Why is Fertility Collapse Happening Faster in Some Places Than Others？ (& Are Women at Fault？)
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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
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about
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a theory about fertility rates that come out from Cremieux, friend of the show. Don't know
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if he's ever been on. We should ask him. Nice guy. But anyway, he has done a new theory where
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he tries to understand why fertility rates fall faster in some countries than other countries,
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i.e. what is protective of fertility rates. And the gist of the argument is that these countries
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modernized later, and that caused them to maintain more of their ancestral culture,
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specifically the misogyny and gender roles, which is not properly updated for the new context,
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and leads to a crash in fertility rates. And I thought that the theory was really interesting,
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so let's go over it piece by piece, because I think he might be onto something here.
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But any thoughts before I start? Let's dive in. Let's do it. All right, let's get a graph on screen
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here. You got to enhance. Enhance. Yeah. Give us the visual. And the premise that Cremieux sets is,
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what differentiates the countries in orange from the countries in blue? Why did the orange countries
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plunge into ultra low fertility, while the blue ones have maintained themselves better?
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So let's talk about the two country groups. Orange includes Korea, Spain, and Italy, while blue includes
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the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.
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And Cremieux groups them into two sets. He says the countries in the first set are group one nations.
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In the second set, they are group two nations. Notice anything about their growth rates? One thing
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is that they've all grown to similar enough levels. Another is the acceleration of the pace of growth.
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So in the second tweet, he shares two additional graphs showing different trajectories of growth
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and different fertility rates. In group one, nations started off a bit richer, and they grew at a more
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stable pace. In group two, the nations started off poorer, but they caught up to group one by growing
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faster in the latter half of the 20th century. Their fertility rate trajectories followed suit.
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And so what you see here is a really interesting thing in group one countries, where we've talked
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about it in other videos, but around the 1930s, there was a huge fertility crash that a lot of
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these group one countries recovered from. This was mostly due to medical technology, although
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housing in the war played a role as well. And you can look at our video on, you know, the baby boom
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to get more information on this. But the gist being is that if you take the baby boom as an anomaly,
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and you sort of try to draw a through line through these, it looks fairly stable. Whereas these other
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countries start to crash really dramatically and pretty quickly. And what's interesting is most of
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the crash in these other countries' fertility rates happens between 1920 and I'd say 1980. So before
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our modern time. And that's where they're dropping for much higher initial fertility rates. So if you
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look at it, like sort of the mean fertility rate at the beginning of this period in 1920 for the group
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two, all of these countries where they started with a much higher mean fertility, let's say around
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four or maybe even 4.5. Whereas the other group started with a mean fertility of 3 to 3.5. So
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it's almost as if the higher fertility you start with, the lower your fertility goes over time.
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Yeah. And Cremieux has a theory around this. Cremieux writes, all societies used to be pretty sexist.
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They used to repress women in various ways. And that was just that for all of human history. But as
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societies have developed, one of the major changes has been that women's status has quickly moved up
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to the levels that have only once been seen by men. With slow continuous growth, these norms changed
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and women's acceptance was taken up gradually without much need for pushing. But with rapid growth,
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the picture is far different. The norms have changed more slowly than the markets. And that may have
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been disastrous. You can see plenty of signs of this everywhere. For example, in the group one nations that
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experienced slow and steady growth, men and women tend to have more similar household labor
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distributions. He then shares a graph of time use and fertility among the 12 group one and group two
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nations. And there is somewhat of a negative correlation between total fertility rate and female
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minus male daily hours of unpaid household labor. He continues, similarly, in the case of distributions
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in the home is incidentally related to fertility among this group of developed countries. He shows
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another graph with negative correlation between time and fertility among 20 nations. He writes,
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I'm aware there are issues with treating this as if it's causal. But the point here is less about
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the particular example of household time use and more about how norms change over time with slow versus
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rapid growth. Take South Korea as an example. In South Korea, men's attitudes towards women are still
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pretty unrefined. A potential result, enormous sex differences and getting along in politics.
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These gulfs are opening up the world over, but South Korea is the most extreme example.
