#911 - Louise Perry - Has Modern Society Set Women Up For Failure?

bonnie blue might be pregnant good news very bad news i mean 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 at exactly the same time come on i also just 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 guess it's plausible.

But I really hope it's not true.

I mean, yeah, 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 think about that. Why would they get involved? Because it's very common for children to be taken away from mums if they are in prostitution.
And the thing is that I think 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, I mean, they do like work from home in the sense of doing camming from home.
And like, I think it would be very, very difficult to protect children completely. Yeah, it's perilously similar.
You you know the word sex worker was reclaimed by only fans and 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 at 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 the 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 i know i mean i yeah i really hope it's not true because imagine the psychological toll on a child who knew that they'd 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 won't yeah i think she does I mean, I guess if you 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 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're just, the torture that that child would be put through in school because everyone would end up knowing. And imagine your conception being on film.
I mean, just everything about it is supporting. What do you make of, you know, it's kind of, it feels like we're in kind of a bit of a post-OnlyFans era, or we were until Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue sort of re-injected 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 covid had maybe started to decline a little bit and uh this wasn't i don't know it was a thing some people do it people don't but you know there was a big talking 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 there's this archaeological evidence that vestigially 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 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 it is forever. And it does make it more difficult to, this is actually something, have you watchedly 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 gonna she doesn't have a boyfriend she doesn't 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 i can't remember the expression she uses but basically who has a cock fetish right um which doesn't sound like a very good basis for a marriage i mean it's like it's a really serious problem and i always think with these women like really good looking any fans women why don, if they want to have easy money,

why don't they just find rich husbands?

That seems like a much better lot.

It's calculating and materialistic, fine,

but it's a much more long-term strategy

rather than blowing up your reputation

by earning not even that much money on OnlyFans.

I mean, the thing is that most women on OnlyFans earn a pittance it's the it's the massive hitters like the power users yeah who ends up and the pareto 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 shit the book is the true whereas with only 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 a it's a crazy thing to do and yet nonetheless i have heard that something like one or two percent of young american women are only fans it's massive what's the what have you sort of come to think about the bonnie blue lily 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 journalists have 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.
Yeah, I remember that. 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 be one of those unicorn women I've like I've always I've always said that probably are some women the world is big enough there are some women who actually really like having sex like a man and really are 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 genes 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 lindisfarne 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 she might be she says that she is like it's possible that she is i don't know i can't see into her mind um i do think that i think lily phillips almost certainly isn't like that um and i i just i've 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 Britain 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 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 fucking intervention with Lily

Phillips. She's an adult and she can do what she wants.
I think a family should do that. Right.
Whether it's like society does. So I think increasingly that agency is more like a personality trait than it is like 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.
It's probably a combination of like industriousness, probably there's some intelligence in there as well. I think there's like multiple things going on, but I think there's some people are naturally more agentic than other people are.
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, et cetera.

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 my entire world to be Elon Musk's.

I think it would be chaos.

Michael Mallis had an interesting take on this

where he said a lot of the time people get criticized

for looking up to role models too much,

sort of mimetically following the desires of others. But it's his position that for maybe most people, this is a Michael Maliceism, 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 cleverer than you is not a bad idea. it's not even just cleverness is important it's not even just that it's also um wisdom is it's just like what guardrails do is that they understand human beings better than human beings generally understand themselves and there will sometimes be some people who break the guardrails and it's for the best, you know, but in most cases you should basically do what most other people do.
My pushback 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 difficulty, right? Yes, there are lots of ways that you can try and do it yourself and fuck 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, well, 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 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 they're maybe divorced so be someone less than one k 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 than one, it's like a tongue tie, I can't do it. Anyway, is because we live in, 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 of 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 them is a lot of people who are in positions of authority in all sorts of ways whether that be in media or politics 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 it's not really something that we talk about, right? It's not like a, I mean, I've basically kind of made up the word Igentic.
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, I'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 don't 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 dismiss a zempick 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 a very unpopular position to be anything that isn't anti ozempic online at least it 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 want it to be uh so perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost in that regard but yeah uh ozempic 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 wellbutrin is one of them which is an SNRI rather than SSRI.
People use it, people that suffer with seasonal affective disorder can use it and 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 affect affect your life a little bit more than you would like? Well, maybe just like this is the ozempic equivalent for your brain.
And I understand that we have this long, illustrious history of SSRIs are one point on the Chapman scale out of 56 of depression, that dancing with somebody for one 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.
And 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 shit 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? It's not effluza.
What was it that they thought it was carried through while they had those big long noses? Not aroma. I know exactly what word you mean.
Miasma. Miasma.
Miasma. 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, we move forward, and we get ever more sort of finely tuned.

