Why So Many Women Feel Lost in Their 30's - Louise Perry

Bonnie Blue might be pregnant Good News very bad news I mean I I I I would bet money that she is not pregnant I would bet money also that Lily Phillips is not pregnant like what are the chances that the two of them are pregnant exactly at the same time come on I also there a lot of sperm yes I did see someone on Twitter saying that actually the most reliable contraception in the world like the marina coil has a one in a thousand so 157 actually breaks it yeah so I you know I guess it's plausible um but uh I really hope it's not true I mean I yeah I I think it would be very likely that social services would get involved in all seriousness wow that's interesting and I totally didn't I totally didn't think about that why would they get involved because it's very common for children to be taken away from moms if they are um in prostitution and the thing is that I think what what social services are normally worried about is children being exposed to punters like if they're coming into the home which isn't happening with Bonnie Blue or lily Phillips but it's like they I mean they do like work from home in the sense of doing camming from home and like it's I think it would be very very difficult for to protect children completely yeah it's perilously similar you know the word sex worker was reclaimed by only fans and on online models and stuff like that and it kind of sex worker I guess 20 years ago would have been girls that were out on the curb but sort of the dark hours of the night and guys driving past and now it covers a whole range of sins many of which are digital and totally parasocial and totally solo uh but something tells me actually yeah that social services might if you want to expand the definition of sex worker to include this sort of a stuff then perhaps Social Services have got something to say about that yeah I mean I think they'd at least have to think about it you know like I and I mean I yeah I really hope it's not true because imagine the psychological toll on a child who knew that they've been brought into the world in those circumstances right and I I mean Lily Phillips is single Lily Phillips doesn't have a boyfriend so if she yeah I think she does I mean I guess if you've had a sample of a thousand guys you've got to be one good one in there or maybe not haven't they been selected for being like the wor it was Guy it was Guy number 854 and I saw him across the room and I thought you're for me I mean though this is a thing as well like they just the the torture that that child would be put through in school because everyone would end up knowing and imagine your conception being on on film I mean just everything about it ising what do you make of you know it's kind of um it feels like we're in kind of a bit of a post only fans Z or we were until Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue sort of reinjected some attention into it I was I wasn't really seeing people talk about it in the same way it kind of become normalized I think a lot of the uh Market inflation the bubble that had occurred around Co had maybe started to decline a little bit and uh I just wasn't I know it was a thing some people do it some people don't but you know there was a big talking point for a long time which was you do this as a younger woman and then you try and either find a partner and then if and when you find a partner you then have a child and does this archaeological evidence that vestig follows you around potentially and follows your kids around for the rest of time what did you make of that what did you make of sort of the concern around that for young women who want to make a little bit of money but then have their whole life ahead of them that they have to carry it forward with um I mean the expression that I've used before is that only fans is to the marriage Market as a criminal record is to the jobs market like is forever and it does make it more difficult to this is actually something have you watched the Lily Phillips documentary I struggled a little bit but yeah I I got through it I thought it was actually really good and really interesting um and well done and this is one of the things she talks about like how am I gon to she doesn't have a boyfriend she doesn't really have any friends right how is she going to find a husband I think she says at one point like oh maybe I'll find a husband who wants to come the expression she uses but basically who has a [ __ ] fetish right um which doesn't sound like a very good basis for marriage I mean is like it's a really serious problem and I always think with these women like really good-looking only fans women why don't if they want to have like easy money why don't they just find Rich husbands that seems like a much more there like a much better lot it's it's it's calculating and materialistic fine but it's a much more long-term strategy rather than blow up your reputation by earning not even that much money on only fans I mean the thing is that most women on only fans earn a pittance MH it's the it's the massive hitter is like the power users yeah who ends and the par distribution is wild like it's it's worse than podcasts right it's worse it's probably it's probably worse than uh book publishing probably yeah and so much worse because you don't trash your reputation by putting out a podcast or a book depends how [ __ ] the book is true whereas with OD fans like you carry the same reputational risk but you earn a tiny fraction of the money that the really successful ones do and I mean there are so many horrible stories as well about women having like photos sent to their families or to their employers or just yeah it's it's it's a crazy thing to do and yeah nonetheless I have heard that something like one or two% of young American women are only fans it's massive what's the what have you sort of come to think about the Bonny blue ly Phillips contribution to the conversation around sex and and women at the moment um so I think from having watched The Lily Phillips documentary I've heard from um jenes who've interviewed her that she's really really nice actually and it does come across I think that genuinely she is um very sweet and one of the things that I concluded from watching the documentary with her is that she's actually really quite vulnerable she says things like she says really poignant things like oh I'm only good for one thing me and yeah and talks about not having any friends and feeling like she does this sort of diffident thing where she says oh I don't care about being judged but it's obvious that she actually massively does care about being judged because she keeps talking about it you know and I strongly concluded from that that actually she's doing this more as a kind of self harm than anything else Bonnie Blue I'm not so sure about like she might one of those unicorn women I've like I've always I've always said there probably are some women the world is big enough there are some women who actually really like having sex like a man and really like really mean it Bonnie Blue might be one of them I suppose you know in uh the way that you have a distribution of different mental makeups within any society uh your jeans are going to roll the dice on a few mutations and a couple of tinkerings here and there maybe you'll have a guy that can grow his hair into a ponytail and raid Linda fan and come back and not have any PTSD you know that's that's that's one type wouldn't do to have a society filled with all of them would probably be quite chaotic uh in the same way perhaps there is a role for one of the local women to not really care too much about getting attached when they have sex with a lot of men and that's not me saying that Bonnie Blue is a the Berserker of the [ __ ] be she says that she is like it's possible that she is I don't know I I can't see into her mind um I do think I think Lily Philips almost certainly isn't like that um and I I just have always had a problem with the idea that just because a woman says she wants to do something or indeed a man says he wants to do something that means that he's definitely doing the thing that's in his best interest and everyone just needs to step back and be like oh yeah great go for it mate isn't it interesting because there is this desire for agency that everybody has it's kind of tied into a meritocracy that you can design your own destiny that your life should not be lived by default who are you to tell me what I can do remembering that Lily Phillips is British we don't exactly have a flourishing culture of Freedom at the moment in brit we're not you know I mean I'm in Texas like the home of come and take it as a tagline um the UK is please feel free to come and take it uh so yeah it's just it's the that's interesting to me that this sort of emancipation Liberation Freedom thing that everybody sort of bows down to at some point you go well maybe we do need a kind of sort of like paternalistic oversight position that we go on here maybe there's certain types of disposition this isn't me saying that we need to step in and like you know have a [ __ ] intervention with Lily Phillips she's an adult and she can do what she wants I think their family should do that right whether it's like Society does so I look I think increasingly that agency is more like a personality trait than is like a an essential quality of human beings I think that it's on a bell curve I think it's probably actually a combination of different personality traits is probably a combination of like industriousness disagree there's probably there's some intelligence in there as well I think there's like multiple things going on but I think there some people are naturally more a than other people are I Elon Musk I think is an amazing example of the most agentic person you can imagine he's just like I'm going to go to Mars he just decides you know age 30 I'm going to go to Mars I'm going to die on Mars and he's just making it happen right and he's just like done everything in his power to make it happen similarly he's like I'm going to have you know gazillions of kids Etc he's just he's one of these people who bends the world around his will not the other way around right and most people aren't like that most people take take life as it comes much more and are much more passive and just basically go along with what other people are doing and kind of follow life scripts and hope for the best and like things don't always work out for them but they get on with it like that's the normal way that people behave and I honestly think that's probably for the best I don't think we want the entire world to be Elon musks I think it would Michael mice had an interesting take on this where he said uh a lot of the time people get criticized for looking up to role models too much uh sort of mimetically following the desires of others but it's his position that for maybe most people this is a Michael malism not me saying it maybe for most people they're too stupid to be able to design from first principles what they want to do with their life so actually Outsourcing your thinking and your life direction to someone