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Here he shares a Financial Times graph showing the ideology gap opening up between young men and women
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in countries across the world. With South Korea being the first country shown, and just over time,
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especially from 2015 to 2020, the gap is just like, like they're just becoming different species.
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Whereas in the US, the gap is violent, but not that insane. In Germany, it's a little bit less bad
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in the UK. It's also, I mean, they're all getting worse. And this resonates with me. I mean, I could
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see a lot of the tension there making sense. I actually think Grok came up with a better answer,
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but I do like this answer. It's definitely something that is contributing to the fertility collapse that
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we're seeing in Italy and Spain is the idea that not, sorry, not Italy and Spain, South Korea. I don't
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know why you said that, but it was likely the same thing is that men are staying much more misogynistic
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in their attitudes and expectations of their wives than men are in the United States. And if you get
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female liberation in terms of the workforce, with all the misogynistic attitudes now, marriage becomes
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an incredibly raw deal for women, just in terms of hedonism. I'm not saying in terms of like genetics
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or whatever, but if you are expected to handle the kids, handle the house and handle a career that's
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equivalent to your husband's career. And he just, what does whatever, like takes the status bosses you
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around. Like why would you want that? Right. And then a lot of men feel like, well, you know, you should
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give us like, we do need to maintain some degree of our historic culture. So I understand why they're
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pushing back and they think a lot of women have gone too far and their accusations around men,
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blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, if you look at the level of misogyny and misandry in Korea,
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it is at a completely different level than what you see in the United States or something like that.
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Like these two genders are almost two separated political classes now. And that's definitely more
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in Italy. I grew up partially in Italy. I lived there for a year when I was a kid. And one of the things
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I distinctly remember is the constant catcalling. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And this is,
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this was true when I was growing up there. And I remember this being an American from Texas,
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being in Italy and in Texas, I don't remember ever hearing catcalling.
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Golly. Okay. You just wouldn't do it. Like you'd get beaten up or something, you know,
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but in Italy, no, it's considered very normal for guys to be, you know, really. And, and people who
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don't understand why catcalling is bad. Like you are intentionally harassing in a way that is meant
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to be derogatory of their status in relative to your status, a woman. A lot of people think that
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this is like, I don't know that there's like, there might be some women who have like a weird
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fetish for it. They're not even a weird fetish. I'd actually say it's probably a normal fetish
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to like being publicly humiliated by men saying you're attractive. But I don't think that it is
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something that you're going to see a lot of in countries where women are seen as,
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you know, tough or deserving of their own like rights. Now, when I put this into any thoughts
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before we go to what Grok has to say? I'm no, you have me so curious about what
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Grok is going to say. I can't say no. All right. So what I put into Grok to sort of test it.
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So if you look at the countries that he includes in the two groups, I decided to only include a few
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of the countries that he includes in the two groups to see if Grok's findings hold true for the
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other groups that are in the two groups. So the full two groups that he used was Denmark, France,
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Germany, Sweden, UK, US. The second group was Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Spain.
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So I decided let's just do two. Okay. So what's the difference between South Korea, Spain, and Italy
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and the US, France, and the UK? All right. Culturally speaking. Sure. What?
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It says the most striking thing would be respect for elders with, and this is definitely true,
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with the US, France, and the UK having much lower levels of this than Spain, Italy, and South Korea.
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And so then my question could be, oh, is that cultural distance also true in the other countries
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here, like Greece and Portugal? Yes, it is. Okay. What about the other countries on the other side?
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Germany and Denmark? Yeah, definitely. Way lower respect for elders. And if I actually think about
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where countries have seen fertility collapse hit the hardest, like Japan, Korea, China,
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these are all countries that have a unique respect for elders. Where has fertility hit uniquely lowly?
