Welcome to the Reality Taboo, where no topic
is off limits. It's April 11, 2025. I'm going
to be biking solo today, which is, at least in
the original game, the only way you can bike.
Jeff is at a bottle rocket conference. He'll
be back next week. We'll start with DEI and how
it just will not die. Looking at an economist
YouGov survey from this week that queried respondents
on how they felt about efforts that companies
and other institutions were making to ensure
diversity, inclusion and equity in their operations.
To the question, quote, do you have a favorable
or an unfavorable opinion of diversity, equity,
and inclusion programs, unquote. We get a net
favorability among the entire population, that
is the percentages who view it favorably and
subtracted from that the percentages who view
it unfavorably. We get a net favorability of
13 points across the entire population. There
are some noticeable demographic differences.
First, men are less keen on the idea of DEI than
women are. The net favorability for men is just
plus five, while for women it is plus nineteen.
The pursuit of excellence is a personality tendency
that skews heavily male, while concerns about
inclusion and The inherent problems with exclusion,
irrespective of the reasons for said exclusion,
is a trait more commonly associated with women.
And so, not surprisingly, we see it born out
here. Women may be the ones disproportionately
crashing the planes as of late. They are also
disproportionately the ones who want to ensure
that there are more female pilots in the future.
And if there are objective standards that get
in the way of that, then those standards are
the problem, not the problems that have to be
solved to ensure that a plane takes off the runway
safely and cruises at a healthy altitude and
that all the landing gear is deployed in a safe
and effective fashion. Those are not the problems
to be concerned with. The problems to be concerned
with are the rates at which men and women are
making it through pilot programs and pilot training.
There is also a stark generational divide. We've
talked in previous episodes about how younger
generations are skewing much more Republican
today than they were a generation or two ago
with Zoomers being about as likely to support
Trump and Elon Musk and the Republican Party
as Boomers are. In fact, Zoomers are more likely,
moderately more likely to support Republicans
than Boomers are. It's tempting to read that
as some sort of seismic shift in the political
and cultural landscape of the West. I... can't
shake the sinking feeling that it is more than
anything else a manifestation of economic frustration
and a depressed purchasing power experienced
by younger generations relative to generations
that came prior. And that goes a long way in
explaining why the tendency for younger cohorts
to move to the political right is something that
is happening not just in the United States, but
as happened in much of Western and Central Europe
and in fact happened in Europe before it moved
across the pond to the United States. And I think
it is largely because not that there is some
sort of cultural reactionary strain that has
grown in Europe and now has been exported across
the Atlantic Ocean to America, but instead that
the economic malaise that is characterizing the
Western world has been felt more acutely and
felt first in Europe, and that is why the rise
of parties like the National Front in France
and UKIP have predated the rise of MAGA in the
United States. If that analysis is broadly correct,
we should expect to see that if economic conditions
continue to deteriorate in America, we will see
a move away most sharply from Trump in terms
of support among younger generations. If that
is the case, I would expect that boomers would
stay about the same in terms of their favorability
towards Trump and the Republican Party, but that
Zoomers and Millennials would move more decidedly
leftward in the midterms and in 2028. And for
some circumstantial evidence that buttresses
that assessment, if we look at favorability of
DEI programs by age cohort, we see that zoomers
have a positive favorability and that favorability
of positive. 38, that is a staggeringly, overwhelmingly
pro -DEI orientation among those under the age
of 30, and it is mirrored identically among millennials
who also have a plus 38 favorability when it
comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Contrast
that to generation X, the Xers, that is the only
generational cohort with a net. unfavorable view
of DEI. Exers come in at negative 12, and Boomers
come in at plus seven. So Zoomers and Millennials
at plus 38 are wildly supportive of DEI. Exers
are skeptical as their generation is rightly
renowned for being. Boomers at plus seven are
lukewarm in their affection for DEI. If we look
next at the racial angle with regards to favorability
towards DEI. We see that I expended too many
adjectives describing the enthusiasm that Zoomers
and Millennials have for DEI because the racial
dynamics are even more stark than the generational
or the sexual dynamics are with regards to support
for DEI. Whites come in at a net favorability
of plus eight, so that same lukewarm. sentiment
to that boomers express we see mirrored here
in the racial group that most commonly gets coded
generationally as boomers, and that is whites.
