks
00:02:51.640
wait that's gonna dissuade people not the women the babies oh the babies but the women also get
00:02:59.300
better yeah we got in fights all the time in the early days not fights we disagreed about
00:03:03.400
things strategically but sure fights what we had been encouraged to read is a a sub stack post by
00:03:11.780
an excellence name excellently named sub stack performative bafflement i've always loved the
00:03:16.100
name of this sub stack i haven't read everything in it haven't read this the title of this
00:03:19.600
particular article that we're going to read is against more marriage as a solution to the
00:03:23.960
fertility crisis let's create the torment nexus to pump out a few incremental taxpayers
00:03:29.460
all right let's go into it it has 66 likes 48 comments and 15 restacks so did pretty well
00:03:37.120
they write okay so we all know about the fertility crisis right all the developed countries are going
00:03:42.820
extinct many consider this bad or worrisome idea etc said crisis is happening for hundreds of
00:03:49.440
interlocking reasons but the big kpi people like to point to here seems to be marriage
00:03:54.340
marriage directly tracks fertility and the decline in relationship formation and marriage
00:03:59.220
drives most of the fertility gap since 2000. He inserts graphs showing clear what looks to be
00:04:07.040
causation. Okay. Okay. It is correlation, but looks like it. One of the main solutions, he writes,
00:04:12.840
to the fertility crisis that most folks seem to like is pro-marriage incentives and initiatives.
00:04:17.940
I am here to argue against this. These people are basically advocating for creating the torment
00:04:22.580
nexus for mega folks of people mega folks to pump out a few incremental taxpayers my position let's
00:04:30.580
not create a torment nexus please and thank you aren't i being totally hysteria okay i want to
00:04:35.620
see where they're going with this i have no idea i have no idea where they yeah my guess is they're
00:04:39.520
just going to be like i don't know let the system break i don't want to grind for some boomers to
00:04:44.160
have more social security is this a leftist or right i don't even know it doesn't matter it
00:04:50.660
doesn't matter. I don't care because performative bafflement is a great sub stack name and I'm not
00:04:54.880
going to color your view of this person. Don't click on their sub stack. Be good. So I decided
00:04:59.780
to check and they are center right of the based variety. They talk a lot about genetics, stuff
00:05:06.380
like that, working out, that sort of stuff, but not probably as far as us and male. So at least
00:05:13.280
I didn't have my mind changed by a lefty woman as I thought. Okay. Let's go into the argument.
0.96
00:05:19.940
sexual sorry where is my mind today secular marriage trends first they're absolutely right
00:05:27.240
that marriage is declining it has been declining every single generation since the 40s when we hit
00:05:32.400
a local peak of 90 marriage rates which have which drove the baby boom 90 i didn't know that
00:05:39.120
actually can you imagine living in a society where nine out of ten people were married
00:05:43.160
no it's crazy okay i continue literally every single generation on generation since then each
00:05:51.660
cohort of women has looked out at the world said lol nope and opted out of marriage at higher rates
00:05:57.900
than the one before and they show a graph of women in the u.s by decade of birth who are getting
00:06:04.600
married and it ain't looking it ain't looking good it's it's it looks like a rainbow that's dying
00:06:11.180
and guy continue and just as a note i am framing this as primarily women's choice because one
00:06:18.740
women are traditionally proposed to and say yes or no two historically women are the sex that wants
00:06:25.040
and pushes for marriage while in a relationship more often three women getting educated and having
0.93
00:06:30.660
jobs and careers of their own is a big part of the fertility crisis in the sense those things
1.00
00:06:36.880
all reduced fertility when first introduced to a society that doesn't sound right do women push
00:06:42.020
for marriage more than men i don't think so so these days definitely men are pushing more for
0.96
00:06:46.600
marriage so she's i mean she's right that women are driving the decline in marriage
0.98
00:06:50.040
you can see it in the polling we've done plenty of episodes that cite this polling
00:06:54.340
so i that is true when you look at at least historical tropes because we didn't live in
00:06:58.660
this time yeah i know historical tropes but i think the reality is and potentially even into
00:07:03.480
history that's been the men i mean in a lot of the stories that you know i remember from my
00:07:08.460
childhood the romance stories it's the man pushing for marriage it's the i'll go to ip switch for
00:07:14.080
you it's the you know like that's those are romances that's not reality reality is men
00:07:20.580
want to maintain as much optionality as but look sexually like from a sexual strategy perspective
00:07:25.440
babies i pushed you to get married right your your game of musical chairs was rapidly ending
00:07:33.600
you you felt like you're i guess and i was like 24 at the time when i know but you felt like an
00:07:39.620
old maid or whatever the male equivalent of that is you're a very unusual case the the male strategy
0.66
00:07:45.560
has almost always been look maintain maximum optionality string women along don't actually
00:07:50.480
commit because then you can move on to another woman and even when women now in our modern
1.00
00:07:54.840
society after no fault divorce were able to just divorce women when they wanted to and then move
0.92
00:07:59.840
on like that there's a lack of commitment although these days i know women initiate the majority of
00:08:04.780
divorces but no i i think i think that checks out i agree i think that most women wanted marriage
00:08:09.880
more than men historically and often what was hat what happened even when like a woman gets pregnant
00:08:14.960
it's the shotgun wedding not because the woman is being held at gunpoint it's because the young man
00:08:21.200
is being held at gunpoint. Women can't escape the reality of being pregnant if they live in a
0.99
00:08:29.240
society or in a family that does not approve of abortion or have a culture that doesn't approve
1.00
00:08:33.340
of it. Anyway, yes, I agree with performative bafflement. So la la la. Four, women being able
00:08:41.360
to have jobs and lives of their own gives them more options and is what enables them to opt out
1.00
00:08:46.600
of marriage at ever-increasing rates. I am here to argue that this gigantic reduction in marriage
00:08:51.680
rates is an unambiguously good thing, and that the great majority of these ladies are genuinely
0.99
00:08:56.440
making smart decisions. Marriage is a bad idea in the great majority of cases. Broadly, people
1.00
00:09:02.460
aren't compatible, because people suck. I mean, come on, Malcolm, you can't disagree with that.