who's clever than you is not a bad idea yeah it's not even just cleverness is important it's not even just that it's also um wisdom is it's just like the what guard rails do is that they understand human beings better than human beings generally understand themselves and there will sometimes be some people who break the guard rails and it's for the best you know but in most cases you should basically do what most other people do because reason my my push back against that would be you know 50% the average American is obese divorced and with less than 1K in the bank so doing what everybody else does sounds like a safe option but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you probably definitely don't want so in this we have a we have a difficulty right yes there are lots of ways that you can try and do it yourself and [ __ ] it up like building your own car or something it's like hey look people that are good at car building have tried this before but this would be like if the car manufacturer Market had more than a 50% fatality rate or like more than a 50% like you know serious incident crash rate and you saying I've actually got two quite difficult choices in front of me I can sort of roll the dice on my own so I guess you need to make but the people that need to make the Judgment of am I smart enough to be able to try and roll this on my own and build my own car are precisely the people that can't do that and that actually need to follow it because there maybe divorce obes and one less than mon in the bank is better for them than had they have tried to do it from design not from default so I think the reason that the average American is divorced to beast and has less than one it's like a it's like a tongue Tire I can't do it anyway um is because we live in we our society is set up in a maladaptive way for human nature right like the reason that people are obese is because there is a abundance of cheap calories available and no real need to do exercise and this is kind like kind of a great thing right like we don't have to worry about famine in the way that our ancestors did but it clearly is terrible for people's waistlines similarly the reason that divorce is so prevalent is because of all the stuff that I've written spoken about for so many years you know we don't encourage people to make good relationships decisions and the institution of marriage was actually really good and throwing out the window was a mistake and so basically I think that if um we should be making so I think one of the one of the M A lot of people who are in positions of authority in all sorts of ways whether that be in Media or politics or whatever tend to be really really agentic people they tend to be intelligent yeah but they also tend to be very good at basically bending life to their will right and those people often find it very difficult to empathize with people who aren't like that particularly because we just not really something that we talk about right it's not like a I mean I've basically kind of made out the word agentic it's not it's not really something that people are familiar with as a concept um that means that they can find it really hard to you know for instance they'll just say oh just just eat less and move more you know why why are people struggling with their weight like this is ridiculous I'm fine because I'm have exceptionally good self-control and I'm really conscientious and I just design my life such that I'm not tempted by empty calories but and they it doesn't occur to them that most people aren't like that and aren't really capable of being that willful and therefore and these are exactly the same people who will like just dismiss as zic or something and say oh we don't need any of this stuff because people can just eat less and move more I'm fascinated it's a very unpopular position still now very unpopular position to be anything that isn't anti OIC online at least maybe I've made my own bed a little bit you know the audience agency is one of the most important things in my life and intentionality and you know design designing your life in the way that you wanted to be uh so perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost in that regard but yeah uh as and this sort of bolstering this naturalistic fallacy sense that you should be using the willpower that you should make it more difficult for yourself you know there's a a new class of um psychiatric medication coming out well buttin is one of them which is an snri rather than SSRI uh people use it people that suffer with seasonal um effective disorder can use it they can quite easily go on and go off within the space of sort of three to four months and there's another new class as well I can't remember the name of it but all of those are kind of getting perilously close to just free happiness so it's like hey are you a little bit more neurotic than you would like are you too high in neuroticism does negative effect effect affect your life a little bit more than you would like well maybe just like this is the OIC equivalent for your brain and I understand that we have this long illustrious history of ssris a one point on the Chapman scale out of 56 of depression that dancing with somebody for 1 hour a week has three times the effectiveness of this with none of the side effects and all the rest of the stuff but you have to assume that as medicine and Science and our understanding of the human system becomes better that we are going to be able to design better drugs that impact people in a more effective way with fewer side effects you go okay well if that's happening at some point we're going to reach Health restriction escape velocity and we're going to be able to just design [ __ ] that is negligible on side effects and does make your life better in the same way as you might be able to you know before the germ theory of disease people just wouldn't oh it's tiny invisible things you mean it's not the what was it called not eusa what was it that they thought it was carried through why they had those big long noses Aroma I know exactly what word you mean um miasma miasma miasma um it's you mean it's not it's got nothing to do with it you mean that my Lavender in the end of this long beak isn't protecting me in this way you know we just move forward move forward and we get ever more sort of finely tuned um but yeah I think every so I I'm Al I think AIC is great and I think that everything has tradeoffs there probably are some tradeoffs down the track with a zic I don't think they're going to be as catastrophic as the anti OIC people hope they will be right let you do it's really easy to find people on the internet who are like it's going to make you blind it's going to cause you cancer or whatever just because they sort of feel like fat people should be punished for not getting in the right way I think that the best comparison in terms of that social response in the history of medicine that I've come across is actually anesthesia when anesthesia first became available fascinating there take your amputation like a real man yeah well there were people who thought that pain was essential to the healing process for instance who thought that if you don't have terrible pain during surgery or you know of anything I mean like some degree of painkilling has been available forever um people used to chew willow bark because Willow actually contains the same chemical as aspirin right so people have always been killing pain to some extent but when proper anesthesia became available in the 19th century um yeah there were loads of people moralizing about it and saying this is going to cause all sorts of problems down the track this you know um that has remained interestingly you know the only area where you're not supposed to use proper painkillers child birth yeah that always comes back to making babies with you that remains a very moralistic area of Medicine because epidural right epidurals or indeed having C-sections or you know whatever whatever medicalization of of and like look I'm I'm as Centrist on this I think that the natural child birth movement have some sensible things to say on how women can sometimes feel like over medicalizing child birth is frightening and can cause more problems than it solves and whatever like I get it but I don't agree with the idea that child birth has to to be painful and actually I don't really understand why this is the only type of serious medical experience that has to be painful and I feel like often when you find people having these very deeply held but quite amorphous objections to some area of Medical Science like a zic it's normally got more to do with social stuff than it has to do with the medical objections I learned from Daniel sloth his most recent live show cuz his wife and him have now had two kids uh I learned that women are given some weird cocktail of hormones endogenously that makes them forget how painful some areas of the process were of childbirth now I are you going to tell me this is so you mean people get that naturally yes yeah yeah I think that is one of the things that happens right so Daniel does his life bit and he's talking about I think second child maybe was a complicated birth and he's in the room Animan Dr anim says something not too dissimilar as well about her first child complicated child birth uh father who you know has been able to Wrangle the world around himself at least some amount of agency he's managed to get this woman pregnant that's not totally un agentic and he's sat in the corner literally with his dick in his hands unable to help unable to do anything like the most spare prick in the entire room as an army like a Formula 1 one style Squadron of people in latex gloves move around the love of his life carrying the next love of his life and then something happens and he doesn't know what's going on and he can't help again he's just you know completely trapped completely helpless and then this a thing comes out and everybody gets wheeled out of the room in basically no time at all everyone's wheeled out of the room mom goes to one room child goes to another room or maybe the same room I don't know and nobody turns to look at dad nobody turns to say are you okay this is what's going on here's an update because you're not a priority but psychologically the scars that come through from that you know the PTSD that men have post childbirth isn't something I think that should be overlooked and then his wife apparently during this I don't know whether this is true or he's exaggerating for Comic effect she's screaming at him like you did this to me I can't believe you know the classic sort of Comedy sketch and uh then maybe 12 hours later everything's okay baby's okay mom's okay and Dad and baby and mom are United Anna she like later that day she turns to him and she says it wasn't so bad was it like we should have another one and Daniel's there Shell Shocked you know like the old Battle of the S style shell shot you still you know his his adrenals his adrenals are never going to recover and uh he's like and then he learned about this thing he's like oh women get this [ __ ] Amnesia drug for free yeah