But yeah.

I think a Zempick is great.

And I think that everything has trade-offs.

There probably are some trade-offs down the track with a Zempick.

I don't think they're going to be as catastrophic as the anti-ozempic people hope they will be right like 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 thin 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.
Oh, fascinating. 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 childbirth yeah that always comes back to making babies with you that remains a very moralistic area of medicine because there are epidural right epidurals or indeed having c-sections or you know whatever whatever medicalization of and like look i'm a centrist on this i think that the natural childbirth movement have some sensible things to say on how women can sometimes feel like over medicalizing childbirth is frightening and can cause more problems than it solves and whatever like i it. But I don't agree with the idea that childbirth has 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 zempick it's normally got more to do with social stuff than it has to do with the medical objections a quick aside do you ever wake up and look in the mirror and think i could really use some bone broth right now uh me neither but then i found kettle and fire and they make the most insane tasting cleanest bone broth in the world.
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I learned from Daniel Sloss, his most recent live show because his wife and him have now had two kids. 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 animation dr animation says something not too dissimilar as well about her first child complicated childbirth uh father who 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 unagentic 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 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 completely trapped, completely helpless.
And then 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 mama reunited anna like later day, she turns to him and she says, I wasn't so bad, was it? We should have another one. And Daniel's there, shell-shocked, you know, like the old Battle of the Somme style shell-shocked.
It's still, you know, his adrenals are never going to recover. And then and then he learned about this thing he's like oh women get this fucking amnesia drug for free yeah but dad dad doesn't so you've got this jekyll and hyde bipolar fucking 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 that's 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 yeah sleep deprivation yeah and then the um and then you like six or twelve months later you're like i should have another baby i'm already i have the most horrendous pregnancy and my son is almost six months and i'm already like drinking to go again i'm like i should have another baby i think i mean if it wasn't like that the human species done by design done by design just to just to sort of i think there's maybe a little uh line that we can draw back to the lily phillips thing you'd mentioned about this kind of 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 admire me.vip chelsea ferguson she's the owner of OnlyFans competitor that's in the UK.
And 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 capitalism go native in a weird way. And they start to maybe derogate their own capacities or what they could do outside of this.
And, you know, it's like it's the guy that 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 me 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 now 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 three 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 dude cheating on his wife for the final time before of cheating on his fiance for the final time before he can and 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 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 like if if if bonnie blue is the lebron james of fucking guys and not catching feelings you're you're like lebron james is five foot six cousin. Yeah.

I interviewed Andrea Hines recently,

who used to be in the sex industry.

Really interesting.

Is that the lady that you looped me in with?

Different lady.

All right.

Also very interesting.

The specific thing that Andrea talks about is how being in the sex industry,

like to be more explicit, like being in prost 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 it's very similar. And she talks about the sort of, um, 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, well, I'm earning so much money or, you know, I've got out of whatever bad situation I was in, 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 definitely more than 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 clothes holidays 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 why you've got it and it has there's almost thatulsion to like, just get rid of it. Which is why, I mean, Lily Phillips is clearly making loads of money.
Bonnie Blue is making loads of money. I don't necessarily think though that means they're set up for life.
Because one, HMRC is going to take half of it. Assuming that they're paying their taxes, which I'm sure they are.
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 talking about nine figures to be able to not have to do it again and i mean you've got it's going to have to be a lot more men than a thousand to be able to get there yeah i mean we've only heard of them for the last like few months they haven't been earning that much money for that long. I think people who say, oh, whatever, this is amazing for them because they just get to do this for a little bit and then they set up for life.
I think that's probably not the 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, 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 one pound 50 and change. 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 didn't like the job so much that I was distracting myself by buying internet packages so that I could go on MSN and talk to my friends who were all out having fun.
But I realized that I was being paid £4.50 an hour, but to connect to the internet, it was £9 an hour. so I was netting a loss of £4.50 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, OnlyFans isn't a very good life decision, right 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 idea that you get from the OnlyFans industry or from, you know, sex positive feminists, that this is great for women because it's a source of easy cash. I just think that I think 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 is the bank account, etc.
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, I harp 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 hurting me, but it gives me a sense of 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 or whatever it might be.
And you think, well, fine, that's something that you can parade around in many ways. But what does it mean that you're in psychological pain because they're mistreating you? Well, how much is that? Show me where that is.
You can show other people, go, dude, dude, your new girlfriend's hot. You can see that registers somewhere, but you having a sleepless night, that doesn't register.
So 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 percent of gen z saying that they're 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 don't know what the sort of heritage is there.
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? Can I just repeat the take of a different modern wisdom guest, which is Lyman Stone i interviewed him the other day and he had a view on this which i found so interesting and actually really like pulled 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 mean he's looking at america but this applies to britain 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 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 get married multiple times account for just a 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 eighties, I got married when I was 25, which is basically child bride in my peer group in the eighties.
That was average, right? So people are basically just skipping the whole of their twenties 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 said, 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 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 the person or people who can provide that for you,

