Pearl - October 23, 2025


The Odds of A Horrible Marriage Are Worse Than Russian Roulette

Topics
divorce rates
Mentioned
Matt Pierce Brosnan Michael Knowles Ben Shapiro
Why Can't Right Wing E-Girls Just Admit We're All Hoes Divorce Court： Men Pay While Women Play

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

163.58

Word count

2,340

Sentence count

211

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator who argues that marriage is a bad idea. He's been married to his wife for over 20 years and has 2 kids, but he still doesn't get it. He doesn't understand how bad it is to get divorced, and he doesn't care enough to talk about it. Matt and Ben discuss why he's wrong, and why it's a terrible idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Most people are going to be single parents. If most people are getting divorced and not staying
00:00:04.860 together, what do you think your future is probably going to be? I mean, by a picture of
00:00:09.120 myself, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, we aren't old enough to know better and don't know the
00:00:13.560 reality of what we're pushing. Yet a woman who is younger than us and single does know better
00:00:18.580 and does understand this reality. Another post, she goes on to say that marriage is again. Then
00:00:23.900 he starts attacking me. You know, again, it's like these Christian people. I didn't attack him. 0.99
00:00:28.920 I didn't. I said, he doesn't understand the reality of what he's pushing. Men commit suicide
00:00:35.220 to this, Matt. Yeah, go yourself. I've seen men that are on the brink of suicide. And when you 0.99
00:00:41.020 push that, you might not know it, but you're sending men to their death. Screw you. If you 1.00
00:00:47.120 don't think that's important to be accurate about that. Screw you. If you don't think it's good to 0.99
00:00:52.320 talk about or screw you, if you don't think it's relevant to talk about the risks. Screw you for 0.99
00:00:59.900 being dishonest about these numbers. I actually do understand it better than you. You follow like 0.99
00:01:08.520 20 bajillion topics. Uh, you got married to one woman. I've seen how this thing plays out in the
00:01:16.180 long haul. Not everybody is an elitist, right? Not everybody is a high class person living in the
00:01:23.720 silver, in a silver top. Like people with money have different choices, but you have no idea how
00:01:29.760 bad a divorce hits a middle American, like the middle class men, they get it the worst. You know,
00:01:36.180 the upper class men, they recover because they can afford lawyers, but it's the men that can't,
00:01:41.340 and they're funding their wife divorcing them. Is it true that men are suicidal from divorce? Yeah.
00:01:49.120 Big terrible deal for men. And she later explains, quote, would you ever sign a contract that fails
00:01:54.760 75% of the time where your business partner is paid to break the contract? Why would you encourage
00:02:00.300 men to sign that contract until the terms are fixed? If no one ever taught you how to manage your money,
00:02:05.360 or you're secretly ashamed of where you're at financially. All right. Screw you. Free financial
00:02:11.080 literacy course. You may be surprised to learn that marriages fail at a rate of 75%.
00:02:21.220 And now he's going to belittle it. Okay. We want, we want to talk about the numbers, Matt. Let's talk
00:02:26.920 about them. 45% divorce rate. On top of that, most women gain 30, 80% of women gain 30 pounds in the 1.00
00:02:39.820 first five years of marriage. A quarter of marriages are sexless. And most people believe that that
00:02:48.740 number is a lot higher. Most women lead the relationships. Most women are in charge. That's 1.00
00:02:56.220 why we have phrases like happy wife, happy life. And you can gaslight men, but they're not stupid. 0.98
00:03:01.220 They're going to see this. Um, I have it in a folder, but I can, I can actually break down and 0.97
00:03:09.540 I'm going to do a video on this breaking down. If there's a hundred marriages, what your odds are 1.00
00:03:14.080 of each thing happening. Yeah. Even if the divorce odds are one in three, which he'll claim not three
00:03:21.280 and four, it's still more risky than Russian roulette. Look, we all know if you include
00:03:25.840 out of the people that stay together. If you include sexless marriages, if you include wives
00:03:32.000 that got obscenely fat, if you include bitchy wives, we know it's more than 50%. 1.00
00:03:39.580 The figure that people like this normally use is 50%. And the claim that 50% of marriages end
00:03:46.500 in divorce is already spurious. And we'll have more on that in a moment, but yeah, because you didn't
00:03:51.400 think through it because your stupid riders do everything for you. 75%. I was wondering where that 1.00
00:03:58.880 number came from. So I scrolled down and I saw something that she reposted from an alleged lawyer
00:04:02.920 who said this quote, it's not 50, 50 that only accounts for divorces. Another 25% on the negative
