Based Camp - January 20, 2025


The Truth About Falling Fertility Rates and Misleading Statistics


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 8 minutes

Words per Minute

177.14581

Word Count

12,130

Sentence Count

13

Misogynist Sentences

42

Hate Speech Sentences

29


Summary

Simone and Zvi discuss the shocking statistics on fertility rates across the world, and how the urban monoculture is perpetuating a false narrative about women not being able to have children. They discuss the role of social media in perpetuating this false narrative, and why it s a symptom of a larger, systemic problem.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 hello simone today we are going to do a very very very statistics heavy episode on fertility rates
00:00:07.360 and it's going to be a collection of statistics to focus on just how bad the situation has gotten
00:00:14.480 with a lot from zvi's fertility roundup number four i love his fertility roundups yes
00:00:21.120 fantastic stuff and a lot coming from random graphs and stuff like that they didn't find a
00:00:28.360 fit into another episode what we're going to find as we go through this is two overarching
00:00:35.000 theses one is the people who thought that this was going to level off this year or we were going to
00:00:41.040 begin to see signs of it slowing this year we're wrong there is very little evidence that that is
00:00:47.000 happening uh but this is what the un and the urban monoculture claims every year here i'll put a graph
00:00:51.620 on a screen of the un's yearly predicted fertility rates in which you'll see as it's like going off
00:00:57.540 a cliff in every country and every year the un's like this is the year it's just going to stabilize
00:01:01.120 out of nowhere so i think that we're seeing that narrative is being broken and then the other big
00:01:07.340 thing that we're seeing is a reinforcement of what we have said from the beginning is that culture is
00:01:14.700 the only realistic way to fix this and every solution that you attempt that is not cultural
00:01:21.060 whether it is making houses cheaper or making people earn more or even forcing one partner to
00:01:27.740 live at home is not going to resolve this issue it's just going to make things worse
00:01:32.860 right which seen in the statistics but what we'll see as you hear is we'll continue to see this in the
00:01:37.720 statistics so the first errant tweet here that i wanted to go over that i thought was really
00:01:42.500 interesting as he was commenting the culture is all too eager to tell us that children or even
00:01:47.560 marriage will make us miserable when it is not even true if you discount the long term the latest
00:01:52.820 example of this where there was a widely distributed claim in a new book that said married women are
00:01:58.080 miserable because they report being unhappy when their spouse isn't around but what the study actually
00:02:04.620 meant by quote-unquote spouse absent was no longer living with them not stepped out of the room
00:02:12.220 which is the way he implied it he's like when a spouse isn't looking over their shoulders they say
00:02:17.060 that they're less happy but what it really meant when the spouse is dead they're less happy
00:02:21.560 yeah missing presumed dead yeah i'm probably less happy goodness gracious wow but i love that a lot
00:02:29.880 of people like i actually remember when that stat was going around and i was like that's pretty wild
00:02:35.060 that seems really out of line with what i've seen in my i don't know but i think what made it actually
00:02:39.600 work and what made so many people misunderstand it is this implication that when the husband's back
00:02:46.200 is turned when he's out of earshot suddenly people say other you know wives say different things
00:02:51.080 it's exactly the trope that was pulled in that ballerina farms article that they that that they
00:02:57.240 later categorized as a hit piece implying that when hannah's husband left the room wait sorry is her name
00:03:04.360 hannah when when the husband left the room that she then talked about getting an epidural and then
00:03:11.580 talked about how it was kind of awesome and it was just great and then that there's this understanding
00:03:17.120 that spouses will say very different things about their partners when their partners are not present
00:03:22.200 so yeah i don't know i i can understand how people definitely believed that and were very very
00:03:28.220 credulous but it's so man it's a case study and how this stuff can be used to mislead people i hate it
00:03:35.220 yeah so you are happy you're married by the way you know these these people are lying to you but
00:03:41.080 they need to have you believe so much of this movement is just cope around when i say this
00:03:46.120 movement i mean the parts of the urban monoculture which glorify a single lifestyle cope around failing
00:03:50.940 to secure a partner just as much as a lot of the incel movement is when they act like women are evil or
00:03:56.820 like these demonic creatures destroying society when if you look at voting patterns that just isn't true
00:04:02.980 of married women it might be single women are evil and destroying society but married women are on
00:04:09.160 team civilization okay so but actually do you have any thoughts on that point simone on sorry on which
00:04:16.180 which point that this view that sort of the incel migtau parts of it movement have of women that they are
00:04:25.760 the force of evil that has created the urban monoculture and all these forces destroying society
00:04:30.280 and i just if you look at statistics around married women that's just not true it's it's really this
00:04:36.140 single woman urban monoculture mind minded person i just see these things as more systemic issues
00:04:44.260 and you know there there are many elements of society that feel more feminized now but that's not
00:04:49.520 inherently the problem it's just a symptom of a larger systemic problem that can't really be characterized
00:04:54.900 by tropes yeah all right so here is an interesting one this is a tweet by melissa carney she says
00:05:02.260 the social security's actuaries are still bullish on the idea that u.s women are going to start having
00:05:07.220 more babies than they're have than they've been having quote birth rates are assumed to increase from
00:05:13.960 recent very low levels to an ultimate level of 1.9 children per woman for 2040 and thereafter
00:05:21.020 why she says the trustee continue to assume that recent low birth rates of period fertility are in
00:05:29.240 part indicative of a gradual shift towards older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts quote
00:05:35.500 marco jurek when we say our core societal institutions are fragile and dysfunctional because they no longer
00:05:42.960 suit the circumstances to which they were designed but cannot change this is what we mean and so here what
00:05:50.100 she's talking about is other people have pointed out that like institutions like the social
00:05:55.760 securities actuaries were created during a time of stable fertility rates and they just can't make the
00:06:01.160 math work if they actually show what's really happening so they keep saying oh women are just choosing to have
00:06:07.020 kids later which we know from the data isn't true and i'm going to put some graphs on screen here that show
00:06:12.600 both what they're the what we're seeing right and so you can see the the birth rates going down per
00:06:18.540 generation but here if you look at the age of birth by the various age groups which now i'm putting on stage
00:06:26.100 here what you're seeing is it is not moving later yeah no and this is such a simple thing to think through
00:06:32.220 someone sitting there looking at a massive spreadsheet or whatever and trying to model out
00:06:37.520 things and needing to make the numbers work because if you can't make the numbers work people are going to get
00:06:42.120 really mad and make a big fuss and it's going to ruin your entire week because you just don't want to think
00:06:46.380 about it that much so you find a way to make the numbers work and then you find a narrative to
00:06:49.880 justify that many anyone basically anyone who's been involved in any kind of modeling has probably
00:06:55.380 gone through that at some point which makes me very dubious of almost all modeling because just
00:07:00.760 i think it gives people this really false sense of security like oh in the models it all works out
00:07:06.240 can't you see this is the predicted trajectory of of this company's performance or social security
00:07:11.500 and oh my gosh it's so people don't realize what thin ice we're on right yeah and i think that say
00:07:19.400 it's not just about modeling it's about who has was in the urban cultural ecosystem permission to like
00:07:26.140 blow the whistle on this right so like you work at the so you're a social security actuary right
00:07:31.320 and you're doing your report for the year and you could project what any rational person would
00:07:37.420 project and then basically just submit a report that says you know we're fucked right like this
