#962 - Lyman Stone - The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling

26:23And I mean, you can even see in things like most traditional people are dealing with cyclical seasons as part of their subsistence, we are not. We don't have as much seasonality in our life. So that's a big part of it. But then beyond that, I think more contemporarily, I think just in the last 20 years, you see like a supercharged version of this with social media and the internet in the way that we can and all observe each other's consumption in new ways, that it feels like you're missing out on more. Now, tap kids. Even if you're not, like you're actually not missing out on a lot more than you were in the past, but it feels like you are because so many of us spend so much of our life just scrolling through other people's conspicuous consumption.

27:08How much of it is, oh, we talked to me about the relationship between the diffusion of mobile phones and fertility preferences. Is this a correlation? So I have a paper in review right now on exactly this. And the correlation is actually surprisingly weird. The strongest relationship is when people get more access to mobile phones into the internet, they're more likely to adopt concrete discrete preferences. Not necessarily lower ones, just more concrete ones. That is, they have less fuzziness around the numbers. they report. They're less likely to say, I'll just have, it is, many kids has got gives me.

27:50And they're more likely to like say a number. And if they're going to say a number, they're more likely to say one number rather than like five or six, four or five, they're like, no, I want two. I want three. Cellphones drive this sort of concretization of preferences. And they eliminate some of the flexibility that people naturally have around their family life, right? Historically, people had limited control over their family life. There was a lot of early death, limited ability to control conception, and so humans adapted by having a kind of flexible conception towards family life. As people get more exposed to like Western media, they tend to lose that flexibility and adopt really inflexible family norms.

28:38I want not exactly this. If I don't get exactly this, it's a big problem. And what's interesting, this actually sets people up for a lot of misery. Okay, so in non -western contexts, when people under shoot their fertility desires, it seems like they don't suffer as much loss of like happiness as western people who under shoot their fertility desires. Like when western people say they want two kids, if they only have one, their odds of being depressed in their 40s and 50s are a lot higher. But if you look at like an African woman who says she wants five and she ended up with three, the effects on her subjective well -being actually don't seem to be quite as large though I will readily admit we don't have as good of data for that context as well.

29:22And it seems like what's going on is Western people just adopt these really inflexible family norms, not just lower. And when people get cell phones, the inflexibility translates more rapidly than the actual lower numbers to, at least is what we're finding in early research. But what does happen with social media, aside from family desires, is we see people become less likely to intend big families even if they desire them. So this is actually a weird dynamic. When people get cell phones, we see that more of them, they still want the same number of kids as their non -cell phone having neighbors.

30:01Okay, so like if you're in a village where people have cell phone service and the neighboring village doesn't You all you both want the same number of kids But if you have the cell phone you're less likely to actually intend to have that number of kids. Why? Beats me I Just report the data man. Yeah, no, so like this is like this is our like questions for further research section is like why And we kind of think what's going on is we do see this concretization, this spread of like more concrete fertility desires. And what's going on is people say, well, it would be instead of saying, well, it would be nice to have four.

30:47And maybe I'll have them. So I'm open to that. I'll try for it. Maybe I don't get it. Maybe I will. Well, once people are more exposed to Western media, they start to say, well, it'd be nice to have four, but I'm not sure if I can hit it. So it's better to just content myself with the two I have. So you get this sense of rationalizing the difficulties of your life. At the same time, there's a whole different possibility that this is basically about exposure to different status hierarchies. what the flexing brunch with the boys and the girls on a Saturday is far more Instagram worthy than a night of changing dirty nappies.

31:29Yeah, yeah, basically. So I think one of the, so I published this study on this a couple of months ago where we looked at, it's very hard to find cases of status interventions. Like how often does a government or something like implement a policy where they announce like three kids is high status now. And even if they do, like, do people really believe it? What does that even mean? Right. So, but we have one case where this did happen successfully. So, the country of Georgia, their state church, the leader of their state church is, he's a rock star. He's like the most popular public figure in the country.

32:08He has crazy eye approval ratings. He's like a hero of national independence and revival, whatever. So he got ticked off that, and like 80 % of Georgia is Georgia North of ox, so like it's most of the people in the country are part of this church. If he got annoyed that they just built this gigantic new cathedral and no babies were being baptized in it, okay, and he was like crap. My congregate, my fold is dying. Like they're not reading, and also they're having a lot of abortions, which is like a big no -no in conservative Christianity. And he said, okay, Here's what I'm going to do. I will personally baptize any third born or higher child born to marry to George and Orthodox couples and I will become their God parent.

32:52Okay, so this is interesting because for traditional Christian movements God parents matter a lot like they are kin. They are family so much so that it's actually incest to marry a God sibling in most traditional Christian traditions. You can't marry God siblings in in Eastern Orthodox canon law because it's incest. You are siblings, you can't marry siblings.

33:17So anyways, this guy, he did this thing, he announced this in an 18 months, the fertility of Georgia rose from 1 .6 to 2 .2. And it remained, it's still above 1 .6 to this day. It's like 1 .85 today or something. So this worked. I have a paper published where we use a bunch of different quasi -causal methods to show that it worked. George Northard Oxford fertility rose more than minority fertility. It's specifically rose among married, third or higher births, all these different things. The point is it worked, but the question is why? Like why did it work that like this old religious leader was like, ah, I'll baptize your kids.

33:57Why did that make everybody be like, eh, we're having a third kid. Like, why? So what we can say is the number of children, Georgian women said they wanted to have didn't change. They wanted three before the intervention and they wanted three after the intervention. But the number they intended to have rose. Okay. Wanting is if I just ask like, eh, ideally how many kids would you like to have? Intending is how many do you actually plan on having? Okay, so that's very different. You can imagine saying, well, I loved F4, but it's not gonna work out for me. I'm only gonna have two. We also know that people, the abortion rate fell, the marriage rate rose.

34:42Women's education did not decline. Women's workforce participation did not decline. So it's not like women adopted more traditional roles. People just like spontaneously had more kids. It's, we think what happened is that in this case, this religious leader, he was popular enough and the offer of God family was compelling enough. And also being part of a big mass baptism in the cool new church that they leveled amount into build is kind of, actually kind of an Instagram worthy experience. That this like hacked enough different psychological constructs that it made a lot of people be like, like, well, you know, we used to think having a third child was like kind of backwards, like cool people don't do that.

35:31But now good Georgians have a third baby and we want to be good Georgians. So we're going to have a third baby. So it like unlocked kind of like a religious nationalist impulse that was latent, which means you couldn't just do this anywhere, but it does point to the fact that when you're able to alter status hierarchies, fertility does respond. And without disrupting women's ability to be economic citizens, it's actually not a re -traditionalization. It's like a new traditionalization, right? You get big families, but also women working, which is something that a lot of conservative pronatalists often assume is impossible, right?