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Greater Appalachian cultural region, as we've mentioned, which has almost no respect for elders
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at all. Like elders are kept alive, but like... We won't kill you, but... We won't kill you,
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but it's all... We'll resent you a little bit. And Jewish culture. And I actually argue Jewish culture
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does not have a particularly high respect for elders when contrasted with, let's say, Korean or
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Japanese or Confucius culture. You have like a little degree, but I don't... I'd say less than
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Christian, even like your modern, like East Coast Christian. Elders are just not assigned a high
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status unless they can meritocratically prove that they deserve a high status. So it's not that you
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don't see elders in positions of status. It's just that being elder in and of itself is not a thing
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deserving of respect. Okay. And so the question could be, why would that cause... Well, let's go into
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it a bit more before we ask why. Yeah. South Korea, Spain, and Italy appear to have a cultural
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similarity and that they have a deep respect for their elders rooted in traditions like Confucianism
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in South Korea and Consolacism in Spain and Italy. This respect manifests in behavior such as using
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formal language, giving up seats for elders, and prioritizing family roles, which contrasts with
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the more individualistic and youth-focused culture that the U.S. and the U.K. and France. However, it shows
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a... France, it says, shows a blend of this. Hmm. Okay. Here, it also divides stuff with looking at
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individualism versus collectivism, with the cultures on this side being much more individualistic,
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which I also see, and much more low power difference, which I also see. So that's another
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thing that could be causing this. Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Spain, all are less
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individualistic, more collectivist and have higher power differences, whereas the U.S., U.K., Sweden,
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Germany, France, and Denmark all have fairly low power differences. So let's think about how this could
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have caused a fertility issue, right? Okay. Yes. The respect for elders is, I guess, it's fairly
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obvious to me. Like, where, when resources are limited and demographic collapses are already
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underway, do you distribute the resources that are left? You're going to, if you could choose more
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babies or elders, you're going to choose elders. Yeah. I mean, a country like Korea should be spending
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as much on family creation as it spends on elder care. 100%. Yeah. And I'm fairly sure,
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it's not, I'll add and pose, but I'm fairly sure it's not even like, you know, maybe one-tenth what
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it's spending on elder care. Okay. I found myself surprised on this one. They only spend about double
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on elderly costs. In elderly costs in South Korea, it's around 51 to 54 billion USD. And in children,
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it's around 18 to 22 billion USD per year as of 2025. So the elderly care ratio is two to 2.5x
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birth incentives. Yeah. If you look at, so, so that makes perfect sense to me because it's about,
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or me as an individual, like if one of my parents was like, oh, I'm ailing, come help me. I can't
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survive on social security. It's in a message. I have four kids, you knob, F off. Yeah. Like your problem.
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Your problem. Hey man, I got five kids to beat. I'd be like that scene from Team America where
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he's like, if you get caught, you may need to take your own life. And he slides a hammer across the
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table. Well, you'll probably want to take your own life. Here, you'd better have this.
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All right, team. That's it. We've got a job to do. That'd be me. I'd be like, you know,
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you know what to do. You know what to do. Okay. So that I see. Now let's talk about individualism.
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Why would high individualism lead to higher fertility rates in these cultures? The answer
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here could be that you have an easier time resisting the monoculture and dominant cultural
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practices within your country. And so you're going to have more people who sort of buck the trend,
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which I could definitely see leading to higher fertility rates in many of these countries.
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You were going to say something? No, no, no. I'm agreeing with you. Yeah. And then high power
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distance. That makes a lot of sense. I think in the modern world, high power distance just doesn't
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really work that well anymore. This is where like your boss is like really high above you in status.
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And this is actually really true in a lot of Latin America where we're also seeing a unique
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fertility collapse. It's sort of across Catholic cultures because you have like the people who
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matter and then the people who are the people, right? And why this leads to fertility collapse is I think
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the people, people like don't see a point in continuing the cycle anymore. They don't want
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to put people into this system where they're going to be an underclass. And yeah, that makes perfect
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sense to me. Why would you continue to participate in that? The final sort of hypothesis I'd have here
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about what would lead to this is just a longer time to evolve a resistance to the urban monoculture.