0.99
00:09:07.720
When approximately 90% of women... Other people suck.
1.00
00:09:13.440
there are people who think progressives think i suck you know like right and yeah but we're very
00:09:22.900
unusual and we we both also cast a wide net and and worked i was very targeted in my search you
0.93
00:09:32.300
cast a very wide net and we're also very very choosy and worked extremely hard to find a partner
00:09:39.020
most people don't work that hard but i think are less choosy so you know it all washes out but
00:09:43.160
i i was so committed to living alone not because i wasn't a hopeless romantic i actually kind of was
00:09:48.100
but because i couldn't imagine someone being compatible with me being how weird i am
00:09:54.580
and look you had to live with me disproportionately push for marriage
00:09:57.660
but by a dramatic margin you just checked on ai yeah during what time period
00:10:02.560
2023 data so not even that recent no we're talking about like the 1950s obviously now
00:10:11.700
I said obviously now men are the ones in the 1950s I believe that men also push for it I think that
00:10:16.460
we are shown a narrative in the media that's not real or accurate
00:10:20.200
I don't know chime in in the comments and let us know what you think who's right Malcolm or Simone
0.98
00:10:28.820
but I will continue broadly people are compatible blah blah blah they suck how do we know this by
0.57
00:10:33.700
just looking at actual outcomes looking at revealed preferences and how people actually
0.56
00:10:37.720
end up after marriage obviously the ever decreasing marriage rate for each generation of women above
00:10:43.620
she's referring to the graph the sad rainbow that is driven by something what could that something
00:10:49.040
be i'm here by the way i'm guessing this person's a leftist because they don't seem interested in
00:10:53.020
what's actually true but just sort of i'm assuming that they're a woman um i'm here to argue because
00:10:57.300
these are very common arguments so far that i hear from the female youtubers i watch because
00:11:03.780
i like girly things i'm here to argue that is a genuine reaction to actual marriage quality and
00:11:09.260
outcomes the empirical outcomes even today when many fewer couples get married and marriage is
00:11:14.920
significantly more selected divorce base rates are approximately 42 for first marriages and about
00:11:21.360
half of the remaining marriages are net miserable for at least one party that's roughly two-thirds
00:11:27.900
failure misery rate she she doesn't i'm assuming she performative bafflement doesn't because people
00:11:33.580
don't try they don't try to get into a good marriage and they don't look they'd be miserable
00:11:38.500
by themselves too yeah i don't i do not know any miserably married people any i mean people like
00:11:46.520
to hide it i guess yeah at least people in the base camp community are really solid anyway think
00:11:52.880
about think how net miserable those 90 of marriages were that were not selected at all and could not
00:11:59.600
divorced back in the 50s. Moreover, of the marriages that stay together, all they predominantly do is
00:12:05.320
make people fat and sexless and miserable. Married weight gain is a strong effect seen in practically
00:12:10.920
every country in the world, even after controlling for genes and personalities. For example,
0.95
00:12:16.260
identical twins, one of whom marries and the other does not, the married one typically gains
00:12:20.480
significant weight. Both of you and I weigh less than we did when we got married, which is
00:12:24.120
interesting. The Termik et al. 2024 meta-analysis surveys approximately 200,000 couples and
00:12:31.200
approximately 100,000 matched singles across 18 countries and surfaces a very strong effect size
00:12:38.040
of marriages on obesity, a 1.7 odds ratio up to 2.5 odds ratio in economic downturns.