Among Hispanics, the net favorability is even
lower at plus two, coming in almost even, and
among others, which mostly refers to Asians,
it's just plus one. And that shouldn't come as
a big surprise, given that Asians are often hurt
even more than whites are. Asian men in particular
are hurt more than white men are by DEI and other
affirmative action programs. And because while
they are not at the top of the oppression hierarchy,
they are more culturally sympathetic than whites.
And so it is often by way of the suffering experienced
by Asians through DEI programs that legal challenges
against institutions are brought most famously
the one against the Ivy Leagues against Harvard
for discrimination in favor of blacks and Hispanics
was brought on account of the under -representation
relative to test scores that it caused Asians
to experience. Even though Asians are wildly
over -represented relative to their share of
the population in the Ivy Leagues, they are under
-represented among those who score exceptionally
high on the entrance tests like the SAT and the
AC. When companies are celebrating or attempting
to celebrate their diversity chops, they will
often talk about about the percentages of their
workforce that is non -white. This is especially
the case in Silicon Valley. I recall some years
ago, Google talking about how its workforce was
only about 30 or 35 % white in response to racial
shakedown artists complaining that the company
was less than 5 % black or Hispanic. And both
sides were making points. that were truths by
commission, but there was a huge act of omission
that both were neglecting to mention, and that
was that Asians made up an outright majority
of the workforce and a wildly disproportionately
over -representative share relative to their
populations in the broader culture. But the reality,
whatever the media focus might be, the reality
is that if If admissions are effectively race
normed, then Asians are going to suffer more
than any other group, including whites, relative
to what their aptitudinal results would suggest
their inclusion rate should be. even if they
are over -represented in a numerical sense, they
are still under -represented the most relative
to how well they do on the batteries of exams
that allow people to be admitted in the first
place. So that is a bit of a long -winded way
of saying it's not especially surprising that
Asians are aware of the threat that DEI pretends
for them. The Hispanic figures are a little bit...
more of a head scratcher because Hispanics do,
although not to the same extent as blacks, which
is the figure I have. scandalously withheld up
to this point, but Hispanics do stand to benefit
quite a bit from DEI programs, even if not as
much as blacks do, and yet Hispanics also come
in at almost even on their net favorability towards
DEI. If I were to just offer some lazy armchair
conjecture, it would be something along the lines
of Hispanics not being as socially conscious
or socially obsessed as Non -Hispanic groups
in America are the image of an Amerindian day
laborer taking a siesta under a tree with a modello
Midday as the sweat and other bodily perspiration
evaporates as he takes his midday break in his
roofing or landscaping job being content to let
the gringo do the accounting and the marketing
and the drumming up of business and not being
particularly upset by the fact that he isn't
going to make as much per hour as the guy, the
foreman who is arranging all of the work but
isn't sweating as much, but whose neurons are
being asked to fire a lot more rapidly. I guess
that's an inarticulate way of... suggesting that
Hispanics are not as inherently upset by the
idea of social and economic hierarchies as non
-Hispanic Americans are. So to recap, whites
at plus eight favorability, Hispanics at plus
two favorability, and Asians at plus one. Blacks,
in contrast, deviate starkly, coming in at plus
52. DEI is F -U -B -U. It is FUBU. It's for us,
by us. Blacks understand that and understand
that attempts to undercut the initiative that
they've seen so much progress made on over the
last five or six years that rolling that back
will mean rolling back the benefits and the opportunities
that they have artificially enjoyed by the push
for greater DEI across all Western institutions.
be they academic, or business, or non -profit,
or broadly cultural, or existing in any other
social context. The distribution bipartisan affiliation
will likely come as, little surprise, Democrats
come in at a positive 64 net favorability, Independents
are lukewarm at a plus five favorability, and
Republicans come in at a negative 32. unfavorability.
The broader take -home point here with regards
to the future that DEI has in America is that
that future is bright. Overall the general broader
population is favorably inclined towards the
push for DEI and the demographic groups that
have the most cultural cachet. That is younger
people, blacks, Democrats, people on the left.
are the ones who are especially supportive of
DEI. And the Mr. Burns style Republican old white
male fat cats to the extent that they even exist
anymore given that the vast majority of the ultra
wealthy donate money to Democrats and to ostensibly
leftist or at least corporately democratic, corporately
liberal causes to the extent that that fat cat
Republican does still exist at the level of CEO
or other high executive office in private companies
or prestigious administrative positions at academic
institutions or charities or nonprofits. Well,
those guys can benefit by singing the praises
of DEI and pulling up the ladders beneath them
to ensure that the generations that come after
them don't look like them without suffering any
at all themselves. This poll was taken at the
end of March of 2025, well past the peak point
of DEI's perceived or presumed ascendancy in
America, and yet even with the election of Donald
Trump and the popular electoral majority that
he received and the support that Doge and other
MAGA associated movements have had over the last
several months relative to the last several years.