I mean, you need them, you need someone,

and the obvious person is the father of your children.

And that's what monogamous marriage is,

basically like legally obliging men to step up during those moments.

And so women are looking for a man who will do that

and who is capable of providing those resources in that difficult moment and they look for signals 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 running your own business, or military service, that's an interesting example. Down to about 3%, I think, compared with 50% in the 1940s.
I asked Lyman this and he was like, yeah, he thought it was true. Is it possible that part of the reason there was a post-war baby boom, particularly in America, is because so many men had had military service and had had this opportunity to demonstrate their suitability as fathers and husbands? See how reliable I am.
I just went to war. I can raise your child.
Exactly. Yeah.
It is harder now for young men to do that costly signal and to say, it's harder to buy property, depending on where you you are but it is generally harder to buy property when you're younger um the nature of everyone going to 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 that 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 in other news you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because key thing. Maybe that's why like birthroats are falling off a cliff.
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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things going on, but certainly comparatively, if you were to roll in whatever Malcolm Collins' or a Stephen J.
Shaw's idea around this, that as females who seem to be much better at all types of education, 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 handling in homework. I saw Alex Datesike post something this morning about how they can do better sort of long-term planning about when they need to revise for tests.
And so like every different part of education, when the breaks get taken off for women, for girls, it seems to be, they're pretty good at it. And 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. 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, intergenerational competition theory.
Look at where my parents were when they were my age, and they had this house, and they had 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 fucking can, adjusted for inflation, Gen Z 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 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 described about women being great highlighter girls, basically, women earn more 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.
A lot of women are just going to be like, 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 asked, why don't you have children, is not because I'm a girl boss or because I don't own my house or whatever.
It's actually I can't find the right man. Just haven't found the right partner.
Yeah. Yeah, that was the GSS survey.
Just haven't found the right partner 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 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 sort of interesting to talk.
And I just sit and go, so like, who's single? And talk to me, like, what is it that you're finding about the girls that you date? Invariably, it's, they're not mature, they don't have their life together. And 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, 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. But a lot of the time, it's a bit more amorphous than that.
It's kind of blobby. I 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 in the moment oh my last boyfriend was 35 and uh the guy that i'm seeing at the moment's 38 i'm like these are big big age gaps and uh yeah that was really surprising to me it's one of the reasons why, do you remember Princeton Mom? No. This is this woman who wrote, this was quite a few years ago now, who wrote in the Princeton student magazine or the alumni magazine maybe, advice to women at Princeton, which is 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 that women used to use is, or everyone used to use as women would go to university to get their MRS, 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 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 fine-grained stressing about who earns more, whatever, because 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 soho house girls women sorry i should say who yeah has quite a lot of career success absolutely does not want to date down and probably you also 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 tears 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 hypergamy, because it does seem like high-performing women desire more hypergamous mates than non-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 go, oh my god like as you are a rarefied if you stand atop 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 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 be like oh yeah cool i'll just get whatever lamp looks 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 like perfectly fits that house. It's going to be much harder to find a lamp because you're going to have much more picky criteria.
But 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.
You've probably kind of structured your daily schedule around exactly what you like and whatever. 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 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 anytime anybody wants to bring up declining birth rates and marriage that it's seen as a right-wing or fascist talking point? Well, I could say that they shouldn't think that because basically all societies are interested in the fertility of their people um and there are loads of examples of