00:12:47.180
Oh, people eat their feelings. And the trend reverses. On divorce, both men and women lose
00:12:52.880
weight. On sexlessness, as far as I can tell, a lot of sources consider fewer than one times a
00:13:00.460
month to be basically a sexless marriage. In GSS, this ranges from 5% to 20% of all marriages
00:13:06.160
that have lasted at least five years, depending on how happy they are and how long they've been
00:13:11.180
going. And obviously, there's a giant survivor effect there, with the approximately half of
00:13:16.380
them that have been divorced were more likely to be sexless prior to divorce. So 5% to 20%
00:13:21.980
is the heavy heavily survivor biased portion of sexless marriages that already have a huge thumb
00:13:29.100
on the scale in terms of upping the amount of sex this is to say that i personally think some
00:13:33.900
much larger portion of marriages attain sexlessness it's just that the majority of those end up
00:13:38.480
divorced leaving our relatively more modest five to twenty percent her thing is it's a good thing
00:13:42.740
that it's not happening because most people are failures okay yeah okay yeah that's i think that's
00:13:48.860
broadly what is being argued here. And she's like, and you should, I mean, I guess like the
00:13:52.720
type of person who's not finding a partner today is the type of person who would have been a bad
00:13:56.440
partner in the past. Well, performative bafflement proceeds to present a flow chart showing total
00:14:01.340
marriages and then they split off divorce. And then of the active marriage pool, we have 20 year
00:14:08.560
successes. That's 18% of all relationships. We're almost coming up on 11 Malcolm. So we're getting
00:14:14.180
there. And then net miserable and or dead bedroom, 40% of all relationships. And there's some weird
00:14:23.740
like extra thing in it. And who cares? Whatever. Over only 20 years, only approximately 18% of
00:14:30.180
marriages are actually still happy and sexually active. All the rest are divorced or net miserable
00:14:34.500
slash dead bedroom. And I don't think if you're PMC, you're immune. So I've just ignored the
0.78
00:14:39.440
obesity effects on this chart because that's apparently almost every American's fate and
00:14:43.460
nobody cares about this, at least not enough to do anything about it. This view is a simplification.
00:14:48.540
Obviously, a lot of the divorces were dead bedrooms or miserable before divorce, and this
00:14:52.680
caused the divorce. And obviously, people trickle into the net miserable column at increasing rates
00:14:57.140
over time. But this is genuinely what all the data tells us over 20 years. And there's a good
00:15:01.920
reason to think that GSS is optimistic on both the dead bedroom and the happy marriage front.
1.00
00:15:05.660
So every woman opting out of marriage at a higher and higher rates, super smart. Definitely the
1.00
00:15:11.180
right move. If you track empirical outcomes, that's definitely the best. Wait a second.
00:15:17.020
But she's not looking at the counterfactual. She's not looking at the mental health rates of
00:15:20.340
women who never get married. We're only looking at married couples. And look, a lot of women who
0.94
00:15:26.760
end up divorced get alimony and more financial security because of the divorce. Anyway, she
1.00
00:15:32.460
continues. We're just assuming performative bafflement as a woman, not really knowing the
1.00
00:15:37.000
background. And as an aside, I think this kind of is kind of an amazing demonstration of the wisdom
00:15:41.620
of crowds and invisible hands at work. Basically, nobody knows these numbers. All anyone can do is
00:15:46.560
look around at the relationships around them and judge their quality and outcomes. It is an
00:15:50.580
exceptionally noisy information channel that's highly selected and skewed for everyone. And even
00:15:55.120
with all that noise, even with literally zero idea of the statistical ground truths, women in the
0.99
00:16:01.440
aggregate have still arrived at a better closer to the truth answer in each subsequent decision
00:16:07.180
round over 80 years of cumulative decisions that's amazing and before everyone here closer to the
00:16:13.440
truth she's arguing that no one should get married or reproduce i think so yeah i think yeah i'm
00:16:18.880
getting some anti-neutralism in here like though it's like what's even the point of fixing this if
00:16:23.460
sometimes marriage is bad right like what well and sometimes being single is bad but she's not
00:16:29.880
talking about that is she before i've never seen two decent people in a bad marriage
00:16:34.740
i have i have my my best friend in childhood her parents were perfect and i thought they
0.90
00:16:43.620
were the perfect marriage and the dynamic broke at one point when the wife was given the job
00:16:51.920
opportunity of a lifetime and they moved across country and the husband went a long time without
00:16:57.900
working and it just killed the family's dynamic because he no longer felt like the provider he
00:17:02.140
became the stay-at-home dad and that he his identity wasn't ready for that and then they
00:17:07.400
both ended up with other partners and they're happy now but like there are things that have
00:17:11.100
nothing to do with the two individuals who can be incredibly these people were like smart and
00:17:16.840
good looking and insanely tall like they were both over six feet oh that doesn't really make sense to
00:17:22.200
me so what he cheated on her what do you mean they both ended up with other because presumably
00:17:25.400
it's going to be harder for him to get his job back
00:17:31.080
which I mean if she was like gone a lot for her
00:17:35.820
you know when my friend was going through all this
00:17:55.400
it all worked out in the end so i'm happy anyway she performative bafflement continues and before
00:18:01.520
anyone here jumps in and tries to argue that their spouse is mother theresa and sydney sweeney
00:18:05.980
combined and was recently best and also hottest human being who has ever or will ever exist yes
00:18:12.580
i'm not talking about you and me friends we all know my readers are notable exceptions whose
00:18:17.980
spouses descended from heaven on gossamer wings and whose very presence inspires the involuntary
00:18:24.000
outbursts of angelic hymns and paroxysms of joy mine does though that's the problem mine does too
00:18:29.320
i know i'm i'm the one woman who made it i'm talking about everyone else says performative
00:18:34.660
bafflement those who are far less fortunate than we you know the ones i mean you see the quality
00:18:39.980
of your friends and relatives and co-workers marriages as is usually the case with revealed
00:18:44.640
preferences and it's high quality i i do see the quality in my generation it's high quality
00:18:53.760
that this idea that like if you look around all this can tell me is this person is in some sort
00:18:59.000
of circle where everyone's miserable and i can only guess it's all progressives or something
00:19:01.780
i guess yeah i mean i'm even like thinking as far as i can work it in in my head even with people
00:19:08.520
who have i would say very imperfect marriages they're all just due to imperfections they have
00:19:14.280
as people which they would experience perhaps in a more magnified fashion if they lived independently
00:19:19.880
But again, it's something that I wasn't considering at this point in the piece because I hadn't gotten to the end argument, which does help think this for me, is the people we surround ourselves with, e.g. Simone and I surround ourselves with, are exceptional people.