Even given all of that, all of that momentum,
still we see in surveys like this that the majority
of the population has a favorable view of DEI
and perceives attempts to dismantle or otherwise
deprioritize it as racist and sexist and hidebound,
retrograde, ugly regressive stuff. I want to
shift gears now, but before I delve into some
data from the general social survey, hopefully
news you can use that can be applicable in your
own lives or in the lives of those who you might
have under your stead with regards to what traits
in women are associated with infidelity and what
traits are associated with fertility with fecundity.
I want to get some incohate thoughts out about
the consequences or at least some segment of
consequences from the AI revolution that we are
in the midst of now, specifically with regards
to content creation. We are now at the point
where all the major AI programs are capable of
creating bots that are built on the entire corpus
of individual authors and writers, bloggers,
and other types of pundits. And these bots do
a remarkably good job of creating the sorts of
content that is... virtually indistinguishable
from the individuals that the bots are in reference
to. The Steve Saylor bot will give you a better,
wittier, and more immediate response than the
actual aged writer will be able to do at this
point. And anyone can create a Steve Saylor bot
and then... feed that bot some information about
some current event that is occurring and generate
a Steve Saylor response that will incorporate
Steve Saylor at the peak of his perspicacity
calibrated to the question or the subject at
hand and will deliver it in a way that draws
on everything that someone like Steve Saylor
who has been writing and commentating for several
decades has ever put out a corpus of content
that is much greater than the meat sack Steve
Saylor's brain would be able to recall at any
given moment in time. AI pulp fiction novels
are already as good as if not better than and
largely in many cases indistinguishable from
the large quantity of middling authors filler
content that fills digital book marketplaces
and what's left of brick and mortar bookstores
and they can be generated much more rapidly and
cheaply and without all the concerns about commissions
and royalties and copyrights. AI generated music
is better than the vast majority of what fills
the pop 40 radio airwaves. AI is not there yet
on the quantitative side of things. It's quite
bad, makes a lot of embarrassing mistakes when
it comes to trying to quantify things or do mathematical
problems or provide scientific proofs. But that's
likely only a matter of time and initially AI
was deep inside the uncanny valley when it came.
to images that it generated, but it has made
market improvements in just the last several
months, such that now AI images are becoming
increasingly difficult to detect by the naked
eye. If the last decade or so has represented
a sort of bountiful harvest for independent content
creators using the Patreon... type of freemium
model, something that was virtually impossible
to do 25 years ago. I think that may come to
represent a sort of interglacial period between
ice ages. I suspect the future will be one in
which it becomes quite difficult to carve out
a living as a digital content creator because
it will mean competing against a limitless pool
of knowledge that can be conjured at a moment's
notice, to scour everything that has ever been
written and posted online anywhere in the world
across all of time, and to do so with parameters
that are designed to appeal to certain targeted
groups, demographic groups or groups with particular
cultural affinities or interests, instead of
having to be a marketer who can write good copy.
The marketer just has to request that the AI
write copy for white men between the ages of
18 and 30 who have ever visited the Mises Institute
to read about some issue related to monetary
policy and how that plays into official CPI readings.
Or to make things even more simple, he can say,
write me an email subject line that Tom Woods
would use when talking about changes in perceptions
towards wearing masks during the COVID -19 pandemic
during the years of 2020 and 2022. If your work
is in the digital world, Even if it's not relegated
largely to clerical repetitive tasks, even if
it has a creative element, I admonish you to
be wary. I think you need to be on notice. This
could be, this is shaping up to be quite disruptive
to that broad professional segment of the modern
Western economic structure. There are a lot of
professions that have a lot of work that can
be very easily outsourced to AI to be done at
a fraction of the time and an even smaller fraction
of the cost. And these methods are going to improve
exponentially as they learn what to filter out
and what to bring in and how to react to specific
parameters that they're given. Conversely, skilled
workmanship in the meat stick world has a bright
future in front of it. The sci -fi of the 20th
century often predicted a future in which robots
did the vast majority of the physical tasks,
the menial labor, and the skilled technical physical
labor that humans had done for millennia prior
to that. perceived onset of that great technological
robot revolution. The reality though, at least
at this point, is that AI and advances in technology
have done much more, especially in the last couple
of years, to displace work in the digital world.