36:16That the only path to the difference is to roll back this. And in Georgia, we see that's not the case religious revival generated more babies, but didn't retraditionalized women's roles How many kids the most western women say that they want? British American to like two to two point five There's a few countries that are like one point nine like Malta is like one point eight or one point nine Austria I think is one point nine maybe But generally most people say like between two and two point five. Well, they don't say two point five But the national average is like two two point five and in the US is like two point two or two point three and how many do they intend?

36:57Uh, and it were from one point two to one point seven or one point eight. Yeah, I think the US is one point nine Right, uh, so Yeah, I guess they're not actually that far off like the birth rates and the intention rate not actually on the thought of how births versus intentions are not radically far off. People are reasonably good predictors of what they themselves intend to do. It's just that what they intend to do is a lot less than what they would like to do if their circumstances were different. And so like the biggest things that predict intentions being lower than desires for young women are things like mental illness is a big one.

37:41People with more severe diagnosed mental illness have a bigger gap between intentions and desires. People with less relationship history, so people who have never had a relationship by the time they're 28, have bigger gaps between intentions and desires.

38:05People with predict a shortfall between intentions and desires. People who are basically failing to hit key milestones. Before we continue, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery's slow or you've just been feeling off, it might not be a training plan or your diet, it might be something a bit more boring, like zinc. And while supplements like Toncatale can help zinc quietly plays a huge role in testosterone production, strength, recovery, and energy and most people are chronically low on it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Mementus' zinc. it supports testosterone, boost vitality, and helps keep everything running like it should.

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39:11A checkout that's L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -O -U -S .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Where do fertility preferences come from? Like what is that? That is a great question. Not jeans. Um, right. This is the one area of psychology that apparently genetics isn't going to step into. Yeah. It's not genes. We actually know this one. Um, uh, there are very few genes that are relevant for fertility and, um, they, uh, they don't appear to be highly implicated in fertility preferences. Um, so it comes from some kind of socializing environment. Um, people are socialized into having higher fertility preferences.

40:04Some of that is from your parents, you tend to absorb, there is some heritability of fertility and fertility preferences, though heritability of these things is pretty low. Fertility is much less heritable than most traits that we study heritability of. So it tends to come from

40:26idiosyncratic personal, positive experiences of family life. So you happen to attend a church that has happy families. And so you go, yeah, okay. So like religious people have much higher fertility preferences, but not all religious people, right? And it's not necessarily the religious people whose parents had high fertility preferences. So it tends to be what we call horizontal culture, rather than vertical culture. That is, it's culture you absorb horizontally from other people in your society, not vertically from your parents primarily. There is some parental influence. And what is that horizontal culture?

41:06Well, it's going to depend on the society you live in. sometimes it's religion, sometimes it's peers, some of it's friends with people with big families. What's that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, actually, there's great studies on this that show that there's a study using a huge database of Dutch people. There's actually a lot of studies involving large databases of Dutch people because I guess Dutch people like large databases. but it shows that the more of your personal social network that is people with bigger families, the more kids you want to have. And like, causality here is a little tricky. Like maybe the reason you have those friends is because you wanted big families.

41:49But the others try to control for that. And they argue that it's actually causal, that like social exposure to people with big families makes you want big families. And they also show on the other side that like the more childless friends you have, the more likely you are to not want to have kids. So this suggests that there's a real contagion of fertility preferences. And this also points like the George North and Oaxaca case I give, like what really happened here is that like a public figure like started a fertility epidemic, right? Like he stood up and said like, you should all do this. This is a good idea.

42:25And then for whatever reason, some influential social actors were like, yeah, okay. and then it just like infected everyone.

42:34So my favorite case of this, actually, there's a study that looks at co -workers, and particularly like co -workers who sit close to you at work. And the first studies do this show that like when a co -worker who sits close to you at work has a baby, you become more likely to have a baby over the next few years, right? that there's like contagion via approximate coworkers. But then somebody said, they're like, wait, maybe that's not really causal, because maybe your seating chart is not random. They said, but what is random is the sibling behavior of coworkers. So they said, what happens to your fertility when your coworker has a sibling who has a baby?

43:14And they show that like a ripple effect, like when a coworker sibling has a baby, it makes the coworker more likely to have a baby. And then that eventually makes you more likely to have a baby. It's like a ripple effect of babies. It's like, it's all a little goofy. I'm like, I'm not sure how much I believe the exact effect estimate there, but I think the model that lays out is plausible. That like fertility behaviors are highly contagious and they operate via social learning. That like a lot of us, a lot of people think parenting is harder than it is. It's really genuinely not as hard as people think.

43:54And the way we know this is that the number one thing that makes people most likely to increase their fertility preferences, like if you reserve people longitudinally across a lot of waves, like what causes people to increase their fertility preferences. The number one thing is they had kids. When people have kids, they tend to want more kids. They raise their fertility preferences. And so what that tells us is as you acquire experience of children, you realize this is better than I expected. Could that not be contributed to by the fact that there's an overhead that you need to pay in order to have one child, you need to child proof the house, you need to get a big car, you need to do all of these things.

44:35So kind of like a man who built a factory to make one pair of shoes, you go, well, you know, I mean, the shoes are nice, but yeah, I'm kind of in for a penny and a thousand for a pound, you might as well have it make it ton more shoes. Is it possible to sort of bifurcate that? Yes, it is actually. So in the US, actually not just the US, like every industrialized country that has these big fertility declines recently, the fertility declines are almost entirely among first births. Conditional on having baby one, your odds of having baby two have only declined a little bit in most countries. And conditional on having baby two, your odds of having baby three have not to client at all in most countries.

45:16And your odds of having baby four, conditional and having baby three, have actually risen in a lot of countries. So it is actually the case that, yes, what we see is in for a penny and for a pound. People who have any kids at all are still having them like they always did. We're just seeing that some people are not having kids at all. And as a result, they never learned that this is actually a pretty good thing. But then if you imagine the social contagion effect, if none of your friends are having that first baby, you're not learning that actually when people have a baby, they're not baby they tend to want more kids.

45:45You're not seeing that. And as a result, you get this contagion where people are just, they're not observing something that people used to observe in human life, which is once you have one, you realize, yeah, I could totally have another one. And then you think, yeah, I can have another one after that. And then you think, maybe I could have another one. Did a lot of people feel this way? Not everyone. Obviously, there's some people who get to and they're like, oh, I'm done. Or they get one and they think that that's always been the case. I'm not, I don't want to say that doesn't happen. But on average, having more kids causes upwards revision in fertility preferences.

