Fertility, Culture, and Economic Dynamics

Join us in this deep dive into the alarming trends in global fertility rates. Drawing extensively from Zvi's Fertility Roundup #4, we uncover the harsh realities contradicting the usual claims by bodies like the UN. We discuss two main theses: the halting narrative of fertility rate stabilization and the cultural key to solving this crisis, dismissing non-cultural solutions such as housing or income adjustments. We'll cover intriguing statistical misinterpretations, like the infamous study misrepresenting married women's happiness, and counter controversial views on the role of cities and the perceived evils within modern and traditional gender roles. From analyzing tweets by Melissa Kearney and Lyman Stone to touching upon socioeconomic impacts on fertility, this episode is a comprehensive look at this critical issue, including thought-provoking cultural insights from Japan and Korea.

Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today we are going to do a very, very, very statistics heavy episode on fertility rates.

And it's going to be a collection of statistics to focus on just how bad the situation has gotten. There's a lot coming from Zvi's fertility roundup number four. I love his

Speaker: fertility roundups. Yes!

Speaker 2: Fantastic stuff. And a lot coming from random graphs and stuff like that that didn't find a reason to fit into another episode.

Okay. What we're going to find as we go through this is two overarching theses. One is the people who thought that this was going to level off this year or we were going to begin to see signs of it slowing this year were wrong. There is very little evidence that that is happening, but this is what the UN and the urban monoculture claims every year.

Here, I'll put a graph on screen. Of the U. N. S. Yearly predicted fertility rates in which you'll see if it's like going off a cliff in every country and every year, the U. N. S. Like this [00:01:00] is the year. It's just gonna stabilize out of nowhere. So, I think that we're seeing that narrative is being broken.

And then the other big. thing that we're seeing is a reinforcement of what we have said from the beginning is that culture is the only realistic way to fix this. And every solution that you attempt that is not cultural, whether it is making houses cheaper or making people earn more, Or even forcing one partner to live at home is not going to resolve this issue.

It's just going to make things worse, which seen in the statistics, but what we'll see is your heroes will continue to see this in the statistics. So the first errant tweet here that I wanted to go over that I thought was really interesting. As he was commenting, the culture is all too eager to tell us that children or even marriage will make us miserable When it is not even true if you discount the long term.

The latest example of this, where there was a widely distributed claim in a new book that said married women are miserable because they report [00:02:00] being unhappy when their spouse isn't around. But, what the study actually meant, by quote unquote spouse absent was no longer living with them, not stepped out of the room.

Which is the way he implied it. He's like, when a spouse isn't looking over their shoulders, they say that they're less happy. What it really meant when the spouse is dead, they're less happy.

Speaker: Yeah. Missing, presumed dead. Yeah. I'm probably less happy.

Speaker 2: Goodness gracious.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker 2: But I love that a lot of people, like, I actually remember when that stat was going around.

And I was like, that's pretty wild. That seems really out of line with what I've seen in my life. I don't know,

Speaker: but I think what made it actually work, and what made so many people misunderstand it, is this implication that When the husband's back is turned when he's out of earshot, suddenly people say other, you know, wives say different things.

It's exactly the trope that was pulled in that ballerina farms article that they that that they later categorized as a hit piece implying [00:03:00] that when Hannah's husband left the room Wait, sorry. Is her name Hannah? When, when the husband left the room that she then talked about getting an epidural and then talked about how it was kind of awesome and it was just great.

And then there's this understanding that spouses will say very different things about their partners when their partners are not present. So, yeah, I don't know. I can understand how people definitely believed that and were very, very credulous. But it's so, man, it's a case study in how this stuff can be used to mislead people.

I hate it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So you are happy you're married, by the way. You know, these, these people are lying to you, but they need to have you believe so much of this movement is just cope around. When I say this movement, I mean, the parts of the urban monoculture, which glorify a single lifestyle cope around failing to secure a partner just as much as a lot of the incel movement is when they act like women are evil or like these demonic creatures destroying [00:04:00] society.

When, if you look at voting patterns, that just isn't true. Cool. of married women.

It might be single women are evil and destroying society, but married women are on team civilization. Okay. So, but actually do you have any thoughts on that point, Simone? On,

Speaker: sorry, on which, which point?

Speaker 2: They, This view that sort of the incel MGTOW parts of the movement have of women that they are the force of evil that has created the urban monoculture and all these forces destroying society.

And I just, if you look at statistics around married women, that's just not true. It's really this single woman, urban monoculture mind minded person.

Speaker: I just see these things as more systemic issues and, you know, there, there are many elements of society that feel more feminized now, but that's not inherently the problem.

It's just a symptom of a larger systemic problem that can't really be characterized by tropes.

Speaker 2: All right. So, here is an [00:05:00] interesting one. This is a tweet by Melissa Kearney. She says, the Social Security's actuaries are still bullish on the idea that U. S. women are going to start having more babies than they are, than they've been having.

Quote, birth rates are assumed to increase from recent very low levels to an ultimate level of 1. 9 children per woman for 2040 and thereafter. Why, she says, the trustees continue to assume that recent low birth rates of period fertility are in part indicative of a gradual shift towards older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts.

Quote, Marco Jurek. When we say, Our core societal institutions are fragile and dysfunctional because they no longer suit the circumstances to which they were designed but cannot change. This is what we mean. And so here, what she's talking about is other people have pointed out that like institutions like the social securities actuaries were created during a time of stable fertility rates, and [00:06:00] they just can't make the math work if they actually Show what's really happening.

So they keep saying, Oh, women are just choosing to have kids later, which we know from the data isn't true. And I'm going to put some graphs on screen here that show both what they're, what we're seeing. Right. And so you can see the, the birth rates going down per generation, but here, if you look at the age of birth by the various age groups, which now I'm putting on stage here what you're seeing is it is not moving later.

Okay.

Speaker: Yeah, this is such a simple thing to think through someone sitting there looking at a massive spreadsheet or whatever and trying to model out things and needing to make the numbers work because if you can't make the numbers work, people are going to get really mad and make a big fuss and it's going to ruin your entire week because you just don't want to think about it that much.

So you find a way to make the numbers work and then you find a narrative to justify that. Many, anyone, basically anyone who's been involved in any kind of modeling has probably gone through that at some point. Which makes me very dubious of almost all modeling [00:07:00] because just I think it gives people this really false sense of security, like, oh, in the models, it all works out.

Can't you see this is the predicted trajectory of of this company's performance or social security? And oh, my gosh, it's so people don't realize what thin ice we're on, right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think that I'd say it's not just about modeling. It's about who has was in the urban cultural ecosystem permission to, like, blow the whistle on this.