There aren't robots who can fix your leaky faucet
or figure out what's wrong with your circuit
breakers in your basement, but there are AI bots
that can write up. business contracts and marketing
copy and legal briefs in seconds on the hour
and pennies on the dollar of what the white color
cubicle monkeys of yesterday would require for
the same output. Okay, turning now to the general
social survey. Let's take a look at what traits
are associated with female infidelity. If you
are looking for a potential mate or you are responsible
for someone who will be doing so, hopefully will
be doing so in the future. Here are some broad
tendencies and traits and characteristics to
avoid and... alternatively to seek out if you
want to find someone who is likely to be loyal
to maintain sexual exclusivity with you. the
general social survey has for decades, ask respondents
if they have ever had sex with someone other
than their spouse while married. And so the caveat
at the outset is this data is being pulled from
respondents who either are married or have been
married at some point in the past. It's not looking
at infidelity if that is what it. if that's the
term that should be used when regarding a dating
relationship between two people. And that's probably
for the better. This is the sort of cheating
that is serious. It is cheating that has occurred
between people who have officially made the vows
and tied the knots and entangled themselves legally,
financially, spiritually, and otherwise. in a
way that's a lot more serious than a couple who
have been dating on and off for a couple months
when one of the members decides to go in a different
direction, even if it is without the knowledge
of the one who she is leaving behind. But the
tendencies and the patterns are surely applicable
to less serious relationships. If a woman will
cheat while married, then it is a pretty good
bet that she will cheat while dating. First thing
we'll look at are community types. So women who
live in big cities are about 30 % more likely
to cheat than women who live in small towns or
in suburbia. The differences here as we'll see
compared to other traits are fairly modest but
it's not surprising that closer proximity to
other people and the perpetual bustle of city
life is more conducive to running around. Sex
in the countryside doesn't quite get there in
the same way that sex in the city does. Devotion
to God is a pretty good proxy for devotion to
one's man. Women who attend church on a regular
basis are half as likely to cheat as women who
never or infrequently attend church services.
So the non -churchgoers are 100 % more likely
to cheat than the regular churchgoers are. That
is in comparison to the community type where
the big city women are about 30 % more likely
to cheat than suburban and small town women are.
More intelligent women are considerably more
likely to cheat than women of modest or mediocre
intelligence are. Using the word sum vocabulary
test as a proxy for intelligence from the general
social survey we see that women in the top quintile
of intelligence. are more than twice as likely
to cheat as women in the bottom quintile are,
with women in the middle three quintiles being
about midway between those two points. To put
some actual figures of straying on here, the
really smart group, so that's the top 20 % roughly
of intelligence, 16 .4 % of married women in
that category have cheated, compared to just
6 .9 % of women. in the bottom quintile, with
the middle 60 % coming in at just under 12%,
having cheated. Female hypergamy is a real thing,
and the types of women who have the firepower
to want to do the eat, pray, love thing are the
ones who are more susceptible to thinking that
there is really more out there for them more
to explore of themselves by exploring. other
people and not being constrained and confined
by the limiting bounds that official matrimony
puts in place. I looked here too at a list of
35 different occupations and ranked them by propensity
for women in these occupations to cheat. The
least loyal occupation with the most infidelity
is real estate agents and appraisers. With over
a quarter 26 % of them saying that they have
had sex with someone other than their husbands
while married. The second least loyal, lawyers,
with 24 % having ever strayed. Next is writers,
sculptors, painters, actors, and other artists
that I grouped together under an artistic umbrella.
22 % of them. have cheated. Next, fourth least
loyal are waitresses with 20%, one in five having
cheated. And the fifth least loyal are those
involved in sales and finance with 17 % having
cheated. You'll notice one thing that stands
out here are these are occupations that are very
type A, personality driven, at least three of
them, the real estate agents, lawyers, and the
sales and finance women. These are aggressive,
competitive, occupations that involve coming
into contact with a lot of high -status men.