00:07:43.460 isn't going to stay solvent do you culturally have permission to do something like that like
00:07:48.920 as a social security actuary do you have the permission to be the one to sort of wake up society and be
00:07:55.620 like but you know we're really screwed and i don't feel like they feel like they actually have permission
00:08:02.500 to be that person that's something that needs to sort of be said from a position higher or within
00:08:08.700 an administration that is going to be more favorable to that like if i was a social security
00:08:12.920 actuary in the trump administration i'd be much more likely to be like okay fertility rates are actually
00:08:17.500 a massive issue without worrying about my job if you wrote that i mean they'd be fired right yeah i don't
00:08:24.460 in the government though i can't imagine people getting fired for things like this
00:08:31.340 it's just you're not is is what would it happen okay so imagine you do the actual social securities
00:08:37.300 math and a u.s branch of the government a fairly boring one puts out a report that basically says
00:08:43.640 we're fucked due to falling fertility rates that then becomes a media storm yeah because all the
00:08:49.480 right-wing media is going to jump on it and how is the left-wing media going to reflexively react to that
00:08:54.000 they're going to reflexively say it's not true or they did the math wrong they're they never yeah
00:08:59.880 i guess they're going to maybe scapegoat that person to say this person intentionally was negligent
00:09:07.840 and don't they realize of course then someone's going to retroactively figure out how to fudge the
00:09:12.060 numbers to make them work and retroactively build a narrative as to why that's obviously true
00:09:15.960 there's going to be a rebound this person didn't count for that in cnn there's going to be all of
00:09:22.860 these phds who come in and the phd is going to go up and say well this is how they did it wrong and
00:09:28.780 then they'll have a panel of phds all arguing they all agree that that one actually is of course yeah
00:09:34.200 but but like maybe this is an issue we should at least have on the discussion board which is so
00:09:40.080 interesting to me that now that the issue is becoming more public one of the things i always hear
00:09:45.260 is well malcolm and simone were right about the whole fertility rate thing but they're wrong in
00:09:52.820 the way they've been presenting it you know they've been going out there saying that only people like
00:09:57.340 them should have kids only tech elite should have kids you know what we really need is a more like
00:10:02.700 communitarian form of prenatalism that like it involves everybody who's willing to participate in
00:10:07.780 it and it's like that's what we've been doing from the beginning you just don't want to admit that
00:10:13.120 we were right from the very beginning about not just the message but the way it was presented
00:10:19.000 yeah and to keep going i thought this was an interesting point that was made
00:10:25.480 your periodic reminder that we tax marriage which also means we tax fertility we do it less than we
00:10:31.680 used to but we still very much do it when you tax something you get less of it niskanen center
00:10:37.900 the u.s tax code disproportionately discourages marriage among middle and low income we need to
00:10:44.240 fix this they offer a variety of proposals at the core of this is a basic set of arithmetic problems
00:10:50.400 it is not difficult to adjust the numbers such that it almost always is beneficial or at least
00:10:56.540 neutral to be married especially when there are children involved so right now it is not for middle
00:11:02.760 and lower class individuals indeed if we cannot do better there is a very obvious solution raised
00:11:08.940 based rates as needed to compensate and then allow married couples to file as if they were unmarried
00:11:14.460 if they calculate that it is cheaper end of penalty and i i really like that like that's an easy quick
00:11:20.120 fix married couples should be able to file as if they are unmarried there is no logical reason in america
00:11:26.520 why we should be taxing married couples more especially low income married couples more well
00:11:33.120 no this this specifically disproportionately affects middle income so low income you get a benefit from
00:11:38.240 marrying and then a high high income you get a benefit from marrying but middle you get the penalty but
00:11:43.160 again that it doesn't matter you should get no penalty for marrying because marrying in general seems to
00:11:48.080 benefit society well in middle income is where we have the big fertility crash in america especially
00:11:53.720 among the american white population yeah yeah there's the very inverted curve when it comes to
00:11:59.780 income and fertility and i i cannot imagine like if you want to talk about like the rot of the urban
00:12:07.180 monoculture that anyone isn't just like this isn't a bipartisan issue to just get this off the books
00:12:11.880 i think shows often i hear progressives and they're like well our party isn't actually doing the evil stuff
00:12:18.140 like that's just like what a few extremists are saying online and i'm like your party has literally
00:12:23.460 made it so that married middle income people are taxed more than single ones they really are
00:12:28.900 pushing the urban monoculture in a way that's destructive to the individual and that no logical
00:12:33.720 argument other than distribution of the urban monoculture could yeah also funny here you could
00:12:43.960 argue that this is a line you know we pointed out in our why the racist left trump video that
00:12:50.240 a lot of the traditionalist right who had like racialist or anti-gay marriage or anti-women
00:12:57.900 messages like oh you shouldn't you know women are the cause of all evil you shouldn't get married
00:13:02.420 anything like that a lot of them turned against trump right before he the election and were like
00:13:06.920 everybody needs to not vote for him or vote against him and that they have mostly been pushed out of
00:13:13.580 the right coalition and that they should be leftist now because the left is structuring it in a way
00:13:23.320 where no logical person would want to get married so being so anti-marriage seeing marriage as a trap
00:13:29.680 that women have laid for men should they not be supporting the democrats at this point
00:13:34.140 i mean with the four b's you even have the celibate women and everything now it's a it's a perfect
00:13:40.740 match i can't hear you by the way sorry and he was making noises i totally okay here i'm going to be
00:13:49.620 reading an abstract from a paper which i thought was pretty interesting children require care the
00:13:54.400 market for child care has received much attention in recent years as many countries considering subsidizing
00:13:59.760 or supplying child care as a response to dropping birth rates however the relationship between
00:14:04.220 child care markets and the fertility gap the difference between the desired and achieved
00:14:07.640 fertility is yet to be explored we build upon previous work by investigating the regulation
00:14:12.500 of child care and fertility gaps across the u.s states our results consistently show fewer child
00:14:19.840 care regulations are associated with smaller fertility gaps this suggests that women are better able to
00:14:25.240 achieve their fertility goals in policy environments that allow for more flexibility in child
00:14:29.600 care options and lower costs your child care regulations must be really harmful if parents are
00:14:35.720 responding by having noticeably fewer children this is as clear a message as you can get listen the
00:14:42.220 potential changes are big and this isn't the abstract this is v extrapolating from the data in the
00:14:47.800 abstract they estimate that if you shifted from the highest level of regulation connecticut to the lowest
00:14:53.820 of the lowest level of regulation in the lowest level of regulation in the lowest level of regulation
00:14:55.780 the total fertility rate tfr would rise from 1.51 to 1.7 or 13 percent if every state moved to
00:15:05.140 Louisiana's level we would see a roughly 38 percent improvement or a 5 percent increase in fertility well and
00:15:12.940 probably the economy would be better off people would be happier and better off to regulatory bloat this isn't it
00:15:20.300 amazing how regulatory bloat suppresses not just economic growth and and building and infrastructure
00:15:28.180 development and fixing things but also literally human life that it is it is suppressing
00:15:33.780 like the uk right like i i do love what you're saying here right like this idea that regulatory bloat
00:15:41.120 and bureaucracy is smothering of human potentiality not just in our inventiveness but in the very birth of
00:15:47.180 more humans so sad oh gosh it's it's it's sad and damning but i do think it is the inverse of
00:15:54.760 vitalism the vitalism that we need and that's why it's so important the job of institutions like doge