46:25So it's mimetic in both ways. It's mimetic on the way up and mimetic on the way down. But it's a little bit of an unfair war when the social contagion is moving in the downward trajectory because it's very easy to flex the kind of lifestyle that seems aspirational online without kids and also all of the costs of having kids are very obvious and all of the benefits of having kids are very hidden. Yes, the benefits of having kids are literally behind closed doors like they're the days where like on this podcast right now my kids are with my wife out at play group. You don't see them. But the benefit of kids is times where I'm working on something at home and my 18 month old just comes and sits in.

47:17I've got a little kid chair beside my chair. You can't see it. But um, and she just comes and stands there and plays with her legos on my desk. And it's just sweet. And it makes that 30 minutes of my day just more pleasant and happier. Okay. But no one sees that because when it's time to record, I like shoe away. I like go away kids. I don't want you on the recording. We literally hide the joy of children.

47:45So before we were recording on this, we were talking about how we were both tired. I don't know what your reasons for sleep loss were, but mine, of course, were jet lag, because I was just in Asia for 2 and 1 half weeks with my kids and with another family with small kids. We had five kids, five and under in Hoi An, Vietnam, and in Hong Kong. And it was awesome. Like, it was so much fun. And yes, I'm going to do a massive flex post here in a few weeks where I do a blog post on how great it was and I show pictures of my kids. But like, that is not... That's not typical. Like usually the travel flexes people being like, oh here's like gorgeous me with like no children in sight.

48:37But it's so fun to travel with kids. Like it's exhausting, like it's exhausting in very different ways. But like watching your kids freak out about some piece of cultural difference that you barely noticed is so much fun. Or like when you're like explaining something to your kids when you're traveling, and they, and it like clicks with them, it's so cool. That's a bit of a digression, but yes, it's just easier to flex a childless lifestyle. Also, it's the inertial position, right? Like people are born childless. And so it doesn't take any effort to stay that way. So it's life changed through commission, or life changed through omission, I suppose.

49:15Yeah, the set point here. All right, what about male socioeconomic status? How much is that contributing to this? It definitely matters. So male earnings, young men's earnings, have seen essentially no economic growth in the last 20, 25 years. Other groups have young women have to some extent, but particularly older people have. Now, there's a popular notion that when men have more income than women, or like when women are more dependent on men for their sustenance, that there will be more marriage and more babies. This actually turns out not to be true in industrialized societies that like US states have a bigger gap between men and women.

50:05Like if you put together like a like a panel model with fixed effects of states with like gender gap for young men and women versus marriage rate, a bigger gender gap in incomes does not actually predict like a higher rate of interest into marriage. What does predict it is when young men have a higher income relative to older men. Now this might sound weird. Why is it that young, that older men having really high incomes would be bad for young men's marriage rate? Immediately there will be some people saying, well, it's because older men are poaching all the young women. No, it's actually not that either.

50:41Even if we restrict to only the incomes of already married older men, why is this? And the reason is, through all of time, all of human history, since we came down from the trees, there is one thing that women have desired above all else, and it is insurance. They have desired to be insured against income volatility, particularly the income volatility that arises from family. To be clear, insurance is very different from economic provision. In most human societies, women produce about half of the economic benefits of their family. They farm, they gather, in hunter -gatherer societies, women gather, they produce a lot of the calories of a society.

51:31In agricultural societies, women work on the farm, so do children. In early industrial societies, women worked in factories. Women have always been able to do economic provision. The problem is their incomes tend to take a hit when they have a baby. So they need someone who provides insurance. Well, what kind of insurance are they looking for? Well, most women's sense of what they want to be provided for their children is going to be shaped by one thing. And that is what they observe from fathers when they are growing up. Okay. So the comparison young men are facing is not young men's income versus young women's income.

52:12The comparison young men are facing is their income versus the income of the women, the incomes of the women's they want to marry fathers. So if you want to marry a woman, she's comparing you to her dad. And why do we know this? Because across centuries of data on mating behaviors, we see that there's almost no hypergamy. That is women do not marry up if you compare their husbands to their fathers. They marry up if you compare their incomes to their husbands, but they don't marry up if you compare their husbands income to their fathers income. Women match to husbands that share their fathers socioeconomic status, which means when older men become much wealthier compared to younger men, sucks to be a young man because all the women are like you clearly can't provide the things that my dad provided for my family.

53:11It's so, it's like so incestuously weird to think that your potentially eligible male suitor is not competing with the other men around. Like you as a guy don't need to be worried about that. You're competing with her dad in a really weird... So it's actually you're not strictly competing. You are competing with her dad, but you're competing with her dad and the other dads of women she saw as peers when she was growing up. Right. Yeah. So there's a something I saw here across the last 300 years of British data. Men and women very reliably match on male status correlated to women's father status.

53:52I a lot of women without college degrees made themselves be poor, but often their families are not exactly. Exactly. So that's Greg Clark's study. That's a wonderful instantiation of this. So yeah, you're, man, you're not competing with other guys. You're competing with me. You're competing with a confederation of fathers. And what that means is as dads, one of the things we can do for future men is not spoil our kids. And I know that sounds weird, but really, it's like if you have a lot of income, hide it from your kids. Wait until they're 35 to reveal to them how much money there was millions waiting there.

54:40Meanwhile, you have to have bread and cheese again for dinner, little Timmy. No, like, but I mean, really, I think there's a genuine argument here for like, princess spoiling your daughters really wrecks their future marriage process.

55:00Especially like I have a lot of sympathy for this. Like whenever I see someone like a peer or a near peer who's like living a really opulent life, it's always like the game of like real money or debt. Like which one is paying for this? Like do you have that much income? Or you just like up to your eyebrows and credit card debt. And it's it's off in the latter. And then I think, but the kids don't know. The kids don't know. Like I have a dear friend, someone I cared about very much, who was always giving so many gifts to his kids. And not just to his kids, to ever and around him. He was like, infamously generous, until he committed suicide, because it turned out he had massive gambling.

55:46Highly over leveraged. Right. And the problem is after he died, his older kids understood what had happened, but his younger ones didn't. And so they just were mad at their mom because she's not providing what dad. Why can't we maintain the lifestyle that we had before? Well, in the answer is the lifestyle we had before, killed your father. So I mean, honestly, I think there's actually an argument that like don't spoil your kids, it's actually a really important part of like society you maintain healthy fertility rates. I look forward to you proposing that to parents and see. And I say this having just taken my kids on a two and a half week vacation in Asia, where I absolutely spoiled them.

56:29So, you know, chief of sinners, I am. Is one of them a girl? They're all girls. Wow. You have cursed them. I have. Direct their mirrors. Good luck to the future. In fairness, I brought two eligible marriage prospects on the trip as well. the other family has boys. So, you know, we're arranged, very arranged. I saw that have you seen this experimental evidence on the acceptance of males falling behind this new paper? No, how does this? Allow me to educate, this is the one part where I get to tell you something that you didn't already know. In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a siop meant to keep you poor and late.

