Why is Fertility Collapse Happening Faster in Some Places Than Others？ (& Are Women at Fault？)
Episode Stats
Words per minute
184.91711
Harmful content
Misogyny
24
sentences flagged
Toxicity
12
sentences flagged
Hate speech
53
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss a new theory from a man named Robert Cremieux about why fertility rates fall faster in some countries than in others, and why this might be because of misogyny and gender roles.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about
00:00:03.500
a theory about fertility rates that come out from Cremieux, friend of the show. Don't know
00:00:08.820
if he's ever been on. We should ask him. Nice guy. But anyway, he has done a new theory where
00:00:15.520
he tries to understand why fertility rates fall faster in some countries than other countries,
00:00:21.580
i.e. what is protective of fertility rates. And the gist of the argument is that these countries
00:00:29.660
modernized later, and that caused them to maintain more of their ancestral culture,
00:00:35.500
specifically the misogyny and gender roles, which is not properly updated for the new context,
00:00:42.860
and leads to a crash in fertility rates. And I thought that the theory was really interesting,
00:00:47.620
so let's go over it piece by piece, because I think he might be onto something here.
00:00:51.680
But any thoughts before I start? Let's dive in. Let's do it. All right, let's get a graph on screen
00:00:57.320
here. You got to enhance. Enhance. Yeah. Give us the visual. And the premise that Cremieux sets is,
00:01:08.840
what differentiates the countries in orange from the countries in blue? Why did the orange countries
00:01:14.280
plunge into ultra low fertility, while the blue ones have maintained themselves better?
0.99
00:01:19.120
So let's talk about the two country groups. Orange includes Korea, Spain, and Italy, while blue includes
00:01:27.660
the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.
00:01:31.040
And Cremieux groups them into two sets. He says the countries in the first set are group one nations.
00:01:37.240
In the second set, they are group two nations. Notice anything about their growth rates? One thing
00:01:42.120
is that they've all grown to similar enough levels. Another is the acceleration of the pace of growth.
00:01:49.120
So in the second tweet, he shares two additional graphs showing different trajectories of growth
00:01:55.920
and different fertility rates. In group one, nations started off a bit richer, and they grew at a more
00:02:03.160
stable pace. In group two, the nations started off poorer, but they caught up to group one by growing
00:02:08.200
faster in the latter half of the 20th century. Their fertility rate trajectories followed suit.
00:02:15.160
And so what you see here is a really interesting thing in group one countries, where we've talked
00:02:19.860
about it in other videos, but around the 1930s, there was a huge fertility crash that a lot of
00:02:24.120
these group one countries recovered from. This was mostly due to medical technology, although
00:02:28.000
housing in the war played a role as well. And you can look at our video on, you know, the baby boom
00:02:35.020
to get more information on this. But the gist being is that if you take the baby boom as an anomaly,
00:02:42.100
and you sort of try to draw a through line through these, it looks fairly stable. Whereas these other
00:02:49.200
countries start to crash really dramatically and pretty quickly. And what's interesting is most of
00:02:56.740
the crash in these other countries' fertility rates happens between 1920 and I'd say 1980. So before
00:03:05.120
our modern time. And that's where they're dropping for much higher initial fertility rates. So if you
00:03:10.940
look at it, like sort of the mean fertility rate at the beginning of this period in 1920 for the group
00:03:16.420
two, all of these countries where they started with a much higher mean fertility, let's say around
00:03:21.160
four or maybe even 4.5. Whereas the other group started with a mean fertility of 3 to 3.5. So
00:03:30.660
it's almost as if the higher fertility you start with, the lower your fertility goes over time.
00:03:37.140
Yeah. And Cremieux has a theory around this. Cremieux writes, all societies used to be pretty sexist.
00:03:42.940
They used to repress women in various ways. And that was just that for all of human history. But as
00:03:47.400
societies have developed, one of the major changes has been that women's status has quickly moved up
00:03:52.980
to the levels that have only once been seen by men. With slow continuous growth, these norms changed
00:03:58.700
and women's acceptance was taken up gradually without much need for pushing. But with rapid growth,
00:04:04.760
the picture is far different. The norms have changed more slowly than the markets. And that may have
00:04:10.220
been disastrous. You can see plenty of signs of this everywhere. For example, in the group one nations that
00:04:15.100
experienced slow and steady growth, men and women tend to have more similar household labor
00:04:19.220
distributions. He then shares a graph of time use and fertility among the 12 group one and group two
00:04:25.240
nations. And there is somewhat of a negative correlation between total fertility rate and female
0.99
00:04:30.220
minus male daily hours of unpaid household labor. He continues, similarly, in the case of distributions
00:04:37.060
in the home is incidentally related to fertility among this group of developed countries. He shows
00:04:43.020
another graph with negative correlation between time and fertility among 20 nations. He writes,
00:04:48.640
I'm aware there are issues with treating this as if it's causal. But the point here is less about
00:04:54.820
the particular example of household time use and more about how norms change over time with slow versus
00:05:00.140
rapid growth. Take South Korea as an example. In South Korea, men's attitudes towards women are still
00:05:05.640
pretty unrefined. A potential result, enormous sex differences and getting along in politics.