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I think the urban monoculture didn't really care or the iterations that existed before it,
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like the pro-domal iterations of it, didn't really focus on these other countries when they were
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super poor and culturally different. And I think that was leading to their high fertility rates at
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that period. And so they didn't have a century for the people who are slightly lower fertility rate
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when exposed to the urban monoculture to die out disproportionately. And so now they're all dying
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out at once. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. It's so dire. That is, that is interesting. I don't
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know. I still, I'm still finding myself, however, gravitating toward the, the misogyny thing just
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because so much of this problem is couples just failing to get married. True. And a misogynistic
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attitude pervading a culture where women have an option not to marry is going to lead to women
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not as enthusiastically engaging with the marriage culture. And every high fertility family we know
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personally has husbands has husbands who contribute a lot are extremely supportive. If they, if they're
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the breadwinners, they also contribute a lot of labor. Um, if they are not the sole breadwinners,
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they contribute probably as much labor as their wife also breadwinners contribute, you know,
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this is just like, actually, I might word it differently. I'd say every high fertility family
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that we know has a husband who would be considered a simp by like the manosphere or the Andrew Tate
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movement. And not necessarily like, like for example, us, I'm not like a simp in a traditional
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term, but people have been like, Oh, Malcolm, you're like overly nice to your wife. You overly
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pedestalize your wife. You, and I'm probably of all of the high fertility men that we know
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the most traditionally masculine. Except for maybe Kevin Dolan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kevin
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Dolan's pretty traditionally masculine, but yeah, the, the, yeah, I think that you're a hundred percent
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right here. Women have kids when they feel supported and protected because a woman in a modern context is
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just not going to feel like you have her back if you're pulling this. And, and the truth is,
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is you don't, I think we saw this was a quiverful movement. And it's part of the reason the quiverful
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movement sort of fell apart was a understanding of the man's role in the household. Instead of adapting
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to modern and changing pressures, they tried to go with this dictatorial male in control woman at home
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does nothing birthing. And it didn't create an environment that daughters wanted to recreate or that
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sons were capable of recreating. Yeah, I agree. And, and actually here, I thought I read something
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really interesting on our discord that somebody posted about the failure of the quiverful movement
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to replicate itself. And I was like, Oh my God, this is so true. I've got to read it. So this is
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from the person on the discord called cat. I don't know. It's some sort of vegetation and they have
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three kids because people say that on the discord, how many kids they have. I have so many thoughts
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regarding this topic as somebody who is raised quiverful adjacent Christian homeschooler who
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attended quiverful co-ops, et cetera. But my family wasn't specifically quiverful ourselves.
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I think the big factor of their failure is the way that they specifically and intentionally raised
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non-agentic children. Boys in general have a, had a bit of a rudderless time over the past few
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decades, but I've never seen anything like the slow motion catastrophe that has been the quiverful
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boys aging out of their homeschooling regime. The prototypical quiverful family is a first generation
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of fairly beta white collar husband, fairly crazy homeschooling mother, raising sons who are
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simultaneously long house browbeaten under mommy's supervision his entire life while also being
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inculcated with an irrational entitlement complex based on being male, not being accomplished.