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58:13That's nomatic .com slash modern wisdom. When men fall behind people shrug a fascinating new paper reveals a sobering truth. People are more accepting of men falling behind in the labour market than women, adding insult to injury to insult. They're also less supportive of government interventions to help men catch up. Why? A big part of it is that people commonly assume that males failure is self -inflicted that it's due to a lack of effort rather than buy us a bad luck. As a result, people see men as less deserving of help. This isn't just unfair. It's short -sighted men who fall behind, often stay behind, and society is a whole bears the cost.

58:47But that was a pretty huge new paper that Steve Stewart Williams talked about. Yeah, no, I totally buy that. I mean, you see this routinely that there is generally, I mean, our whole welfare system was designed around the idea that single moms need extra help, okay? But other, but like poor dads don't. Or in general, there aren't that many like single poor dads, but our welfare system is designed on this kind of assumption. It's designed specifically to meet the needs of basically single moms, which is maybe not an ideal way to design a welfare system for various reasons. Partly because it may encourage the creation of more single moms.

59:35Oh, there's less obligation from the guy. Oh, you know, she's got a benefit check. So I can just, I'm, I'll flee. She can look after herself. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I totally buy that. Yes, there is a tendency to just blame men for their own failings, whereas with women, maybe less so. I would also say one of the other things I think going on is that there are just more socially acceptable pathways for women to exit the labor market. If a man stays home and says, well, I'm just going to focus on, I'm going to read, I'm going to cook, I'm going to learn all these useful domestic skills so that someday when I marry someone, I can be a really useful house husband.

1:00:22Nobody's like, okay, cool. But if a woman says that, like there's guys lining up at her door. Right. Allow me to service you. Right. So there are like, there are like these acceptable pathways out of employment for women. They just like aren't there for men. Likewise, like if a woman has a baby and she says, why I'm going to take a year off to like raise my kid, people are like, oh, that's great. But if a guy's like, oh, we had a baby, I'm going to take a year off. People are like, dude, your child must be fed and clothed. Go to work. Yeah, can you dig into the men as providers versus men as insurers thing a little bit more?

1:01:01I've never heard of this this yeah in the past so okay

1:01:08We have a norm that really emerged in the 20th century That women don't contribute to household subsistence Okay, this didn't happen in the past because it would never have worked, right? Like for humans to survive, everybody needed to be working on the farm. Okay? Now, you did have separation of tasks, okay? Men maybe did the plowing, women raised the chickens, women raised the cow, did the dairy, okay, there's a division of labor. But I mean, look, go read Little House on the Prairie, okay? Ma is working all the time. Okay, she's not just keeping house. Ma is out there making things of economic value that then Paul goes into town and sells.

1:01:56Okay. And while those books are fictionalized, they are accurate in representing that particular facet of subsistence, which is that women provided a very large share of the labor that gave households their subsistence in income throughout all historic human societies. It's only in the 20th century, to some extent in the 19th. But especially the 20th century, that society's routinely became productive and wealthy enough that women could actually not contribute to subsistence and income. That men's productivity got so high that it became possible to say actually women can stay home and have book club.

1:02:40Well, they could they could stay home previously, but home was not a place raft of doing Seabed. In an agricultural society, everyone stays home. Like the dad is staying home because home is just the field in front of your house that feeds you or you die. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like, the whole staying home distinction is invented in like 1750. Okay. So you get like the sphere of of domesticities in Vintu basically. I mean, look, you can go into the Bible in the book of Proverbs, the Proverbs 31 woman. She grows crops, she weaves fabric, she sells goods in the marketplace. She does all of the economic production of the house.

1:03:23The man sits in the gate, which is code for politics and war. Can I do, I need to just send a giant, I've got an idea that I'm gonna be terrified, I'm gonna lose providers and shows we're gonna go from the woman from the Bible. Is it right for me to say then that what we're talking about is a novel new position for women in society when we take a broader perspective than simply the last 300 years is not one of them working, not one of them providing and contributing in this way, but one that is done in a much much more statusful way. It seems to me that the difference we have in the modern female work to the, I guess, historical and then ancestral female work is that this is done in a much more male style, which is power, status, individuality, autonomy.

1:04:25Is that the, a key distinction or am I so getting shit here? No, you're absolutely right. So actually, the proverb 31 is actually a great case to exemplify this. So the woman does all the subsistence. The man sits in the gate, which is a cultural reference for politics and war, okay? So what is politics and war in a Bronze Age society or an Iron Age society? Well, it's not your daily provision. Like a warrior does not provide you your daily food. What is he? He's insurance against the other warriors, okay? He's, if you say, what is the big risk in my society? Well, it's that the Midianites come and kidnap me and my children and sell us into slavery.

1:05:05That's the big risk. So I wanna ensure against that, okay? I need a man for that. Look, I can weave my own fabric and grow my own barley and make my own barley beer. But I, mother of children, cannot march off on campaign against the Philistines, okay? So a man ensures against that or if you think about agricultural like a state -based agricultural society Where like imminent rating and pillaging is not an immediate threat still Women do a lot of the subsistence work But they do different kinds than they mean they do things that are more compatible with having children around Um, actually often they do more valuable.

1:05:53That is often they're doing work that's actually more cash -based, that is more saleable. Um, whereas often the men are doing the like the, the, the staple crops that are basically muscle -powered intensive. Um, so, uh, but when we think about insurance, what's going on here is women can provide for their own needs, their own daily needs, okay? Most humans can't and this has been true in all societies. But what happens though is suddenly you get pregnant in your ability to work declines and then you have a baby in your ability to work declined and you have more needs Eventually the baby grows up and the baby contributes to work around the age somewhere between a six and 14 depending on the setting The kid basically becomes economically self -sufficient, okay?

1:06:35So you really only have about you know six to ten years for that kid where you you need coverage So you need like a temporary like unemployment insurance program basically and what's that program called is called husband You can do without husband if you don't have kids But if you have kids holy cow you need husband, right? He is an insurance product. He's not a oh Wifey needs hubby because otherwise she can't survive without him. No Wifey needs hubby because those kids that hubby put in her have wrecked her prior subsistence strategy. So he's better insurer for the damage he did. Because that suggests that in the modern world, if women have got a lot of savings, that they are much more prepared to be a solo mother that they...