but Dad Dad doesn't so you've got this Jackal and Hy bipolar [ __ ] wife in front of you and uh the first time I ever learned about it and I thought how have I got 36 years old never learned about this crazy I think it happens with the early newborn days as well like there is a tendency to just forget how terrible it was and then the sleep deprivation helps you forget the sleep deprivation yeah and then the um and then you like six or 12 months later you're like I should have another baby I'm already I have the most horrendous pregnancy and my son is almost 6 months and I'm already like drinking again like I should have another baby I think I mean if it wasn't like that the human speci St by Design St by Design just to just to sort of I think there's maybe a little uh line that we can draw back to the ly Phillips thing you mentioned about this kind of I'm I'm I'm I'm only good for one thing me when she's trying to make a cup of tea or she Burns some toast or something like that um I do see and I remember this from being in in Nightlife especially around girls that worked in strip clubs and then uh you know I had ad miami. viip Chelsea Ferguson she's the owner of only fans competitor that's in the UK and uh I brought her on the podcast I think she was episode maybe 150 something like that I wanted to know what it was like to do this and there is this I want to call it something else but I can't think of it there is kind of like this Stockholm syndrome thing where girls that begin to do some form of sexual [Music] capitalism go native in a weird way and they start to maybe derate their own capacities or what they could do outside of this and you know it's like it's it's the guy that um goes to a life of crime and believes that he can never he can never stop you know no job would ever have me or you know a straight life just wouldn't be for I'm just built to be in and out of jail or the addict that just believes that he's never supposed to get off drugs that he's sort of not worthy of this thing and um that made me sad in watching The Lily Phillips thing it reminded me of some of the Vibes that I felt when I used to work in Nightlife and it was 3 in the morning and we'd go to the only place that was open that was the strip club and you know these girls would be in there with some Bachelor dude on his stag do cheating on his wife for the final time before or cheating on his fiance for the final time before he can seeing the worst of men in their you know warped drunken late night desires and uh yeah it it's that bit was probably the least comfortable bit it wasn't the end of the sex thing seeing her cry was uncomfortable and that that that was pretty undialed but the fact that you've sort of internalized this story that you've told yourself which is a combination of self-deprecation and A coping mechanism to be able to justify why this is the thing that you can continue to do even though it's evident that it's not your thing thing like if if if Bonnie Blue is the LeBron James of [ __ ] guys and not catching feelings you're you're like LeBron James is 5 foot six cousin yeah um I interviewed Andrea Hines recently who is um used to be in the sex industry uh really interesting is that the lady that you Loop me in with different lady all right Al also very interesting the specific thing that Andrew talks about is um how being in the sex industry like to be more explicit like being in prostitution right not just camming or whatever um is a bit like being in an abusive relationship except you're in an abusive relationship with like hundreds of men so it's not um it's clearly different but in terms of the psychological effect it's very similar and she talks about the sort of um the the psychological Cycles you end up in which are very similar to domestic violence like you say that feeling of I'm not I can't do anything else I'm not good enough for anything else but equally you do also have the highs where you're like wow I'm earning so much money or you know I've got out of whatever bad situation I was in which led me to try prostitution like there are ups and downs but the the risk is that you yeah you end up in this kind of rut and one of the things that she's talked about and I've heard other women talk about as well is how actually you can earn really quite a lot of money I mean prostitution definitely pays more per hour than almost anything else and defin def itely more than the like the realistic other jobs that many of these women could have um but often the money sort of disappears because often one you're going to want to spend money to feel better because you feel really Dreadful and you feel worse as time goes by and so you want to and so you might spend money on drugs you know that's one obvious alcohol but also you might spend money on like expensive stuff you don't need or cloth H exactly because you want to feel like it's worth it and just putting it in a savings account doesn't make you feel like that there's also a feeling which a lot of women speak about that the money is sort of dirty particularly if it's cash because you know what it's for like you know where you've got it and it has there's almost that compulsion to like just get rid of it which is why I mean Lily Phillips is clearly making loads of money Bonny blue is making loads of money I don't necessarily think though that means they're set up for life because one hmlc is going to take half of it assuming that they're paying their taxes which I'm sure they are y um two think how much money you actually need to earn in like a two or three year period in order to spend your whole life yeah like that's actually massive massive sums and I'd be really surprised if they're being talking about nine figures to be able to not have to do it again and you've got to it's going to have to be a lot more men than a thousand to be able to gather yeah I mean we've only heard of them for the last few months so they haven't been earning that much money for that long um I think people who say oh whatever like this is amazing for them because they just get to do this for a little bit and then they're set up for life I think that's probably not the cas case actually and it will cause lots of problems down the track not least in terms of relationships yeah I uh I remember my first ever job I was a room service boy at a Tall Trees Hotel in yarm which had a nightclub attached to it so I would go and deliver the drug dealers their breakfast on a morning and move literally move huge big pillows of pills aside and weed and all the rest of the stuff and pop it down and they would give me £150 and change he would have and I remember that I really hated this job but I just didn't I wanted to be proud of the fact that I had a job and this is when the internet was just about coming online and you'd be able to get through some weird browser hack for a Nokia phone you'd be able to get MSN Messenger or you'd be able to get Myspace or something like that on your phone and in order to be able to connect to the internet I actually worked this out I I didn't like the job so much that I was distracting Myself by you buying Internet packages so that I could go on MSN and talk to my friends who were all out having fun uh but I realized that I was being paid £450 an hour but to connect to the internet it was £9 an hour so I was netting a loss of £450 an hour to go to work in order to sedate myself from having to be at a job that I didn't like and that is the same sense I get from your sex worker lady friend yeah also generally people as we've talked about only fans isn't a very good life decision right generally people women who are going to take the long-term risk of going on only fans are not going to be that good at managing their money like to be blunt because managing your money actually requires you to be very forward thinking and uh you know to to like win the marshmallow test repeatedly throughout the day right and that's probably not like this the the the idea that you get from the only f industry or from you know sex positive feminists that this is great for women because it's the source of easy cash I just think that I think it it's missing what's really going on here which is actually a lot of women setting their lives on fire for not that much benefit at least in part the observable metrics and hidden metrics are two things that people often make the wrong trades for and this is another example of that that an observable metric is how nice is the car that you're driving how high are the heels that you're wearing how big's the bank accounts Etc uh but what you're trading that for is a sense of self-worth and security and future and psychological pain and all of the other things and even for yourself you know like I I hop on about this hidden observable metrics trade all the time but it's not even that easy to work out yourself because you go well where is my bank balance of sanity this relationship is really is really hurting me uh but it gives me a sense of uh belonging or it gives me a sense of camaraderie or I've got someone who's really hot or I've got someone who's out of my league whatever it might be and you think well fine like that's something that you can parade around in many ways but how do you know what what does it mean that you're in psychological pain because they're mistreating you like what well how much is that show me where that is you can show other people go dude dude your new girlfriend's hot you like you can see that registers somewhere but you having a sleepless night that doesn't register so it's a it's an interesting trade that the girls are making here as well which is observable metric of Fame and attention and money and and things that money can buy for stuff that even they actually aren't able to necessarily see about themselves yeah talk to me about the declining rates for marriage because this is a trend that's been going on for a while I think we've got whatever it is 38% of jenz saying that not having sex we've got sex recession and all the rest of it but I do get the sense that more worrying than that is like casual sex coming and going unless it I don't know precedes more meaningful relationships happening I I don't know what the sort of uh Heritage is there uh but the marriage thing I think seems to be a little bit more concerning so have you had a look at this have you thought about what's going on here modern marriage Trends um can I just repeat the take of a different modern wisdom guest which is lime and stone because I interviewed him the other day and he had a view on this which I found so interesting and actually really like pull together a lot of the things I've been confused about when looking at marriage rates and fertility and all this stuff that I'm writing about he doesn't think that actually uh he basically thinks the only thing that is wrong with fertility rates in the West is I he's looking at America but this applies to Brit as well is um people getting married late he thinks that's the only problem because actually once people are married they tend to have kids like you know it's it's almost like you get married and you're like well what else are we going