00:19:34.200
I don't like to talk to people who I do not think are exceptionally competent or exceptionally contributory to the future of humanity.
00:19:42.360
And it is that type of person, when they end up in a marriage, that they have a good marriage.
00:19:47.240
It is the type of person who lives the life for whatever, as you're about to hear, that even when they are otherwise good people, have toxic marriages.
00:19:58.200
And the great thing is that a lot of people's vices can be moderated.
00:20:04.440
Well, this is the whole thing. If your purpose in life is to make humanity better and to contribute to humanity's continued flourishing in the future, e.g. the next generation, one of the most important things you can do, but by far, I mean, unless you're going to cure cancer or something, which you're probably not, okay, is have a lot of kids and raise them well, right?
00:20:27.700
especially with this being a crisis that humanity is going through right now and the fact that you
00:20:36.200
wouldn't even try to do like one of the it's like you know you're on a spaceship and the life
00:20:41.560
support's dying and somebody's like well you know i don't really see the point in trying to fix the
00:20:47.460
life support it sometimes shocks you it's like what are you talking about it's the only option
00:20:53.220
i haven't heard you present a secondary option yeah yeah we'll we'll continue then we'll see
00:21:00.680
the argument's only warming up there's a lot more marriage is a bad idea even from a purely
00:21:06.920
theoretical point of view on top of the base rates indicating that it's a bad idea empirically the
00:21:11.380
whole idea of being able to accurately predict how people are going to evolve or change over 20
00:21:15.720
to 70 years is silly to begin with and 20 years is pretty much the minimum you have to consider
00:21:23.220
How much have you changed versus you 20 years ago?
00:21:26.200
Why wouldn't you expect your spouse to change that much
00:21:28.480
and you to change that much in the next 20 to 70 years?
00:21:36.540
and didn't think they'd get divorced or be miserable.
00:21:39.180
See, this is why you have to grow together as a couple
00:21:50.920
Next section. Good marriages are heaven and bad marriages are hell. Here I'll point out that a
0.99
00:21:55.680
good relationship is one of the best things on earth and a bad relationship is one of the worst
00:21:59.620
things on earth. Being single is much better than being in a bad relationship. Okay. I'm going to
00:22:05.020
skip through this section too, because we agree. Well, yeah, but that means you should just leave
00:22:08.680
the relationship. Being married is much better than being single. Yeah. Being in a good marriage
00:22:13.540
is if you're in a bad marriage leave it right the person learn about the person grow together
00:22:21.640
get married young what like the advice is just so easy to get around yeah what this cashes out to
00:22:30.540
performative bafflement writes as soon as no-fault divorce opened up in the late 60s divorces surged
00:22:35.860
and that was a good thing it was millions of soul-crushing relationships suddenly being able
00:22:39.980
to be dissolved no it was millions of relationships becoming soul crushing because people got other
00:22:45.040
options this there were bad relationships before this but i can guarantee you they were probably
00:22:51.540
at about a third the rate maybe yeah when you when you create a norm around leaving a relationship
00:22:59.220
or a motivation to leave a relationship or look for flaws in your partner instead of trying to
00:23:04.520
make it work this is why arranged marriages have higher love rates or equal love rates but when
00:23:08.540
you can count survivorship bias higher love rates than non-arrange marriages so no fault divorce
00:23:13.100
created the first fomo or a dangerous new form of fomo and it caused a bunch of people to become
00:23:20.340
miserable when they couldn't they did not need to be or would not have been yeah okay next section
00:23:25.100
then we'll skip to is this women getting all uppity so lots of guys think this is a female
1.00
00:23:30.020
selectivity problem indeed if you do the math approximately 80 percent of women are opting out
0.99
00:23:34.500
of marriage at the bottom quintile of male SES, and nearly two-thirds are opting out of the
00:23:40.400
medians and below. Marriage is increasingly a luxury good. The top quintile of SES men
00:23:45.920
still have 85 to 90% marriage rates, just like all men in the 40s. Oh, that's interesting.