1:07:27Yeah, and so most solo mothers, by choice, do tend to be higher income. You talk to high income unmarried women and they do talk about, oh, I have to save up all this money before I have a kid because it's all going to have all these effects. They're not entirely... Sure is. Yeah, yeah. They're self -insuring. Yeah. But self -insuring is really hard. It's really expensive. It's really nice to have somebody else with uncorrelated income. And men's income is uncorrelated with women's fertility choices. We know this from all the motherhood penalty literature that when women have a baby, their income crashes, but their spouse is doesn't.

1:08:02So like the judgment that you want someone with uncorrelated income, it has been tends to be uncorrelated is true. Yeah. Why is it that women keep selecting for men who are higher than this even if those women are out earning men on average? So basically, so what do you, so, okay, so I recently bought disability insurance for myself. Okay, so like if I get disabled, it'll cover, I don't know, something. And it, it's calculated as a percentage of my income. Why is that? Well, because when I was talking to my financial advisor, she was like, well, you have to about maintaining your standard of living if you become disabled.

1:08:38So why do women want spouses whose income is in some way comparable to their expectations and those expectations as we discuss are largely based on the standards of living that they would expect that their father provided for them. For the same reason that your disability insurance is or your life insurance is calibrated based on your income because you want to maintain a standard of living during the period in which you expect to be drawing on your insurance plan. People understand that habituation and hedonic adaptation are a hell of a drug and people don't like to go backward. Exactly. People intuitively understand that you do not want to go backwards.

1:09:14I mean, that's the same with the your current girlfriend's father's net worth versus your own thing. And how much do you think just a little bit back to that? How much do you think that is contributing to the sort of resentful bitter energy of intergenerational competition theory. The... Yes. Yes. My absolute favorite answer. When I'm like a third of a way through a half baked theory and you're like, yes. That's it. Is that two questions on that? is that both true for, why is that true? Is that true for both men and for women? Is there this sense in women where they go, these male suitors aren't doing as well as my dad, which makes for a pool of ineligible partners?

1:10:10I think so, yeah, I mean, you can see lots, you can, is easy to find women complaining about the lack of eligible partners online. And if you, so I've done some structured interviews use on this as part of a project. And when you lean on this argument a little bit, you end up finding that what these women are tend to be saying is, a lot of it is about socialization. That is they'll say, I mean, look, there's guys out there, but they're weird. So like that's a big part of it. And that's not really about income. That's, we can talk about that. That's, yeah, that's a separate dynamic. Okay, but when the income stuff comes up, usually what they'll say is, look, you know, he doesn't have to earn more than me.

1:10:51He just has to have a stable job that like he's proud of. And then you say, okay. Really? And then they're like, well, like, so I did a couple of these structures and interviews and like multiple women unpromptedly were like, well, look, my dad wasn't rich, but he did this job. And I'm like, boom, we're at the daddy comparison. We got like intuitively if you just push people on this like you don't even have to If they start to compare to fathers. Yeah, and I think that's super normal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, who is the most who is the most formative male partner role model that you have? That's most common people appeal to is like a friend's husband.

1:11:35Okay. Is like a friend who got married and has a husband. and they'll say, well, my friend's husband, like, she earns more than him, but he has a good job. And then they're like, is his income similar to what her father's income was? And you're like, I guess, yeah, it is kind of similar. So for my wife and I, I'll just do full disclosure. Her mom is a nurse and her dad is a pastor. and my dad is a pastor, and our mom is a nurse. I earn way more money than my wife earned zero money now, but my earning potential was clearly higher than hers early on. And so if you just looked at our individual stuff, it looked like hypergamy, she married up.

1:12:26But if you look at our parents' occupations, it's like this was literally a perfect 100 % within class marriage. Yeah, the regression to the mean keeps on regressing. Dig into that social ineptitude among young men. That's the most polite way that I can put it. Yeah, so for what it's worth, I don't think it's just young men. I think there's a lot of socially incompetent young women as well. But they code very differently. socially, being competent young men code as like creepy, weird, and autistic. socially, being competent young women code as like angry, depressed, and anxious. So there are different kinds of things.

1:13:13But basically what I think is going on, and I think actually scholar named Alice Evans has written a lot on this and very, very capably and lucidly and not from like a, you know, frothing at the mouth, right, being perspective. She's, she's, I think, quite, quite liberal, personally. But she's nonetheless, well, sees the same thing, which is where young men and women are just inhabiting totally different social spheres. They don't live in the same world. Online or in person, they learn different ways of interacting, different cues about what's normal. My favorite example of this, there was a survey in Korea where like something like 70 % of young women reported that they'd been like sexually assaulted and then they asked them like what what is the sexual assault and like like 5 % of men reported they've been sexually assaulted and like only like 8 % of men admitted to ever having sexually assaulted anyone So they're like how do these numbers stack up and then they asked everyone like what counts as the sexual assault and like women's list of what counted as sexual assault was just like pages of things.

1:14:20And men were like, well, he didn't ejaculate in her. So was it really sexual assault? Like, Jesus Christ. They just had like totally different definitions. Right. So both groups are absolutely insane. Yeah, they like clearly both had some, like there were clearly a bunch of psychotic people in both groups. Well, to say that there were bad things happening on both sides and people being truthful on both sides. Yes. Yeah. And also a ton of concept creep as well. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, you know, like clearly bad things happening. But like the training to me was just the extent to which the two sexes just had zero mutual understanding of what is second massive failure of cross sex mind reading.

1:15:01And you see this, I mean, Korea is an extreme case, okay? Not ever as like Korea, but you see versions of this Africa. Can you explain what, like what the fuck happened in Korea culturally?

1:15:14I don't have complete answers to that, but I can do some educated speculation. So Korea is not alone. We see similar dynamics in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Japan. And these countries have some things in common culturally. And so there's a temptation to say it's something about like the historic legacy of synodic cultural norms or something. I don't think it's that. I think it's the specific development model that they adopted in the mid 20th century. So all of these countries adopted versions of export -led growth and basically the idea that they would massively suppress consumption, labor activism, everything to maximize savings, investment, exports, and growth.

1:16:21Okay? So the result is you have these societies that just had incredibly low fertility rates early on. I mean, Japan's fertility rate gets low quite early. There's societies that really aggressively told people you should not have a family, you should work harder. You should grind harder instead of having kids, which is civilizationally suicidal advice. So what were you wishful? Yeah, yeah. So they gave this advice and they implemented this advice successfully. And they grew really fast. These are also societies that their strategy for growth was not just grind harder in the factory. It was grind harder at school.

1:17:11And grind harder at school is an interesting dynamic because women Women do really well in school. School is a female favorable environment for a variety of reasons, and it has become more so over time. And yet, these are societies that women had curtailed work opportunities. So they did great in school, and then they didn't get a great job. Because sexist boys club, or because it was hard to make work compatible with family or any number of things. women degrade at school and didn't get great jobs. So this creates a situation where a lot of women feel aggrieved about their circumstances, legitimately in many cases, which creates a uniquely extreme culture among young women.