00:16:00.420 and stuff like that yeah oh i'd note how bad things probably are in the uk in regards to this they have
00:16:06.100 some of the worst child care regulation in the world with you essentially needing like a call
00:16:11.220 multiple people it was like college type degrees overseeing children in daycare centers
00:16:17.180 because well you can't even have for example your neighbor watch your kids in the uk because of
00:16:22.600 regulation you have to have some kind of certified professional watch your kids which that imagine how
00:16:30.000 unsustainable child care is now and this is i think a relatively new rule since the 90s because there was
00:16:36.600 some tragic and genuinely sad incident of a child being watched by a neighbor or something or children
00:16:42.900 being watched by a neighbor and one of them died but think of just the number of children now who will
00:16:49.220 never exist because it is so unsustainably difficult to raise kids in the uk now and this
00:16:55.680 brings me to something that uh we've said before but i really need to pound home and make sure this isn't
00:17:01.320 our policy doc by the way simone is that any policy that is meant to protect children's lives
00:17:07.220 need to weigh how many children don't exist because it was implemented so a policy doc that says
00:17:14.640 something like you know child seat certification like x many children's lives will be saved by this
00:17:20.720 also needs to calculate the number of children who are functionally going to be killed because
00:17:24.700 they don't come into existence
00:17:26.120 that kid but why they are replacements of people who had their existence consumed
00:17:37.560 by denizens of the crimson world it's the same with uh regulation around caring for children it's the same
00:17:44.760 with any of that can you actually make a note to add that to our policy doc yeah because that's really
00:17:51.120 powerful and under one of our videos the if you have under three kids you are definitionally a cuck
00:17:56.860 because you're below replacement rate video the top comment for a while i don't know if it still is
00:18:01.820 but i found it really powerful and it argued that we should see having two kids as having zero kids
00:18:10.260 because that's slightly below replacement rate like having two kids in our society should be considered
00:18:15.580 having slightly fewer than zero kids having one kid is having negative one kid and having
00:18:21.100 zero kids is having negative two kids it's burdening society with your existence and that you really
00:18:27.260 only get to you know one kid or two kids once you are above the two kid mark you know so when you have
00:18:35.020 three kids you have slightly less than one kid when you have two kids you have slightly less sorry when
00:18:39.860 you have four kids you have slightly less than two kids um and i think that that conceptual framing
00:18:44.540 difference is the way we will raise our children to think about kids
00:18:48.120 all right now i'm going to read a tweet by more births you can see it pulling from a huge diversity
00:18:57.240 of sources here today in this tweet he says did you think fertility couldn't get any lower than south
00:19:02.680 korea's seemingly impossible 0.72 births per woman in 2023 macau is trending towards
00:19:08.280 0.49 births per woman in 2024 lesson number one don't build like macau if you want your country to
00:19:18.380 have a future by the way more birth thing really like the guy we were actually had him over at our
00:19:23.360 place just last weekend him and and robin hansen and the woman who wrote hannah's children we had them
00:19:29.520 together and we we chatted a lot about fertility rates catherine and they his core bugaboo in the
00:19:36.740 same way that ours is culture is property prices and the way that you build he really thinks that
00:19:42.620 like tall buildings are suppressive of fertility i just do not agree at all like it clearly has an
00:19:49.120 impact but as for example israel became more dense their fertility rate also increased like
00:19:54.080 where you see high fertility cultures they are just completely immune to this so like why are we
00:19:59.520 pretending that this is an issue i don't know that's my take on this well it's the bigger thing
00:20:04.800 we've discussed as well is solving housing policy is one of those things of like yeah and you know
00:20:11.700 while we're at it let's you know make nuclear energy pervasive but it's not you know this isn't an
00:20:18.140 easy to solve problem whereas producing regulatory bloat is within our reach it's a stretch goal but
00:20:24.020 it's feasible well same with cultural change like cultural change at the family level at the
00:20:29.240 individual level at the level of our listeners our people that's possible and yeah and then i'd also
00:20:36.640 he at birth gauge had tweeted and this was in a retweet new update i guess we can forget any recovery
00:20:43.920 this year for now and it was a fertility rates by country and you just see red across the board i'll put
00:20:49.840 it on screen here but basically just across the board
00:20:53.100 all right now we're going to look at some things from lyman stone that zvi uh brought up which i
00:21:01.500 thought were pretty interesting so he says i looked at the nl sy 1979 cohort the housing data
00:21:09.400 that's readily coded kind of sucks it's basically metro versus non-metro to homeowner versus not live
00:21:16.680 with parents live on own or gqb but gq but we can untangle some major indigeneity because nlsy gives
00:21:28.800 us one fertility preferences surveyed before exit from parental household or adulthood two sibling
00:21:35.940 numbers three childhood religious environment all potentially huge confounds driving endogenous
00:21:42.960 selection so if we start with just housing related variables this is what we get turns out more
00:21:49.840 years in metro areas maybe boost fertility and more years as a homeowner reduces fertility this is bizarre
00:21:58.180 for me but look at the effect of living with parents note this graph is for men not women but they look
00:22:04.880 similar so really bizarrely here what this shows is living in metros when you control for other things
00:22:13.860 actually increases not decreases fertility for a period of your life and you and i lived in a metro
00:22:21.160 for a period and then left and i assume that that's what we're seeing here as to why it would increase
00:22:25.960 fertility a lot of people can be like how could that possibly make sense in the day i have a really
00:22:29.900 instant intuition what's yours it's very hard to find a partner outside of a city exactly yeah you
00:22:36.260 find your partner in the city and then you get out as soon as you're ready to have kids so it may turn
00:22:41.460 out money find a partner the cities are actually critical to getting fertility rates back up because
00:22:49.120 they're the only environment where there are lots of single young people around and if you try to date in
00:22:54.860 a rural area you're just not going to find a partner well even keep in mind like we talk about
00:22:59.100 bringing back the london season it was the london season it existed because it was a time when parliament
00:23:04.960 was in session the house of lords was in session and all these families happened to be in london at the
00:23:10.320 same time even though they typically lived in really dispersed rural manor houses and estates so
00:23:16.740 even in the past cities really mattered when it came to matchmaking and a transient time in a city
00:23:24.340 was important for matchmaking so that is really enlightening and helpful well yeah and if a
00:23:30.080 young person came to me and they're like i have decided to avoid cities because you know urban
00:23:36.480 monoculture hellholes how do i find a partner i'd say well you're not going to you need to go to a city
00:23:41.680 like that would be my advice not even partner at university or college you have to find them
00:23:46.960 at a city yeah i'd say basically if you're not if you haven't found the person you plan to marry by the
00:23:52.720 age of 25 you should be in oh shit territory and you should be grinding for it at that point
00:23:57.860 like that's like the point of a video game when you get stomped by a boss and you need to go in the
00:24:02.360 woods and start grinding to get your level up you are under leveled for life if you do not have the
00:24:08.540 person who you are going to marry in front of you around the age of 25 and i think that our society
00:24:13.420 right now the the heuristic that i would use for most young people is if you don't know who you're
00:24:18.360 going to marry by the time you graduate college you should be panicked yep wait by the time you
00:24:24.780 by the time you graduate from college graduate from college like if you leave a college environment
00:24:30.160 where you had tons of single people around your age similar socioeconomic income similar education
00:24:36.640 level uh and you were unable to secure a partner you immediately need to be panicking at that point