00:04:08.960 side for miserable men trapped in cheaper to keep her marriages unwilling to risk financial destruction
00:04:15.060 and loss of their children. 75% chance of a devastatingly bad outcome is just a bad
00:04:21.360 plan. No sane person would enter into a commercial contract on such terms. Now I did ask him where
00:04:28.320 he got this 75% figure from. And the worst part is they have such big egos. Like it's just turned
00:04:36.260 into this Jesus rock star, like bullshit. They just use the religion to get as much attention and cloud 1.00
00:04:42.440 as possible. Guys, I have a whole video breaking down the actual divorce rates. It's called how
00:04:48.980 conservatives are lying to you about marriage. If you want to see it, go there. And he wouldn't say
00:04:54.180 apparently the magic statistic fairy came and whispered it in his. And that's a, that's a liberal
00:05:00.300 tactic, right? He's going into it in bad faith where he's saying, Oh, you're just lying. You're just
00:05:05.600 making this stuff up. Well, if that's what you think, why, why would we even have a discussion?
00:05:09.380 All the men getting divorced, Matt, really? We're all, the whole red pill is just making this up.
00:05:16.420 Now for her part, Pearl later tweeted a picture of Pierce Brosnan with his wife of 20 years. And
00:05:21.940 she questioned whether the marriage counts as successful since Brosnan wife, Brosnan's wife
00:05:27.460 has put on some weight at the age of 60. So apparently even. Yeah. And now he's going to white 0.99
00:05:33.120 night. Now he's going to white night. Yes, ladies get fat, do it, gain a bunch of weight. 1.00
00:05:39.520 Men love that. If they're happy and have remained married for two decades. How do you know they're
00:05:45.900 happy? They still might fall into that 75% failure rate because they have not both remained in
00:05:52.040 supermodel condition into their sixties. This debate on social media brought out the rest of the marriage
00:05:57.800 skeptical crowd on the right. A bunch of these red pill influencers decided to hop on
00:06:03.040 an emergency Zoom call and spend two hours talking about me and the rest of the Daily Wire crew
00:06:08.520 and our reckless promotion of society's most fundamental institution. Now there's one clip
00:06:14.680 here that you should see. This is apparently a divorce lawyer who says that the failure rate for
00:06:23.020 marriage is not 50% and it's not 75%. It is in fact even higher. Listen.
00:06:29.560 I think marriage can be successful. Of course. It's just not something that's as scalable as we as a
00:06:36.640 society are trying to pretend it is. Marriage is, and I've said this a hundred times and I'll say it a
00:06:41.440 hundred more. Marriage is like the lottery. You are probably not going to win. Okay. You're probably not
00:06:48.680 going to win. Don't make that your 401k. You're probably not going to win. But if you win, what you win.
00:06:56.120 Okay. And that's the ego. And this is, this is what I really cannot stand about traditional
00:07:03.480 conservatives. They're just, they are just not pragmatic at all. Every conservative thinks
00:07:10.480 they are above the numbers. They all think they won't be statistics. If everyone else is getting
00:07:17.260 30 year old women that are giving them one, maybe two children, what do you think your wife is most 1.00
00:07:24.140 likely going to be? Most people are going to be single parents. If most people are getting divorced
00:07:32.980 and not staying together, what do you think your future is probably going to be? And there's this
00:07:38.360 cope, you know, I'll be different. I'll be special. Why do you have such a big ego to think that you're
00:07:43.580 different or special? Seriously. Why, why, why would you not have the same results as everyone else?
00:07:52.380 Yeah. There we go.
00:07:53.580 Is so great that I don't blame you for buying a ticket and trying. I personally don't buy lottery
00:08:00.740 tickets, but when somebody says, yeah, I played a lottery. Hey man, somebody's got to win. And you
00:08:05.340 know what? As long as you're not blowing money that you need for food or to put shoes on your kid's
00:08:09.320 feet, you're not hurting anybody. Go out, give it a try. So I always tell people, listen, marriage,
00:08:14.420 when it works, when you have somebody who's married 20 plus years and they're still crazy about
00:08:18.600 each other, that is the exception, not the rule. But when you do it, it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal.
00:08:25.040 So why not buy the ticket, take the ride, but have a prenup? Wear a seatbelt, guys. You can be a safe
00:08:29.960 driver, but wear a seatbelt. So a happy marriage, he says, is like winning the lottery. And the thing
00:08:36.540 about the lottery is that almost everybody loses. This is a perfect summation of how this entire club
00:08:43.240 views marriage and the message that they're sending to young men in particular. Sure,
00:08:49.600 it can be great, they concede, but only if you're insanely lucky. Everybody else is screwed. 0.99
