YMMV - Your Mileage May Vary Podcast

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Episode 176: Taboos, Too-Obvious Arousal, No Foreplay, Dating Economics, OnlyFans Killing Free Porn

Team YMMV | 8-23-2024 | 1:13:48

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Straight back from consuming the dreadful convention coverage from the political parties, Mike tackles porn and society. The key word for the week is "taboos," as so much of what we're allowed to talk about now revolves around what will and won't make other people uncomfortable.

The history of mankind is best understood by thinking economically, and this applies to sex and dating as well as it does to other cultural institutions. I didn't talk about it this week, but religion can be understood in similar ways. Sadly, economics may presage the death of the tube sites that have dominated online porn for so long. OnlyFans appears to be pretty powerful, and the cucks who are willing to pay make life difficult for the rest of us.

And, what happens when women experience problems usually reserved for men such as too-obvious arousal and a lack of desire for foreplay?

Here's the channel I mentioned where a guy talks about dating from an economic perspective:

https://ymmv.me/176/dating

We get a lot of our questions from Reddit, so for our listeners' enjoyment, here are links to some of the questions we discussed this week:

https://ymmv.me/176/clean

https://ymmv.me/176/penetration

https://ymmv.me/176/disgust

https://ymmv.me/176/onlyfans

Episode Transcript

Transcript automatically generated by a robot. Apologies for any inaccuracies.