to do right he says that actually the number of people who are married and are deliberately not having children like the dinks they're quite culturally prominent but they're actually rare there aren't very many people who do that most people get married and if they can they will have some children right but but when people are getting married into like I think the average age of first marriage now is over 30 definitely and the average age of marriage in general is quite old because people that get married multiple times account for just number of marriages so they drag it up but um you know in during the baby boom um the average age of first marriage was so young it was like 22 or something really young and even in the 80s I got married when I was 2 which is basically a child bride in my peer group in the 80s that was average right so people are basically just skipping the whole of their 20s during which they could have been having children because they're not actually coupling up until later or they're not coupling up at all so lyman's take and I think it's actually a really interesting one it's not to do it's not well sorry people often say it's just to do with housing it's just because housing is expensive or it's just to do with the availability of contraception or it's just to do with feminism telling women that like they're girl bosses and they don't need to have kids whatever he says no it's actually just a coordination problem it's actually just that people are not getting married sufficiently early so that they then have their whole of their reproductive lives ahead of them and can have you know 2.5 kids but that is linked to the other stuff in the sense that he thinks and I think this is really persuasive that the reason people aren't getting married younger is because men in their 20s are not able to for various reasons signal their suitability as husbands in a way they used they used to because what women are looking for when they're looking for a husband is someone who they know is going to be reliable during moments of difficulty when they have children because when you're pregnant and when you're nursing and you've got young children you simultaneously need more resources and also have less ability to get those resources for yourself so you're in a real pickle and like the person or people who can provide that for you like I mean you need them you need some you need someone and the obvious person is the father of your children and that's that's what monogamous marriage is basically like legally obliging men to step up during those moments um and so women are looking for a man who will do that and who will Who who is capable of providing those resources in that difficult moment and they look for signal in men that that they're up to that you know and wealth is one of them um but there are other ways of showing it as well like um going to an elite University that's pretty good um or uh uh running your own business or military service that's an interesting example down to about 3% I think compared with 50% in the 1940s yeah that I I asked lman this and he was like yeah he thought it was true is it possible that part of the reason there was the postwar baby boom particularly in America is because so many men had had military service and had had this opportunity to demonstrate their suitability as see how reliable I am I just went to war I can raise your child ex exactly yeah like we don't it is harder now for young men to to do that costly signal and to say like it's harder to buy property depending on where you are but it is generally harder to buy property when you're younger um the nature of everyone going to University University actually is kind of well not everyone but when lots of people go to university it actually devalues the signal and it also basically extends your Adolescence in that you don't you can't start your business buy your property do whatever until you've graduated and this just like pushes further and further into your 20s um yeah military service as you say much less common basically the ways that men could demonstrate their that they are up to being fathers and husbands have become scarcer and it's it's no good if you start like if you gain those costly signals in your 50s right because at that point like you're outside of the reproductive window it has to be really in your 20s or maybe in your early 30s and that is exactly I think what we are missing right now and maybe that's maybe that's the key thing maybe that's why like birth rates are falling off a cliff yeah I mean there's a lot of things going on but certainly comparatively if you were to roll in whatever a aut Malcolm Collins's or Stephen J Shaw's idea around this that as females who seem to be much better at all types of Education Soo socioeconomic success in the modern world is pretty much laid at their feet until they pay the motherhood tax in their 30s or whatever they are more conscientious on average they're better at handing in homework I saw uh Alex daty post something this morning about how they can do better sort of long-term planning about when they need to revise for tests and stuff like every different part of Education when the breaks get taken off for women it for girls it seems to be they're they're pretty good at it and uh they're they're flourishing and then I think if you have that which sets well look this is how much I can look after me if you at the very least can't look after me as well as I can look after me how much faith can I have in you being able to step up the bare minimum should be that you can do what I can do and it seems like you maybe can't uh and then on top of that I think the exposure that we have to life expectations of other people online getting to see the best of everyone's life while we get to see the worst of our own creates this lifestyle inflation expectation you know intergenerational competition Theory look at where my parents were when they were my age and they had this house and they had this this thing and they had this that I'm never going to be able to get this despite when economists do every different type of analysis that you [ __ ] can adjusted for inflation jenz are better off than every other generation that came before them economically they feel like they're not and the way that you feel is reality when it comes to this because you're not looking at so you're not doing an economist you don't have a spreadsheet to work out what's actually going on what you're doing is saying well how do I feel about this you go I feel poor and unprepared and like the world is about to burn because it's filled with carbon that's what I'm concerned about yeah and also young for all of these reasons you describe about women being great highlighted girls basically women earn more than young than men do in their 20s and that's a catastrophe actually that's actually a catastrophe because it's precisely what women do not want in a partner someone who earns less than them so unless those women are then coupling with significantly older men which most people don't actually do I mean I think that the average age gap between couples is only like two years it's not that big um a lot of women are just going to be like why would I why would I saddle myself to some guy who I don't think can actually be relied upon I'm just not going to do that and the overwhelmingly most common reason that women give when they when asked why don't you have children is not because I'm a girl bass or because I don't own my house or whatever is actually I can't find the right man just haven't found the right partner yeah yeah yeah that was the GSS survey just haven't found the right partner every time that I'm around you know my favorite place to do uh evolutionary psychology mating research is the Soho House pool here in Austin so it's like just replete with University educated 60 to 100 Grand earning [Music] uh attractive girls and you know there's all of these Cabanas around the outside of this pool and the music's at the level where everybody can hear and no one's really got much going on it's kind of a bit boring but it's it's it's sort of interesting to talk and I just sit and go so go like who's single and talk to me like what is it that you're finding about the girls that you dating invariably it's they're not mature they don't have their life together I'm like okay so what do you mean when you say that like talk to me about what you mean and sometimes they can come with you know that emotionally they can't really get on the same level as me they don't seem to be prepared to commit you know like the classic kind of lothario guys especially if you're going a little bit more quote unquote high value uh but a lot of the time it's a bit more amorphous than that it's kind of Blobby and I think to myself I reckon you out earn most of the guys that you're trying to date and say okay so who is it that you're dating at the moment you're 26 Lydia uh who is it that you're dating at the moment oh my last boyfriend was 35 and the guy that I'm seeing at the moment's 38 I'm like these are big big age gaps and uh yeah that that was really surprising to me it's one of the reasons why um do you remember Princeton Princeton mom no this this woman who wrote this was quite a few years ago now who wrote in the Princeton student magazine or the Alum the alumno magazine maybe advice to women at Princeton which is um you will never be around so many eligible men ever in the rest of your life the most important thing you can do at Princeton is find a husband not get your degree and this used to be like the old phrase um the women used to use as uh everyone used to use as women would go to university to get their mrss right and actually it's quite a lot to be said for it if you do go to university one of the advantages of just marrying your University boyfriend which is what I did is that you neither of you have had any Career Success yet right like you've been selected for your suitability for that institution but you can't do this like grained stressing about who earns more whatever because no one earns anything oh I see you're just picking someone at the start of the race as opposed to the end of it yeah and obviously you want to be making a pretty good bet but I can see how you could get into a real problem if you're one of these Soo house girls with women sorry I should say who yeah has quite a lot of Career Success absolutely does not want to date down and we probably you also get to that point where you're like I've waited this long I've got to find the perfect person look at how much effort I've put into myself look at how much sweat and blood and te is I've crafted and you know I think one of the things that might help this at least a little bit in terms of reducing the need for hypogamy because it does seem like high performing women desire more hypogamous mates than non-h high performing women so this is as women earn and educate themselves more effectively further up the socioeconomic ladder they don't reduce down their desire for a partner who's better than them proportionally they want even more even as they are in absolute terms more effective