1.00
00:05:11.060
These gulfs are opening up the world over, but South Korea is the most extreme example.
0.98
00:05:17.800
Here he shares a Financial Times graph showing the ideology gap opening up between young men and women
00:05:22.600
in countries across the world. With South Korea being the first country shown, and just over time,
00:05:28.900
especially from 2015 to 2020, the gap is just like, like they're just becoming different species.
00:05:34.340
Whereas in the US, the gap is violent, but not that insane. In Germany, it's a little bit less bad
00:05:40.820
in the UK. It's also, I mean, they're all getting worse. And this resonates with me. I mean, I could
00:05:46.420
see a lot of the tension there making sense. I actually think Grok came up with a better answer,
00:05:52.020
but I do like this answer. It's definitely something that is contributing to the fertility collapse that
00:05:57.920
we're seeing in Italy and Spain is the idea that not, sorry, not Italy and Spain, South Korea. I don't
00:06:03.940
know why you said that, but it was likely the same thing is that men are staying much more misogynistic
00:06:10.120
in their attitudes and expectations of their wives than men are in the United States. And if you get
00:06:16.840
female liberation in terms of the workforce, with all the misogynistic attitudes now, marriage becomes
00:06:22.280
an incredibly raw deal for women, just in terms of hedonism. I'm not saying in terms of like genetics
00:06:26.660
or whatever, but if you are expected to handle the kids, handle the house and handle a career that's
00:06:33.100
equivalent to your husband's career. And he just, what does whatever, like takes the status bosses you
00:06:38.960
around. Like why would you want that? Right. And then a lot of men feel like, well, you know, you should
00:06:46.040
give us like, we do need to maintain some degree of our historic culture. So I understand why they're
00:06:50.720
pushing back and they think a lot of women have gone too far and their accusations around men,
00:06:54.840
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, if you look at the level of misogyny and misandry in Korea,
0.98
00:06:59.300
it is at a completely different level than what you see in the United States or something like that.
00:07:03.900
Like these two genders are almost two separated political classes now. And that's definitely more
1.00
00:07:10.320
in Italy. I grew up partially in Italy. I lived there for a year when I was a kid. And one of the things
00:07:14.980
I distinctly remember is the constant catcalling. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And this is,
00:07:20.420
this was true when I was growing up there. And I remember this being an American from Texas,
00:07:23.740
being in Italy and in Texas, I don't remember ever hearing catcalling.
00:07:28.180
Golly. Okay. You just wouldn't do it. Like you'd get beaten up or something, you know,
00:07:32.380
but in Italy, no, it's considered very normal for guys to be, you know, really. And, and people who
00:07:38.840
don't understand why catcalling is bad. Like you are intentionally harassing in a way that is meant
00:07:45.340
to be derogatory of their status in relative to your status, a woman. A lot of people think that
00:07:52.360
this is like, I don't know that there's like, there might be some women who have like a weird
1.00
00:07:55.800
fetish for it. They're not even a weird fetish. I'd actually say it's probably a normal fetish
00:07:59.140
to like being publicly humiliated by men saying you're attractive. But I don't think that it is
00:08:05.060
something that you're going to see a lot of in countries where women are seen as,
1.00
00:08:10.720
you know, tough or deserving of their own like rights. Now, when I put this into any thoughts
00:08:17.680
before we go to what Grok has to say? I'm no, you have me so curious about what
00:08:21.760
Grok is going to say. I can't say no. All right. So what I put into Grok to sort of test it.
00:08:28.280
So if you look at the countries that he includes in the two groups, I decided to only include a few
00:08:35.060
of the countries that he includes in the two groups to see if Grok's findings hold true for the
00:08:39.800
other groups that are in the two groups. So the full two groups that he used was Denmark, France,
00:08:45.000
Germany, Sweden, UK, US. The second group was Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Spain.
00:08:52.280
So I decided let's just do two. Okay. So what's the difference between South Korea, Spain, and Italy
00:08:57.500
and the US, France, and the UK? All right. Culturally speaking. Sure. What?
00:09:02.880
It says the most striking thing would be respect for elders with, and this is definitely true,
0.50
00:09:09.280
with the US, France, and the UK having much lower levels of this than Spain, Italy, and South Korea.
00:09:17.520
And so then my question could be, oh, is that cultural distance also true in the other countries
00:09:21.800
here, like Greece and Portugal? Yes, it is. Okay. What about the other countries on the other side?
00:09:28.480
Germany and Denmark? Yeah, definitely. Way lower respect for elders. And if I actually think about
00:09:34.360
where countries have seen fertility collapse hit the hardest, like Japan, Korea, China,
00:09:40.380
these are all countries that have a unique respect for elders. Where has fertility hit uniquely lowly?