Right? So like you work at the, so you're a social security actuary, right? And you're doing your report for the year and you could project what any rational person would project. And then basically just. Submit a report that says, you know, we're fucked right? Like, this isn't going to stay solvent. Do you culturally have permission to do something like that? Like, as a social security actuary, do you have permission to be the one to sort of wake up society and be like, But you know, we're really screwed. And I [00:08:00] don't feel like they feel like they actually have permission to be that person. That's something that needs to sort of be said from a position higher or within an administration that is going to be more favorable to that.

Like if I was a social security's actually in the Trump administration, I'd be much more likely to be like, okay, fertility rates are actually a massive issue without worrying about my job. If you wrote that, I mean, they'd be fired, right?

Speaker: Yeah. I don't, in the government though, I can't imagine people getting fired for things like this.

It's just not What you're not

Speaker 2: seeing is, is what would happen. Okay, so imagine you do the actual social security's math. And a US branch of the government, a fairly boring one, puts out a report that basically says we're fucked. Due to falling fertility rates.

Speaker 3: Mhm.

Speaker 2: That then becomes a media storm.

Because all the right wing media is going to jump on it and how is the left wing media going to reflexively react to that? They're going to reflexively say it's not true or they did the math wrong. They're, they, they never Yeah, I [00:09:00] guess

Speaker: they're going to maybe scapegoat that person to say this person Intentionally was negligent.

And don't they realize, of course, then someone's going to retroactively figure out how to fudge the numbers to make them work and retroactively build a narrative as to why that's obviously true. There's going to be a rebound. This person didn't count for that.

Speaker 2: And CNN, there's going to be all of these PhDs who come in.

And the PhD is going to go up and say, well, this is how they did it wrong. And then they'll have a panel of PhDs all arguing. They all agree that that one actually is. Of course. But, but like maybe this is an issue we should at least have on the discussion board. Which is so interesting to me that now that the issue is becoming more public one of the things I always hear is, Well, Malcolm and Simone were right about the whole fertility rate thing, but they're wrong in the way they've been presenting it.

You know, they've been going out there saying that only people like them should have kids. Only tech elite should have [00:10:00] kids. You know, what we really need is a more like communitarian form of prenatalism that like involves everybody who's willing to participate in it. And it's like That's what we've been doing from the beginning.

You just don't want to admit that we were right from the very beginning about not just the message, but the way it was presented.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Anyway to keep going, I thought this was an interesting point that was made. You're a periodic reminder that we tax marriage, which also means we tax fertility.

We do it less than we used to, but we still very much do it. When you tax something, you get less of it. Niskanen Center, the U. S. tax code disproportionately discourages marriage among middle and low income . We need to act now. They offer a variety of proposals at the core of this is a basic set of arithmetic problems.

It is not difficult to adjust the numbers such that it almost always is beneficial or at least neutral to be married, especially when there are children [00:11:00] involved. So right now it is not for middle and lower class individuals. Indeed, if we cannot do better, there is a very obvious solution. Raised based rates as needed to compensate and then allow married couples to file as if they were unmarried if they calculate that it is cheaper end of penalty. And I, I really like that. Like, that's an easy, quick fix. Married couples should be able to file as if they are unmarried.

There is no logical reason in America. Why we should be taxing married couples more, especially low income married couples more. Well that, no,

Speaker: this, this specifically disproportionately affects middle income. So low income, you get a benefit from marrying and then a high, high income. You get a benefit from marrying, but middle you get the penalty.

But again, that's, that's It doesn't matter. You should get no penalty for marrying because marrying in general seems to benefit society

Speaker 2: Well in middle income is where we have the big fertility crash in america, especially among the american white population. Yeah

Speaker: yeah, there's the Very inverted curve when it comes to [00:12:00] income and fertility

Speaker 2: And I, I cannot imagine like if you want to talk about like the rot of the urban monoculture that anyone isn't just like, this isn't a bipartisan issue to just get this off the books.

I think shows often I hear progressives and they're like, well, our party isn't actually doing the evil stuff. Like that's just like what a few extremists are saying online. Your party has literally made it so that married, middle income people are taxed more than single ones. They really are pushing the urban monoculture in a way that's destructive to the individual, and that no logical argument other than distribution of the urban monoculture could focus.

Yeah. Also, funny here you could argue that th this is a line, you know, we pointed out in our Why the Racists Left Trump video That a lot of the traditionalist right who had like racialist or anti gay marriage or anti women messages like oh you shouldn't [00:13:00] You know women are the cause of all evil.

You shouldn't get married anything like that A lot of them turned against trump right before he the election and we're like everybody needs to not vote for him or vote against him and that they have mostly been pushed out of the right coalition and that You They should be leftists now, because the left is structuring it in a way where no logical person would want to get married.

So, being so anti marriage, seeing marriage as a trap that women have laid for men should they not be supporting the Democrats at this point? I mean, with the four Bs, you even have the celibate women and everything now, it's a, it's a, it's a perfect match. I can't hear you, by the way.

Speaker: Sorry, IndieWiz making noises.

I totally agree.

Speaker 2: Okay, here I'm going to be reading an abstract from a paper, which I thought was pretty interesting. Children require care. The market for child care has received much attention in recent years, as many countries considering subsidizing or [00:14:00] supplying child care as a response to dropping birth rates.

However, the relationship between child care markets and the fertility gap, the difference between the desired and achieved fertility, is yet to be explored. We build upon previous work by investigating the regulation of child care and fertility across the U. S. Our results consistently show fewer childcare regulations are associated with smaller fertility gaps.

This suggests that women are better able to achieve their fertility goals in policy environments that allow for more flexibility in childcare options and lower costs. Your childcare regulations must be really harmful if parents are responding by having noticeably fewer children. This is as clear a message as you can get.

Listen. The potential Changes are big and this isn't the abstract. This is the extrapolating from the data in the abstract. They estimate that if you shifted from the highest level of regulation, Connecticut to the lowest Louisiana, the total fertility rate TFR would rise from 1. 51 [00:15:00] to 1. 7 or 13%. If every state moved to Louisiana's level, we would see a roughly 38 percent improvement or a 5 percent increase in fertility.

Speaker: Well, and probably the economy would be better off. People would be happier and better off to regulatory bloat. This isn't it amazing how regulatory bloat. Suppresses not just economic growth and, and building and infrastructure development and fixing things, but also literally human life that it is, it is suppressing

Speaker 2: like the UK.

Right? Like, I do love what you're saying here, right? Like this idea that regulatory bloat and bureaucracy is smothering of. Human potentiality, not just in our inventiveness, but in the very birth of more humans. So sad.

Speaker: Oh gosh.

Speaker 2: It's, it's, it's sad and damning, but I do think it is the inverse of vitalism, the vitalism that we need.