definitely not fascist at all countries having pro-natal policies like south korea would be an example france has had all sorts of pro-natal policies for years whatever um i think that would be slightly dodging the question though because i think what people mean there is like why does it matter

if

countries why does it matter if countries die out? Why do you care so much is the question that's been invited there. To push back against nationalism in a way.
Yeah, I think so. And to push back against any kind of in-group preference, 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 i've seen it 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 prefer 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 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 mostly about my family and then and then about my extended 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.
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 leftist thought that you're you're you're sort of not allowed to care more about people close to you your 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 may be 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't know, people who live in China who actually

don't really think about very much and sometimes expressing, China is probably 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 stick with which to beat the rednecks

down the street that you don't like.

The narcissism of small differences, the bigotry of small differences. It sounds sounds a little bit like that yeah i i think that 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 right wing support of population collapse or the right wing concern about population collapse 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 manosphere again the manosphere fucking hate me so i'm sure that they were very insulted to have me use uh like given their moniker in the chapters and the timestamps and all the rest of this stuff but um what i found was kind of interesting with that video was a lot of the quotes that at least i was taken as saying were these sort of very milquetoast as far as I could say, 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 hundred years.
And I think that birth rate decline is. I'm like, I can't see within that sentence, I can't see what's supposed to be so fucking controversial, unless you believe that I don't actually believe the thing that I'm just playing lip service to the 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 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, I'm not to say that all pronatalists, like I'm sure there's many pronatalists that are assholes and and bigots and stuff as there are people that are anti-natalists 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 i'm coming from when it comes to this and and this isn't the chris williamson like fucking 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 carl 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, fucking 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 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? Because 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 know, fucking obviously I'm not that retarded 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 deathbed.
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 as far as I can see, no one has put together the definitive sort of thesis on birthright 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 know, like when you've still got conferences going about stuff, it basically means that the science isn't settled about what the fuck's going on, because people have still got so much shit to discuss.
So yeah, that's a long rambling diatribe 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. 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 is pushing back my kids getting in the way of my pronateism 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 world of political objections to 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.
I actually don't get that worried about kind of crazy progressivism, the sort of really outlandish blue haired 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.
And similarly, I mean, a culture that thinks that you have no obligation to look after the elderly. Another thing I learned from Lyman 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 simulate 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 pushback against the golden retriever population that's an issue for me no look i i mean that's a yeah dogs are great but cats are great whatever but 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 yeah it's like socially acceptable pornography use but it's it's simulating that's funny i haven't I heard that take before, but it doesn't surprise me simulating reproduction in a fake way. So getting away from that, 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 offense to it for a Labrador.
But I don't worry too much about this runaway progressivism because it is self-limitingiting like the the people genetically and culturally who are currently being selected for are people who are basically capable of forming societies which are pronatal 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 really good at supporting young families. That's what's getting selected for.
And it might be that getting there is painful. 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 happening is we're going through this almighty bottleneck. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.
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That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, that's exactly what I had in my...
This is the first time I've heard anyone put words to it, but it makes complete sense. It's natal fatalism, right? We are on this particular set of rollercoaster tracks.
Just to call it out for the people that maybe aren't behavioral genetics pilled, 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 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, over time, 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 kid havers 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 are 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 generation population boom which was an issue population, which is, I think, what's happening right now, that actually you see this massive explosion when they get to the next generation.
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, I wrote an essay about this recent issue for First Things, 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 like the Amish, it's older Orthodox Jews, it's people who actually have not embraced modernity, really.
I mean, they're living within modern societies, and to some extent, they get to piggyback off some of, for instance, the health infrastructure of modern societies. Like, the Amish 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 infant mortality. And so there isn't a lot of communicable diseases that they're vulnerable to.
I don't know if they vaccinate, but they're not at risk of waves of smallpox and bubonic plague and stuff because the rest of America is keeping a check on that. Exactly.
However, are the Amish actually capable of maintaining that kind of medical infrastructure long term? Like if the entire country, just not because of their intelligence or whatever, but just because that's not what they're minded to do. Like if the entire country was composed of Amish 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 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%. And that's the great miracle of the modern world.
And as a mom, that is the thing I do not want to let go of. Sometimes people will be very 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 losing the welfare state.
It's not the numbers, it's the technology that... Yeah, it's whether the people who come out of this bottleneck are capable of maintaining the type of medical tech, which I really want to be maintained.
That's 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 high tech, they will dominate the world. They will have the world at their feet.
My housemate, 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, relative felt this um sort of surge of of meaning go through him that he hadn't felt before 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 like Lone Ranger, solopreneur 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, I know, classic men. So envious, yeah.
Classic men. However, 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, 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 it seems like the data is kind of mixed on this.
If you have one child, it's likely that you're going to have blah, blah, blah. 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 have this kind of recursive loop of fewer mothers mothers beget fewer role models showing other non-mother women how it what it's like to be a mother and extolling 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 the elon musk of women that's going to go and be agentic and or or Bonnie Blue, I suppose. Um, uh, so yeah, well, mimetic desire to be a parent.
What do you reckon now? I think that'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 your baby is different from all other babies because your baby looks like you. And it's the most amazing thing.
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? 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 virtuous 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. Just things like, I'm taking my kids on a plane for the first time.
I'm 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 plane being unpleasant