00:09:46.560
Greater Appalachian cultural region, as we've mentioned, which has almost no respect for elders
00:09:50.260
at all. Like elders are kept alive, but like... We won't kill you, but... We won't kill you,
00:09:59.640
but it's all... We'll resent you a little bit. And Jewish culture. And I actually argue Jewish culture
1.00
00:10:05.860
does not have a particularly high respect for elders when contrasted with, let's say, Korean or
00:10:11.300
Japanese or Confucius culture. You have like a little degree, but I don't... I'd say less than
00:10:17.420
Christian, even like your modern, like East Coast Christian. Elders are just not assigned a high
00:10:23.420
status unless they can meritocratically prove that they deserve a high status. So it's not that you
00:10:30.120
don't see elders in positions of status. It's just that being elder in and of itself is not a thing
00:10:34.580
deserving of respect. Okay. And so the question could be, why would that cause... Well, let's go into
00:10:40.600
it a bit more before we ask why. Yeah. South Korea, Spain, and Italy appear to have a cultural
00:10:46.380
similarity and that they have a deep respect for their elders rooted in traditions like Confucianism
00:10:50.640
in South Korea and Consolacism in Spain and Italy. This respect manifests in behavior such as using
00:10:54.900
formal language, giving up seats for elders, and prioritizing family roles, which contrasts with
00:11:00.380
the more individualistic and youth-focused culture that the U.S. and the U.K. and France. However, it shows
00:11:05.920
a... France, it says, shows a blend of this. Hmm. Okay. Here, it also divides stuff with looking at
00:11:12.840
individualism versus collectivism, with the cultures on this side being much more individualistic,
00:11:18.560
which I also see, and much more low power difference, which I also see. So that's another
00:11:22.980
thing that could be causing this. Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Spain, all are less
00:11:28.620
individualistic, more collectivist and have higher power differences, whereas the U.S., U.K., Sweden,
00:11:34.740
Germany, France, and Denmark all have fairly low power differences. So let's think about how this could
00:11:41.720
have caused a fertility issue, right? Okay. Yes. The respect for elders is, I guess, it's fairly
00:11:48.440
obvious to me. Like, where, when resources are limited and demographic collapses are already
00:11:54.320
underway, do you distribute the resources that are left? You're going to, if you could choose more
00:11:59.980
babies or elders, you're going to choose elders. Yeah. I mean, a country like Korea should be spending
1.00
00:12:05.340
as much on family creation as it spends on elder care. 100%. Yeah. And I'm fairly sure,
00:12:11.700
it's not, I'll add and pose, but I'm fairly sure it's not even like, you know, maybe one-tenth what
00:12:15.540
it's spending on elder care. Okay. I found myself surprised on this one. They only spend about double
00:12:19.660
on elderly costs. In elderly costs in South Korea, it's around 51 to 54 billion USD. And in children,
00:12:26.300
it's around 18 to 22 billion USD per year as of 2025. So the elderly care ratio is two to 2.5x
00:12:33.860
birth incentives. Yeah. If you look at, so, so that makes perfect sense to me because it's about,
00:12:39.780
or me as an individual, like if one of my parents was like, oh, I'm ailing, come help me. I can't
00:12:45.940
survive on social security. It's in a message. I have four kids, you knob, F off. Yeah. Like your problem.
00:12:56.580
Your problem. Hey man, I got five kids to beat. I'd be like that scene from Team America where
00:13:03.840
he's like, if you get caught, you may need to take your own life. And he slides a hammer across the
00:13:07.720
table. Well, you'll probably want to take your own life. Here, you'd better have this.
0.99
00:13:19.040
All right, team. That's it. We've got a job to do. That'd be me. I'd be like, you know,
00:13:23.360
you know what to do. You know what to do. Okay. So that I see. Now let's talk about individualism.
00:13:30.800
Why would high individualism lead to higher fertility rates in these cultures? The answer
00:13:35.380
here could be that you have an easier time resisting the monoculture and dominant cultural
00:13:40.020
practices within your country. And so you're going to have more people who sort of buck the trend,
00:13:45.140
which I could definitely see leading to higher fertility rates in many of these countries.
00:13:50.000
You were going to say something? No, no, no. I'm agreeing with you. Yeah. And then high power
00:13:56.080
distance. That makes a lot of sense. I think in the modern world, high power distance just doesn't
00:14:00.420
really work that well anymore. This is where like your boss is like really high above you in status.
00:14:05.660
And this is actually really true in a lot of Latin America where we're also seeing a unique
00:14:08.700
fertility collapse. It's sort of across Catholic cultures because you have like the people who
0.78
00:14:13.420
matter and then the people who are the people, right? And why this leads to fertility collapse is I think
00:14:18.280
the people, people like don't see a point in continuing the cycle anymore. They don't want
00:14:22.320
to put people into this system where they're going to be an underclass. And yeah, that makes perfect
1.00
00:14:28.180
sense to me. Why would you continue to participate in that? The final sort of hypothesis I'd have here
00:14:34.360
about what would lead to this is just a longer time to evolve a resistance to the urban monoculture.