And that's why it's so important. The job of institutions like [00:16:00] Doge and stuff like that.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Oh I'd note how bad things probably are in the UK in regards to this. They have some of the worst childcare regulation in the world with you essentially needing like a call that multiple people, it was like college type degrees overseeing children in daycare centers because,

Speaker: well, you can't even have, for example, your neighbor wants your kids in the UK because of regulation, you have to have.

Some kind of certified professional with your kids, which that imagine how unsustainable childcare is now. And this is, I think, a relatively new rule since the 90s, because there was some tragic and genuinely sad incident of a child being, you know, Watched by neighbor or something, or children being watched by a neighbor and one of them died, but think of just the number of children now who will never exist because it is so unsustainably difficult to raise kids in the UK now.

Speaker 2: And this brings me to something that we've said before, but I really need to. [00:17:00] pound home and make sure this isn't our policy doc. By the way, Simone, is that any policy that is meant to protect Children's lives need to weigh how many Children don't exist because it was implemented. So a policy doc that says something like you know, child seat certification like X many Children's lives will be saved by this also needs to calculate the number of Children who are functionally going to be killed because they don't come into existence.

But why?

They are replacements of people who had their existence consumed. By denizens of the crimson world

Speaker 2: It's the same is regulation around caring for Children. It's the same with any of that. Can you actually make a note to add that to our policy doc?

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: Because that's really powerful and under one of our videos the if you have under three kids, you are definitionally a cuck because you're below replacement rate video the [00:18:00] top comment for a while.

I don't know if it still is but I found it really powerful and it argued that We should see having two kids as having zero kids because that's slightly below replacement rate. You're like having two kids in our society should be considered having slightly fewer than zero kids. Having one kid is having negative one kid and having zero kids is having negative two kids.

It's burdening society with your existence. And that you really only get to, you know, one kid or two kids. Once you are above. The two kid mark, you know, so when you have three kids, you have slightly less than one kid when you have two kids, you have slightly less. I'm sorry. We have four kids. You have slightly less than two kids and I think that that conceptual framing difference is the way we will raise our children to think about kids.

Speaker 3: Mhm.

Speaker 2: All right. Now I'm going to read a tweet by more births. You can see pulling from a huge diversity of sources here today. In this tweet, he says, [00:19:00] did you think fertility couldn't get any lower than South Korea's seemingly impossible 0. 72 births per woman in 2023. Macau is trending towards. 0. 49 births per women in 2024.

Lesson number one, don't build like Macau if you want your country to have a future. By the way more birthing, really like the guy. We were actually, had him over at our place just last weekend. Him and, and Robin Hanson and the woman who wrote Hannah's Children. We had them together and we, we talked a lot about fertility rates.

Catherine. And they. His core bugaboo in the same way that our culture is property prices and the way that you build, he really thinks that like tall buildings are suppressive of fertility. I just do not agree at all. Like it clearly has an impact, but as for example, Israel became more dense, their fertility rate also increased.

Like where you see high fertility cultures, they are just completely immune to this. So like why are we [00:20:00] pretending that this is an issue? I don't know, that's my take on this.

Speaker: Well, it's, it, the bigger thing that we've discussed as well is Solving housing policy is one of those things of like, yeah, and you know, while we're at it, let's, you know, make nuclear energy pervasive, but it's not, you know, this isn't an easy to solve problem.

Whereas reducing regulatory bloat is Within our reach. It's a stretch goal, but it's feasible.

Speaker 2: Well, same with cultural change. Like, cultural change at the family level, at the individual level, at the level of our listeners, our people, that's possible. And yeah. And then I'd also he, he, At birth gauge had tweeted and this was in a retweet new update, I guess we can forget any recovery this year for now And it was a fertility rates by country and you just see red across the board i'll put it on screen here, but basically just Across the board.

All right. Now we're going to look at some things from Lyman Stone, that [00:21:00] Zvi brought up, which I thought were pretty interesting. So he says, I looked at the NLSY 1979 cohort, the housing data that's readily coded kind of sucks. It's basically Metro versus non Metro to homeowner versus not live with parents, live on own or GQB, but But we can untangle some major indigeneity because NLSY gives us 1.

Fertility preferences surveyed before exit from parental household or adulthood. 2. Sibling numbers. 3. Childhood religious environment. All potentially huge confounds. Driving endogenous selection. So, if we start with just housing related variables, this is what we get. Turns out more years in metro areas maybe boost fertility, and more years as a homeowner reduces fertility.

This is bizarre for me, but look at the [00:22:00] effect of living with parents. Note, this graph is for men, not women, but they look similar. So really bizarrely here, what this shows is living in metros when you control for other things actually increases, not decreases, fertility for a period of your life. And you and I lived in a metro for a period and then left, and I assume that that's what we're seeing here.

As to why it would increase fertility, a lot of people can be like, how could that possibly make sense in the data? I have a

Speaker: really instant intuition. What's yours?

Speaker 2: It's very hard to find a partner outside of a city.

Speaker: Exactly. Yeah, you find your partner in the city, and then you get out as soon as you're ready to have kids.

So it may turn out

Speaker 2: that cities are actually critical to getting fertility rates back up because they're the only environment where there are lots of single young people around and if you try to stay in a rural area, you're just not going to find a partner.

Speaker: bringing [00:23:00] back the London season. It was the London season. It existed because it was a time when Parliament was in session, the House of Lords was in session, and all these families happened to be in London at the same time, even though they typically lived in really dispersed rural manor houses and estates.

So. Mm hmm. Even in the past, cities really mattered when it came to matchmaking and a transient time in a city was important for matchmaking. So that is really enlightening and helpful.

Speaker 2: Well, yeah. And if a young person came to me and they're like, I have decided to avoid cities because, you know, urban monoculture hell holes.

How do I find a partner? I'd say, well, you're not going to, you need to go to a city. Like that would be my advice. If you don't have a

Speaker: partner at university. Or college, you have to find them at a city.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I say basically, if you're not if you haven't found the person you plan to marry by the age of 25, you should be an oh s**t territory.

And you should be grinding for it at that point. Like that's like the point of a video [00:24:00] game when you get stomped by a boss and you need to go in the woods and start grinding to get your level up. You are under leveled for life. If you do not have the person who you are going to marry in front of you around the age of 25.

And I think that our society right now, the, the, the heuristic that I would use for most young people is if you don't know who you're going to marry by the time you graduate college, you should be panicked.

Speaker: Wait, by the time you, by the time you graduate from college.

Speaker 2: Graduate from college. Like if you leave a college environment where you had tons of single people around your age, similar socioeconomic income, similar education level, and you were unable to secure a partner, you immediately need to be panicking at that point.

You need to say, because it's going to get infinitely harder in the real world. And so if you weren't able to find one in that environment, it means that there was something systemically wrong with you or how you were trying to secure a partner.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And people can be like, but it's just so hard these [00:25:00] days.