1:18:04And I do want to emphasize, I said before there's something going on on both sides, but But if you compare Korean young men's social values on the world value surveys to other countries with similar incomes, they're young men are not unusual. Young, free and men are not unusual. They're not super, their views of gender and sex and marriage are not that atypical for other societies with their income levels. But Korean women, young Korean women, have extremely atypical gender attitudes for a country of their income level. They're extremely progressive, basically. On a number of standard survey battery questions about women in the workforce, mother staying home with children, the place of marriage and children in a happy life, questions like this, young Korean into electric, lesser extent Taiwanese, Japanese, young people, or just the young women are just unusually progressive for societies with their other characteristics.

1:19:20The young men are kind of normal. So to me that says that something did happen among women particularly and I think it's a combination of women succeeding in school then being locked out of the workplace by Asian work norms. I think also K -pop was a state sponsored initiative by the Korean government in the 1990s. To create a services export to match their goods exports They were very successful they created a whole new cultural world and the distinctives of kpop are and now of C pop or J pop or any of the Asian pop cultures now are single sex bands that are young heavily plastic surgery and and contractually sell it.

1:20:23That is literally they sign like when they apply to the record programs, they agree to like live in dorms, not have relationships, not have children for the duration of their contract. And then once they wanna have a family, they have to stop performing. So they systematically created a culture of childless celebrities and role models. Wow. So I really recommend there's a documentary about the band Blackpink. It's an interesting documentary to watch, if you're interested in the social phenomenon of K -pop. I am, what can people watch it on YouTube? It's on Netflix, I think, or at least it used to be on Netflix.

1:21:03The last scene, you're gonna watch the whole thing and it would be like, why is life in recommending that this is weird unless you're just like really into teen girl culture? The last scene will clarify for you why I recommended it. But beyond that, I mean, okay, so I was in Vietnam two weeks ago. And we went to a place called the Bana Hills, okay? It is, it's a hill, it's a big mountain above Hoi An, above Dhan An, Vietnam. And I've done a couple of these cable car top of the mountain hill stations in Southeast Asia before. And the other ones I've been to, you go to the top and it's a scenic view.

1:21:44You know, you see the clouds and the mountains and the hills. It's beautiful. Maybe there's a Buddhist temple. Okay. I did not realize what Bonna Hills was. They have built a fake French German Bavarian village on top. There's a fake castle. It's crazy. Okay. There's nothing to do. You just take Instagram pictures. And it's filled with cute. It's filled with cute. like the little cats and the little dogs and the two cute stuff that's like so Asian. And I think the whole cute culture is like part of what's going on in Asia is like their childhood was so ruined by their educational culture that they have to stay children until they're 40.

1:22:33I'm just now like saying that. Yeah, I'm in trouble. But we're already in trouble. But like talk to young Asian people about how much how their school culture was when they were growing up. It's not fun. That's fascinating and so the the only thing that I still don't fully I mean, I don't understand a lot of it But the thing that I mostly don't understand is where this intense liberalization of women in Korea came from is that That's simply a reaction to this imbalance between performance in school and opportunity in the workforce. Or is there something else going on? Yeah, so I think the genesis of it is basically Asian women lept ahead in school, in the in a rancid or brick wall in the workplace, which created a culture of legitimate frustration.

1:23:28So think about how fucking resentful you'd be. I would be totally fuck. So you tell me for all of this time, I've been in this weird, you know, insular in some places, on a culture thing. Does this sort of, it's very patriarchal, it's sort of steeped in history, it's got a long heritage, fuck me if you're in Japan. It's, you know, the country was completely isolated for the like four centuries or something, and you're telling me that now, oh, hooray, I finally got access. I can go and perform in education in the way that I want, and I reach out and nothing's changed. Yeah, so like, there's a legitimate frustration there.

1:24:04And then I think that the emerging cultural norms around like the K -popification of Asian youth, on the other hand for young men, you get a different dynamic around like anime and porn and stuff like that. But I think that it basically creates, like K -pop stars, they're not just K -pop stars, they're lifestyle influencers. They're sharing things about their vacations and all this stuff. And they are childless. Surely that creates a vector though for opportunity in the same way that the Georgian priest did, because if you're concerned about population decline in Korea, all that you need to do is make all the new K -pop stars have come out on stage full of children.

1:24:45Someone's been reading my advice to the Korean government. No, we just have the same level of autism. There you go. So no, so yeah, so like if like if I was you know in charge of Korea For a day Oh, there's Kim Jong -un or whatever like here's here's what I would do I would first say first the standardized testing that like governs your whole young life first born children Get automatically docked like 5 % of their grade Just first one children are pinched Second born children, the penalty is a little bit smaller. Third born children, no penalty. Fourth born it up, you get bonuses, okay? So you just punish people for having small fans.

1:25:28You just, basically you just say look. If you were to... If you were to... If that would cause a situation in which stupid, but seventh children of a family get better jobs, does that not create an issue in the economy? You know, maybe, but I'm confident enough that like look like I have utmost confidence in the ability of the Asian education system to turn people into functional workers. And there's not that many seventh born children, so this is not going to be a big problem. And you could still set like a minimum standard. Like you could be like, yeah, you can't get it to the top universe. But like, yeah, so one is, yeah, I think that you should basically just just, you know, just penalize our bonus test scores based on parity or you could just say like no first more children are allowed in the top university so you could do categorical qualifications instead and then secondly just make it illegal to perform publicly in Korea if you don't have a child perform music publicly so boom all kpop stars will have children in nine months you've done You've done very well in creating the North in the South overnight, the dictatorial accusation.

1:26:46So, I mean, look, would this work? Like, no, because it would be massive backlash. Um, but no, that's a difference. Would it work? Maybe. Would it be accepted? Let's put it this way. I would be king for precisely one day. Yeah. Until everyone read your fucking policies. So like, there's, this wouldn't work for a variety of reasons. but I think the question, once you start thinking about why it wouldn't work, you immediately realize that it's correctly identifying the problem, right? It's the high status social role models. It's the status system. The fact that it probably actually would topple a Korean government if they messed with K -pop is all you need to know about what's really going on.

1:27:30Wow. Yeah, well, look, it seems to me to be a vector for influence and you know that can go in directions that the time seemed great and in retrospect seemed maybe great. So, unless authoritarian way of doing this is to know that the Korean, the Korean like called Ministry of Culture or whatever it's called actually does have like stakeholder quasi -owner status in some of the K -pop industry and they could just use that status to nudge the companies they are involved with, to systematically promote K -pop stars with families. Going back to the West for a second, what is the truth in the double shift for women but not for men.