00:24:43.300 you you need to say because it's going to get infinitely harder in the real world and so if
00:24:48.460 you weren't able to find one in that environment it means that there was something systemically wrong
00:24:52.940 with you or how you were trying to secure a partner yeah and people can be like but it's just so hard
00:24:59.680 these days it's like it doesn't matter that it's hard these days right like it's like somebody comes
00:25:05.120 to me and they're like i'm a discriminated minority in my country and they really are a discriminated
00:25:09.700 minority in their country and so i'm like okay well then you have to work twice as hard you have to work
00:25:12.880 three times as hard you have to work four times as hard for the same it takes a while we had a friend
00:25:16.840 who maybe one or two years maybe even two years back moved to austin and was looking really really
00:25:23.660 hard for a partner and now we just got word of the engagement and that's great and it's perfect
00:25:29.700 she was grinding for it though yes and that's an attractive popular semi-famous woman who has been
00:25:36.940 grinding for a potential husband for years at this point and i think that the young men who are like
00:25:44.480 oh the women just aren't considering me they're being delusional that they are being absolutely
00:25:50.400 delusional actually brett cooper did a thing on this recently where she's like yeah i know a lot of young
00:25:55.680 women who are like i want a male who's good to marry and i can't think of a single young male that i
00:26:02.320 would introduce them to and brett cooper's a fairly based person right like you know she's not like
00:26:08.320 simping here for males and it's the same with us we know more females looking for husbands that we
00:26:16.640 struggle to match than we know young men looking for wives that we struggle to match um i don't know
00:26:23.640 you see it about equal or i think it's equal yeah and i think that for the most part
00:26:28.840 the biggest problem is a mixture of not trying hard enough and having unrealistic expectations
00:26:35.840 which is the worst combination you could possibly imagine to both have incredibly high standards and
00:26:40.820 not really be doing a high throughput i mean it's one thing if they're like yeah i'm dating at least
00:26:45.760 one person one new person every single night of every single day of the year doubling up on weekends
00:26:51.240 but i also have very high standards i'd be i would say that they have a long battle to fight but
00:26:57.260 they can probably get something because they're being so prolific in their attempts what i'm hearing
00:27:02.560 from people now though is oh i have incredibly high expectations and oh maybe three dates a month
00:27:09.540 a month i mean you're not even going to find a two at that rate true and i also go on to say here
00:27:16.100 i would say of the young males we know at least so of the males of this young generation right now
00:27:23.280 um i don't know any that have made it to 30 and we're seriously looking for someone to marry who
00:27:29.500 haven't secured a partner typically what i i am finding is that young men that are serious about
00:27:34.460 working to improve themselves have a life plan have their shit together they're typically finding
00:27:40.320 marriage partners that are really solid i won't say that's true for every young woman i know but i
00:27:44.240 will say that's true for most young men i know who have their shit together the ones who who don't
00:27:49.040 i'm often embarrassed to tell them like you really don't have your shit together you just are
00:27:53.220 pretending like you have your shit together aren't we all though not really anyway so then he goes on
00:28:01.060 to say i have told you people repeatedly this is the problem and it remains today in fact the problem
00:28:07.420 the young people must have their own houses so he's really against because if you correct for things
00:28:14.180 here people living at home right like it what's interesting though is if you correct for religion
00:28:21.300 and siblings and everything like that uh living with your parents is not that big an effect
00:28:26.060 isn't that interesting yeah but i i think that this is not about getting young people houses
00:28:34.020 i think this is about changing cultural norms about having uh finding a partner when you're living with
00:28:39.600 your parents like for our daughters i would not hugely well i don't know what i say like a guy
00:28:46.120 basically doesn't have his shit together if he's still living with his parents depends on how rich
00:28:50.000 the parents are depends on what he's doing with life yeah i i guess i'm kind of okay with the people
00:28:57.600 still living with their parents being removed from the gene pool even if it causes a major fertility crash
00:29:01.580 it depends on the circumstances in my opinion but yeah i think if if one is if someone is living with
00:29:10.620 their parents but could immediately move out and live on their own then it's a very different thing
00:29:18.480 some people live with their parents just to really quickly pay off student debt for example or save up a
00:29:25.220 lot of money to get a down payment on a house because it just makes more sense and that makes sense for
00:29:30.000 example if you have a job in the bay area and your parents live there i could see and i didn't do this
00:29:36.740 right i got my own apartment in the bay area regardless but i could see a lot of value in continuing to
00:29:42.720 live with your parents so that you don't have to pay rent for an apartment in the bay area to bide your
00:29:47.400 time to either get something really good maybe buy property or just get a different job and leave
00:29:53.120 california entirely right so there there are there are reasons why i would be okay with it but i would
00:29:59.600 want to know that that person was capable of moving out immediately if they wanted to and they were only
00:30:04.960 living at home with their parents because it was financially responsible for some reason does that
00:30:08.880 make sense so to continue okay but these are kind of dumb controls to be really savvy we don't just
00:30:16.620 want a control variable we want an interaction say does the effect of home ownership vary based on
00:30:23.620 preferences yes it does this is for women with all other controls entered for women who desire zero or
00:30:31.220 one child so women with quite low preferences one extra year of home ownership is associated with a
00:30:37.060 considerable decline in fertility but as desires rise so does the effect this kind of looks like home
00:30:44.160 ownership is associated with a modest improvement in correspondence between desires and outcomes at
00:30:50.140 least for people at the extremes i can tell you the same effect appears if i use metro status more
00:30:56.460 years spent in metro equals lower fertility for women with zero to one desires higher fertility to women
00:31:02.020 with three plus desires on the whole the results are a lot more favorable to density than i expected
00:31:07.820 them to be cc more bursts that said the measure here really are oblique quote
00:31:13.940 do you own a home in quote quote are you in a metro area in quote in quote do you live with your
00:31:19.280 parents in quote none of these are quote unquote high density so what you can see here is that owning
00:31:26.540 your own home and the number of years you own your own home actually increasingly suppresses fertility
00:31:32.740 for low fertility preference individuals likely because it's increasing stability um but increases
00:31:39.000 fertility for high fertility individuals and it's the same with living in a metro area
00:31:43.740 living in a metro area it decreases fertility of your low fertility preference but increases fertility
00:31:49.400 of your high fertility preference which again would ally with what we're saying like people who have
00:31:53.840 shit together it's just a higher standard of having your shit together is expected for this generation
00:31:59.640 than previous generations i think that's really what's going on here yeah well and i think i'm living in
00:32:05.260 a city with intention is like using psychedelics with intention right like a lot of people can
00:32:13.100 take psychedelics and have a weird trip and nothing really changes with their lives and then other
00:32:18.260 people can go into psychedelics with severe ptsd or other serious problems and come in with a really
00:32:23.760 good plan and then really good therapy afterward and like come at a way completely changed better person
00:32:28.580 with a more functional life and i think cities are like that you can just be in a city and kind of
00:32:33.200 sit in rotten one and it's a it's an experience it's the urban experience or you can go in with a
00:32:37.860 plan and follow up and follow through and change and then then you get out and you're good you're
00:32:44.620 changed forever you have your partner you have your life together you have your family but you have
00:32:48.460 to go into an urban area with intention and not just hedonism and a broad interest in maximizing