It's like, it doesn't matter that it's hard these days. Right? Like, it's like somebody comes to me and they're like, I'm a discriminated minority in my country and they really are a discriminated minority in their country. And so I'm like, okay, well then you have to work twice as hard. You have to work three times as hard.

You have to work four times as hard for the same outcome. It

Speaker: takes a while. We had a friend who maybe one or two years, maybe even two years back moved to Austin and was looking really, really hard for a partner. And. Now we just got word of the engagement and that's great. And it's perfect.

Speaker 2: She was running for it though.

Yes. And this is an attractive, popular, semi famous woman who has been grinding for a potential husband for years at this point. And I think that the young men who are like, Oh, the women just aren't considering me. They're being delusional that they are being Absolutely delusional. Actually, Brett Cooper did a thing on this recently where she's like, yeah, I know a lot of young women who are like, I want a male who's good to marry.

[00:26:00] And I can't think of a single young male that I would introduce them to. And Brett Cooper's fairly based person, right? Like, you know, she's not like simping here for males. And it's the same with us. We know more. females looking for husbands that we struggle to match. Then we know young men looking for wives that we struggle to match.

Speaker: I don't know.

Speaker 2: You see it about equal or I

Speaker: think it's equal. Yeah. And I think that for the most part, the biggest problem is a mixture of not trying hard enough and having unrealistic expectations, which is the worst combination you could possibly imagine. To both have incredibly high standards and not really be doing a high throughput.

I mean, it's one thing if they're like, yeah, I'm dating at least one person, one new person every single night of every single day of the year, doubling up on weekends. But I also have very high standards. I'd be, I would say that they have a long battle to fight, but they can probably get something because [00:27:00] they're being so prolific in their attempts.

What I'm hearing from people now, though, is, oh, I have incredibly high expectations and Oh, maybe three dates a month a month. I mean, you're not even going to find a two at that rate

Speaker 2: true. I also go on to say here. I would say of the young males we know, at least so of the males of this young generation right now.

I don't know any that have made it to 30 and we're seriously looking for someone to marry who haven't secured a partner. Typically what I am finding is that young men that are serious about working to improve themselves, have a life plan, have their s**t together. They're typically finding marriage partners that are really solid.

I won't say that's true for every young woman I know, but I will say that's true for most young men I know who have their s**t together. The ones Who, who don't, I'm often embarrassed to tell them, like, you really don't have your s**t together, though. You just are pretending like you have your s**t together.

Speaker: Aren't we all, though?

Speaker 2: Not really. [00:28:00] Anyway, so, then he goes on to say, I have told you people repeatedly. This is the problem and it remains today. In fact, the problem, the young people must have their own houses. So he's really against because if you correct for things here people living at home. Right? Like what's interesting, though, is if you correct for religion and siblings and everything like that, living with your parents is not that big an effect.

Isn't that interesting?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: But I, I think that this is not about getting young people houses. I think this is about changing cultural norms, about having Finding a partner when you're living with your parents. Like, for our daughters, I would not hugely, Well, I don't know, would I say like a guy basically doesn't have his s**t together if he's still living with his parents?

Depends on how rich the parents are. Depends on what he's doing with his life, yeah. I, I guess I'm kind of okay with the people still living with their parents being removed from the gene pool, [00:29:00] even if it causes a major fertility crash.

Speaker: It depends on the circumstances, in my opinion, but yeah, I think if, if one is, if someone is living with their parents, but could immediately move out. And live on their own, but it's a very different thing. Some people live with their parents just to really quickly pay off student debt, for example, or save up a lot of money to get a down payment on a house because it just makes more sense.

And that makes sense. For example, if you have a job in the Bay area and your parents live there. I could see, and I didn't do this, right. I got my own apartment in the Bay area regardless, but I could see a lot of value in continuing to live with your parents. So that you don't have to pay rent for an apartment in the Bay Area to bide your time to either get something really good, maybe buy property or just get a different job and leave California entirely.

Right? So there, there are, there are reasons why I would be okay with it, but I would want [00:30:00] to know that that person was capable of moving out immediately if they wanted to, and they were only living at home with their parents because it was financially responsible for some reason. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: So to continue, okay, but these are kind of dumb controls to be really savvy. We don't just want a control variable. We want an interaction. Say, does the effect of home ownership vary based on preferences? Yes, it does. This is for women with all other controls entered. For women who desire zero or one child, so women with quite low preferences, One extra year of home ownership is associated with a considerable decline in fertility But as desires rise, so does the effect.

This kind of looks like homeownership is associated with a modest improvement in correspondence between desires and outcomes, at least for people at the extremes. I can tell you the same effect appears if I use metro status. More years spent in metro equals lower fertility for women with 0 to [00:31:00] 1 desires, higher fertility to women with 3 plus desires.

On the whole, the results are a lot more favorable to density than I expected them to be, That said, the measure here really are oblique. Quote, Do you own a home? End quote. Quote, Are you in a metro area? End quote. End quote. Do you live with your parents? End quote. None of these are, quote unquote, high density.

So what you can see here is that Owning your own home and the number of years you own your own home actually increasingly suppresses fertility for low fertility preference individuals, likely because it's increasing stability, but increases fertility for high fertility individuals. And it's the same with living in a metro area.

Living in a metro area, it decreases fertility of your low fertility preference, but increases fertility of your high fertility preference, which again would ally with what we're saying, like people who have s**t together. It's just a higher standard of having your s**t together is expected for this generation than [00:32:00] previous generations.

I think that's really what's going on here.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, and I think I'm living in a city with intention is like, Using psychedelics with intention, right? Like a lot of people can take psychedelics and have a weird trip and nothing really changes with their lives. And then other people can go into psychedelics with severe PTSD or other serious problems and come in with a really good plan and then really good therapy afterward and like come at a way, completely changed, better person with a more functional life.

And I think cities are like that. You can just be in a city and kind of sit in rotten one. And it's a, it's an experience. It's the urban experience. Or you can go in with a plan. And follow up and follow through and change. And then you, then you get out and you're good. You're changed forever. You have your partner, you have your life together, you have your family, but you have to go into an urban area with intention and not just hedonism and a broad interest in maximizing your financial gain, which seems to be the default reason for [00:33:00] entering a city.

Speaker 2: I agree with that. Yeah. So, to continue here, other times it's easier to identify Alex Curtis. I just met a 72 year old woman who's been telling me about her life. Best quote. She said, you can either have a house and kids or you can fly first class. I want to fly first class. I find her inspiring. Oh, well, I mean You want to fly first class Simone, but we never do.

You take that as, That's what we say

Speaker: for

Speaker 2: kids.

Speaker: Well, what I, what I, I understand that reasoning, and I completely understand that mindset. But then when I think about it, and I think about the num, the percentage of my life that I spend on a plane every year versus the percentage of my life that I spend living every day, day to day.