00:23:52.180
And look again, look at the ground truth. This is just women being actually smart and reacting to
1.00
00:23:56.980
actually huge effect sizes. What's the percent of marriages that make it and were retroactively
0.98
00:24:02.880
actually worth entering roughly 20 boy if i were making that bet i'd sure try to only do it with
00:24:10.760
the top quintile of people uh-oh malcolm your top quintile i i am top quintile i'll say that
00:24:18.360
yeah but you know i could just get a i could just get a as you've said in the past i should just get
00:24:22.120
a harem so i'll get a few more wise and right but you know we know from that like one one bit of
0.95
00:24:27.580
research on African, what's the word, polygamous marriages, that the more wives a man has,
00:24:37.440
his value gets moderated down because the wife considering choosing him as a husband has to
00:24:41.780
understand that you now have to divide his assets by the number of wives, plus a little bit more of
00:24:46.820
a discount because there's the uncertainty of knowing you may fall out of favor. So he's not
00:24:54.340
as certain of a bet as a man of more moderate income who you know will not be further diluting
00:25:03.020
it with additional wives. Because keep in mind, what if you're like wife number three for like
00:25:07.340
millionaire man, but you don't know how many more wives you might convince to get? This economy is
0.99
00:25:12.240
about to get gnarly, right? So you're going to get, I think, fairly low quality women unless you're
1.00
00:25:18.720
super, super high value or they're very insensitive. Now, I think it's different with
0.99
00:25:22.540
things like sister wives, right? Because in a sense, it seems like in many cases, sister wives
00:25:27.100
actually choose each other and the husband's just like, oh, okay. Whereas they're like, look, I need
0.72
00:25:32.080
another woman around the house. I, you know, it's like not, you know what I mean? That that's kind
1.00
00:25:37.780
of a dynamic at play. So I'm not talking about those types of marriages anyway. Okay. So basically
00:25:44.080
she's saying that like, it only makes sense for women to marry the, the high value men. Next
00:25:49.740
section let's put any returns to bed for good of course return spent with a spelled with a v
00:25:54.740
which you've noticed as a whole thing right return spelt with a with a v you've not are you
00:26:01.720
really i don't know what you're talking about there's this whole how do i best describe it
00:26:08.620
guys how do i describe this to malcolm this like go back to roman times it's like the it's supposed
00:26:15.800
to be so it's like trying to be highbrow bronze age pervert and you start some like men's association
00:26:22.620
called retvrn uh and it's all about going back to traditional christian values
00:26:28.960
this brings nobel you've not seen any of this i have no idea what you're talking about anyway
00:26:34.540
i'm gonna read i will read and this is largely why some of these men are the biggest proponents
00:26:39.840
of returning to a regime where women are locked out of jobs and bank accounts and are stuck
00:26:46.260
barefoot and pregnant in kitchens shackled to duds it's seemingly the only way they see actually
00:26:50.880
marrying women nowadays given the high ever-growing opt-out rates clearly not offering an alternative
0.96
00:26:57.140
like we're literally talking about it in the human civilization okay so yeah manosphere rejected no
0.82
00:27:02.680
return or turning case study what can a median woman get from marrying the median man okay so
00:27:09.100
prospectively the median woman can get a snag and expect to snag a median man the median man is
00:27:15.700
short and obese only has a high school degree and makes approximately 50k a year that can barely
0.59
00:27:21.300
buy you groceries much less a house anywhere oh also when it comes to sex the median ejaculatory
0.99
00:27:26.500
latency time is nine minutes nine minutes so every week or so you'll get nine minutes of awful sex
1.00
00:27:31.520
approximately zero women could get off to man sounds great i can see why average women are
1.00
00:27:37.440
just busting down the doors for median men to get married that's really the average time i mean that
0.96
00:27:42.760
sounds bad right i don't want that i i think you i think you'd prefer that oh you mean short and
00:27:50.900
quick well malcolm we have things to do yes no but not a i mean i'm honest i would probably prefer
00:27:58.800
that to be my time men prefer cookies more than you you under we're not going to get into yeah
00:28:07.120
we're not going to get into it but like yeah that is women tend to prefer longer sexual periods
00:28:11.660
that sounds very efficient maybe this is actually because the way that men experience sexual pleasure
00:28:17.040
works a little differently from the way that women experience sexual pleasure actually this
00:28:20.700
might be why we have such an extreme stance on like it how how are people having kids when they
00:28:26.600
when they're like naturally when when they have a bunch of kids already yeah like when are you how
00:28:31.440
do you people have active sex lives and now that i'm hearing that the average time for a guy to
00:28:35.700
come as nine minutes i'm like that's how you have that's how you have sex lives and kids yeah yeah
00:28:41.500
you think the kids are going to leave you alone for longer than 10 minutes i mean this is yeah
00:28:45.000