00:32:55.900 your financial gain which seems to be the default reason for entering a city i agree with that yeah
00:33:02.360 so to continue here other times it's easier to identify alex curtis i just met a 72 year old
00:33:10.920 woman who's been telling me about her life best quote she said you can either have a house and kids or
00:33:17.480 you can fly first class i want to fly first class i find her inspiring oh well you want to fly first
00:33:26.820 class the moon but we never do you take that as that's what we do for kids well what i what i i
00:33:33.340 understand that reasoning and i completely understand that mindset but then when i think about it and i
00:33:38.840 think about the number the percentage of my life that i spend on a plane every year versus the percentage
00:33:44.620 of my life that i spend living every day day to day the typical routine
00:33:49.380 the percentage of time i spend on flights is not worth an entire like forgoing
00:33:55.760 the most powerful thing yeah i mean i think this is a really great framework because of what could be
00:34:02.700 more indolent millennial urban monoculture than wasting money on first class it's such a transient
00:34:09.380 pointless selfish thing very similar to claiming everest right we have our video on that that that it is
00:34:16.380 i think indicative of to say i cannot make indulgent pointless expenditures if other people are relying
00:34:25.160 on me so i will choose here's my thing i really okay my argument for business class it's a little
00:34:32.680 different from everest some people do just fly business class to flex but i see it as akin to getting
00:34:40.200 anesthesia during a medical procedure or maybe maybe more similarly getting nitrous oxide during
00:34:49.240 like a dental procedure right you you can you can get through it fine uncomfortably but fine without
00:34:57.880 nitrous oxide but with it man like it would you don't even remember it it was it's just fine i mean it's
00:35:05.000 it's what you're saying is i would pay anything i would deny anyone in life to have the right to
00:35:09.960 their life to avoid discomfort yeah and which of course isn't justified but i'm just saying it's
00:35:15.620 different from everest you're saying it was no it's not it's not an everest thing it's a it's a
00:35:19.960 it's it's a hedonistic avoidance of discomfort and pain issue for many people which i respect but
00:35:26.720 also if you're a little bit less myopic about your pain which is difficult i think when you're in the
00:35:34.080 urban monoculture because it's all about avoiding pain you'll realize that the upside potential
00:35:40.480 of the the joy that family and children give to you and the meaning that your life gets and the
00:35:45.760 the extent to which actually on aggregate your pain and suffering and anxiety especially with a larger
00:35:53.120 family just becomes such a small percentage of your mindscape because it's so full of everything else
00:36:00.040 with your family that there's no room for the anxiety there's no room for the discomfort
00:36:03.720 that it's it's a silly trade-off to even think about making of course it's better to have a
00:36:08.640 family well it's something that you've talked about which i i find really interesting here is
00:36:12.500 also you would just not want to travel anymore because you've entered a state of your life where
00:36:17.520 our home and our life is so high quality that you view leaving it even for vacation and i feel the same
00:36:25.220 way is nothing but work and a burden but i think that that shows how our life is different from the
00:36:31.600 life of the person who opts into the urban monoculture belief system they find pleasure in taking a break
00:36:39.100 from their lives from getting in a plane going somewhere else and doing something other than what
00:36:44.660 they built for themselves whereas we would always take more pleasure from our day-to-day lives than we
00:36:52.020 would from leaving them hmm yeah anyway back to the stats here i'm going to put a graph on screen
00:36:59.720 and this is lyman stone here talking owd heads this section by saying quote fertility first falls
00:37:07.640 within development and then rises with development building on this uva student maxwell trabrock
00:37:14.120 argues that quote maximum progress can prevent declining fertility if society advances enough
00:37:21.880 fertility will rise again i mentioned maxwell because i did a twitter thread recently rebutting this
00:37:27.080 piece i did so because i was asked to do so by others but ultimately maxwell did an impressively good
00:37:33.140 job of putting together the u-shaped argument in one specific place since writing the thread i've had
00:37:39.940 requests to formalize the argument a bit more this that's what this is lyman stone my basic thesis is this
00:37:48.200 the view that more growth will boost fertility again is wrong it is based on seriously outdated
00:37:54.680 underlying research doesn't fit the actual empirical facts of the case well and it leads to theoretical
00:38:00.680 confusion which inhibits clear understanding of how fertility actually works and i agree with that
00:38:07.160 you just don't see this you cannot develop your way out of this issue unless you have ais creating and
00:38:14.920 raising kids any sane person would know that like if you look at your ultra developed ultra urban
00:38:20.900 monoculture friends these groups fertility rates is like 0.2 like it's so astonishingly low having even
00:38:27.740 two kids is considered quite a lot by some of these groups um so then he goes on to say so do we have
00:38:36.180 evidence on lifetime disposable income yes we do from sweden fertility rises with men's income and has
00:38:43.720 basically forever meanwhile women's incomes are pretty much totally unrelated to fertility whoopsie
00:38:49.700 and women's earnings are negatively related to fertility and i'll put some graphs on screen here
00:38:53.360 by the way this is lyman stone so just so people know and we've pointed this out before lyman stone
00:38:58.180 heavily biases anything he's looking at to try to argue that it's a really weird thing it's like being a
00:39:04.960 flat earther of the pro natalist movement that low income doesn't lead to higher fertility and that high
00:39:10.280 income generally doesn't lead to lower fertility and if you look here he had to find like one
00:39:15.260 obscure country where this is the case sweden to make this point but he's about to pull out some
00:39:20.380 data which makes our point which is that culture is everything which i'll get to in a second
00:39:23.500 so every kind of income is pro natal except for women's wages women's interest income business income
00:39:31.380 and rental income welfare income support from husband or family all probably pro natal earnings
00:39:38.320 no that's really interesting so women getting income from nothing or from not working he argues
00:39:46.520 is increasing fertility rate i think that's because he likes the idea of women living at home he really
00:39:51.760 likes this oh for sure yeah and that's what he's trying to argue even though he doesn't have any data
00:39:56.320 that supports this actually the data supports the opposite when women win the lottery their fertility
00:40:00.360 went down and this would be uh equivalent to you know like rental income business income welfare
00:40:05.880 income like it's a random cash deposit we also know from the big study on cash handouts that was done
00:40:12.940 on universal basic income didn't increase female fertility so he's just making something up here i guess
00:40:18.420 uh earnings no on the other hand you might look at the nearly universal rule of species that status
00:40:25.760 predicts reproductive success you might look at the stable male earnings fertility gradient
00:40:30.480 and suppose that high income will usually predict high fertility this is my view high income will
00:40:36.140 usually predict high fertility uh except it like doesn't in most countries in like that he had to
00:40:42.220 choose sweden to make this work is really i i think sort of the exception that proves the rule
00:40:46.520 so just so people understand how insane the statement you might look at stable male earning fertility
00:40:52.420 gradient and suppose that high income would usually support high fertility this is my view high
00:40:57.100 income will usually predict high fertility is just look at these charts here right this is between
00:41:03.560 country fertility rates this is with in-country fertility rates almost no matter how you slice it
00:41:08.500 lower income and this is between and within countries is predictive of higher fertility rate but then he goes
00:41:14.760 on to say which i think is interesting here is the relation between income and fertility is culturally
00:41:20.540 determined income has a relation with fertility but it's not income to fertility either up or down it's
00:41:28.960 income times culture to fertility okay i do agree with this the problem is is that the dominant
00:41:35.120 culture on earth the urban monoculture has a negative number attached to that culture times income to