The typical routine, the percentage of time I spent on flights is not worth an entire, like foregoing the most tiresome thing. Yeah. I

Speaker 2: mean, this [00:34:00] is a really great framework because of what could be more indolent millennial urban monoculture than wasting money on first class. It's such a transient, pointless, selfish thing.

Very similar to claiming Everest, right? We have our video on that. That, that it is, I think, indicative of to say, I cannot make indulgent, pointless expenditures if other people are relying on me. So I will choose

Speaker 3: to deny them a right.

Speaker: I really, okay. My argument for business class, it's a little different from Everest.

Some people do just fly business class to flex, but. I see it as akin to getting anesthesia during a medical procedure, or maybe, maybe more similarly getting nitrous oxide during like a dental procedure, right? You can, you can get through it. Fine, uncomfortably, but fine without nitrous oxide, but with it, man, [00:35:00] like it would, you don't

Speaker 2: even remember it.

It was, it was just, I mean, it's what you're saying is I would pay anything. I would deny anyone a life to the right to their life to avoid discomfort.

Speaker: Yeah. And which of course isn't justified. But I'm just saying it's different from Everest. You're saying it was, you know, it's not, it's not an Everest thing.

It's a, it's a, it's, it's a hedonistic, yeah. Avoidance of discomfort and pain issue for many people, which I respect, but also if you're a little bit less myopic about your pain, which is difficult, I think when you're in the urban monoculture, because it's all about avoiding pain, you'll realize that the upside potential of the joy that family and children give to you and the meaning that your life gets and the, the extent to which actually.

On aggregate, your pain and suffering and anxiety, especially with a larger family, just Become such a small percentage of your mindscape because it's so full of everything [00:36:00] else with your family, that there's no room for the anxiety. There's no room for the discomfort that it's it's a silly trade off to even think about making, of course, it's better to have a family.

Speaker 2: Well, it's something that you've talked about, which I find really interesting here is also, you would just not want to travel anymore because you've entered a state of your life where our home and our life is so high quality. That you view leaving it even for vacation, and I feel the same way, is nothing but work and a burden.

But I think that that shows how our life is different from the life of the person who opts into the urban monoculture belief system. They Find pleasure in taking a break from their lives from getting in a plane, going somewhere else and doing something other than what they felt for themselves, whereas we would always take more pleasure from our day to day lives than we would from leaving them.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: anyway, back to the stats here. I'm going to put a graph on [00:37:00] screen. And this is limestone here talking. Oh, W. D. heads this section by saying, quote, fertility first falls within development and then rises with development. Building on this, UVA student Maxwell Trebrock argues that quote, maximum progress , can prevent declining fertility.

If society advances enough, fertility will rise again. I mentioned Maxwell because I did a Twitter thread recently rebutting this piece. I did so because I was asked to. to But ultimately, Maxwell did an impressively good job of putting together the U shaped argument, in one specific place. Since writing the thread, I've had requests to formalize the argument a bit more.

This is That's what this is, Limestone. My basic thesis is this. The view that more growth will boost fertility again is wrong. It is based on seriously outdated underlying research, doesn't fit the actual empirical facts of the case well, and it [00:38:00] leads to theoretical confusion, which inhibits clear understanding of how fertility actually works.

And I agree with that. You just don't see this. You cannot develop your way out of this issue unless you have AIs creating and raising kids. Any sane person would know that. Like, if you look at your ultra developed, ultra urban monoculture friends these groups fertility rate is like 0. 2. Like, it's so astonishingly low.

Having even two kids is considered quite a lot by some of these groups.

So then he goes on to say, so do we have evidence on lifetime disposable income? Yes, we do. From Sweden. Fertility rises with men's income and has basically forever. Meanwhile, women's incomes are pretty much totally unrelated to fertility. Whoopsie! And women's earnings are negatively related to fertility.

And I'll put some graphs on screen here. By the way, this is Limestone. So, just so people know, and we've pointed this out before, Limestone heavily biases anything [00:39:00] he's looking at to try to argue that It's a really weird thing. It's like being a flat earther of the pronatalist movement that low income doesn't lead to higher fertility and that high income income generally doesn't lead to lower fertility And if you look here, he had to find like one obscure country where this is the case sweden to make this point But he's about to pull out some data which makes our point which is that culture is everything which i'll get to in a second So every kind of income is pronatal except for women's wages Women's interest income business income and Rental income, welfare income, support from husband or family, all probably pronatal.

Earnings, no. That's really interesting. So women getting income from nothing or from not working, he argues is increasing fertility rate. I think that's because he likes the idea of women living at home. He really likes this tradition for sure. And that's what he's trying to argue, even though he doesn't have any data that supports this.

Actually, the data supports the opposite. When women win the lottery, [00:40:00] their fertility went down and this would be equivalent to, you know, like rental income, business income, welfare income, like it's a random. Cash deposit. We also know from the big study on cash handouts that was done on universal basic income didn't increase female fertility.

So he's just Making something up here, I guess. Earnings, no. On the other hand, you might look at the nearly universal rule of species that status predicts reproductive success. You might look at the stable male earnings fertility gradient and suppose that high income will usually predict high fertility.

This is my view. High income will usually predict high fertility. Except it, like, doesn't in most countries. He had to choose Sweden to make this work is really, I think, sort of the exception that proves the rule.

Malcolm Collins: So just so people understand how insane the statement.

You might look at stable male earning fertility gradient, and suppose that high income would usually support high fertility. This is my view. High income will usually predict high fertility [00:41:00] is. Just look at these charts here, right? , this is between country fertility rates that stays within country fertility rates.

Almost no matter how you slice it, lower income. And this is between and within countries. Is predictive. Of higher fertility rate.

Speaker 2: But then he goes on to say, which I think is interesting here is the relation between income and fertility is culturally determined. Income has a relation with fertility, but it's not income to fertility. Either up or down it's income times culture to fertility.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Speaker 2: I do agree with this Yeah, the problem is is that the dominant culture on earth the urban monoculture has a negative number attached to that Culture times income to fertility outcome Which means that the only way to fight it is with cultures other than the dominant culture which means It's culture silly Any thoughts before I move forward there?

Speaker: No, the answer here is It's [00:42:00] the culture stupid.

Speaker 2: It's the culture stupid. Yeah. And so here we're back to Zvi again. Perhaps one could say that income relative to expectations or societal positions predict individual fertility. That seems like an actual mechanism. As you get higher income, perhaps excluding female labor income because of the substitution problem relative to the perceived financial cost of children, you get more children.

The problem is that if rising income also raises perceived costs more, you go backwards. As it does in the urban monoculture. This is really interesting because the urban monoculture is at its core like a consumerist culture as you get more income it's always going to say that the first thing that you should be spending it on is signaling class status instead of Anything like genuinely meaningful and so it's going to lower the fertility rate because you're going to be more interested in signaling class status Her core argument is that What we actually have here is Simpson's Paradox, that what's [00:43:00] going on is the compositional changes in income cohorts are creating a U shaped curve that isn't a good way of understanding the situation.