so you got oh my God like as you are a rarified you if you stand at top your own dominance hierarchy you're looking above and across one to like like who is it that's left it's like again it's LeBron James you know what I mean it's like every all roads back lead back to LeBron James but the comparison that I've heard as well which I like is with um buying a lamp for your house so if you have just bought a house and there's nothing in it and you need to buy a bunch of stuff you need to buy a lamp you can can be like oh yeah cool I'll just get whatever lamp look sort of nice if however you have perfectly designed your house like it is it is every every element of it has been really carefully thought through in terms of decor and then you need to find a lamp that just like perfectly fits that house it's going to be much harder to find a lamp because you're going to have much more um uh picky criteria you also can't build the house around the lamp indeed right that is kind of what it's like when you're looking for a spouse later in life you've already kind of set up your life you know where you're living you know what your career is you have really strong preferences youve probably kind of structured your daily schedule around exactly what you like and whatever like all of your life is designed around you and then you have to find someone who fits into that whereas if you get married young you kind of just develop it together and you end up your your your lives as a joint thing are formed around each other and obviously that does sometimes go wrong but I think that is part of the reason why there's this age basically if you get married somewhere in the medium kind of age range between like 20 and 35 maybe something like that like not too young not too old you're less likely to get divorced and I think it probably has something to do with that it's that sweet spot in terms of you're not so young that you make really stupid decisions but also you form your life around your partner not the other way around that's so interesting why do you think it is that uh anytime anybody wants to bring up declining birth rates and marriage that it's seen as a right-wing or fascist talking point um well I could say that they shouldn't think that because basically all societies are like interested in the fertility of their people um and there are loads of examples of definitely not fascist at all countries having pratal policies like South Korea would be an example France all sorts of PR policies for years whatever um I think that would be slightly dodging the question though because I think what people mean there is like um why does it matter if countries die out like why do you care so much is kind of the question that's being invited there a push back against nationalism in a way yeah I think so and to push back against any kind of ingroup preference um which is yeah I mean that's like a fundamental difference between right and left like do you think you know the concentric circles heat map thing I'm sure you've seen that shared online it's such I've seen I've seen it shared online and I I've never actually understood what it was so it's one of those memes that just went kept going over my head and I pr I so grinned in the corner and was like yeah yeah sure heat map sometimes it gets misrepresented as people on the left literally care more about TR um plants and trees and they do about their own families which I don't think is true and doesn't sort of pass the sniff test does it but what it does describe is that people on the right tend to be quite happy and confident in just saying like yeah I care most about my family and then and then about my extender family and then my community and then my country and then whatever fine like I don't I'm not embarrassed to say that that's my preference whereas people on the left tend not to do that and to say no actually I have like Universalist aspirations I should care just as much about a child on the other side of the world as a child in my own neighborhood um and this can lead to some quite perverse preferences I think that in practice people actually normally don't really behave like that I don't think that anyone really does care as much about people on the other side of the world as people close to them but it is a sort of problem within left's thought that you're you you're sort of not allowed to care more about people close to you you're universalism is the ideal even even if that doesn't appear in practice it appears in rhetoric and that that's what you're able to espouse online yeah I think also what often happens in practice is actually um this is me being a bit cynical but I think sometimes commitment to the far out group as Scott Alexander has called it um can be a stick with which to beat the near out group right so if say you're an American um Democrat and actually the people that you feel the most animosity towards are American Republicans right they're your near out group they're the people who you actually are most preoccupied with in terms of the people that you dislike whereas your far out group might be I don't know people who live in China who actually don't really think about very much and sometimes expressing China is really a bad example Haiti okay sometimes expressing a really really like Fierce loyalty with the people of Haiti might be a little bit insincere and might actually just be a a stick with which to be the red down the street that you don't like the the narcissism of small differences the bigotry of small differences sounds a little bit like that yeah I I think there might be part of it I think there's also an element of like these are just status competitions and people will use all sorts of tools in their status competitions because they're deeply important to us there was a uh well done video about the sort of rightwing support of population collapse or the right-wing concern about population collapse uh I featured quite prominently it was really well done actually I thought it was a really really good video this guy that put it guy that put it together I've watched some of his stuff before he's done some really great videos and um I think maybe I was part of the Mana spere again the manosphere [ __ ] hate me so I'm sure that they were very insulted to have me use uh like given their Monica in the chapters and the time stamps and all the rest of the stuff but um what I found was like kind of interesting with that video was a lot of the quotes that at least I was taking as saying were these sort of very milk toast as far as I could say me me saying things like well I'm not saying that climate change isn't something that we should be bothered about in fact I think there should be more attention paid to climate change properly than there is already but climate change isn't going to cause an issue within the next 100 years and I think that birth rate decline is I'm like I I can't see within that sentence I can't see what's supposed to be so [ __ ] controversial unless you believe that I don't actually believe the thing that I'm just playing lip service to the uh climate change discussion so that I can sneak my white supremacist pronatalist policy in underneath it which is obviously not what I'm doing you know another question that I asked was well how do we know that it's not women's standards being too high and that men's standards aren't meeting what it is that women should do I'm like is that not like the entire sort of leftist discussion around like the Fe the sort of pro feminist third wave feminist entire thing so when it comes to even like I say this video was really well done and I commented on it and said Well Done not just because I was in it even this left leaning assessment of these issues in many ways seems to not really be able to fully Square the circle it's like well you're trying to find some nefarious at least in me that's I'm not to say that all pro natalists like there's I'm sure there's many pronatalist that are assol and and bigots and stuff as there are people that are antinatalists but at least with the sections that I was looking at I was like well I know at least I think I know the place that I'm coming from when it comes to this and this isn't the Chris Williamson like [ __ ] Defcon one Iron Dome defense thing but a bunch of it's the first conversation I've had about uh birth rate decline since I keep getting popped for Random clips this one was old this was a really really old one and this is a k Benjamin take who says he he was adamant you have a duty to produce children so that someone you contribute to the pool of people to look after old people given that you're going to be a person that's going to be old at some point in future first time I ever heard it I was like [ __ ] hell Carl that's a bit strong and then after a little bit more thought I was like oh well I can kind of see the logic I understand where you're coming from and uh I said something not too dissimilar when we were talking about Birthright decline exclusively in the service of countries and economic future I'm like well look who do you think is going to keep the GDP going when you get old cuz it's not going to be you and this was somebody I think on the right that was saying oh yeah this is the only reason that anybody should have kids so that you can continue to drive the GDP I'm like you no [ __ ] obviously I'm not that [ __ ] as to not think that it's the most meaningful loving caring thing that you can ever do for your genetic progeny and it's going to be the single most important part of your life when you look back from your death bed like I'm taking that as a given and then on top of that there are these other things that people don't talk about all that much so it just seems that the entire discussion no matter whether you're coming from the right or coming from the left is largely just not that thoughtful and a lot of the time people have either problems with or sort of problems for that they really struggle to articulate and I as far as I can see no one has put together the definitive sort of thesis on birth rate decline why it's a problem why it's happening etc etc it's all being you know pulled together there's a pronatalist conference happening here in Austin and you like when you've still got conferences going about stuff it basically means that the science isn't settled about what the [ __ ] going on because people have still got so so much [ __ ] to discuss so yeah that's a a long rambling diet tribe about how I don't think that people from either side of the fence fully understand what they're talking about when it comes to population collapse uh it's a really big and interesting topic and yeah I mean you're right the reason we have conferences is because actually there's a lot of contestation about what's going on I'm trying to write a book about this and I keep having kids which like pushing kids getting in the way of my prism book I'm walking the walk so effectively that I can't talk the talk um look I think that uh I find it tiresome obviously when people are really silly about this and um have I mean sometimes people can be like really really like anti-natalist to the