00:14:40.760
I think the urban monoculture didn't really care or the iterations that existed before it,
00:14:46.500
like the pro-domal iterations of it, didn't really focus on these other countries when they were
00:14:51.320
super poor and culturally different. And I think that was leading to their high fertility rates at
00:14:55.320
that period. And so they didn't have a century for the people who are slightly lower fertility rate
00:15:02.500
when exposed to the urban monoculture to die out disproportionately. And so now they're all dying
00:15:07.000
out at once. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. It's so dire. That is, that is interesting. I don't
00:15:19.620
know. I still, I'm still finding myself, however, gravitating toward the, the misogyny thing just
00:15:27.300
because so much of this problem is couples just failing to get married. True. And a misogynistic
00:15:35.140
attitude pervading a culture where women have an option not to marry is going to lead to women
0.97
00:15:39.680
not as enthusiastically engaging with the marriage culture. And every high fertility family we know
0.87
00:15:46.360
personally has husbands has husbands who contribute a lot are extremely supportive. If they, if they're
00:15:55.680
the breadwinners, they also contribute a lot of labor. Um, if they are not the sole breadwinners,
00:16:01.480
they contribute probably as much labor as their wife also breadwinners contribute, you know,
00:16:08.240
this is just like, actually, I might word it differently. I'd say every high fertility family
00:16:11.580
that we know has a husband who would be considered a simp by like the manosphere or the Andrew Tate
00:16:17.560
movement. And not necessarily like, like for example, us, I'm not like a simp in a traditional
00:16:22.040
term, but people have been like, Oh, Malcolm, you're like overly nice to your wife. You overly
00:16:26.120
pedestalize your wife. You, and I'm probably of all of the high fertility men that we know
0.64
00:16:31.420
the most traditionally masculine. Except for maybe Kevin Dolan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin
00:16:39.580
Dolan's pretty traditionally masculine, but yeah, the, the, yeah, I think that you're a hundred percent
00:16:46.140
right here. Women have kids when they feel supported and protected because a woman in a modern context is
1.00
00:16:53.520
just not going to feel like you have her back if you're pulling this. And, and the truth is,
00:16:59.060
is you don't, I think we saw this was a quiverful movement. And it's part of the reason the quiverful
00:17:02.880
movement sort of fell apart was a understanding of the man's role in the household. Instead of adapting
00:17:08.820
to modern and changing pressures, they tried to go with this dictatorial male in control woman at home
1.00
00:17:15.320
does nothing birthing. And it didn't create an environment that daughters wanted to recreate or that
0.87
00:17:21.800
sons were capable of recreating. Yeah, I agree. And, and actually here, I thought I read something
00:17:29.780
really interesting on our discord that somebody posted about the failure of the quiverful movement
00:17:35.240
to replicate itself. And I was like, Oh my God, this is so true. I've got to read it. So this is
00:17:41.460
from the person on the discord called cat. I don't know. It's some sort of vegetation and they have
00:17:50.940
three kids because people say that on the discord, how many kids they have. I have so many thoughts
00:17:55.280
regarding this topic as somebody who is raised quiverful adjacent Christian homeschooler who
00:18:00.360
attended quiverful co-ops, et cetera. But my family wasn't specifically quiverful ourselves.
00:18:04.800
I think the big factor of their failure is the way that they specifically and intentionally raised
00:18:10.540
non-agentic children. Boys in general have a, had a bit of a rudderless time over the past few
00:18:16.920
decades, but I've never seen anything like the slow motion catastrophe that has been the quiverful
00:18:22.040
boys aging out of their homeschooling regime. The prototypical quiverful family is a first generation
1.00
00:18:29.080
of fairly beta white collar husband, fairly crazy homeschooling mother, raising sons who are
00:18:36.300
simultaneously long house browbeaten under mommy's supervision his entire life while also being
00:18:41.780
inculcated with an irrational entitlement complex based on being male, not being accomplished.
00:18:47.520
They can't follow in their haired, checked out father's white collar footsteps because they are
0.97
00:18:53.300
undereducated colleges of this world, but they often don't have the connections or
00:18:58.860
savvy to make it in the working class trades world. So they either languish in some sort of
0.94
00:19:04.360
drifting failure to launch, or if their family is particularly committed to get married off and
00:19:09.160
are expected to support a family that increases by one every year, starting at the age of 18
00:19:13.720
on nothing but thoughts and prayers. It's such a mess. Anecdotally, I can confirm mass
00:19:19.500
deconversion rates. I don't think the Duggars are at all archetypical. They mostly compensate for the
0.98
00:19:25.160
above issue by having all that TLC money that Jim Bob bought real estate with. So he basically
00:19:30.080
supports his sons through the dad welfare. It's just crazy to me that they had all this IBLP
00:19:37.640
propaganda about how they were going to raise a Joshua generation that's going to take over the
1.00
00:19:42.420
government and lead a worldwide revival and then raise the least agentic children ever walked the
0.84
00:19:47.340
earth. Timid, sullenly. Not good. Not good. Complete and utter failure and refutation of the
00:19:54.420
movement's philosophy. Yeah. And yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think that that might be
00:20:00.060
what we're seeing in these cultures that have these stricter power differences between the old and the
00:20:03.440
young as well, is that they are, but they put really strict rules on their kids. And if you look
00:20:08.100
at our family, while we have rules for our kids, I expect them and will be proud of them when they break
00:20:13.280
those rules. That's part of why we use corporal punishment instead of limiting punishment to just
00:20:17.960
like yelling or emotional escalation. Because when a kid does something bad, it allows me to quickly