And here I am putting some graphs on screen here. Where I think what we can really see the answer from this final graph, which is like a graph. I always wish it existed and I'm glad we have it here. What this graph shows is the U shaped curve of fertility rates where you see them going up again at high levels of income, but it shows the population size of each one of these incomes as well.

And you see that basically no one exists within the level of wealth you need for that to increase fertility rate. And that is. Above half a million to a million a year in household income.

No, here's something that's really interesting. If we're talking about Korea that I didn't know, Korea is very low fertility and we often talk about saving Korean culture and everything like that. It's that Korean culture for whatever reason. Makes large businesses more productive than they [00:44:00] should be and small businesses less productive than they should be They are a chai bowl culture Chai bowls are these giant megacorps that are in korea where like you'll live in like a samson apartment with a samson fridge and A samson computer and a samson internet connection that makes samson boats it's it's weird and dystopian if you've ever lived there from the perspective.

Oh, it's kind

Speaker: of cool

Speaker 2: But yeah,

Speaker: sure

Speaker 2: It is kind of cool. I feel very much like i'm in like akira or something whenever i'm there i'm like It

Speaker: I have

Speaker 2: to put my Sampson card to open the door for my Sampson building. And they're tracking me all the time. So great. But anyway so, so here it says, well, small to medium sized businesses are rarely as productive as large ones.

It's striking how unproductive South Korea small businesses are compared to those in Western nations. The OECD, for example, found small service sector firms in Korea, Are 30 percent as productive as larger firms with over 250 workers and the Netherlands in Germany. It is 84 to 90 percent [00:45:00] respectively.

Similarly, the Asian Development Bank found that in 2010, small Korean firms with 5 to 49 workers. We're 22 percent as productive as firms was over 200 workers. So in most countries it's like a 20 percent or 10 percent hit in productivity in Korea. It's like an 80 or 90 percent hit to productivity. And I think this culturally shows how much Korea is optimized for both collectivism and to work in these giant, giant, giant firms.

Which is interesting to me and I I think that there's probably something to that that we'll probably dig deeper in the next time We look at korean fertility statistics.

Speaker 3: Yeah

Speaker 2: So next here we are looking at a list of wealthy people's names. And this person, Matthew Iglesias is saying small sample, but at the top end but Larry Ellison and Larry Page each have two kids, Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, Ballmer, and Brin each have three.

[00:46:00] Bezos has four, Arnold has five, and Musk has seven. And they're talking about the wealthiest people in the world right now, or in the U S I suppose. I would say this is really bad. You should not live in a society where a number of the wealthiest people only have two children. That basically means they're aiming for what's normative.

I would go so far as to say that if you are at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars wealth, that you should probably have multiple wives.

Speaker: Well, one that's not legal in the United States. I think it would be very functionally does. He does. And there are other people in society who are proudly advertising the fact that they have Multiple wife, not wives, women who are pregnant with their children.

Just sent us that tweet from what was

Speaker 2: this tweet?

Speaker: Some rapper who is very proud about the fact that he has like six women concurrently pregnant.

Speaker 2: I wouldn't imagine [00:47:00] the effect of that are going to be entirely genetically positive.

Speaker: It's just not sustainable in the same way. Like I get it. I historically, yes. Very resourced men have typically had a lot of children, either very publicly or privately, you know, kings of England and France had all these b*****d children, for example who were recognized with varying degrees.

But they weren't,

Speaker 2: they, they were not. They had no genetic advantage over there. Like they may have from some sort of historical reason, but it's not like they competed in a meritocracy and ended up on top.

Speaker: Yeah. I just

Speaker 2: yeah. Is going to happen. Okay. I suspect that the moment we get artificial wombs working really well we will have some billionaires begin to just mass produce children.

Yeah. Mass educate them mass, give them nurturing. So you'll have some that's producing like 20 kids per [00:48:00] year or something like that. This is something where if somebody did that and they were looking for somebody to run this facility that is my dream job. So let me know. I will make sure very few of these kids end up totally messed up.

Speaker: Oh my God. I, I don't know. I think that There are some people who just from an ideological perspective, want to spam children, but that most of the billionaires who have larger families and I've like anyone people of any level of wealth do it because they love their children and they want to give their children a good life.

And they like spending time with their kids. And when you change it to this industrial scale.

Speaker 2: A w***e, you, you don't, kids aren't pets. You don't have them because of how they, yeah, they're not pets. They're humans. They're people. You're bringing full people into the world and they deserve, shouldn't have kids because of the emotional states they generate in yourself.

No, [00:49:00] but you should be because

Speaker: you're willing to commit to raising and bringing a new person into the world. And. Yes, very, very well resourced. People can do that by bringing in a ton of staff and stuff. It's just that after a while, it becomes so abstracted from you personally, that I kind of feel like you're missing the point.

I think that there's a sweet spot.

Speaker 2: So consider my childhood, right? I spent very little time with my parents. I spent a lot of time being raised by maids and stuff like that.

Speaker: You still spend a lot of very formative experiences with them. And if you had. 50 siblings, you would not have had that. No, you have been very shaped by

Speaker 2: formative

Speaker: experiences.

Speaker 2: You have been gaslit by my parents a little bit here who have not presented an entirely. I've seen

Speaker: your home videos. I mean, you've had enough to have formative experiences.

Speaker 2: This is exactly what I'm talking about gaslighting Simone. Home videos can be chosen for the maybe A few hours a year I would have spent around my parents.

I have read about the amount of time that Elon spends with his kids. I absolutely guarantee [00:50:00] you that on average, Elon is spending twice as much time with any of his kids as my parents spent with me and my child. And

Speaker: my point is that he has about the right number of kids. I think he has 11 kids, right?

And I think that's about the right number. I think that

Speaker 2: No, the point I'm making, which I don't think you're, okay, if, if, if he spends twice the amount of time with his kids as my parents spent with me, right? And I grew up very much seeing my parents as my parents. My parents is the culture that I'm taking myself, my life from.

I don't even remember the names of some of the maids who spent years, you're saying you're missing. Is it? Yeah. Kids brains are biologically coded to know who their parents are among the caregivers and culturally code to them.

Speaker: Yeah, roughly I agree with you. So you're indicating that a number between 10 and 30 is, is optimal.

No, I mean, you're, you're really implying that you think it's like 100, you think it's 200. That just [00:51:00] doesn't seem You can easily get to 100

Speaker 2: or 500. In the age of

Speaker: AI, we're There are various reasons why I don't I don't like that. I don't like the lack of genetic diversity in that. I, I think that we're better off.