extent of being like really anti- children like really hostile to mothers and families I mean like there's a whole there's a whole world of political objections antinatalism that are basically disgusting they don't worry me that much because you know what they're not going to be selected for within the coming decades like I I actually don't get that worried about kind of crazy progressivism the sort of really outlandish bluehead sort of stuff because honestly I think it's kind of self-limiting in the sense that the people who are most committed to that kind of politics they don't have children they don't want to have children they like if you and similarly I mean a culture that thinks that you have no obligation to look after the elderly another thing I learned from lman Stone recently the average American spends more time looking after pets than they do looking after elderly relatives right I mean the whole point of pets is to like simulate that that caring relationship with children it's like not to replace it sorry to sound anti pet but like that's the point this is a line in the sand that I'm prepared to absolutely stand on if we get pushed back against the golden retriever population that's an issue for me no look I I mean that that's a yeah dogs are great but cats are great whatever but that they're like they are like the reason people are attracted to them is because it's they're mimicking Human Relationships right and the fact that we're using them as I mean Malcolm Collins is much harsher on this he says that having a dog as like your baby replacement is like using pornography like it's it really is like it's social sorry emoty it's like socially acceptable pornography is but it's it's simulating that's funny I haven't heard that take before but it doesn't surpr way yeah um so getting away from that that's like that is going to get clipped and it's going to get used it's going to get clipped by Mary Harrington she's going to take massive off Labrador yeah um but I don't worry too much about this like runaway progressivism because it is self-limiting like the the people genetically and culturally who are currently being selected for are people who are basically capable of forming societies which are pratal right like One Way Or Another We're going to come out of this the other end with whether that be people who just have the genes for thinking babies are really really adorable or people who are just really good at forming like cohesive cultures that are really good at supporting young families that's what's getting selected for and it might be that getting there is painful like the welfare state is definitely going to die democracy might die as well there are all sorts of really really difficult political challenges presented by this problem but I'm not a Doomer about it I don't think that the human race is going to die out I think what's going what's happening as we're going through this Almighty boss L yeah that's exactly what I had in this is the first time I've heard anyone put words to it but it makes complete sense it's n natal fatalism right that we are on this particular set of roller coaster tracks I just to call it out for the people that maybe aren't behaviorally uh behavioral genetic I pilled uh your political ideology the positions that you tend to take on lots of issues is highly predisposed by your personality and your personality is highly predisposed by it's heritable it's disposed by your parents if you are part of a ideological group Which is less likely to have children that means that that group's genes the the ideology genes are less likely to be passed on which means that that ideology gets less predisposed to over time and dies out so you end up with overtime you should do basically people who have kids have kids and those kids are more likely to be the kid- having type of kids which means that they continue but if you've got this squeeze that we're going through at the moment it may end up looking a lot like an hourglass where you have sort of wide lots of people liberated everyone can do it you get some technologies and some environmental changes which causes this to stop and then you select out and then come through on the other side when you have a critical mass of people who are the children of kids even in the new environment and then you get through that but you're right I mean the next 300 years probably I don't know has anyone done far out like real far out projections like centuries away projections to see when this sort of thing would rebound um if anyone has it's probably Malcolm and Simone Collins um I mean they've definitely spoken about the risk actually of having a J curve in terms of population explosion where the very very fertile people have selected for so aggressively which is I think what's happening right now that actually you see this massive explosion when they get to the population boom which was an issue population bust which is an issue and then population double boom which is a bigger issue yeah I mean the big question there though um I wrote an essay about this recently for First Things is is whether or not modernity can survive as such because if you look at the groups right now that are doing really well in terms of fertility it's people let the Amish it's Ultra Orthodox Jew is people who actually have not embraced modernity really I mean they're living within modern societies and to some extent they get to piggy back off some of for instance the health infrastructure of modern societies like the armish actually have very low infant mortality rate even though they basically have 19th century technology but they don't have 19th century infant mortality and I think that must be because they live in America which has low INF mortality and so there isn't a lot of communicable diseases that they're vulnerable to I don't know if they vaccinate but you know they're at risk of waves of small pox and bonic plague and stuff because the rest of prot keep check on that exactly however are the armish actually capable of maintaining that kind of medical infrastructure long term like if if the entire country just just not not because of their intelligence or whatever but just because that's not what they're minded to do if the entire country was composed of arish people would America still have great health infrastructure and would you still have really low child mortality I don't know so it might be that the thing that the two things that keep a lid on population explosion one is mortality the other is fertility the the magic combo is the group that can do both right that can be highly fertile and keep their children alive because we like we must not forget that in most times and places the child mortality rate is almost 50% so and that's the great miracle of the One World and as a month that is a thing I do not want to let go of like sometimes people will be very um flippant about tech and say oh you know smartphones are rubbish oh you know yes there are all sorts of things about tech that we don't really like you know what no one wants to get rid of and that's C-sections and antibiotics and all of this miraculous I mean I would be dead my son would be dead if we hadn't had modern medical technology in my most recent my most recent pregnancy like this is serious stuff and that's the thing of all the stuff that worries me about the fertility crash it's not it's not losing the welfare it's not the numbers it's the technology that it's whether the people who come out of this bottleneck are capable of maintaining the T the type of medical Tech which I really want to be maintained that's that's my my biggest worry about this that's scary and that's something that I hadn't considered and you've now given me another thing to be worried about sorry it's okay it's fine I'll just add it to the list although on the plus side right like if there is a group at the moment Israel is probably in the lead for this right if there is a group that can manage to be both fertile and Hightech they they will dominate the world they will have the world at their feet my housemate uh his sister recently had her first child and he drove to go and see her and this kid's you know weeks old and he said that he held this baby in his arms and sort of looked down and realized that it was his genetic progeny and felt this genetic relative felt this um sort of surge of of meaning go through him that he hadn't felt for this is the first uh nephew or niece that he's ever held first baby that's kind of his in his vicinity of genes that he's ever held and um he said he's uh got a contrarian opinion that he doesn't want to have kids until he's 50 he's just going to like Lone Ranger solo preneur it make all of the money have all of the life experiences and then lock in at 50 and just go to town I think a bunch of our friends that I know classic so envious yeah CL man um however uh he basically said he sort of felt this surge of genetic Dynasty sort of go through him and it got me thinking we both had a long conversation about this uh the sort of desire to be a parent being mimetic not only in close friend groups that you see friends have kids which makes you think about having kids or you don't see friends having kids which makes you less likely to have kids also if family sizes are reducing I know that there's it seems like the date is kind of mixed on this like if you have one kid one child it's like that you're going to have blah blah blah um but if you have fewer siblings to show you what it's like to have children maybe that sort of mimetic desire to become a parent gets turned down and you know you have this kind of recursive Loop of fewer mothers beget fewer role models showing other non-mother women how it what it's like to be a mother and extoling the virtues like the best advertising campaign ever the thin end of the wedge is your friend that's just had a kid and is loving it but if you don't have any friends that have had kids yet then nobody wants to be the first mover unless you've got Elon Musk of women that's going to go and be agentic and or Bonnie Blue I suppose um uh so yeah what mimetic desire to be a parent what what you Reon that I think it's a massive factor and that is really interesting about nieces and nephews I hadn't really thought about it in that way because yeah it is it's hard to overstate how magic it is you don't when you have a baby you don't just have a baby you have your baby right and like your baby is different from all other babies because your baby looks like you and is like it's it's the most amazing thing to like like my eldest has my eyes exactly and it's such a strange and amazing feeling to look at this person that you love more than anything and they have your eyes right like there's just nothing like it and I can see how if you can get like an echo of that through having nieces and nephews or cousins or whatever um which could be very motivating or indeed your your your friends have children as well I think there probably is a kind of vicious cycle where and a virtual cycle where um when you live in a low fertility culture it becomes harder to have children because nothing is really set