00:41:43.180 fertility outcome which means that the only way to fight it is with cultures other than the dominant
00:41:49.260 culture which means it's culture silly any thoughts before i move forward there no the answer here is
00:41:59.520 it's the culture stupid it's the culture stupid yeah and so here we're back to zvi again
00:42:05.740 perhaps one could say that income relative to expectations or societal positions predict
00:42:10.600 individual fertility that seems like an actual mechanism as you get higher income perhaps excluding female
00:42:16.820 labor income because of the substitution problem relative to the perceived financial cost of children you get more
00:42:22.840 children the problem is that if rising income also raises perceived costs more you go backwards as it does in the
00:42:29.940 urban monoculture this is really interesting because the urban monoculture is at its core like a consumerist culture
00:42:34.260 as you get more income it's always going to say that the first thing that you should be spending it on is signaling
00:42:41.120 class status instead of anything like genuinely meaningful and so it's going to lower the fertility
00:42:47.760 rate because you're going to be more interested in signaling class status her core argument is that
00:42:54.240 what we actually have here is simpson's paradox that what's going on is the compositional changes in
00:43:02.000 income cohorts are creating a u-shaped curve that isn't a good way of understanding the situation and here i am
00:43:08.560 putting some graphs on screen here where i think what we can really see the answer from this final
00:43:15.840 graph which is like a graph i always wish it existed and i'm glad we have it here what this graph shows
00:43:20.800 is the u-shaped curve of fertility rates where you see them going up again at high levels of income
00:43:26.320 but it shows the population size of each one of these incomes as well and you see that basically no one exists
00:43:34.160 within the level of wealth you need for that to increase fertility rate and that is above half a
00:43:40.160 million to a million a year in household income now here's something that's really interesting if
00:43:45.680 we're talking about korea that i didn't know korea is very low fertility and we often talk about saving
00:43:51.840 korean culture and everything like that it's that korean culture for whatever reason makes large businesses
00:43:58.640 more productive than they should be and small businesses less productive than they should be
00:44:03.520 they are a chibol culture chibols are these giant mega corpse that are in korea where like you'll live
00:44:08.720 in like a samson apartment with a samson fridge and a samson computer and a samson internet connection
00:44:13.040 that makes samson boats it's it's weird and dystopian if you've ever lived there from the oh it's kind of
00:44:18.400 cool but yeah sure it is kind of cool i feel very much like i'm in like akira or something whenever i'm
00:44:24.240 there i'm like oh so i have to put my samson card to open the door for my samson building and yeah
00:44:30.400 they're tracking me all the time so great but anyway so so here it says while small to medium
00:44:36.400 sized businesses are rarely as productive as large ones it's striking how unproductive south korea's
00:44:42.240 small businesses are compared to those in western nations the oecd for example found small
00:44:48.160 service sector firms in korea are 30 as productive as larger firms with over 250 workers in the
00:44:56.480 netherlands and germany it is 84 to 90 respectively similarly the asian development bank found that in
00:45:04.640 2010 small korean firms with 5 to 49 workers were 22 as productive as firms with over 200 workers so in
00:45:14.160 most countries it's like a 20 or 10 hit in productivity in korea it's like an 80 or 90
00:45:20.480 hit to to productivity and i think this culturally shows how much korea is optimized for both collectivism
00:45:27.360 and to work in these giant giant giant firms which is interesting to me and i i think that there's
00:45:34.480 probably something to that that we'll probably dig deeper in the next time we look at korean fertility
00:45:38.480 statistics yeah that's interesting okay so next here we are looking at a list of wealthy people's
00:45:47.280 names and this person matthew iglesias is saying small sample but at the top end but larry ellison
00:45:54.400 and larry page each have two kids zuckerberg gates buffett volmer and brin each have three bezos has four
00:46:00.960 arnold has five and musk has seven when they're talking about the wealthiest people in the world right
00:46:05.360 in the us i suppose i would see this is really bad you should not live in a society where a number of
00:46:11.760 the wealthiest people only have two children that basically means they're aiming for what's normative
00:46:17.840 i would go so far as to say that if you are at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars
00:46:22.880 wealth that you should probably have multiple wives well one that's not legal in the united states
00:46:30.720 i think it would be very functionally does he does and there are other people in society who are
00:46:39.200 proudly advertising the fact that they have multiple wife not wives women who are pregnant
00:46:46.640 with their children just sent us that tweet from what was this tweet some rapper who is very proud
00:46:54.880 about the fact that he has like six women concurrently pregnant i i wouldn't imagine the the effect of
00:47:00.880 that are going to be entirely genetically positive it's just not sustainable in the same way like i i get
00:47:07.920 it i historically yes very resourced men have typically had a lot of children either very publicly or
00:47:17.920 privately you know kings of england and france had all these bastard children for example who were
00:47:23.040 recognized with varying degrees but they weren't they they were not they had no genetic advantage
00:47:29.200 over there like they may have from some sort of historical reason but it's not like they competed
00:47:33.680 in a meritocracy and ended up on top yeah i just yeah i is gonna happen okay i suspect that the moment we
00:47:44.880 get artificial wombs working really well we will have some billionaires begin to just mass produce
00:47:52.640 children yeah mass educate them mass give them nurturing so you'll have some that's producing
00:47:58.880 like 20 kids per year or something like that this is something where if somebody did that and they
00:48:03.440 were looking for somebody to run this facility that is my dream job so let me know i will make sure
00:48:10.640 very few of these kids end up totally messed up oh my god
00:48:14.160 i i i don't know i think that there are some people who just from an ideological perspective
00:48:23.840 want to spam children but that most of the billionaires who have larger families and i even
00:48:30.800 like anyone people of any level of wealth do it because they love their children and they
00:48:36.880 want to give their children a good life and they like spending time with their kids and when you change
00:48:41.200 it to this horrible reason to have kids oh horror you you don't kids aren't pets you don't have them
00:48:48.320 because of how they yeah they're not pets they're they're humans they're people you're bringing full
00:48:52.960 people into the world i may deserve you shouldn't have kids because of the emotional states they generate
00:48:58.560 in yourself no but you should be because you're willing to commit to raising and bringing a new person
00:49:04.000 into the world and yes very very well resourced people can do that by bringing in a ton of staff and
00:49:09.920 stuff it's just that after a while it becomes so abstracted from you personally that i kind of
00:49:15.600 feel like you're missing the point i think that there's a sweet spot so consider my childhood right
00:49:20.560 i spent very little time with my parents i spent a lot of time being raised by maids and stuff like
00:49:25.360 that you still spent a lot of very formative experiences with them and if you had 50 siblings
00:49:31.440 you would not have had that no you have been very shaped by formative experiences you have been gaslit
00:49:37.840 by my parents a little bit here who have not presented an entirely i've seen your home videos
00:49:42.160 i mean you've had enough to have formative experience this is exactly what i'm talking
00:49:45.520 about gaslighting simone home videos can be chosen for the maybe a few hours a year i would have spent
00:49:52.800 around my parents i have read about the amount of time that elon spends with his kids i absolutely guarantee
00:49:59.120 guarantee you that on average elon is spending twice as much time with any of his kids as my
00:50:05.280 parents spent with me and my child and my point is that he has about the right number of kids i think
00:50:08.880 he's 11 kids right and i think that's about the right number i think that no the point i'm making
00:50:13.840 which i don't think you're okay if if he spends twice the amount of time with his kids as my parents