to us because they don't think children belong there and they're not used to seeing children

in public spaces let alone 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

Thank you. 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 not even necessarily hostile, but just clueless.
And it just makes life more difficult in all sorts of ways. 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 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.
I think, so going back actually interestingly to like the doomerism about say environmentalists who don't want to have kids because they're'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 than men like quite a lot and that difference only comes on at puberty and it seems likely 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 are children and actually jordan peterson likes to talk about this painting i don't i can't remember the name of the painter which is of um um the virgin mother holding the infant christ michelangelo's pieta it's a sculpture is it with the snake on the floor oh interesting maybe 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 the protected mother.

And it can confirm you get super neurotic when you're, you know, a friend of mine warned me before I went 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 I just worry about things one of the differences between me and mums 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 in myself, I find that really difficult to do. And I would really struggle to have say three, 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 fuss too much.
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… Ah, well, just do it.
Who cares about the state of the economy? Who cares about the carbon parts per million? Exactly. Who don't get themselves all like so wrapped up 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.
Run it back. Yeah, exactly.
I wonder if neuroticism is now being selected against. Wow, that's interesting.
Yeah, it's just my hypothesis and my impression from looking around at people. 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 am like every crazy neurotic mother i read every news story that crosses my eye about something terrible happening to a child and i gotta say like the vast majority of cases we read about some terrible accident that's happened to a child, I'm like, I would never let that happen.
Like the negligence. Neglect, lack of supervision.
Yeah. I mean, often it's just people being just silly.
And I read that and I'm like, I would literally never do that. Like this is not, that's more 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 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 oh 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 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 that little boys behave is much further towards the ADHD type of behavior than the normal way that little girls behave I'm amazed when when friends bring around their little girls, like two-year-old girls who just sit at the table, like quietly coloring. My son does not do that.
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 demands 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 know it's just this is not what they want to do.
It's so fascinating, right? I don't know. 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 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 tails 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 medication. And yeah, I can just see how you go, well, look at the gold standard.
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 mean, where's that come from? You're not even, you weigh 10 kilos. How have 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 don't 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 for the boys I think it'd 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 being done at school is crowd control which is why I used to think maybe I should homeschool the children.
And now I actually don't think I have the personality to do that for multiple reasons, because it's incredibly hard work, actually. Like, because the problem is, it's a coordination problem.
If we all lived like people used to live for most of human history, where you live around your extended kin and you live in a walkable environment and you're constantly hanging out with other people who have children and that would be one thing. But the reality of living in a low fertility society where everyone sends their kids to school is who the kid's going to hang out with during day and i know that there are homeschooling co-ops but in reality it can be quite hard to actually get over with other parents get over to texas there's communes everywhere right so 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 they can skin an elk in five minutes flat yeah 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 going to find my people and i'm going to um you know um educate children exactly how i want them to be educated all right maybe we'll end up doing that but um it you can't really i always i think of this as being a 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 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 happens. Proper trad life is pan-generational housing.
yeah it's you've got a friend who is a teacher and you help out a little bit some days and you take the class another day that's proper trad life and you have a dozen cousins around you who all have kids of the same age right that's actual trad life and you've always and you can't read and you all live in the same place as opposed to this solopreneur trad life equivalent yeah it's like one of my friends an irish cath friend, she always likes to say that actual tradcaths, 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 sort of Instagram trad life, right? Because you know, 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 that's part

of what's been 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 has been appealed to. And actually, frontier life