00:20:24.800
show them like, Bob, they did something wrong, but I still love you. Like it was recorded in that piece
00:20:29.700
so that they understand that breaking rules does not remove them from the circle of love of the family
00:20:35.800
and that I will set down a fence and rules for them. But I still, especially when they're breaking
00:20:42.720
rules in their own, you know, based on their own internal moral compass, have respect for them
00:20:47.240
in doing that. And, you know, you see this, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, like
00:20:51.880
Jordan Peterson, a guide to raising simps. Jordan Peterson is like, you just need to break the child's
00:20:58.460
will down until they listen to you. And I'm like, that is not a good idea. That raises non-agentic
00:21:04.120
children. You want to build the child's will up until they take from nobody. And if they don't
00:21:10.420
understand why you're giving rules and you're just like, you just obey the authority, then they're
00:21:14.440
just going to obey the urban monoculture. And I think a lot of these religious families, that's
0.60
00:21:17.920
what they were, just obey the authority, just obey the authority, just obey the authority. But they
00:21:21.120
thought the authority was always going to be the church. And they didn't realize that the authority
00:21:25.780
changes based on the person's context of their interacting within the real world. And so they were
00:21:30.820
easily browbeaten. And they also created males that like, who would want that? Like a lot of girls just
0.99
00:21:36.440
aren't going to want that. And, and so they, they get assist, you know, because it's like much worse
00:21:43.980
than like a Mormon community or something where you have more of the church, like keeping track of
00:21:48.080
things and less a chance that one man is going to be like overly domineering with his family or
00:21:54.820
something within these more dispersed Protestant communities. I, as a woman, honestly, I wouldn't want
1.00
00:22:01.840
to marry into one of these. I'd be really worried. Uh, especially if they were raised with a sort of
00:22:06.000
like, well, men lead the family attitude, like, and we have me as a man lead the family. I just
00:22:12.860
consider that a gift from Simone. Well, and back to our repeated theme of, of real dominance,
00:22:19.980
real dominance, isn't shut up and do what I say, follow my orders. Real dominance is demonstrating
00:22:25.660
through your competence, good decision-making and good leadership, natural leadership, that your plans
00:22:31.520
are trustworthy and the best way to go. People fall in line. There is no ordering and there's
00:22:35.720
no shutting people down and systematically training them to be compliant. You don't need to train people
00:22:40.920
to be compliant when they know you're right. And that's the big difference.
00:22:44.520
Yeah. Well, and we had the episode on, on Andrew Tate, where I was like, Andrew Tate's idea of
00:22:49.680
masculinity. It's like, he watched the gladiator and he's like, ah, the emperor. That's what the ideal
00:22:54.220
man is like. And that, that, you know, the, the gladiator Maximus, he's a simp. Whereas the exact
00:23:00.120
opposite is true, you know, and I pointed this out because if you watch it, he attempts to force
00:23:07.240
the women around him to follow his wills, literally at sword point, you know, like Andrew Tate being
0.99
00:23:11.360
like, this is why I have a sword. So women don't, you know, they talk down to me and you see the
1.00
00:23:15.720
emperor playing with like a sword in his house, you know, and wanting to be loved. And I think
00:23:20.900
that if you look at Maximus, none of this is about being loved by people or anything like that. He just
00:23:24.720
has a duty and he's carrying it out. And it's certainly not about like, if you look at the character of
00:23:29.680
Maximus, you look at the relationship he's framed at having with both his kids and the woman who has
00:23:33.100
that desperate crush on him is, is this is not a guy who is pushing around his wife, telling his
00:23:39.080
wife, like get in the kitchen, telling his wife, like you do what I say. Now, you know, the wife
0.99
00:23:43.720
is making him dinner because she cares about him. Right. And they're working on a shared goal or
00:23:47.900
something like that. Like you don't have any feeling like they don't have traditional gender roles,
00:23:52.340
but the traditional gender roles are carried out because those are the preferences of the male and the
00:23:57.800
woman. They are not carried out because the woman has some supernatural reason to be obedient or
1.00
00:24:03.280
some like biological mandate to be obedient to her husband. It's just average biological differences
0.99
00:24:09.620
here. Yeah. Yeah. Which means that there also is no commitment to those specific roles. And the
00:24:19.680
commitment is to where someone's propensity and skill lies. So if, for example, a man and a woman
00:24:27.420
or whatever configuration of people you want work to pair up and start raising kids together,
00:24:31.820
we're not going to be like, well, you're the woman. So of course you're doing those things. It's
0.93
00:24:34.860
well, okay. What are you going to contribute best? Do that thing. So if a man ends up doing all of the
0.99
00:24:40.140
cooking, indoor cleaning and infant rearing, fine, we're, we're not married to that. And I think a lot
00:24:45.000
of these really conservative religions are, um, and these, these cultures as well, like when the,
00:24:49.540
the man can't do that, even if he'd rather do that, like, even if the woman has the highest educational
00:24:54.320
degree and the greatest earning potential and the greatest professional network, she has to
1.00
00:24:58.380
become the mother who stays at home and somehow the less educated, less connected, less privileged
0.93
00:25:04.640
man has to earn enough for both. So this isn't just like a religious culture thing. This is also
00:25:09.160
within the wider online manosphere, right-leaning culture where recently there was a fight of memes
00:25:14.820
in which there was this concept of like the dad meme or the husband meme. And it's typically the
00:25:20.520
husband being like, Oh honey, of course I'll do X for you. Or I'll do Y for you. You know,
00:25:24.320
he's doing something sweet for the wives. It's like normal for her husband to do.