00:50:18.240 spent with me right and i grew up very much seeing my parents as my parents my parents is the culture that
00:50:26.000 that i'm taking myself my life from i don't even remember the names of some of the maids who spent
00:50:32.080 years you're saying what you're missing is that the kids brains are biologically coded to know who
00:50:40.240 their parents are among the caregivers and culturally code to them
00:50:47.360 yeah i agree with you so you're indicating that a number between 10 and 30 is is optimal no i mean you're
00:50:55.760 you're really no i'm not arguing you think it's like 100 you think it's 200 that just doesn't
00:51:00.240 easily get to 100 or 500 in the age of ai there are various reasons why i don't like that i don't
00:51:06.720 like the lack of genetic diversity in that i i think that we're better off in society if if if one
00:51:15.200 billionaire had literally 10 000 kids it would do nothing to earth genetic diversity literally zero he
00:51:24.880 wouldn't even be 0.0000001 percent of earth's population right but we're not talking about
00:51:32.720 that we're talking about ultimately if if artificial booms became widely available there would be
00:51:40.240 you know 250 billionaires who are doing that and then suddenly there's this non-trivial percentage of
00:51:46.240 the future population that no it is a trivial do the math this is something that people don't do when
00:51:51.360 they make this genetics argument is they literally like they're like hypothetically that means 50
00:51:57.360 of the next population could all be a handful of people's kids and i'm like no even if every
00:52:03.280 billionaire on earth was doing this it would still be under 0.01 of earth's future population
00:52:10.400 like you're not running the actual numbers in your head here simone it would be completely trivial
00:52:17.280 and keep in mind that by the time it became an issue we would have genetic engineering to fix any
00:52:25.040 potential issues that this was causing even if it became an issue which it very is unlikely to become
00:52:31.520 an issue and in addition to that we this next generation like when this is happening this is when
00:52:38.160 they'll be able to train ais on uh books like if somebody wanted to train an ai on you and me for
00:52:44.320 example given the amount of content we put out there that ai would probably be within like 10 to
00:52:49.760 5 percent of uh being able to replicate our answers our parenting style in terms of how it interacted
00:52:57.440 with a kid just due to the sheer volume of information on us the idea that you cannot clone a parent
00:53:03.920 anymore is just factually wrong please can't you just leave the child with huggy stop calling him the
00:53:11.840 child richard his name is rocket and i'm not leaving him with your crappy robot sally why that's almost
00:53:19.280 churlish you can't replace family with a robot richard we need real human affection that's why huggy's
00:53:26.960 programmed to simulate its sweetness oh yes yes perhaps the fresh air will uh calm the female
00:53:37.200 uh hmm real human affection perhaps a pill or a burst of gamma radiation yeah i mean maybe this is just
00:53:47.280 you know intuitively not what feels right for me and i respect that sometimes logic is just
00:53:58.960 not in concordance with someone's intuition and feelings and i feel like if one of our kids ended
00:54:06.560 up doing this and one of our kids ended up i would talk with them about it i would you would try to
00:54:16.080 dissuade them from having more kids the same way my mom did with me no no because your mom was all about
00:54:24.160 putting in resources that i don't think really matter i mean i really this this is so against
00:54:29.680 everything that i stand for aesthetically so i think you can understand that i'm not fronting here
00:54:35.120 but i really think that children deserve a lot of very warm love and care and unique mental space of a
00:54:44.160 parent and when you have 50 plus children the fraction of them like you're gonna start having trouble
00:54:51.760 keeping track of who's who and what their names are and what their favorite colors are and i just feel
00:54:57.280 like if you're gonna bring someone into the world they are entitled to a certain proportion not just of
00:55:04.160 your wealth not just of your resources but also of your mindscape and maybe this is the difference
00:55:10.240 between men and women i mean obviously you evolutionarily as a male have been programmed on a
00:55:16.320 very deep level to spam and to just not give a like you can like you are just designed to have
00:55:24.240 as many kids as possible and genuinely not care whereas i have been you know evolved to be very
00:55:31.040 careful about the the quality and resources that each kid can can be given because typically it's the
00:55:40.080 women who are left with the kids and it's the men who walk away so i understand why you have the
00:55:43.520 mindset that you do and why none of this is what you're saying i might have a genetic predilection
00:55:48.320 to this mindset but i think that you're being overly sentimental and mythologizing the role of the
00:55:55.040 parent when a lot of this parental love can be simulated you can't replace family with a robot richard
00:56:02.640 we need real human affection that's why huggies program to simulate it sweetness this one is from
00:56:10.640 laura left finir well i have to ask you like would you be willing to i don't know like look one of
00:56:18.560 our kids are our living kids now in the face and say like hey i'm now going to send you to a facility
00:56:24.800 and you're largely going to be raised by other people and you know we're not going to live our
00:56:28.960 life together anymore and you know you're gonna have do you have any idea what my childhood was like
00:56:35.840 i was taken away from my parents at around the age of 12 stopped living with them after that i
00:56:42.080 never lived with them again i first lived in a prison system complex saying yes i lived at a
00:56:48.240 pre-preparatory boarding school for middle school and you're saying that was ideal yes it was better than
00:56:54.480 i know i literally i know all the other kids of rich people in my neighborhood all of them are drug
00:57:01.840 addicts they're od'd they're waste yeah as are many of the kids that you went to all these facilities
00:57:07.680 and schools with so fewer of them really yes how many of your classmates are thriving right now
00:57:17.920 well not many people are like me simone what i will say is my genetics does well in hardship environments
00:57:25.920 and i'd point out here that this childhood that she is terrified of one of our kids potentially
00:57:30.480 facing is the childhood that created me the person who presumably like i love who i am and she seems
00:57:38.480 to like who i am i would be really happy if my kids ended up like me and even if all of the hardship
00:57:46.400 was a negative even if i maybe could have been a better person without it i still would choose
00:57:54.640 existence plus hardship over non-existence and if through sending kids to a facility i was able to
00:58:00.880 bring more humans into existence of course are you willing to look at those additional kids in the
00:58:06.400 face and say sorry i wasn't willing to bring you into existence because your brother's at a facility
00:58:12.960 functionally those kids are up in heaven waiting on us to have them and you're just leaving them hanging
00:58:19.520 no this isn't cosmologically how i think things work but functionally it's how things work because
00:58:24.560 you're denying a human a right to exist what kind of dance should i do first for mom and dad
00:58:28.800 something classical or cha-cha
00:58:35.600 from what i've heard it's gonna take a while to even learn how to walk so maybe just a twist then
00:58:40.960 and i would be very and keep in mind when i was told this to the kid i wasn't told this like a bad
00:58:51.360 thing it's like oh you get to go to an environment where things are harder and you have more self
00:58:55.600 determination a kid especially one of our kids would love that if you don't frame it as some like
00:59:02.560 negative oh you were going to be away from mommy's hugs and you're like all right buddy now you're turning
00:59:08.240 eight the game gets harder like kids are like oh yeah let's do it like i i you're gonna have to
00:59:16.800 fend for yourself oh when i'm fending for myself i'm gonna do 10 times as good as when mommy and daddy
00:59:22.240 are fending for me you know that is the mindset i went into all this with and i look at our kids and
00:59:28.400 i know our kids like if you're saying our actual kids they'd effing love this in fact i remember like
00:59:36.240 just the other day our kids were playing and octavian took me aside and he goes daddy i need
00:59:41.200 you to go in the other room and look at the computer i was like what and he goes the little
00:59:46.960 ones are playing i need you to go look at a computer um because he knows what's up he he they were having
