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