These are also occupations that buck traditional
gender stereotype rules of what women who are
in the workforce should be doing or prefer to
be doing. If we look now instead at the five
most loyal occupations, we see the very most
loyal occupation of all our teaching assistants
with not a single one of those in the Decades
of the surveys existence having ever reported
cheating on their husbands next lowest our bank
tellers with three percent having strayed teachers
at 7%, office department managers at 8%, and
receptionists at 9%. Despite the common image
of an office secretary doing more for the boss
than just taking calls and sending out emails,
it's women in traditionally female job roles
who are the most trustworthy. I think the teaching
environment is especially ideal. particularly
women in elementary and middle school settings.
The women are surrounded by kids that fosters
a maternal instinct. They're shared with colleagues
who are also predominantly women and the men
who tend to be in elementary school and middle
school settings are not particularly desirable
alpha type males with the possible exception
of gym teachers who teach only as an excuse,
only as a way of being the coach of the varsity
football or basketball teams. I shouldn't just
allied over the other two occupations of high
infidelity that are not traditionally masculine
occupations that involve a lot of high pressure,
highly competitive settings that help build sexual
tension. Waitresses and artists are also quite
likely to stray. In the case of the artsy careers,
those careers by their very definition require
a high level of openness and so they are by way
of the personality types they tend to attract.
That is, those high in openness to experience
are inherently risky bets. And in the case of
waitresses, the sheer number of men that waitresses
inevitably come into contact with means the opportunities
for flings are endless. There are racial differences
as well. Black Black women are the most likely
to cheat with 16 % of black women having cheated,
compared to 13 % of white women, 9 % of Hispanic
women, and 7 % of Asian women. So the weeb stereotype
of the soft -spoken demure waifu is one that
is born out in reality. The anime girl only has
eyes for you, Mel House. You're all she thinks
about, you're all she dreams about. No one else
but you, forevermore. The biggest red flag of
all though, by far, is expressed sexual orientation.
Women who are bisexual, a staggering 42 % who
are married say that they have strayed on their
husbands. Or, in the context of this particular
case, their wives. That's compared to less than
12 % of heterosexual women and some 34 % of lesbians.
The quite open secret about same sex marriages
is that they tend to be, well, open. And if a
woman is bisexual, she's going to be open. Open
wide to... just about whatever comes her way.
But don't worry, normalizing homosexuality and
bringing it into the institution of marriage
will have no deleterious effect in undermining
the fidelity that is foundational to the Western
concept of serial monogamy through marriage that
has extended back into antiquity. We discarded
all of that retrograde garbage. 15 years ago
and as the evidence clearly shows the vigorous
state of marriage in the western world has never
been better. And parenthetically all this talk
about infidelity and by extension marriage and
the products of the union of marriage that is
children to the question to a selfish answer
to the question of why have children, beyond
it being the most basic biological imperative,
or the second most basic, I suppose. Surviving
is the most basic, and then procreating is the
next. Survive and reproduce, those are the biological
raison de tres of all animal species, all mammalian
species for sure. including humans. But since
we're talking about infidelity, something that
is inherently selfish, perhaps we can mine a
selfish reason for having children. And it's
that as we age, as we move from plucky, adventurous
adolescence and early adulthood into the middle
-age mellowness that inexorably sets in over
time. Everything dulls. Going to a bar or to
a concert or to poker night. Taking trips and
going on hiking excursions. Or cruises. Or trying
the new sushi restaurants down the street that's
all the rage. Getting the newest handheld gadget.
Binging on the hottest new Netflix series. All
of these things dull. They just don't pop quite
the same way that they used to. They don't hit
with the same sweetness. The excitement doesn't
build quite as much. The... Existential experience
becomes a little more difficult each time to
divorce from the broader timeline of one's life.
And really the only way to rekindle that magic
is to live vicariously. by experiencing through
the eyes of one's own flesh and blood, the very
product of your loins, your children, to see
them experience the things that you experienced,
but to see them experience it anew in a way that
you once could, but no longer can, that is satisfying,
that is fulfilling in a way more deep, so much
deeper and more lasting than being a millennial
going to see the newest Star Wars corporate slop
with a few of your childless buddies cannot possibly
match. And that'll do it for us this week. Thanks
for listening. We'll talk to you next time. you