up for children and the expectation is that you won't have them um just things like I'm taking my kids on a plane for the first time um and not just on a plane but on a plane to Australia in like two weeks and I am one of the reasons I'm nervous is not because I actually think they'll be quite good but the thing that makes me nervous is actually other people on the being unpleasant to us because they don't think children belong there and they're not used to seeing children in public spaces Ling on airplanes and yeah you just there are so many there are so many issues you encounter when you have children and very few other people do where people are just um not even necessarily hostile but just clueless and it just makes life more difficult in all sorts of ways um and I think the flip side so I hear from people who live in very fertile societies is it becomes super normal and the infrastructure is there and there's always kind of waiting Pair of Hands to Hold Your Baby if you need you need them to and yeah I think that there's definitely a sense in which um what other people are doing makes a massive impact on what you do and what's easy for you to do given that you're now a mother of two what have you learned about optimal parenting and The Perils of the pressure of trying to be an optimal parent and how resilient children are and stuff like that optimal parenting um I think so going back actually interestingly to like the the dumer ism about say environmentalists who don't want to have kids because they're massive doomers I've been thinking recently about the role of neuroticism in parenting because you know you'll know that women are more neurotic by than men like quite a lot and that difference only comes on at puberty and it seems like that the reason women are more neurotic than men is mostly to do with the fact that women are mothers who are primarily responsible for this children and actually Jordan Peterson likes to talk about this painting I don't I can't remember the name of the painter who which is of um um the virgin mother holding the infant Christ Michelangelo's pior it's a sculpture is it with the snake on the floor oh interesting Maybe not maybe or maybe not I think this is a painting rather than sculpture but I can't remember the artist she's holding the infant Christ because there's a snake on the floor and she's like got her foot on the snake and it's basically protecting her infant from the snake and he always holds this up as like the archetypal image of protect of the protected mother and um uh it like can confirm you get super neurotic when you're you know a friend of mine warned me before I my first you will behave in ways as a new mother that would have you diagnosed as OCD in any other circumstance but in this instance it's actually fine and it's normal and you'll get over it but the neuroticism is adaptive it's not very pleasant but it is adaptive because neurotic mothers historically were the ones who you know spotted the snake on the ground or took whatever protective measures necessary in order to protect their children I now wonder if neuroticism might be doing the opposite I wonder if actually neuroticism might be discouraging people from having children either like the super neurotic people who are so worried about climate apocalypse that they don't have children at all but also even I mean I noticed in myself I'm quite a neurotic person and I just worry about things one of the differences between me and uh moms I know who have lots of kids close together is that they are generally much more chill and much more willing to just kind of let their kids get on with it and not be constantly following them around and not be just not worrying too much just kind of being not being helicopter parents just being chill and I recognize myself I find that really difficult to do and I would really struggle to have say three under three because you just have to like in reality if you've got three kids under three and you don't have loads of nannies or whatever you just have to let the kids go on with it and just and not F too much and and certainly not be too worried about your house being too tidy and you know like actually the sort of Personality that I wonder if is now being selected for in terms of people who are willing to have kids are people who are actually quite chill and quite um ah we'll just do it who you know who cares about the state of the economy who cares about the the carbon parts per million exactly who don't get themselves all like so wrapped up that they're too that they're too worried to just go ahead and do it and then when they do have children they're like oh we'll have another one we'll make it work whatever like run it back yeah exactly I wonder if neuroticism is now being selected against wow that's interesting yeah it's just my hypothesis but and and like my impression from looking around at people I mean I I would be fascinated to see whether the children of neurotic parents have higher or lower infant mortality they probably have higher but I mean I I um like every crazy neurotic mother I read every news story that crosses my eye about something terrible happening to a child and I got to say like the vast majority of cases where you read about some terrible accident that's happen to a child I'm like I would never let that happen like the the the negligence lack of Vision yeah I mean often it's just people being just silly and I and I read that and I'm like I would literally never do that like this is not that that's what crazy but then I think the chance of your child dying is still really really low right even even properly quite negligent parents the chance of their child dying in some kind of accident is still really low it's probably still the case therefore that neuroticism is being selected against because actually you're moving from like one in a 10 million chance to one in a million chance kind of thing and so it's probably actually fine like if you live in a really safe environment like we do with vaccines and all this good stuff um whereas being like ah let's just have another baby that makes a pretty big impact on how much genetic material you leave behind when you're when you're gone yeah how much uh gender neutrality can there be in parenting now that you've got a full two split tests to be able to compare uh what have you learned about gender neutrality um I think that male children are really different from female children I mean I don't have a girl I've got two boys right so I don't have a girl yet um uh I have definitely learned that I can completely see why little boys are diagnosed more with ADHD than little girls are because actually the normal way the little boys behave is much further towards the ADHD type of behavior than the normal way that little girls behave I'm amazed when friends bring around their little girls like two old girls who just sit at the table like quietly coloring um my my son does not do that other son other other little boys I know do not do that they are much much more rambunctious and actually is really difficult sometimes um fitting the the character of little boys around the demand of Modern Life I mean I don't think it's a coincidence that um ADHD diagnoses go up at the same time that we're expecting little boys to sit quietly on the mat all day in school and be you it's just it's just not what they it's not what they well it's it's so fascinating right I I don't know I I certainly know that ADHD diagnoses are increasing but I don't know whether the DSM criteria with which ADHD is diagnosed has remained stable across time uh or whether there is just well this new more peaceful more brains less Brawn style world it's kind of just inconvenient for these boys to be the way that they are and you know you have you could argue perhaps that apart from being a huge step change anything that's within sort of the 95th to the fifth percentile of any trait is like just that's just normal like all of that is normal even out to pretty close to the tals that's just that's just pretty normal but as soon as it begins to get inconvenient it's kind of simpler to just register that as a thing some sort of pathology something that needs treating something that needs therapy or or or medication and yeah I can just see how you go well look at the gold standard they they're just they sit there they color in they clean up after themselves you know the dolls and then I look over the far side and there's a hole in the door I where's that come from you're not even you you weigh 10 kilos how you put a hole in the door and um yes uh yeah I mean basically we kind of cut I don't know what portion of uh boys are diagnosed with ADHD it's pretty high though I think it's like I know it's non-trivial it's like 20% something like that I've read um what we have basically done is we just cut off the like most rambunctious 20% of the male bell curve and just give them drugs and um I don't think it's very good the boys I think it would be much better if we had an education system that was better suited to boys who boys normal behavior um but it's kind of difficult I mean a lot of what's been done at school is crowd control um which is why I used to think maybe I should homeschool children and now I actually don't think I have the personality why to do that for multiple reasons because it's incredibly hard work actually like the cuz the problem is it's a coordination problem if we all lived like people used to live for you know most of human history where you live around your extended kin and uh you live in a walkable environment and you're constantly hanging out with other people who have children and you know that would be one thing but the reality of living in a low fertility Society where everyone sends their kids to school is who are the kids going to hang out with during the day and I know that there are homeschooling co-ops but in reality it can be quite hard to actually with other parents get over to Texas there's communes everywhere these people go you'll teach them to whittle a flute out of a stick they'll learn they'll learn to do archery by age four I mean they can't count but holy [ __ ] they can they can skin an elk in five minutes flat yeah the so yeah the really high agency thing to do would be like I'm just going to move to Texas and I'm going to find my I'm G to find my people and I'm gonna um you know um educate children exactly how I want them to be educated I right maybe we'll end up doing that yes but um it it you can't really I always I think of this as being a as unilateral Trad life when you're like I'm just going to go and live in the woods and I'm going to homeschool my children and I'm going you know and it's like yeah except that it's actually very difficult to do that on your own Trad life involves other people you know that's what proper proper Trad life is pan generational housing it's you've got a friend who is a teacher and you help out a little bit someday and you take the class another day that's proper life and you have a dozen cousins around you who all have kids of the same age right that's actual TR life and you've always and and you can't read and