00:59:57.040 fun and me being around was was was lowering their ability to play so i disagree you make valid
01:00:06.000 arguments i just maybe it's just inbuilt to my biological right so you're like hyper on this side
01:00:18.320 i was an only child yeah and i loved being an only child and i loved having a close relationship with
01:00:22.960 my parents and i i love my parents and i also just have this deep inbuilt intuition and maybe this this
01:00:31.200 happened after i had kids we're just i really think kids deserve and i i am not someone to say
01:00:39.600 that anyone is entitled to anything right but i still think that if you're going to bring a person
01:00:44.080 into the world they are entitled to like a minimal percentage of your overall octavian think about
01:00:50.400 octavian our oldest kid our most cognitive kid if you asked him simone would you prefer more brothers
01:00:57.360 and sisters or more time with mommy and daddy what is he going to answer we can ask him tonight
01:01:06.720 i know i know it's more brothers and sisters you know it's more brothers and sisters you don't even
01:01:11.840 have to ask but we will we will all right so i'm gonna keep going so laura left fender says french
01:01:18.240 fertility rates top ratings in europe not for much for reasons of immigration but rather because
01:01:25.200 fertility among native born women is high and so here you can look at native born versus all women
01:01:30.800 in the country in what you see and what we've always said is that diversity in a country and
01:01:35.680 there's this one study that argues against this but it's like obviously not true if you look at the
01:01:39.600 data like it's so weird to me that people can't tell when people are lying to them with data i'm like
01:01:44.080 okay what countries have the highest fertility rates you're looking at like france and the united
01:01:47.840 states and israel fairly diverse countries which countries have the lowest fertility rates countries like
01:01:51.520 korea and china it's like okay well it's it's clearly diversity especially competitive diversity
01:01:57.840 is good for fertility rates which again we're finding in the data here now i thought this was
01:02:03.200 interesting to understand the cult of the host so this is talking about japan and host clubs
01:02:08.720 this was tweeted by jordan schneider we have to start with two statistics i'm sorry if you don't know what
01:02:13.920 a host club is it's a place where women in japan go to pretend to sort of date guys
01:02:20.000 like they buy pretty host clubs are basically bars or nightclubs in japan staffed by attractive
01:02:27.040 male boyfriend experience type people you select one when you get there and then one or two it's
01:02:33.200 you know like maybe one to a person and then sit there and drink with them and they make money from
01:02:37.840 the drinks that you purchase and then after that they may even like continue texting you and you know
01:02:42.320 asking you to come back and that's kind of how they make money and that they're a really interesting
01:02:47.760 phenomenon and you should definitely watch some youtube videos summarizing this this economy
01:02:52.000 because it's crazy some women even end up going into sex work because they are trying to support
01:02:58.320 the the addiction to their fake boyfriend yeah they'll quit their job and they'll go into sex
01:03:03.840 work to support their addiction to their fake boyfriend who works at basically also in sex work
01:03:08.560 which is basically the female equivalent of it which is more of a relationship style experience it's crazy
01:03:14.160 it is crazy and it is culturally normalized i think is really negative as well yes we can provide a
01:03:21.520 way to masturbate sort of the boyfriend desire that many japanese women have although i imagine
01:03:26.000 their host clubs are going to take a major hit as chat ais get more popular i could see that yes i
01:03:31.200 could also see the government banning them they probably should to be honest they should a lot of
01:03:36.720 women are going to be angry but they probably should yeah well i don't know i mean so this is something
01:03:40.880 would be like why would you not say that porn should be banned then because there's like no
01:03:44.240 statistics that shows that porn lowers birth rates actually anything if you look at the statistics in
01:03:48.640 the countries where porn is banned porn seems to a woman is very unlikely to be going through the
01:03:54.240 grind of dating and finding a husband if she's going to host clubs and this is not true of men in
01:03:59.520 porn and despite it's not true women in porn women can read romance novels and still actively be dating
01:04:05.120 but if you are investing in a host club relationship you do not have money or time to date you can only
01:04:10.400 spend your evenings and money on on supporting this this host club relationship which is just so
01:04:16.160 it's so toxic so i you know i typically am not for banning anything but i just i don't really see
01:04:21.040 anyone benefiting from this yeah even even though the the men who work in host clubs are paying huge
01:04:27.520 commissions to the club owner for you know all the all the alcohol purchase they're not being paid
01:04:32.880 directly they're being essentially paid a commission on drinks purchased at the bar it's it's stupid
01:04:38.320 yeah more than 60 percent of the japanese women in their late 20s are unmarried double the rate in
01:04:46.320 the mid-1980s a recent study found that more than a third of unmarried japanese adults 20 to 24 have
01:04:53.600 never dated oh yikes ouch that is wild so so when you consider that 60 are unmarried of of women at that age
01:05:03.760 range and a third of them more than a third of them have never even dated this makes a lot of
01:05:09.120 sense there's just not a cultural system that is pressuring them to go out and interact with guys
01:05:14.160 and they don't feel the need to do this they do not think guys have anything to offer right and i think
01:05:19.680 that this is something that a lot of guys in the west haven't gotten yet they if you increase this
01:05:26.080 narrative of women evil it can get to a point where women just decide in mass i'm not even going to try
01:05:32.160 anymore yeah because that's what happened in korea and japan yes well japan's doing relatively quite
01:05:39.280 well in east asia it's i don't think it's as bad in japan but in korea certainly it is and and this
01:05:48.000 people talk about the four bees move in and and misogyny being really stuff that is only very
01:05:54.640 serious among extremists but i do think that there is a trickle down effect that it sort of rubs off
01:06:00.240 and gives people general bad taste of the other sex because of these very high profile
01:06:08.320 battles taking place amongst extremists on each side so just because you yourself are not part of
01:06:14.000 the four bees movement if you're a woman in korea you might still be like like women and men hate each
01:06:18.800 other here right you know this isn't really a place for me to get married i shouldn't really be investing
01:06:23.520 in dating because it's not really great for women right it's not a good overall scheme
01:06:30.160 one note malcolm that in four minutes i have to jump on that call yeah i was actually thinking about
01:06:34.560 splitting this into two episodes so i am totally okay with that okay yes so people are commenting
01:06:40.720 on how like the conservatives now that they've won are beginning to split and fight amongst themselves
01:06:44.880 a bit more and one of the big areas which i think we've even seen is really the losers of the
01:06:49.840 conservative movement the traditionalists like that you know the the ones who really want to go back to
01:06:55.760 the old ways of doing things they've gotten quite mad about this stacy wojack meme who just acts like
01:07:01.920 a normal wife like you know demands things of her husband sometimes makes mistakes stuff like that
01:07:07.120 okay oh this is super relatable and they're like oh you guys are owning yourselves and women should
01:07:12.400 like always serve their husband and like not make any mistakes as a wife and like you're just looking
01:07:16.400 really cucked right here and all the normal like actually married men are like this is the way most
01:07:20.880 married women are like what are you doing um and it sort of devolved into this it was one faction
01:07:27.360 apparently sort of being led by nick fuentes which makes a lot of sense i mean you can talk a lot about
01:07:32.400 how a woman should act as a wife if you're not dating anyone you know because then you can say well
01:07:38.000 this is the ideal wife and i should only continue civilization if i can find this idealized wife
01:07:42.720 and it's created a huge problem for people i i think we should do an episode on it but it's a little
01:07:48.640 too similar to our don't trust influencers without parents episode which hasn't gone yeah or not
01:07:54.400 which hasn't gone live yet too too similar you can maybe add some annotation to it though about this
01:08:02.720 anyway
01:08:12.720 wow