00:08:55.840 This is a rather bleak view of marriage and thankfully, it's also nonsense. First of all, 0.99
00:09:01.640 the claim that marriage isn't scalable is obviously ridiculous because marriage has served as the bedrock
00:09:08.580 of human society since time immemorial. Yeah, and as soon as people got the option to opt out,
00:09:15.160 they did. You know, again, I don't really care what people say. And again, that's the issue you get
00:09:22.540 with traditional conservatives. A lot of times they go off of what the woman says. I go off of what 0.77
00:09:30.000 people do. Again, if it was that great, why did everybody opt out the first second they got?
00:09:37.460 Seriously. Seriously. That's my question. Why?
00:09:41.800 It has already happened at the scale of civilization for thousands of years. Now the divorce lawyers come
00:09:50.080 along and say that, you know, this thing that society has been doing forever, turns out it doesn't
00:09:54.660 work. So the next way conservatives manipulate you, okay, is they use history as a way to paint
00:10:08.680 what's not going to happen in your lifetime. So what they'll do is they'll say, well, this movement's
00:10:15.920 going to happen because at this time in history it worked. Well, you know, it's like, so what they'll
00:10:23.440 do is they'll say, oh, well, a hundred years ago, you know, we propagated women back. And I'm like,
00:10:32.040 well, let's look outside. You know, it's like, imagine if you're going to make a decision as a
00:10:39.440 business, because really in a way you should kind of look at your time, your resources, your energy
00:10:43.600 as a business. You only have so much of it. So if you came to a business owner, right? And you said,
00:10:50.060 all right, make this decision. You know, the business owner would say, okay, well, has anyone
00:10:56.800 else made this decision? How did it go for them? They're like, well, half of them, it didn't work
00:11:02.200 out. And a quarter are sexless and fat, 25% chance of it working. And then if you take the risk, you
00:11:09.580 know, well, it's probably not going to work. But, and business owners take risks all the time where
00:11:15.480 they know they're not going to make their money back, but they know. Right. Um, but imagine if
00:11:21.100 that person went to the business owner and said, well, a hundred years ago, this worked. And the
00:11:25.860 business owner would say, uh, okay, does that work today? And the business owner, uh, and the
00:11:33.400 investor said, well, no, but you know, I swear a hundred years ago, the, the business owner would
00:11:38.840 say, well, I don't care. And it, you know, I'm not saying that history doesn't repeat itself,
00:11:43.980 but we cannot predict how the future is going to go. You never can.
00:11:50.840 So it takes a big ego to believe you can really predict how the next a hundred years are going to
00:11:56.700 go. I don't know. I can't say, uh, based on what I see now, I could tell you how I, what I think may
00:12:03.080 happen, but who knows? Um, but they'll say, well, a hundred years ago, this works well, Matt
00:12:10.720 today. It's not working. So now what? Unless you're the one in a million.
00:12:18.340 It's, it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous claim. Now, what about the failure rate of marriages in 0.99
00:12:24.260 our culture? We've heard 50%. We've heard 75%. We just heard that they, they fail at a rate similar
00:12:29.880 to the rate that people lose the lottery, which would mean higher than 99%, a lot higher.
00:12:35.840 Um, yet these kinds of astronomical odds are not based in anything, but the doom and gloom
00:12:41.880 speculations of the people inventing them. There is no evidence that having a happy marriage is as
00:12:48.580 unlikely as winning the lottery or that 75% of marriages end in misery. And what about the 50%
00:12:55.600 number? Well, this is at least is a, is a familiar statistic. It's, it's something that you've
00:12:59.440 probably heard before 50% of marriages ended divorce. Oh my God, this tastes so good. You
00:13:05.600 guys hit it out the park. Well, thank you. It's cause it's different. It's fermented.
00:13:09.440 Um, it's familiar, but it is bogus. And one way that you know that it's bogus is that people have
00:13:16.020 been claiming that 50% of marriages ended divorce since I was a kid. I've been hearing that my whole
00:13:23.620 life. And that would mean that divorce rates are static across time. But of course that isn't the
00:13:29.500 case. In fact, we know the divorce rates have gone down in recent years. Okay. Let's see divorce rate
00:13:39.220 from 1950. We all know why it's gone down to present. Okay. So again, this is, it's so dishonest what they
00:13:53.720 do. So the divorce rates gone down from 22 divorces per thousand women. 1.00
00:14:06.800 To 20. So what they'll do is when it's stayed relatively stagnant, they'll just zoom in a lot
00:14:16.400 to make it look like there was a big change.