you all live in the same place as opposed to this solo prur Trad life equivalent yeah yeah yeah it's like one of my a friends an Irish Catholic friend she always likes to say that actual Trad caths right they don't go to Latin Mass several times a day they go to mass twice a year they can't read and they believe in fairies right similarly actual Trad life does not look like the sort of Instagram Trad life right because you know not floral floral prints and baking cakes yeah I mean not just that but it's the loneliness actually of it I think that I think unilateral Trad life is actually a lot more like frontier life I think some that's part of what's being recreated it's the Little House on the Prairie kind of Lifestyle where you go out as the nuclear unit and you live in difficult conditions in the middle of nowhere I think actually that's the sort of cultural memory that is been appealed to and actually Frontier was very very difficult particularly for women which is why there was this um contagious mental illness called Prairie Madness if you ever heard of this where women living you know in the in the um on the Western frontier would literally go completely crazy through loneliness and stress like unilateral Trad life is Hardcore and most people are not suited to it but the problem is that trying to recreate non- unilateral Trad life requires the involvement of other people a coordination you God's God's eye view of this well I have a bunch of friends who've tried to do uh bilateral Trad life or whatever the poly lateral Trad life whatever the other word would be and um this is a funny story so maybe how many it's probably 10 couples I would say something like that and uh they had this plan some of them had kids some of them were about to have kids all of them quite wealthy uh many of them had had exits from companies late 20s early 30s highly agentic very white very middle upper class people from all over the country living in Austin Texas and they decided that they were going to do the commune thing they were going to homeschool the kids but that one of them was a teacher they the intention was at some point in the next 5 to 10 years we buy 100 acres of land between us all and we do the the polyal Trad lifee thing mhm they tried to do a couple of pet projects I think one of them was to uh revamp a ranch out in Bastrop out toward Bastrop sort of out uh East from Austin um there was a couple of other projects they done to see how they would get like a test project right you know it's like a job interview for everybody to interview each other to see how they would get on and and you know whether the group would work like this and uh I don't think it's happening I don't think it worked um right just the coordination problem of trying because again what what people are doing there is they're Ling as tradlife people which causes you to be as selective as the girl that's 27 earns 100 Grand and has got two degrees as opposed to what actual Trad life was which was an imposition that was placed upon you that you just had to get make it [ __ ] work like you don't get to you don't get to test run it and go I don't actually really like the way that that homeschooler did the history stuff because I really want it to be done it's like no you just get what you get and uh yeah I think I wonder whether elective Trad life with the expectations that the people who have the ability to do Trad life have I wonder whether that's just uh incompatible because you want the five star service you want the business class flights and you want the you know Uber black XL you I don't think that that's realistic unless you sort of keep rolling the dice and and and really come up lucky I think it's a heart where you're not related to each other because to some extent when you're related to each other as you would be in an actual multigenerational setup um you are uh you're genetically invested in each other and also you can't really opt out like only in extreme circumstances can you just ditch your family like you sort of have to make those relationships work whereas the issue with these these chosen connections you everyone knows you can kind of opt out and no one really has that much genetic investment in each other's life children whatever um I do so interestingly I have a friend Elizabeth Oldfield who she has written about doing this it's not really it's not a commune but she she and her husband bought a house with another couple and Elizabeth and her husband have children the other couple intend to have children and they uh they're facing London property prices you know Nightmare and so they did economy of scale by bu buying this one house together and they share the kitchen but then they had other separate areas and whatever I've been to the house load of times and they've they've done really well I mean like they it solves a lot of problems um and when more children come along there'll be like Child Care sharing and there's like there's there's a lot of um sense to it but they also went into it really really clear eyed about problems and they do all sorts of stuff to try and smooth issues like they have a weekly house meeting where they talk about any issues people are having they have like carefully mapped out exit plans if ever anyone wants to get out of the situation like it takes actually so much work to make these relationships function and it's it what really jumps out to me is that when you're not related to people it's much harder to make these things work than if you are related to people and you sort of have to which is not to say that that you don't have issues with families um but yeah I mean there's sort of a reason that people have historically grown these um and communities around actual genetic relationships the only way that you can bear to put up with someone that you're in that close proximity to is if you're genetically related you know the real nightmare scenario actually in really traditional cultures I'm really interested in some of the differences between patri local and matre local societies which is a very like nerdy anthropology thing but um patri local societies are where when a couple gets married they move to where the husband is from like they either they may be move into his 's house or uh just to be nearby them mat local is the other is the other uh flip side so that's when you move to the mothers good to Guess that the mat local is rarer well not necessarily so so interestingly uh English working class culture is traditionally maty local and one of the um consequences of that is that um you'll be familiar with all these like um old style Comics who complain about mothers-in-law like often the reason they complain about mother inlaw is because they actually live with their mothers-in-law because it's a mat loal society and when you've just got married and you don't have enough money to set up your own house you'll go and have to live with your your the the the woman's parents for a bit um and uh there's also all sorts of stereotypes around um Cockney women in particular being very like brassy I mean that's the that's the that's traditional term right being quite like strong willed uh like Mom the mom being actually quite a dominant figure in in the family like there's lots of ways actually in which English workingclass culture British working class culture is actually um empowers women quite a lot like women have quite a lot of power whereas patri local societies tend to be the opposite because you end up with the um the new bride moving into her husband's family and often getting dominated by them like being actually in a very weak position and having to be very subservient to them and often patri local cultures tend to have Norms where women are more demure and more quiet and more willing to be bsed around by other people well you have uh that's certainly one of the concerns I think in David bus's book bad men uh about how women become socially isolated from brothers and uncles and fathers and grandfathers who would have been able to step in if there was an abusive partner in the mix or if she was a financial prisoner in one way or another so in many ways I can see actually why it would be more adaptive for it to be mat local because you know the the the guy should be a little bit more robust at being able to deal with the slightly overbearing mother-in-law then the wife would be able to deal with a potentially abusive partner and a bunch of uncles and brothers who aren't her genetic uh part of her genetic lineage that are turning a blind eye to it so yeah I imagine that's a yeah I choose matro local every time I'm sure but then maybe I would say that yeah of course you would Louise uh you're great I I love every time that we get to speak where should people go they want to check out the things you write and things you say and whatever else you got going on uh so my podcast is called M mother matriarch it's on all podcast podcast platforms YouTube Etc um I mostly talk about sexual politics although I increasingly I I've been thinking to myself what are the what are the things I'm generally interested in um and I've decided that what I'm interested in is um birth sex violence and death so if you want to hear about any of those themes nice great for um and my first book was the case against sexual Revolution and I actually have a a new edition of that book coming out which is a young adult Edition so it's been edited down to be shorter and simpler and less Grim for a young adult a so it's intended for sort of 14 15 16 17 year olds is um so and that's called also oh no that one's actually called a new Guide to Sex in the 21st century but it's the it's the young adult edition of the case together sexal Revolution and it is basically the same book it's just that would be I can't wait to see what sort of a response you get for that one like whether it's this you know right-wing mother trying to color the the thoughts of our impressionable meanwhile Bonnie Blue and [ __ ] Lily Phillips are just like yes Queen Over The Far Side so far I've had like 95% positive responses actually to my book it's I thought it was going to get can canell and I didn't um hopefully the same thing will happen the young adult audition although I think that some of the young adults themselves might be a bit we did run we did run it past and when we doing the editing process we got some teenagers to read it and give like Anonymous feedback and there was there was more than one that was absolutely Scandal by my like gender exclusive language and so so some of them we didn't even we didn't even get a chance to get around to being sis English today we can talk about maybe talk about that next time uh look Louise you're so great everyone should go and check out your stuff case against sexual Revolution is a seminal book people refer to being Perry pilled now like young women refer to being per pilled so uh if nothing else your legacy will live on as a a meme in New York like college chicks and uh until next time I hope that you survive all of the children and the craziness thank you Chris do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go and go and check it out