[00:00:01] Mike: Hello and welcome to Your may Mileage May vary. I'm your host, Mike, and ah today I have a pretty fun lineup of topics for you. This is the podcast, by the way, where we talk about... Hello and welcome to Your Mileage May vary. This is a podcast where we talk about sex and relationships in a way that is
[00:00:32] Mike: Hello and welcome to your mileage may vary. We talk about sex and relationships with Frankness that is often controversial, but mostly in good faith. I'm your host today, Mike, and I've got a bunch of topics today. A female cleanup, ah long but not thick penises, women's experience of threesomes, hookup aftercare, and much, much more. um What I'm gonna do actually this time is jump into some topics right off the bat. and I think I have some other topics that will come up naturally ah in discussing these and so we'll get off on some other tangents. I had the ah misfortune this week and last week of listening to large portions of the Republican and national and Democratic National Conventions. Was it last week? Well, whatever.
[00:01:24] Mike: This week was the Democratic one, and a few weeks ago waston that was the Republican one. And in any of event, i guess the I guess the Olympics intervened. ah I had the misfortune of listening to that stuff, and um there's an element of that that that made me think about how um society's inability to kind of come to grips with a lot of topics resembles what we do here on this podcast where we talk about sex and relationships where you know these are topics that often have taboos around them people don't like to talk about. and
[00:01:57] Mike: um I feel like I have a certain level of gravity and ability to speak freely because of the 170 something hours I've spent talking about porn and masturbation. Most people haven't done that. um Maybe someone like Howard Stern has, ah but it's an unusual kind of position to be in. And I think it gives me an unusually clear lens to see other topics that people aren't willing to talk about.
[00:02:23] Mike: um It reminds me of a quote from the well-known Bob Kazimakis who said, there is only sex, everything is sex, which is true. Sex is ultimately something that drives a lot of behavior in society and and a lens through which you can understand things. so um But like I said, I'm going to jump into so of jump jump into some topics here just to sort of warm up First topic is cuddling with nothing on, skin to skin. The question is, how do you girls cuddle with your parking partner naked? Sombra despairs to say that, but I'm curious. I just started to sleep with my partner, but I'm always soaking wet with him. Even after we've done the deed, I'll clean up, come back to bed to cuddle, and I'm soaked again, and it's dripping down my thighs.
[00:03:11] Mike: even when he's not doing anything, just holding me in his arm and stuff. I keep going to the bathroom to clean up or I have to have panties on. It just gets annoying sometimes. Any suggestions? Is it normal? How do you guys deal with this? Now, this is actually more commonly a problem that a guy would have.
[00:03:27] Mike: ah Because the guy has the unfortunate situation of well depends on your perspective but potentially unfortunate situation of having an erection ah When with an attractive young lady in bed and so it's really impossible or difficult for the guy to mask his arousal um and this is something that I think women don't consider in other settings. I'll come back to what the woman should do in a second, but this is something women don't consider in other settings that men are frequently in. ah As a man, um because your arousal is so apparent, well, I mean, there's a couple things. One is that you know a penis can very easily be viewed as a weapon. I remember well ah being in San Francisco at a gym,
[00:04:16] Mike: in the bath, in the locker room, taking a shower and having a probably gay man with his erect penis kind of just looking at me. And ah you immediately kind of interpret that penis as as some kind of a club or a spear. It's certainly something that could penetrate you and maybe be painful, maybe even propagate an illness to you. ah So it's some serious business there. um And, you know, look that necessitates wearing in clothing for guys on some level.
[00:04:43] Mike: um yeah i mean once a guy If a guy ah is naked around a woman, he can't really conceal his arousal. right and so yeah I could actually see this being used in stepmom, stepsister porn as a trope. I don't think I've ever seen it used that way, but it could be. i mean yeah Maybe it is actually. like Oh, look, you're aroused. Oh, look, you're your' horny. ah But like, yeah, this is a thing. I mean, a guy can't sort of can't sort of cover cover that up. And so ah even if a guy really just wants to cuddle ah in bed or just wants to kind of be intimate but not lead towards sex, it's actually kind of, it can be complicated because he's likely to have an erection. And this is something that I think women
[00:05:22] Mike: I don't know. Actually, the female experience is probably like, oh, you know, he wants to have sex, but that's not always true. maybe Maybe women sort of ignore it, but it's certainly something a woman doesn't typically have to deal with. This woman who is soaked and dripping down her thighs, I think is a little bit unusual.
[00:05:38] Mike: um I mean, it's not impossible, but a little unusual because most women, I think, produce a little less lubrication than that. And it actually makes you wonder if there's something something else, something more medical going on with her. um But you know if she's that excited, you know it's... she she basically is getting to have the experience. Actually, it's more annoying than the male experience, but something like the male experience where you simply can't kind of a hide what's going on and ultimately you ah wind up kind of needing to wear clothes. Someone in the comments talked about cuddling and then what they do if they have kids, family, that kind of stuff. And yeah, I mean, that's another issue. Obviously as a father, it would be ungainly to be wandering around your house with a
[00:06:24] Mike: ah firm erection pointing at your kids. um but It doesn't matter what age your kids are, it's going to be a shocking sight and experience. ah Fortunately, the presence of children, at least for me, I've found to significantly diminish the sexuality of any situation. I'm lucky to not have that predilection, unlike some of our political leaders.
[00:06:48] Mike: you know so but but anyway so women you know but But ultimately, i mean there's just practical suggestions you could give. Some people are giving suggestions in the comments here, ah like yeah i mean having a towel or a washcloth or something like that, ah wearing wearing clothes. ah She could try to be less aroused, less and less attracted to her partner.
[00:07:07] Mike: um Yeah, i mean he must be a pretty attractive young man. like that ah it's hard for me too It's in some ways hard for me to understand or think about what what he what what he must look like or be doing to generate that much attraction, but bravo bravo for him.
[00:07:22] Mike: um I also imagine it's possible that if she simply had an orgasm, it would lessen it. That's certainly an advice that might be given to a man to just masturbate or have sex and then it's likely to to lower down.
[00:07:38] Mike: Okay, so on on this same on this kind of topic general topic area of women having situations that often a man would would have, here's a second one. My wife doesn't want foreplay. Instead, she just wants penetration right away, which would be ah this would be a really common a complaint about a man.