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They can't follow in their haired, checked out father's white collar footsteps because they are
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undereducated colleges of this world, but they often don't have the connections or
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savvy to make it in the working class trades world. So they either languish in some sort of
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drifting failure to launch, or if their family is particularly committed to get married off and
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are expected to support a family that increases by one every year, starting at the age of 18
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on nothing but thoughts and prayers. It's such a mess. Anecdotally, I can confirm mass
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deconversion rates. I don't think the Duggars are at all archetypical. They mostly compensate for the
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above issue by having all that TLC money that Jim Bob bought real estate with. So he basically
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supports his sons through the dad welfare. It's just crazy to me that they had all this IBLP
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propaganda about how they were going to raise a Joshua generation that's going to take over the
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government and lead a worldwide revival and then raise the least agentic children ever walked the
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earth. Timid, sullenly. Not good. Not good. Complete and utter failure and refutation of the
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movement's philosophy. Yeah. And yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think that that might be
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what we're seeing in these cultures that have these stricter power differences between the old and the
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young as well, is that they are, but they put really strict rules on their kids. And if you look
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at our family, while we have rules for our kids, I expect them and will be proud of them when they break
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those rules. That's part of why we use corporal punishment instead of limiting punishment to just
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like yelling or emotional escalation. Because when a kid does something bad, it allows me to quickly
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show them like, Bob, they did something wrong, but I still love you. Like it was recorded in that piece
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so that they understand that breaking rules does not remove them from the circle of love of the family
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and that I will set down a fence and rules for them. But I still, especially when they're breaking
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rules in their own, you know, based on their own internal moral compass, have respect for them
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in doing that. And, you know, you see this, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, like
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Jordan Peterson, a guide to raising simps. Jordan Peterson is like, you just need to break the child's
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will down until they listen to you. And I'm like, that is not a good idea. That raises non-agentic
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children. You want to build the child's will up until they take from nobody. And if they don't
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understand why you're giving rules and you're just like, you just obey the authority, then they're
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just going to obey the urban monoculture. And I think a lot of these religious families, that's
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what they were, just obey the authority, just obey the authority, just obey the authority. But they
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thought the authority was always going to be the church. And they didn't realize that the authority
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changes based on the person's context of their interacting within the real world. And so they were
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easily browbeaten. And they also created males that like, who would want that? Like a lot of girls just
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aren't going to want that. And, and so they, they get assist, you know, because it's like much worse
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than like a Mormon community or something where you have more of the church, like keeping track of
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things and less a chance that one man is going to be like overly domineering with his family or
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something within these more dispersed Protestant communities. I, as a woman, honestly, I wouldn't want
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to marry into one of these. I'd be really worried. Uh, especially if they were raised with a sort of
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like, well, men lead the family attitude, like, and we have me as a man lead the family. I just
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consider that a gift from Simone. Well, and back to our repeated theme of, of real dominance,
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real dominance, isn't shut up and do what I say, follow my orders. Real dominance is demonstrating
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through your competence, good decision-making and good leadership, natural leadership, that your plans
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are trustworthy and the best way to go. People fall in line. There is no ordering and there's
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no shutting people down and systematically training them to be compliant. You don't need to train people
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to be compliant when they know you're right. And that's the big difference.
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Yeah. Well, and we had the episode on, on Andrew Tate, where I was like, Andrew Tate's idea of
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masculinity. It's like, he watched the gladiator and he's like, ah, the emperor. That's what the ideal
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man is like. And that, that, you know, the, the gladiator Maximus, he's a simp. Whereas the exact
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opposite is true, you know, and I pointed this out because if you watch it, he attempts to force
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the women around him to follow his wills, literally at sword point, you know, like Andrew Tate being
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like, this is why I have a sword. So women don't, you know, they talk down to me and you see the
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emperor playing with like a sword in his house, you know, and wanting to be loved. And I think
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that if you look at Maximus, none of this is about being loved by people or anything like that. He just
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has a duty and he's carrying it out. And it's certainly not about like, if you look at the character of
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Maximus, you look at the relationship he's framed at having with both his kids and the woman who has
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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
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
00:24:03.280
some like biological mandate to be obedient to her husband. It's just average biological differences
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
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
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
00:24:58.380
become the mother who stays at home and somehow the less educated, less connected, less privileged
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
00:29:01.160
not going to be very healthy or they need to freeze their sperm. Guys, please freeze your sperm
00:29:08.380
for the love. Like, although here's my other problem with like genetic health, it degrades it around the
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
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
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
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
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
00:31:13.180
out of obligation and they may be great at acting, but I'm pretty sure that the vast, vast majority
00:31:20.400
of 20 something girls who marry wealthy and successful, much older men are faking it.
00:31:28.060
Which is the worst type of woman who's pretending to be into you.
00:31:32.100
Which is the worst type of sex. I just like, I could never, I could never have sex with someone
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
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
00:34:04.360
like the pure infantilization of humanity where they were a generation that had very little
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
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
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
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.
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,
00:35:43.860
instead of actually trying to build like stable civilizations. They're the generation that
00:35:48.120
frees the most whenever we bring up fertility collapse. They're the generation that's out.
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.
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
00:37:31.640
why they're there and they don't know why Trump is a fascist. They're like, Trump's a
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
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
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