yeah when i'm like i just don't understand how it's like plausible that you're having sex and
00:28:50.280
a bunch of kids yeah okay i get it now yeah 10 minutes 10 minutes makes sense note here this is
00:28:56.640
part of the broader conversation that we have which is i don't get these people who are like
00:29:01.180
i'm parents with like five kids four kids and we still have a healthy and active sexual relationship
00:29:07.480
because this guy acts like a dead bedroom is like the worst thing in the world and it's like
00:29:11.800
no i thought it was a natural part of having a ton of kids around the house and needing to hire
0.97
00:29:17.340
a babysitter to be a basically a prostitute by proxy because that's the only way you get to have
0.99
00:29:24.620
sex because god knows i'm not gonna have sex while a little baby is watching me and i'm not
1.00
00:29:30.400
going to leave my baby outside the room for over an hour while i'm just pleasuring myself and my
0.99
00:29:38.200
wife right you know like that's gross right like the baby starts crying or something what a
00:29:42.480
horrifying thing and everyone's like oh no it's so easy and i'm like oh because it only took nine
00:29:47.360
minutes for you that makes sense anyway blah blah blah so she's basically saying that marrying a
00:29:52.720
mid-man is kind of dire looking from the woman's perspective. I mean, I can continue. Man sounds
1.00
00:30:01.620
great. Blah, blah, blah. Another triangulation point. Fully 35% of women lack interest in sex
00:30:06.280
at all. And can you blame them? And around, wow, so 35% of women are asexual basically.
1.00
00:30:12.560
I mean, that makes sense. It's like me and all of my friends in high school and around 50%
00:30:17.020
have at least one noticeable problem with the quality of sex they're getting.
0.63
00:30:20.080
want more context and flavor check here for actual comments from lots of women it's pretty clear that
00:30:24.800
having approximately any job and pets and netflix and you own a place is roughly 10x better than
00:30:30.460
marrying the median man who in addition to subjecting you to nine minutes of terrible sex
0.61
00:30:34.220
every week will want you to do his laundry and dishes and cook for him and spend all your free
00:30:37.800
time raising his awful kids well if you don't like him yeah they're awful kids while also working
00:30:42.880
full-time because he can't afford anything and needs your income for your for you two to even
00:30:46.900
survive i wrote a whole article on why women have a raw deal in general and this section comes from
00:30:52.640
here click click there for a more complete case all right i'll just that's its own i'm not hearing
00:30:59.220
the alternative yeah okay let's see all the positive effects of marriage are driven by
00:31:02.780
selection effects anyway okay this is not a solution how about health okay that's not a
00:31:08.140
solution it's looking at long the relationship between physical health and marriage was
00:31:13.680
completely explained by non-random selection. Okay, so she's saying marriage is not going to
00:31:17.660
make your health better. How about income? She cites some research. The results show that married
00:31:22.560
men earn more because selection into marriage operates not only on wage levels, but also on
00:31:26.680
wage growth. Hence, men on a steep career track are especially likely to marry. We conclude that
00:31:31.380
arguments postulating a wage premium for married men should be discarded. Okay, how about happiness?
00:31:36.580
Okay, she's certainly going to cite studies that show marriage doesn't make you happy. This is why
00:31:41.020
marriage is a luxury good now the only people worth marrying are at the top quintile of peace
00:31:44.720
people basically i feel like a hypocrite because you're like top one percent probably like top 0.01
00:31:50.140
it's true i am one of the best living humans this is like an objective thing that anyone
00:31:54.780
it is though that that does it yeah so like who are we to say right like maybe
00:31:59.260
you are too though simone no for you specifically right i'm i'm the right kind of person
00:32:06.420
and we're really lucky to find each other but i'm trying to find the solution this is a moral and
00:32:11.580
bad i'll make this horrible suggestion for any proposal that's basically suggesting to create
0.99
00:32:14.840
decades of misery okay so basically marriage is immoral and bad because marriage sucks and people
0.99
00:32:18.580
suck blah blah okay so that's her that's the argument but but we need more taxpayers next
0.98
00:32:23.200
section maybe this is finally going to be it come on performative bafflement you might say look
0.97
00:32:27.280
around you dependency ratios the big problem oh dependency ratios you made that one yeah i'm the
00:32:34.580
who popularized dependency ratios you did people i don't even care about more taxpayers anymore now
00:32:39.860
that we have ai i'm just like you know we will replace you that's the goal at this point we've
00:32:43.940
got to replace the existing population that thinks like this dependency uh sorry uh performative
00:32:48.040
bafflement is is humoring you here the big problem south korea and japan and china are headed in for
0.92
00:32:52.800
infinite ever-growing array of old people tiling tiling the sky to the horizon like octogenarian
1.00
00:33:01.620
celestial vampires draining the economic and cultural life force out of their kids and grandkids
1.00
00:33:05.860