1:28:25Women do not have a double shift on average. Statistically speaking, men and women report, which married moms and dads, that's the group we're talking about here, married moms and dads report virtually identical combined hours of household and non -household work. women report slightly more daily hours or daily minutes of leisure and sleep. But it's like, I think it's like seven minutes more or something. It's like trivial margin of error stuff. Mary, moms and dads have virtually identical overall workloads. There's not a difference in leisure of any note between the two. I read that Robert the the berugan article on IFS, the myth of the lazy father.

1:29:14Yeah, what does he say? It's probably something similar. Yeah, it shows that country to widespread belief when you consider both paid and unpaid labor, fathers and mothers do similar amounts of work. In fact, on average, fathers do slightly more. The myth of the lazy father persists in part because when evaluating gender fairness among parents, we tend to focus on household chores while ignoring paid employment. And the guy sites as Steve Stewart Williams again saying, as Steve noted in the 8th to understand the universe, it is more common, not just among humans, but in nature writ for females to be the sex that invests more in children.

1:29:46We shouldn't find it surprising or offensive if women indicate a greater desire to spend time with their children, even if it costs them at work and they do. Yeah, so I mean, there isn't a second shift on average. Now I will say, average is always disguise important variation. For women who are working full time, there is a second shift because women who are working full time don't necessarily tend to have a commensurate reduction in their family responsibilities. On the other hand, for women who are not working at all, their husbands tend to have excessively high combined work. So what's going on is that

1:30:41The distributions are wonkier than the averages would make us think. So there are a lot of women who are working full -time and then coming home and still having to do a lot of domestic stuff because their husband is not compensating in the way that they might have wished. So they are facing a second shift and those women may have a legitimate gripe, but they They are offset by other women who are not working full time and also whose housework is not even approximately close to their husbands combined paid and unpaid work. Yeah, it's a strange one with that, I guess, sort of the visibility and the stereotypical mundanity of household chores.

1:31:34The guy that stays an extra hour at work versus the woman who has to cook a meal. It feels like it feels worse. It's like, well, in the same way, pick up artists back in the day used to take girls to three different locations on one first date because the way that the human brain perceives time and locations, it feels like more is going, oh, I'm more familiar with this person. I've been to the park and I went to the ice cream shop and we went to the swimming pool together or whatever. And I get the sense that the type of chores, the type of household work that you do, it's the parity between those two doesn't feel quite fair.

1:32:11And if you were to say, across a day, 10 hours was, let's say 10 hours was spent. One of those things was done in one. And one of those things was seven and three. The seven and three feels like more work in a way. So the other thing going on is that there's very different, very big differences in the satisfaction that the sex is derived from different activities. So jobs that are more female dominated tend to be jobs that are more personally satisfying. That is they tend to be jobs that people are more likely to report being satisfied and happy while they do the job. Whereas jobs men do are more likely to be somewhat miserable.

1:32:54Again, we're talking averages. I know I'm going to get crap about this at some point. Somebody be like, you didn't think about this thing. We're talking averages. And this is data from the American Time Use Survey that shows this. So when women visualize work, they're visualizing a bit of work that's relatively satisfying and pleasant. So you can have a situation where the woman at home is doing a chore that maybe is not super satisfying or pleasant though I'll come to that in a moment. And she visualizes the work that her husband is doing as being very satisfying and pleasant when the actual work he's doing is perhaps relatively unpleasant.

1:33:39You know, he's up on a roof installing yet another solar panel hoping he doesn't fall off.

1:33:48So you do get a dynamic like that. Then secondly, in general, female biased activities or activities where people tend to report higher life satisfaction while they're doing them, it's not just paid work. So like activities that involve care of children, people tend to report very high life satisfaction while doing those activities, they tend to report that those activities give them a lot of joy. Even if it's changing diapers, yes. So, now that's while that's activity specific. On the whole, when people reflect on their life, you do get a lot of women who say, what did I do with the last 10 years?

1:34:32I just changed diapers and did these things. And I think that's probably because our society culturally does a bad job of providing narratives that create sort of long -run macro meaning in parenting. And I think this is actually an interesting tie -back to the Georgian case. Because I think part of what happened in Georgia is that they were able to give people a sense of long -run meaning in having children. That child is part of a bigger project than just the satisfaction you get from being with your kid and getting some snuggles. So I think what happens with a lot of stay at home moms or not even say almost but mom's doing domestic things is in any given moment they'll talk about how satisfying the work is, how much they enjoy, how much they like it, but then they also feel like they don't really have access to like a story of meaning about how this is like a long -term project that progresses and really built something.

1:35:27They're not they're not building in the way that like their husband is building a career because we don't really have a narrative in our society about that. We don't do a good job of communicating like, well, you are building something. You're building a family. Like, to be very real since you're building a civilization. Like you are, in some sense, like the culture creator for these children. And civilization is just the culture that's built for each generation. Like you are engaged in the central civilizational task your husband is just paying for it. But that's not how we think about it because most of us today can see the central civilizational task as market remunerated work.

1:36:14Right? It's it's that. I have a theory around this. Two working titles for it. You can help me modify it with me if you want. So I'm playing off the Matilda effect. I'm calling it the reverse Matilda effect or second option, the soft bigotry of male expectations. That basically if a woman can do it, it's seen as less important. And this was brought about and it's fucking true, dude. It's true. You know how it was so fucking true, the most true that it's ever been, was that study that said, yes, women did as much big game hunting as men and maybe even more. You know, there was that big study that came out and this group of very ideologically motivated researchers had said, yes, women did precisely the same amount in some situations you can see that they even did more.

1:37:01And big game hunting is calorie negative in any case, so it kind of doesn't matter. And it's like, yeah, because you've finagled the data so hard to make it like one incident of big game hunting was matched with like one a week from female to male. And you have to ask yourself the question. And this was what brought it about. And it's one of those like weird self -owns from people that are trying to be really manipulative with what they're doing. And you go, what were you trying to say? What you were trying to say is that inherent in what women did, what they actually did, or at least what we can infer that they did from, you know, hunter -gatherer societies that we can observe and stuff like that, was somehow less valuable.

1:37:39And because of that, we need to fucking retroactively change the narrative in order for what women did to be what men did. And that's like if I'm a if I'm a woman and my ancestor it's fucking patronizing. It is so fucking patronizing It's the exact same. It's the exact same Andrew Schultz told me this and it's it's like a Formative memory that I've got about what modern women have to deal with so His wife apparently is way smarter than him and used to work at Google and was like you know super high achiever type person, but wanted to have a family. And Andrew's real successful. And she has the benefit of now being a state home mum.