Speaker 2: In society, if, if, if one billionaire had literally 10, 000 kids, it would do nothing to earth genetic diversity. Literally zero. He wouldn't even be 0. 0000001 percent of Earth's population.

Speaker: Right, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about, ultimately, if, if artificial moons became widely available, there would be You know, 250 billionaires who are doing that.

And then suddenly there's this non trivial percentage of the future population that No,

Speaker 2: it is a trivial, do the math. This is something that people don't do when they make this genetics argument, is they literally, like, they're like Hypothetically, that means 50 percent of the next population could all be a handful of [00:52:00] people's kids.

And I'm like, no, even if every billionaire on Earth was doing this, it would still be under 0. 01 percent of Earth's future population. Like, you're not running the actual numbers in your head here, Simone. It would be completely trivial. And keep in mind that by the time it became an issue, we would have genetic engineering to fix any potential issues that this was causing, even if it became an issue, which it very is unlikely to become an issue.

And in addition to that, we, This next generation, like when this is happening, this is when they'll be able to train a eyes on books. Like if somebody wanted to train an AI on you and me, for example, given the amount of content we put out there, that AI would probably be within like 10 to 5 percent of being able to replicate our answers, our parenting style in terms of how it interacted with a kid just due to the sheer volume of information on [00:53:00] us.

Yeah. The idea that you cannot clone a parent anymore is just factually wrong.

Can't you just leave the child with Huggy? Stop calling him the child, Richard! His name is Rocket! And I'm not leaving him with your crappy robot! Sally! Why, that's almost churlish! You can't replace family with a robot, Richard! We need real human affection!

That's why Huggy's programmed to simulate its sweetness! Ugh! Yes, yes. Perhaps the fresh air will, uh, calm the female, uh hmm. Real human affection. Perhaps a pill or a burst of gamma radiation,

Speaker: yeah, I mean, maybe this is just, you know, intuitively not what feels right for me, and I respect that. Sometimes logic is just [00:54:00] not in concordance with someone's intuition and feelings, and I

Speaker 2: If one

Speaker: of our kids ended up

Speaker 2: doing that.

If

Speaker: one of our kids ended up I would talk with them about it. I would You would try to dissuade

Speaker 2: them from having more kids the same way my mom did with me.

Speaker: No. No, because Your mom was all about putting in resources that I don't think really matter. I mean, I really, this, this is so against everything that I stand for aesthetically.

So I think you can understand that I'm not fronting here, but I really think that children deserve a lot of very warm love and care and unique mental space of a parent. And when you have 50 plus children, The fraction of them, like you're going to start having trouble keeping track of who's who and what their names are and what their favorite colors are.

And I just feel like if you're going to bring someone into the [00:55:00] world, they are entitled to. A certain proportion, not just of your wealth, not just of your resources, but also of your mindscape. And maybe this is the difference between men and women. I mean, obviously you evolutionarily as a male have been programmed on a very deep level to spam and to just not give a s**t.

Like you can, like you are just designed to have as many kids as possible and genuinely not care. Whereas I have been. You know, evolved to be very careful about the the quality and resources that each kid can can be given because typically it's the women who are left with the kids and it's the men who walk away.

So I understand why you have the mindset that you do and why none of this

Speaker 2: seems

Speaker: to be reflected. I

Speaker 2: might have a genetic predilection to this mindset but I think that you're being overly sentimental and mythologizing the role of the parent when a lot of this parental love can be simulated.

You [00:56:00] can't replace family with a robot, Richard! We need real human affection!

That's why Huggy's programmed to simulate its sweetness! Ugh!

Speaker 2: This one is from Loire Lafvenir.

Speaker: Hold on, I have to ask you, like, Would you be willing to I will. I don't know, like, look, one of our kids, our, our, our living kids now in the face and say, like, Hey, I'm now going to send you to a facility and you're largely going to be raised by other people and, you know, we're not going to live our life together anymore.

And, you know, you're going to have, do

Speaker 2: you have any idea what my childhood was like? I. Was taken away from my parents at around the age of 12 stopped living with them after that I never lived with them again. I first lived in a prison system complex saying yes I live at a pre preparatory boarding school for me and you're saying

Speaker: that was

Speaker 2: ideal Yes, it was better than, I know, I literally, I know all the other kids of rich people in my neighborhood.[00:57:00]

All of them are drug addicts, they're OD'd, they're wasteful. Yeah, as are many of the

Speaker: kids that you went to all these facilities and schools with, so. Fewer of them. Really? Yes. How many of your classmates are thriving right now?

Speaker 2: Well, not many people are like me, Simone. What I will say is my genetics does well in hardship environments.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: And I point out here that this childhood, that she is terrified of, one of our kids potentially facing is the childhood that created me, the person who presumably like, I love who I am. And she seems to like who I am. I would be really happy if my kids ended up like me. , and.

Even if all of the hardship was a negative. Even if I maybe could have been a better person without it. I still would choose existence plus hardship over non-existence.

And if through sending kids to a [00:58:00] facility, I was able to bring more humans into existence.

Of course, are you willing to look at those additional kids in the face and say, sorry, I wasn't willing to bring you into existence because your brother's at a facility.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: Functionally, those kids are up in heaven waiting on us to have them. And you're just a Lehman I'm hanging. , no, this isn't cosmologically how I think things work, but functionally it's how things work because you're denying a human right to exist.

Kind of dance should I do first for mom and dad? Something classical. Or, cha cha. Cha cha. From what I've heard, it's going to take a while to even learn how to walk. So, maybe just a twist then?

Speaker 2: And I would be very And keep in mind, when I was told this as a kid, I wasn't told this like a bad thing. It's like, oh, you get to go into an environment where things are harder and you have more self determination. A kid, especially one of our kids, would [00:59:00] love that. If you don't frame it as some, like, negative, Oh, you were going to be away from mommy's hugs!

And you're like, Alright, buddy, now you're turning eight! The game gets harder! Like, kids are like, Oh, yeah! Let's do it! Like, I, I, I You're going to have to fend for yourself. Oh, when I'm fending for myself, I'm going to do 10 times as good as when mommy and daddy are fending for me. You know, that is the mindset.

I went into all this with and I look at our kids and I know our kids. Like, if you're saying our actual kids. They'd effing love this. In fact, I remember like just the other day our kids were playing and Octavian took me aside and he goes, Daddy, I need you to go in the other room and look at the computer.

And I was like, what? And he goes, the little ones are playing. I need you to go look at a computer.

Because he knows what's up! He, he, they were having fun and me being around was [01:00:00] was, was lowering their ability to play, so I disagree.

Speaker: You make valid arguments, I just Maybe it's just inbuilt to my, my, like, biological.

Speaker 2: Right. So you're like hyper on this side. I was

Speaker: an only child. Yeah. And I loved being an only child and I loved having a close relationship with my parents.