00:25:27.520
Yeah. This was known as the wife Jack meme wars. I was wrong. It wasn't about a husband meme. It was
00:25:32.280
a wife meme. And then a bunch of guys were like, Oh, like you guys posting what a simp you are,
00:25:37.980
you know? And the guys of course, complaining that these other guys are simps are unmarried. Right. And
00:25:42.380
it's like, well, that's genetically what's being preserved in the human condition. It's not a simp.
00:25:47.360
It's being able to work with people and being able to appreciate what other people are bringing
00:25:51.880
to the table. And it has become almost within these cultures seen as a sign of submission or
00:25:58.640
browbeatenness. If you are shown as making either concessions to your wife, or you are shown as
00:26:06.380
having appreciation for your wife. And yet anybody who is going to have a lot of kids knows that those
00:26:12.520
two things are like within a modern context, critical to, I think, having, let's say over
00:26:18.360
five kids. Like you just can't get to these sorts of numbers. If you're not doing that, if you're, if
00:26:23.420
you're taking the, you do what I say approach, you're going to really struggle to get that high
00:26:28.140
because the woman is just not going to be all about it. She's going to be like, what am I doing
00:26:31.880
all this for? Like, what am I raising my daughters for? Like, what's the point? Right.
00:26:37.200
Yeah. Slave mentality. If you want to turn your wife into a slave, she's going to labor like a
1.00
00:26:41.720
slave. Intrinsic motivation is just a billion times more powerful than extrinsic motivation as
00:26:47.460
is seen across countless studies, research, anecdotal examples. So this shouldn't be common
00:26:53.940
sense. Their wives following them for the same reason in Gladiator, why people followed what the
1.00
00:26:58.280
emperor said instead of the reason why people followed what Maximus said. And it's, it's a completely
00:27:03.160
different, are they following you because you're inspiring them or are they following you because it's
00:27:05.900
rules and because you'll hurt them if they don't. And I think that, that this sort of like ideal of
00:27:13.200
male aesthetics, that's not really working for any man anywhere that I'm aware of, except for maybe
00:27:18.040
Andrew Tate is like super toxic. And with Andrew Tate, it basically only works because he's super
00:27:23.760
wealthy. Like women will do a lot of crazy nonsense for, for very wealthy men. Yeah. It's a trade-off.
1.00
00:27:29.720
Especially if they have like a public profile or something like that. Like you look at the
00:27:35.000
simp women that like Elon gets or something like that. But I could not treat you the way that Elon
1.00
00:27:40.740
treats his wives. Like I would never get away with that. Like you'd leave me. And I don't think that
00:27:47.080
like, and somebody's like, is that fair? It's like, dude, he's a, he's like a infinity billionaire.
00:27:52.320
Like fair is not part of the equation. It's a different social contract when you're interacting
00:27:57.940
with somebody like that. It's like, it's like, Oh, the King in, in like, you know, medieval Europe
00:28:04.260
or something like that treats their wives differently than you do. It's like a entirely
0.57
00:28:09.420
different social contract exists for the King. Of course. Like what, what are you like? How could
00:28:15.740
you think that? And I think that you get sort of two categories of influencers who like go into
00:28:20.800
this category of influence. One is they're super successful. They become super wealthy and they're
00:28:26.440
able to live some sort of like unrealistic life. The other, they go like the Nick Fuences path and
00:28:31.740
they end up like a forever celibate. Right. You know, where they can't like his advice on the way
00:28:38.000
you should treat girls leads to the extinction of your culture. Like he is living proof of that.
1.00
00:28:43.420
Yeah. He's not going to have any kids likely at this point, given how old he is already,
00:28:47.980
or at least not many, not unless he uses IVF, which he won't. And so my problem is, I mean,
00:28:54.400
men really can afford to delay fertility, but they're either ensuring that their children are
1.00
00:29:01.160
not going to be very healthy or they need to freeze their sperm. Guys, please freeze your sperm
0.99
00:29:08.380
for the love. Like, although here's my other problem with like genetic health, it degrades it around the
0.87
00:29:14.160
same rate as female genetic health. It just doesn't fall off a cliff. And these, these higher risk
00:29:18.180
factors that your child will get, if you have them with older sperm, like higher risks of cancer and
00:29:25.820
all sorts of other disorders, they get passed on to your grandchildren and their grandchildren. So what
00:29:30.340
are you doing? But beyond that, like, so, I mean, one, it is actually super possible if you free sperm
00:29:35.640
to have healthy children late in life and, you know, put that off. My problem is that older men
1.00
00:29:42.200
are still in a bad situation if they choose to do that, because either you end up with,
00:29:48.060
you know, your perfect, sexy, 20 something wife who is never going to be on your level because there's
1.00
00:29:55.100
so much of an age gap. You know, you're never really going to have an intellectual equal. I mean,
00:30:00.420
you might need someone who loves old souls, but still like age, you know, it's, it doesn't quite
00:30:06.060
work as neatly as I would hope on that front. And then, or you end up with an older woman who
0.99
00:30:12.400
probably hasn't frozen her eggs. And then you have the same problem with genetic material.