1:38:21And he would be out with her at the supermarket. And they'd both run into people that she used to work with at Google. And they would say, oh, it's so nice to see you. And what are you doing now? And her reply would be, I'm just a mum. And Andrew said it was the word just that really killed him. That there's this inherent sense of insufficiency that women have, that especially if you're talking to a still currently employed, maybe mother, maybe non -mother, that's a fucking Google, that you almost need to apologize. It's like, oh, I got conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic servant. And yeah, I just put my son grass on.

1:39:03And I mean, this weird sort of like survival role that I've got. And he said, yeah, it was the just that killed me. Yeah, it's awful. No, I mean, that's like,

1:39:16and on the other hand, if you say something like, oh, I'm raising my children, people are like, are you saying I'm not because I'm working? Right. Like, okay. Or it was like the soft bigotry of career expectation. Right? If you say what you're actually doing, like, I'm hands on raising my kids, people feel insulted by you saying that, because like, what are you saying about, I'm raising my kids? Or if you were to say something like, you know, I'm ensuring the continuity of civilization of knowledge, it was just a thousand years. People will like, little bit grandiose, don't you think? And I'm like, that's what you're like, when my wife talking, when my wife and I talk about this, I'm like, that's literally what, what, like, I'm working out here, work, I'm working, I'm, you know, I'm doing spreadsheets and emails.

1:40:05because that brings in money that we can spend on a whole year political and religious project. That are people who have been doing for a very long time. Look, I mean, when I'm implementing that project, one of my least favorite dynamics, and this is something that I noticed when I first stopped drinking about nine years ago. So I'm aware that now low and no lifestyles the fucking like health and fitness does your right? It's like so common. Everybody's on low and low and when it comes to alcohol consumption. But about a decade ago in the Northeast of the UK, this is fucking revolutionary, right?

1:40:46I was, I did invented the steam engine. And I should tell you, one of my ancestors, Lyman Beecher literally invented the word T totally. What? Where did that come from? because when they would have their big religious revivals, he would go in around and ask everyone how committed they were to getting rid of alcohol. Where are they going to get rid of all alcohol, just some alcohol. And if they were going to totally remove alcohol, he would mark their name with a T, T for total. What? That is sick. So my family have been T totalers ever since I remain, but I married into Lutheranism. So I'm now the designated driver for my church.

1:41:30Heathens. Heathens everywhere. But yeah, sorry, that's a digression. That was a fucking sick story, dude. Um, yeah, I go sober and I'm in nightlife still. I'm running all of these nightclubs. I'm up till three, four in the morning in different cities across the North of the UK. And uh, people got pissed. But people people got people, other people were made to feel uncomfortable by my lifestyle choice. And I think that it's maybe not too dissimilar when you lean into the level of attention that you are giving to raising your kids. Inherent in me stopping drinking is the value judgment of not drinking is something I want to do.

1:42:17Presumably it's something I want to do because I think it's something that's good to do, which infers that the opposite of this is something which I would prefer not to do, which infers that that's bad, which means that if you're doing it, you are bad, which is your sense of self, which you're fucking self. Right? And this weird quadruple loop rollercoaster, mental cascade dance thing that people go through, just straight away. You know, from I'm doing this thing and take pride in it to, that means I think it's good, that means that not doing the thing is bad, that means that if I do it, it's not bad, that means that it's a slight against me.

1:42:49It's a type of mental gymnastics that would win gold. But why is it like that? Okay, so this is the interesting question. You're, because you're totally right. That's 100 % what's going on. Anytime you say, I'm making choice X for me, people are immediately like, why are you judging my lifestyle? So now in my case, it's fair because I'm also a judgment, a very judgmental person. So like, They're not wrong about me, but I'm sure you're less judgmental than me. So, but the interesting thing is why are people like this? And I think the reason actually gets back to some of the like fertility as a social contagion thing we were talking about earlier, which is like if you think of humans in the ancestral environment, like small mid -sized hunter gathered groups, like conformity is actually really important.

1:43:39like these are actually in many on many dynamics, not everything. These are very conformist environments, same with like agricultural societies where you're living with the same people from many generations. Conformity is really important. And when somebody else just starts doing something differently, like it can be problematic for the group dynamic, right? Like if you're all going to hunt mammoths one way and then Joe is like, man, I'm going to do it this way, like it takes a team to bring down a mammoth. Joe can't just do his own mammoth hunting thing. Likewise for foraging. Like if you all know that there's 13 edible crops in the area and Sarah's like, I'm just going to throw this in the mix of berries that we've collected today.

1:44:22Maybe everyone dies. Thanks Sarah. So, you know, conformity humans are conformists we want to be conformists. It's soothing to conform. It's pleasant. We seek it out. Now there's also cases in which we seek out individuation for certain fitness -related reasons, but at a basic level, for most of our decisions, most of us really want to just follow the crap. Outsource to the wisdom of the group. Yeah, and that's good. I want to be clear, I'm not saying that that's like a flaw. It's actually like a great hack that we do this so naturally, that we mostly for like a lot of kind of low attention decisions we just outsoom.

1:45:05But it also means that we our brains are hardwired to devote like excess attention to people who act differently. We're interested in them, we're fascinated by them, we make Netflix shows about them, our literature is about them, but we're also often horrified and offended by them. And so this speaks to the fertility contagion issue because it means like as soon as what's normal switches for whatever reason and I could go through a laundry list of historic cases where we've seen just a switch in the normal on family life. And not just family size like incest who you can marry, polygamy, like all these different norms where that you can see places where just it flips and what's normal changes.

1:45:55and humans just, everybody changes. And fertility's like that, where you can get quite rapid changes, because what's normal changes, and cultural norms can pivot on a dime. Cultural norms seem like they last forever until they suddenly change. Dude, you're so awesome. You're fucking fantastic at this. I think you're a phenomenal communicator. I'm sure that lots and lots of people are angry about lots and lots of things that we've said and my my inherent Desire to not be misconstrued always runs up against talking about this topic which I'm fascinated in but I'm sure you've given me great Fodder to journal about at some point when when the reactions come but you're you're just really really great I love how you really do approach this like a demographer sterile and inhospitable

1:46:55I can't wait to talk to you again. I've got so much more I want to talk to you about, but for now let's bring this one into land. Where should people go? They want to check out your stuff. InstuperFamilyStudy's ProNatalism Initiative is the place to go or you can find me on Twitter at LimestoneKY. I should clarify that's KY for Kentucky. It's not that I have an Eastern European last name. Oh, KY. Yeah, but yeah, no, I mean, it's great being on here and I hope this is helpful for people. I hope what people took from this is that cultural influence matters. And if you're sibling has a baby, you can make your co -workers have babies too.

1:47:28Wow. What a whatever the opposite of a tragedy the commons is. I appreciate you. Thank you. I'm pleasure.