And I, I, I love my parents. And I also just have this deep inbuilt intuition. And maybe this, this happened after I had kids where just, I really, Yeah. think kids deserve. And I, I am not someone to say that anyone is entitled to anything, right? But I still think that if you're going to bring a person into the world, they are entitled to like a minimal percentage of

Speaker 2: your overall.

Think about Octavian, our oldest kid, our most cognitive kid. If you asked him, Simone, would you prefer more brothers and sisters or more time with mommy and daddy? [01:01:00] What is he going to answer? We can ask him. Tonight. I know, I know it's more brothers than sisters.

Speaker 3: Hmm.

Speaker 2: You know it's more brothers than sisters.

You don't even have to ask. But we will, we will. Alright, so I'm going to keep going here. So, Lore Lefender says, French fertility rates, top ratings in Europe, not for much longer. For reasons of immigration, but rather because fertility among native born women is high. And so here you can look at native born versus all women in the country, in which you see, and what we've always said, is that diversity in a country, and there's this one study that argues against this, but it's like, obviously not true if you look at the data.

Like, it's so weird to me that People can't tell when people are lying to them with data. I'm like, okay, what countries have the highest fertility rates? You're looking at like France and the United States and Israel, fairly diverse countries, which countries have the lowest fertility rates, countries like Korea and China.

And it's like, okay, well, it's, it's clearly diversity especially competitive diversity is good for fertility rates. Which [01:02:00] again, we're finding in the data here. Now I thought this was interesting. To understand the cult of the host. So this is talking about Japan and host clubs. This was tweeted by Jordan Schneider.

We have to start with two statistics. I'm sorry, if you don't know what a host club is, it's a place where women in Japan go to pretend to sort of date guys. Like they buy pretty,

Speaker: host clubs are basically bars or nightclubs in Japan staffed by attractive male boyfriend experience type people. You select one when you get there and then one or two, you know, like maybe one per person, and then sit there and drink with them. And they make money from the drinks that you purchase.

And then after that, they may even like continue texting you and you know, asking you to come back and that's kind of how they make money and that they're really interesting phenomenon. And you should definitely watch some YouTube videos summarizing. This, this economy, because it's crazy. Some women even end up going into sex work because they are trying to support the, the [01:03:00] addiction to

Speaker 2: their fake boyfriend.

Speaker: Yeah, they'll quit their job and they'll go into sex work to support their addiction to their fake boyfriend who works at basically also in sex work, but just basically the female equivalent of it, which is. More of a relationship style experience. It's crazy.

Speaker 2: It is crazy. And it is culturally normalized, I think, is really negative as well.

Yes. We can provide a way to masturbate sort of the boyfriend desire that many Japanese women have. Although I imagine the host clubs are going to take a major hit as chat AIs get more popular.

Speaker: I could see that. Yes. I could also see the government banning them.

Speaker 2: They probably should, to be honest. They should.

A lot of women are going to be angry, but they probably should. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, so this is something that would be like, why would you not say that porn should be banned then? Because there's like no statistics that shows that porn lowers birth rates. Actually anything, if you look at the statistics in the country's report is banned.

Porn seems to

Speaker: A woman is very unlikely to be going through the grind of dating and finding a husband if she's going to house clubs. And this is not

Speaker 2: true of men in porn. [01:04:00]

Speaker: Women can read romance novels and still actively be dating. But if you are investing in a relationship, you do not have money or time to date.

You can only spend your evenings and money on, on supporting this, this host club relationship, which is just so it's so toxic. So I, you know, I typically am not for banning anything, but I just, I don't really see anyone benefiting from this. Yeah, even, even the, the, the men who work in host clubs. are paying huge commissions to the club owner for, you know, all the, all the alcohol purchase.

They're not being paid directly. They're being essentially paid a commission on drinks purchased at the bar. It's, it's stupid.

Speaker 2: More than 60 percent of the Japanese women in their late twenties are unmarried double the rate in the mid 1980s. A recent study found that more than a third of unmarried Japanese adults, 20 to 24 have never dated.

Speaker: Oh,

Speaker 2: yikes. Ouch. That is wild. So, so when you [01:05:00] consider that 60 percent are unmarried of women at that age range, and a third of them, more than a third of them have never even dated, this makes a lot of sense. There's just not a cultural system that is pressuring them to go out and interact with guys and they don't feel the need to do this.

They do not think guys have anything to offer.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker 2: And I think that this is something that a lot of guys in the West haven't gotten yet. They, if you increase this narrative of women evil, it can get to a point where women just decide in mass, I'm not even going to try anymore. Yeah. Cause that's what happened in Korea and Japan.

Speaker: Yes. Well, Japan's doing. I agree. Relatively quite well in East Asia. It's, I don't think it's as bad in Japan, but in Korea, certainly it is. And, and this, people talk about the four B's move in and, and misogyny being really stuff that is only very serious among extremists. But I do think that there is a trickle down effect that it sort of [01:06:00] rubs off and gives people general bad taste.

Of the other sex because of these very high profile battles taking place amongst extremists on each side. So just because you yourself are not part of the 4Bs movement, if you're a woman in Korea, you might still be like like women and men hate each other here, right? You know, this isn't really a place for me to get married.

I shouldn't really be investing in dating because it's not really great for women, right? Not a good overall scheme. One note Malcolm that in four minutes, I have to jump on that call

Speaker 2: Yeah, I was actually thinking about splitting this into two episodes. So I am totally okay with that okay,

yes, so people are commenting on how, like, the conservatives now that they've won are beginning to split and fight amongst themselves a bit more.

And one of the big areas, which I think we've even seen is really the losers of the conservative movement, the traditionalists, like the, you know, the The ones who really want to go back to the old ways of doing things. They've gotten quite mad about this [01:07:00] Stacey Wojak meme who just acts like a normal wife, like, you know, demands things of her husband, sometimes makes mistakes, stuff like that.

Okay. And they're like, Oh, you guys are owning yourselves. And women should like always serve their husband and like not make any mistakes as a wife. And like, you just looking really cucked right here and all the normal, like actually married men are like this is the way most married women are like, what are you doing?

And it sort of devolved into this it was one faction apparently sort of being led by Nick Fuentes, which makes a lot of sense. I mean, you can talk a lot about how a woman should act as a wife if you're not dating anyone you know, because then you can say, well, this is the ideal wife and I should only continue civilization if I can find this idealized wife and it's created a huge problem for people.

I think we should do an episode on it, but it's a little too similar to our don't trust. Influencers without parents episode, which hasn't gone, which hasn't gone live yet

Speaker: too, too similar. You can maybe add some annotation to it [01:08:00] though. About this.

Speaker 2: Anyway.

Multi kill! Ah! Oh, yeah! Wow! One, two, three, uh, uh, Look at that!