00:30:16.480
Well, and these men are going to be doing like you, okay, let me put it this way. You,
00:30:21.980
a guy right now, you're like, yeah, when I'm 50 or 60, I'm going to get a young woman and I'm
00:30:27.060
going to have lots of kids after I'm rich. Do you, do you want a child? Do you want to raise
00:30:32.220
a child and then have her raise child? Like, not just that, but like, do you even want to be having
00:30:38.180
that sex? Like, no, I'm being honest. Like you, do you really want like a 50 year old sleeping with
0.99
00:30:43.400
like a late 20 something? Like, do you think that's hot for the 50 year old, even at that point? Like
00:30:48.220
where you're taking all of the medications so that you're still horny and you're taking all of the
00:30:53.240
pills so that you can still get hard. Like that's not hot.
00:30:56.820
And then there's also the problem, like the most, and I, this is not spoken about enough. The most
00:31:04.020
unsexy type of sex is obligatory sex, especially if you know that the partner is like having sex
0.89
00:31:13.180
out of obligation and they may be great at acting, but I'm pretty sure that the vast, vast majority
0.80
00:31:20.400
of 20 something girls who marry wealthy and successful, much older men are faking it.
0.94
00:31:28.060
Which is the worst type of woman who's pretending to be into you.
1.00
00:31:32.100
Which is the worst type of sex. I just like, I could never, I could never have sex with someone
0.97
00:31:36.480
like that. I'm just saying that like, they think that what they're getting is just delaying and
00:31:41.820
then they get the young hot wife. And it's like, no, you get the young hot wife when you're young
00:31:46.240
and hot, or you get some other type of weird relationship. Not like you create that relationship
00:31:52.100
later in life. So that's going to be a possibility for them. But the reality is it's not either from
00:32:04.220
a genetic standpoint, that real of a possibility or from a, you know, they're not like, oh, I can delay
00:32:10.540
getting this now and I'll get it in the future. No, you're not getting it in the future. You're getting
00:32:14.440
some weird other thing, which is, which is not as fun. You know, you, anyway, love you to death,
00:32:20.860
Simone. I am glad that I settled down with you. I had another one that I'm not actually not going
00:32:26.560
to make, cause I just know it'll do bad, but it was really interesting to research, which was
00:32:31.420
if the trope of the bachelor party where people felt like they were like marrying a ball and chain
00:32:37.740
and like, oh yeah. Like this is my last moment to go wild. Yeah. I was like, is this real?
00:32:42.420
Like, is it, was this ever actually a thing that was practiced in large numbers? Cause it like,
00:32:46.660
doesn't seem. Well, I thought it was a condensed version of the sort of Catholic model that existed
00:32:51.740
back all the way to like ancient Roman times where it was just kind of understood that debaucherous
00:32:58.420
wealthy men would have all the female partners they wanted and then try to sober up later in life when
00:33:04.920
they got married and that a bachelor party is kind of compressing that for less wealthy people.
00:33:09.560
What, what, what did you find in your research? Well, yeah. I mean, apparently it did really
00:33:13.500
happen and it, you know, they were like, well, I understand that today. Cause I was like,
00:33:17.740
it doesn't even make logical sense. Like you're about to get married to presumably the person that
00:33:21.380
you love more than anyone in the world. And you've been so excited to spend your life with
00:33:24.840
like, why would you go out and sleep with other people right before that? Like, why would you want
00:33:29.360
that? And it was like, oh, well, you see people didn't actually used to love their wives
00:33:34.100
during this period of history. Yeah. I mean this, the, yeah, the alternate take there is
00:33:38.260
hold on, actually, maybe this was the sign of a better world in which people got married
00:33:47.600
as business arrangements and saw sex as something that they did separately, but also lived in
00:33:51.880
monogamous societies. A breaking of both, which is to say that it was this period of the boomers
0.96
00:33:57.140
where they got all of the divorces, you know, they had like the really high divorce rate
00:34:00.400
and they'd had terrible marriages. Like everybody knows, like the boomers were almost
1.00
00:34:04.360
like the pure infantilization of humanity where they were a generation that had very little
0.96
00:34:10.420
self-control, very little, like is obsessed with self-validation, just, you know, broke
00:34:16.620
a lot of social traditions that were actually really important without understanding what they
00:34:20.540
were doing. Didn't really pass money down to their kids intentionally. Didn't really establish
00:34:26.060
the idea of like intergenerational family units well in the way that their ancestors had.
00:34:30.400
They just sort of, after the greatest generation, it just like increasingly degraded.
00:34:34.700
And then you got to the boomers. And I think since the boomers, every generation has been sort of
0.62
00:34:40.080
building themselves a little bit back from that point. You know, you look at Gen Alpha and they're
00:34:44.920
definitely a lot more mature than the boomers in terms of the way they relate to things like sex
00:34:49.740
and sexuality and, and, and parties and wives and everything like that. And I think that the boomers
0.57
00:34:55.520
were this generation where they got married out of obligation because it was sort of like what they did.
00:34:59.700
They were like a generation that, that wanted to live this white picket fence ideal, or they had
0.60
00:35:06.440
like an ideal of what they wanted to live without thinking about why these things were ideals,
00:35:11.240
without thinking about why you had kids or without thinking about everything was just about like
00:35:14.660
hedonism and consumerism for them. Very much what I think, you know, something like Fight Club
00:35:20.880
was arguing against was the mindset of the boomer generation. And then you have other generations
00:35:28.400
trying to reestablish some sort of stable state norm after the boomers.
