 You were talking to a lot of people who were referencing the movie, Idiocracy, the Mike Judge film, which has a very famous introduction. And I've also pulled that clip, which I want to roll and talk about a little bit. Best, could you play the Idiocracy clip? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence with no natural predators within the herd. It began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species. Having kids is such an important decision. We're just waiting for the right time. It's not something you want to rush into, obviously. No way. Oh, shit, I'm pregnant again! Shit! I got too many damn kids! I thought you was on the peel of some shit! Oh, no? That's the thing with Brittany. Brittany? No, you didn't! There's no way we could have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no. No, that just wouldn't make any sense. Come on over here, bitch! He don't care about you! Yeah, well, there must be something he likes over here! Give me that to me, baby! It wasn't me! Well, we finally decided to have children, and I'm not pointing fingers, but it's not going well. And this is helping? I'm just saying that before I have an in-beat trail, maybe you should be willing to... It's always me, right? Well, it's not my sperm count. So, implications are obvious. Having a lot of kids is for stupid people. It's a real class endeavor, right? Like, that's the... Yeah, exactly. Why do you think that it has such cultural resonance? Was that say about attitudes towards kids and family? And I love it because I first heard about that movie. The first time anyone ever asked me, have you watched Idiocracy? I was at a Reason Happy Hour and said to one of my friends there that I was expecting my second in 2008. And she said, oh, have you seen Idiocracy? And I think she meant it in a friendly, joking way. But then when she explained the plot, I wasn't sure how to take it. And yeah, and this is something I encountered in Playground and New Milford, Connecticut, which I highlight as a shrinking town. The Playground was outside of an elementary school that's closed down and was currently hosting Senior Yoga instead as sort of the future. And I think, again, the idea that it's smart... And both sides get mocked in this movie, right? Like, the yuppie couple with 140 IQs are not coming out as the, you know, the prudent, the people to look up to. But really the idea that raising kids is this... Because it's become such a choice, because it's not just kind of something you do. Now, there are subcultures where finished school, get a job, get married, have kids. It's just kind of what you're expected to do. And well, if you're going to deviate from that, you're making a different choice. That's fine. But now it's not even that. It's not expected. It's like choosing what color sweater you're going to put on in the morning. It's an explicit choice. It's a lifestyle choice. Because of that, A, it leads to a culture that says it's your problem if you have kids. But B, it makes you feel, and I quote Stephanie Murray. He was a great parenting writer on this. Once it becomes a choice, then you have to do it all exactly right. It's like you... I would tell my kid, don't go to college if you're not going to try to get good grades and that kind of thing. And this is what people say. You're not going to absolutely do it right. Make sure you have everything in order. Make sure you have the house in the right school district and you have the savings to send them to college and you have lined up the piano teacher, etc. Then don't do it. And so that's, again, the way in which I think it's a self-reinforcing thing. As people have fewer children, their perception of the amount of inputs you need to do into child rearing goes up, which then makes parenting seem more daunting, which causes people to put it off. Sometimes you put it off too long and it's no longer in the cards for you. To me, the opposite vision of this is the sound of music, right? There's a little bit of horseshoe theory at play where it's like, okay, the poor and low-class family and idiocracy, okay, they have a ton of kids, but then there's also, we see this actually in a lot of the data surrounding this. Sometimes it's the ultra-wealthy families like Christopher Palmer's family and Sound of Music who end up having a whole bunch of kids who essentially live the libertarian dream, right? Like they have a governess, they do micro-schooling. Like it's an awesome sort of like means of, you know, you can really scale up the family. But so do we need cultural messages like that where we also show this being like a very high-class thing or do we need cultural messages where it's just seen as like ultra-attainable? To you, what's the, what's the ideal? Universal manners. Yeah. One job to come and raise all of the children for all of the families. I don't think the image of perfectly-behaved kids is the right one. To give an example, I try to get my kids to hold, especially my sons, to hold open doors for people because that's really easy to teach them and it's really easy to just say one word as you walk by them door and then they'll hold the door open. And that makes other people happy and it's really, my kids can't sing in unison. I have a son who can play the guitar and that's the extent of the music. And I actually go- They don't wear the outfits made out of curtains. You don't have anybody making them outfits out of drapes or anything. What's the point of having- I criticize the mom fluencers in my book. The, you know, the Instagram moms who everything is perfect and specifically the ones who, they all live in farmhouses. It's a bizarre thing that I can't understand. And the reason it's, I can't understand because it's supposed to look, oh, well, we are going a simple route. I mean, that farmhouse they made with the first five million they made off of their influencer cash. They often started with cash and the simple route, like you notice a denim is all like made to point perfectly towards the hues of the ballerina mother's blue eyes, right? Like it's, none of it is simple. It's all extremely curated. None of that helps people have kids because that's what causes people say, oh, I have to have my life that much in order to raise kids, to have kids who are basically happy who, you know, and they eat nuggets and french fries for dinner at least once a week. That's the kind of attainable image of the parent. I actually praise in family unfriendly. I praise the lawn that's scattered with like footballs and tricycles. And there's some dead grass from where the, you know, the home plate was left or the skateboard was left upside down to be a little bit messy and happy and that sort of thing. And not, not perfect kids, not Ivy League kids. So I, you know, have lower ambitions for your kids is one of the messages I have in the first two chapters for the book. Maybe it's not any accuracy or sound of music. Maybe it's like cheaper by the dozen. Remember like that movie, I guess there was the original one and then the Steve Martin remake, right? Even cheaper by the dozen, because he's like militaristic, that did set for me a tone. And I admit in the book, I say, when I'm a bad dad, when I lose my temper, it's because I want to think of myself as militaristic. Like if I whistle, my dogs come a certain whistle and cheaper by the dozen, he has a certain whistle where his 12 kids come. And again, there's a couple of things I'm good at, which is my kids open the door and they behave well and mass. But after that, I try to be, you know, relatively laissez-faire with the kids. Don't always succeed at that. But yeah, that model, that the things you think you need to do for your kids, you don't. They might look like a mess sometimes. Your house will look like a mess sometimes. Your kids won't get into Harvard, but that those things are all fine. That's the main message that I think needs to get conveyed to people. Now, does that sound to you like I'm saying you should live, you know, be a dude having babies with all his neighbors in the trailer park? Well, those sound the same to you. I'm sorry, I don't have much to say, but I think you can see sort of a stable couple with a moderate income and just trying to raise happy kids that that definitely is doable. Even in this world, you do have to change your expectations. That's all for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don't forget to click here or the full episode here. 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