as each kid has to support a greater number of sky vampires oh that's good performative bafflement
0.58
00:33:11.980
that's good that's going to suck for them their entire economy is going to grind to a halt and
00:33:16.680
everyone is going to hate their lives and in the developing world we're all on the same train
1.00
00:33:21.900
they're just getting to the station first so that's ours and our kids fates too this big
00:33:27.160
ponzi scheme we like to call the american economy isn't just going to make it without a bunch of
00:33:31.980
kids cranked out on mass to keep the wheels spinning right well friends i've got news for
00:33:36.920
here you for you here too the median taxpayer isn't this is to say no matter how you do the
00:33:41.340
math you do not approach the net neutral in taxes paid versus consumed unless you are in the top 10
00:33:46.520
percent of income for 40 plus years oh interesting argument here so only the rich people have to get
00:33:53.940
married okay i'm trying this yeah let's get rid of the average person stare and leaflet has said
00:33:59.520
this as well that we should offer money for people to sterilize themselves yeah let's move to what do
00:34:04.460
we call this like dark pronatalism twist and if your question was in dark pronatalism is well then
00:34:11.320
who's worthy who should be having kids it's the people who are willing to make that sacrifice
00:34:16.160
that's who decides the people willing to make the sacrifice for the future it's you it's the
00:34:22.440
individual who gets to decide who gets to either find or not find a partner who gets to make a
00:34:29.540
good life for that partner a good enough life that they want to have lots of kids elitist
00:34:33.820
pernatalism we've always been accused of elitism you know oh the colleges they want people to have
00:34:38.080
kids but only the right people and they want everyone to think that we're like white people
00:34:42.860
or like christian people but we're like no just like competent happy people yeah so yeah the
00:34:49.640
If competent happy people is this like rare, impossible thing.
00:34:55.220
I will continue because we're going to have to get the kids real soon.
00:35:06.460
We spend $7 trillion a year, mostly on old people entitlements from 52% to 69%,
00:35:11.680
depending on where you account for national debt and interest and some other stuff.
0.94
00:35:15.980
So let's lazily call it $4.5 trillion for entitlements and $2.5 trillion for everything else.
00:35:26.660
You don't hit that amount of taxes paid until you are top 5% of income or $250K plus or so.
00:35:34.460
But people pay dollars in payroll taxes every paycheck.
00:35:41.100
The median worker pays $6 to $7K in federal taxes, including all those.
00:35:45.080
and the mean is around 10 to 12K, still way shy of 40K. I mean, even if you literally take out
00:35:51.540
entitlements entirely, just that 2.5 trillion across all the workers, it's like 15K a year.
00:35:56.540
Because it's highly heritable whether or not your kids are going to pay into the system as well.
00:36:02.140
Yeah, but this isn't, yeah. Anyway, I'll skip around. Performative Baffleman says,
00:36:07.240
I'm not disparaging average people here who are genuinely paying a big chunk of their income in
00:36:10.920
taxes. I'm disparaging our maximally stupid government spending and policies.
0.99
00:36:14.460
and pointing out that there's literally no way it can go like this, go on like this with the
1.00
00:36:18.840
sky vampires hit. The sky vampires. I really like that. If we're always and forever spending 6x more
00:36:24.900
than we make per person, adding more people isn't going to help. We're still, we do our system in
00:36:30.180
the maximally stupid way. And as an example, taking the widow's mite of taxes, 1k back then
0.98
00:36:35.380
in 1970s dollars, immediately spend it, then basically promise the person who paid those
00:36:39.560
taxes and piddling 1970s dollars will spend 40k per year on them in present day dollars when
00:36:44.540
they're old, which we're doing. Yes, that's so true. I hate that. Versus if you were smart,
00:36:48.980
hi Singapore, you'd put those 1970s dollars into some financial instrument that also grew with
00:36:54.140
time. So by the time they were old, their money had grown to offset some of that gap. Oh, and we
00:36:59.300
also take on huge amounts of debt every year in a tiny 1970 dollar equivalence so that we hit both
00:37:04.380
ways by that none of the positive contributions grow but the debt grows with time so today's
00:37:10.140
figure if we actually get to paying off that debt would mean more like 60k per year but obviously
00:37:14.400
we're not paying it off we're racking it up still more debt every year i yeah i agree with this dark
00:37:20.700
pronatalism we should do a full episode where we go hard into the concept of dark pronatalism
00:37:27.380
because there's been the direction i've been moving in terms of like the populations you
00:37:30.600
can actually affect who actually matters who we actually want to have kids and like yeah dark
00:37:36.660
pernatalism I care that you plan to be a productive citizen you want to be a productive citizen and
00:37:41.380
that means you're going to have productive children yeah and performative bafflement
00:37:44.340
after making the whole tax argument which I think we all understand now points out that like if you
00:37:48.880
like kids you'd want them to be raised in a loving functional high socioeconomic status household
00:37:53.780