0.74
00:35:34.260
Huh. Well, that's interesting. It's an interesting idea. Okay.
00:35:39.980
I mean, they're the generation that had all of our societies that just take out debt forever,
0.90
00:35:43.860
instead of actually trying to build like stable civilizations. They're the generation that
0.98
00:35:48.120
frees the most whenever we bring up fertility collapse. They're the generation that's out.
1.00
00:35:52.140
If you look at these, these Trump protests, everyone is like, it's wild that they're all
00:35:56.320
like elderly white people. Those are the only people protesting.
0.61
00:36:01.600
But they still get their news from the news, like CNN and stuff. And so they think that like,
00:36:06.340
oh, the evil Trump is out again. Well, and I guess it's, it's very boomer to think that protests
00:36:13.780
actually work because I don't know. I guess I should go to a protest one day and film and just
00:36:22.320
be like, you know, protests don't work. Nobody cares about what you're doing here.
00:36:27.200
No, you have wasted a day. Do you have nothing better to do with your lives?
00:36:31.020
One of the things that we really can't stand is listening to people who have really bad brain
00:36:35.980
rot and the kinds of people who attend protests are, I would argue the epitome of that type of
00:36:43.540
person. Remember at natal con, there were those protesters outside the opening night and
00:36:49.360
Kiera, the journalist from mother Jones. So try to talk to them sufficiently progressive,
00:36:56.120
right. Didn't look conservative, came up to them, approached them as a mother Jones journalist
00:37:01.640
and attempted to talk with him with them. And when I saw her after her attempted interaction,
00:37:07.640
she's like, well, I couldn't get a word on edgewise. Like she attempted to interview them
00:37:12.320
and they were so brain rotted that she literally couldn't ask them a question to get their opinion
00:37:22.520
Well, it's funny. You say that there's been a lot of videos that have been going viral
00:37:27.280
of people going to these Trump protests and trying to talk to people and they don't know
0.96
00:37:31.640
why they're there and they don't know why Trump is a fascist. They're like, Trump's a
0.90
00:37:34.960
fashion. They go, explain. Like, what has he done that makes him a fascist? And what the
00:37:40.880
right is taking away from this is, oh, these must be paid protesters who don't actually have
00:37:44.940
a vested interest in this. I don't think that's it. I think they're just brainless,
00:37:48.080
brain rotted automatons who are like, CNN says Trump is bad. No, I go to field and yell
1.00
00:37:54.360
at people. I genuinely think more people are like closer to like NPC automatons than you
00:38:03.520
Maybe. Maybe they're just all in the same Facebook groups. I imagine this is a Facebook
00:38:08.320
groups thing. If it's mostly boomers, it's just, oh, no.
00:38:20.960
Yeah, and I'm going to do my, we got them in all these.
00:38:25.340
All these amazing. Oh, yeah. They're brioche buns. We really went all out for that.
00:38:34.000
We are going to, though, save my curry for another night. I can have it tomorrow.
00:38:43.160
Good lunch tomorrow. Hot dog night. Very American. Big deviation from your typical meal
00:38:49.120
choice. But everyone seems to want hot dogs right now, so.
00:38:53.780
Well, the kids wanted hot dogs, and I was like, you know what? We've got the onions. Now we've
00:38:59.400
Do you want them in confetti or slices? Thin slices.
00:39:05.160
Oh, onions and hot dogs you typically want in slices to get more crunch.
00:39:08.700
Thin slices, yeah. Not. Although I guess I've seen it both ways.
00:39:10.840
Or I think of relish, and I think of the confetti.
00:39:12.780
No, either way works, honestly. The confetti works just as well, because you get crunched
00:39:17.160
Actually, I'm thinking confetti is better, because you can really finely chop it, and
00:39:19.980
you don't want to have, like, really peeling off noodles. You know what I mean?
00:39:24.140
So, you guys in the comments need to answer this. Hot dog onions. Is it confettis, or is
00:39:30.220
it noodles? Confetti or noodles for hot dog onions?
00:39:33.960
Asking the hard questions. I'm more interested if you will have alternate theories between the
00:39:37.800
group one and group two countries. If it's that feminism didn't catch up as quickly with economic
1.00
00:39:45.140
development, which then led to a faster backlash and separation between the sexes, or if Grok's
00:39:49.640
theory was more accurate, or if it's something else that you think is going on, because I find
00:39:53.980
that quite interesting. I had previously thought that leapfrogging development, like really fast
00:39:59.000
development was a good thing, because you ended up getting, like, building infrastructure when tech
00:40:03.380
was already more advanced, so you ended up with much better systems than, say, the United States
00:40:08.260
had, because you were developing using, you know, third to fourth generation later technology and all
00:40:13.820
these other things, and so this is making me look differently at the benefits of developing quickly
00:40:18.440
and later. But, yeah, I'm curious to hear people's theories on that.
00:40:22.800
All right, Simone. I love you to death, and have a spectacular day.
00:40:26.640
Goodbye, my dear husband, and I will give you a call on your phone when you're at Nurse