So, let's go. and you live in difficult conditions in the middle of nowhere.
I think actually that's the sort of cultural memory that has been appealed to. And actually, frontier life was very, very difficult, particularly for women, which is why there was this contagious mental illness called prairie madness.
Have you ever heard of this? Where women living 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. There's a coordination problem.
You haven't got God's eye view of this. Well, I have a bunch of friends who've tried to do bilateral trad life or whatever the polylateral trad life, whatever the other word would be.

And this is a funny story.

So maybe, how many, it's probably 10 couples, I would say, something like that.

And they had this plan.

Some of them had kids.

Some of them are about to have kids.

All of them quite wealthy. 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.
The intention was at some point in the next five to 10 years, we buy a hundred acres of land between us all and we do the polylateral trad life thing. They tried to do a couple of pet projects.
I think one of them was to revamp a ranch out in Bastrop, out toward Bastrop, sort of out east from Austin. There was a couple of other projects they'd 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, you know, whether the group would work like this.
And I don't think it's happening. I don't think it worked.
Just the coordination problem of trying, because again, what people are doing there is they're LARPing as trad life people, which causes you to be as selective as the girl that's 27, earns a hundred 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 make it fucking work. Like 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 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 incompatible.
Because you want the five-star service. You want the business class flights and you want the Uber Black XL.
I don't think that that's realistic unless you sort of keep rolling the dice and really come up lucky. I think it's just 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 multi-generational setup, you're genetically invested in each other. And also, you can't really opt out.
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 everyone knows you can kind of opt out and no one really has that much genetic investment in each other's lives 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 buying this one house together and they share the kitchen but then they have other separate areas and whatever i've been to the house loads of times and they've they've done really well i mean like it solves a lot of problems um and when more children come along there'll be like childcare sharing and there's like there's a lot of of 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 much work to make these relationships function. And 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 you don't have issues with families.
But yeah, I mean, there's sort of a reason that people have historically grown these um households 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 patrilocal and matrilocal societies, which is a very nerdy anthropology thing. But patrilocal societies are where when a couple gets married, they move to where the husband is from.
They move into his family's house or just to be nearby them. Matrilocal is the other flip side, so that's when you move to the mothers.
Good to guess that the matrilocal is rarer? Well, not necessarily. So interestingly, English working class culture is traditionally matrilocal.
And one of the consequences of that is that you'll be familiar with all these old-style comics who complain about mothers-in-law like often the reason they complain about mothers-in-law is because they actually live with their mothers-in-law because it's a matrilocal 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 woman's parents for a bit um and uh there's 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 like being quite like strong-willed uh like mum the mum being actually quite a dominant figure in the family like there's lots of ways actually in which english working class culture british working class culture is actually um empowers women quite a lot like women have quite a lot of power

whereas patrilocal 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 patrilocal cultures

Thank you. and often getting dominated by them, like being actually in a very weak position and having to be very subservient to them.
And often patrilocal cultures tend to have norms where women are more demure and more quiet and more willing to be blessed around by other people. That's certainly one of the concerns, I think, in David Buss's book, Bad Men, 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 matrilocal because you know the the guy should be a little bit more robust at being able to deal with the slightly overbearing mother-in-law than 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 a genetic lineage that are turning a blind eye to it so yeah i imagine that's uh yeah i choose matrilocal every time but then maybe i would say that yeah of course you would louise uh you're great 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 made 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 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 pitch um and uh 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 so it's intended for sort of 14 15 16 17 year olds ish um so and that's called also cool 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 against the sexual 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 fucking 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 i was going to get cancelled 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 the we did run it past and when we did 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 some of them we didn't even we didn't even get chance to get around to being cis cis English today.
We can maybe talk about that next time.

Look, Louise, you're so great.

Everyone should go and check out your stuff.

The Case Against Sexual Revolution is a seminal book.

People refer to being peripilled now.

Young women refer to being peripilled. So if nothing else, your legacy will live on as a meme in New York, like college chicks.

And until next time, I hope that you survive all of the children and the craziness.

Thank you, Chris.