with your parents because they will be better off right like they have better everything and they
00:37:59.700
want the kids and can raise them well okay that's pretty much the way wow yeah what a twist huh
00:38:05.520
that was that was great i mean i'm not i don't i didn't get permission from the person who sent
00:38:10.340
this but good send yeah i mean we went into this blind i only had heard of i think someone sent me
00:38:17.200
one performative bafflement article before i don't know who they are we still don't know who they are
00:38:21.100
we like to judge people based on their ideas and at first we were like okay this is whiny but also
00:38:26.440
oh my god you're right marriage does suck for most people who also no no no not for most people for
00:38:31.960
below average people okay that's like half of people yeah but the point is is that we can get
0.96
00:38:38.440
rid of the below average people would not get no look look we will let them do what they want
0.92
00:38:43.520
and that can lead light pronatalism where they want to help the somalis have more kids and the
00:38:51.900
the random you know the freaking homeless people who keep getting pregnant accidentally
00:38:57.100
and we can run dark pronatalism you heard it here folks it's sad to be able to appreciate
00:39:03.540
part of the take and then see that after simone stopped it gets ends on the most mind-bendingly
0.75
00:39:10.620
stupid take i've ever heard which is fertility isn't actually a problem for another hundred plus
0.83
00:39:15.920
years even if the entire world fertility drops to 1.85 for the next hundred years
0.98
00:39:21.220
we're going to have 9 billion people through 2125 the low bar here requires it dropping to 1.5
00:39:28.080
around the world blah blah blah blah fertility isn't actually a problem for another 100 to 200
00:39:33.160
years and in these like and by the time it actually becomes a problem we'll have fully
0.69
00:39:37.220
automated luxury gay space communism as the meme goes what's so funny here in this very piece he
0.84
00:39:43.840
seems acutely aware that the vast majority like one human is not equal to another human in terms
00:39:53.000
of technological progress in terms of economic involvement in terms of economic progress and if
00:39:58.620
we look at dropping populations like if the dropping population is primarily in this one
00:40:04.340
group that's paying all the taxes globally speaking that's really really bad for
00:40:14.200
civilization right like i hate to say it but if you look at like global birth rates and you're
00:40:21.560
trying to act like everyone's going to be equally likely to be economically productive
00:40:25.740
and you're just like okay well where do we have good birth rates oh like somalia do you really
00:40:31.520
think that they're going to be the next collectively i'm not saying any end of any
00:40:37.380
individual somalian can do great i'm just talking like averages and math here that all of a sudden
00:40:43.000
they're going to become this super economically productive region or be as economically productive
1.00
00:40:48.480
as san francisco come on man stop being stupid like that's just intentionally stupid well wow
1.00
00:40:53.040
i mean yeah i like that it's always really fun when something fundamentally changes our view
1.00
00:40:58.060
of something. And we already had a sort of shifting view of prenatalism because of the way
00:41:03.060
we look at AI and how AI can potentially change this, but totally valid point about taxpayers.
00:41:10.380
And that like, well, I mean, we've, we've also pointed that out though, that like, we don't want
00:41:13.440
net tax drains, which is why immigration is not a solution and why, you know, trying to push really
00:41:17.860
low income families to have more kids is not going to solve the problem. It will exacerbate it as
00:41:21.960
much as we welcome anyone who wants to have kids to have kids. Cause also like, why, why do you
00:41:27.000
want to pay taxes for the sky vampires i also hear that but yeah so i'm gonna have to think
00:41:31.520
about this thank you all right well i love you malcolm i'm gonna go get the kids and make you
00:41:36.380
crispy chili oil and garlic green beans with boncha i love you bye i love you too bye
00:41:43.020
i think if you guys use it again i'll just know how to choose that but then i would look there
00:41:53.160
again because you just hit there well I think you'll find one I believe in you
00:42:02.280
Octavian I really do Andy do you think Octavian's a good hider yes exactly to
00:42:11.980
3100 no well that's gonna be a long time 30 or 100 okay ready I'm gonna go one
00:42:19.080
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
00:42:46.980
Why is that box moving Indy? Why is it moving? Oh my god, it's moving again. I'm so scared.
00:42:58.480
What should I do Indy? It's okay, I'm not really scared. It's getting closer. I think
00:43:07.140
I need to. Oh no. It was you the whole time. Wow. You're very good at hiding. Do you know
00:43:20.960
where Octavian is? Well, I need to go inside and make dinner for everyone. Okay. Would
00:43:28.640
you like to help me? Uh, okay. Just be careful love. This is
00:43:37.040
not a box of holes in it and you need air so maybe just a loose covering yeah okay that's fine
00:43:43.280
good okay you just uh i'm gonna find octavian i'm gonna keep it um if it is shiny i thought
00:43:53.040
you wanted to keep it if it's shiny yes okay all right i'm gonna go make dinner i love you