[00:08:00] Mike: Just jumping right into having a PIV penetrative sex as fast as you can. Um, all my life I hear about the importance of long foreplay for women and good sex, but it couldn't be more wrong for the sex life with my wife. She wants sex without any foreplay or just after a few kisses. Also, I'm listening about the importance of oral sex, but my wife, my wife doesn't like it at all. When I get off, she pulls me back and says the best way to turn her on is to have me inside her. I'm wondering if this is about her or me,
[00:08:29] Mike: are there more girls like this? ah Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a fairly unusual, yeah as as he's saying, it's a fairly unusual behavior. And of course, it makes you wonder if she's getting a whole lot out of the sexual experience. That being said, I mean, you know women can find penetration pleasurable and can enjoy it a lot. And depending on kind of the configuration of their clit and Various body parts there like it can be significantly more pleasurable for a woman than receiving oral um It's pretty unusual for it to be more pleasurable than masturbation But it's certainly not impossible ah You know, yeah, I mean most of the time it's a guy wanting to do this I've talked before about the fact that It like
[00:09:22] Mike: you penetrating sort of before there's much foreplay can actually make it so there's more friction. So paradoxically, like the guy might actually have a little bit more, more pleasure or something going on as a result of that. Of course, it depends on the guy's specific anatomy as well, how that's going to feel for him. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, this is pretty, this is pretty unusual for women. Um, yeah. One of the comments says, if I'm extremely horny or just craving dick, then I feel the same way.
[00:09:52] Mike: craving dick. This is not something women frequently want to advertise, probably because if a woman said she was craving dick, there would be an avalanche. Well, assuming she's reasonably attractive and youthful, there would be sort of an avalanche of guys wanting to offer that dick to her, and to provide her the thing she's looking for.
[00:10:15] Mike: Another person's pointing out that like, look, if it's if your partner says that it can't be wrong, that's sort of true. Although, you know when people deviate significantly from the um when people deviate significantly from kind of the norm,
[00:10:29] Mike: it makes you wonder, Uh, and, um, you know, there's not enough information here to know whether his wife is getting, uh, is, is actually climaxing. And you always have to be suspicious or skeptical at least about whether, uh, self-reported climaxes and so forth from women. Women are accurate for the re for reasons we've discussed many times on the podcast. Um,
[00:10:59] Mike: Here's another comment. When I hear stories like this, I always want to hear from the wife. I want to understand this from a sociology angle, like whether she's having real orgasms or the level of excitement that women have been documented saying is an orgasm, which is a person right at my own alley here being suspicious or skeptical, I should say, as in, uh, they found out the orgasms can be seen on brainwave measuring devices. So then they did studies on this as a person pointing out their medical ways to sort of understand if a woman's having an orgasm. Um, and that's true. There is some information you can gather there.
[00:11:29] Mike: um But that being said, a woman can, there are plenty of women who orgasm from PIV sex and also it's entirely possible that he that she simply in most cases just wants kind of closeness closeness intimacy and isn't pursuing an orgasm.
[00:11:47] Mike: um Yeah, I mean, there I recently read a posting by a woman who pointed out that she was basically talking about the fact that she but had never been able to orgasm and was basically certain that she would not ever be able to no matter what she did. And ah yeah, I mean, like I think that is this is a woman who is being unusually honest and clear-headed about the experience she's had, but I think that's actually more common than people sort of want to let on.
[00:12:19] Mike: And actually the people know because it can be difficult. it It could be challenging necessarily for a woman to know what an orgasm is. I mean, if you've never had one, you don't know what one is necessarily. um By analogy, ah reports from people who are born blind, it's not that they see black all the time, right? The report is like they just don't see, like they they have no internal representation of their brain of what seeing is.
[00:12:42] Mike: So similarly, if you've never had an orgasm, like you just don't you have some idea of what a mounting pleasure feels like and so forth, but you don't have an internal representation in your mind of what an orgasm would feel like. So that's challenging. One more topic here. ah She looked at me with disgust after I came.
[00:13:03] Mike: That sounds familiar. I'm kidding, but I can imagine. I'm assuming it's a guy yet. I've been dating this girl for a few months. I'm a Virgin and she's not. We haven't had penetrative sex yet. Yesterday, she decided to give me a hand job while we were making out. It started to hurt me because she was being a little rough. I asked her if she could put some lube on it to make it better. After that, she masturbated me for a while longer and eventually ended up coming. The problem is that immediately after I came, she looked at me with a disgusted look on her face.
[00:13:31] Mike: and ran to the bathroom to wash her hands. She came out of the bathroom putting a lot of alcohol gel in her hands to clean them. It sounds like maybe a ah woman who's having a more masculine experience, at least we've had reported on the show before of guys who kind of view their own semen as pretty toxic.
[00:13:50] Mike: Uh, so she was cleaning her hands very carefully. Her urgency hurt me a lot because it seemed like I was toxic or something. And her expression right after I came made me feel feel humiliated. It was instant. Maybe I had a traumatic experience. I don't want anyone to touch me and also I can't masturbate. I feel disgusted with myself. I felt very humiliated and rejected at a time when that was supposed to be fun. Later when we went to sleep, she continued to treat me normally. But after that, I just wanted to go home and cry. I feel dirty and maybe a little traumatized. Has anyone anyone been in a similar situation?
[00:14:22] Mike: So, I mean, look, this is a general male experience, right? That men are supposed to sort of, ah well, put it this way, men generally get the feedback that their cocks are gross, our bodies are gross. Like the thing I said in the intro or earlier, that, ah you know, oh, when I was talking about ah people being too wet and so forth,
[00:14:49] Mike: If a guy is going around with an erection, that's kind of scary and gross, like the male body is kind of aggressive. And this is just another aspect of that, right? I mean, this you know it's it's whereas the lubrication that comes out of a ah vagina while aroused is kind of... considered gentle and you know something that facilitates the sex act, like s semen is much more complicated and viewed as kind of almost like a weapon. If you if I were to put ketchup or to spill ketchup on somebody,
[00:15:26] Mike: Uh, that would be viewed as just a faux pas, social faux pas. But if I spilled my semen on them, that would actually be a crime probably. Um, because that's a particular, I guess if I peed on them, that might be a crime too. Not sure. So maybe it's all bodily fluids spitting on someone. I'm not sure. But a semen has a particular, uh,
[00:15:45] Mike: a particularly challenging aspect. And the male orgasm as well is something that gets kind of lampooned and not viewed as kind of delicately as women's experiences. And look, I mean, there's this is sort of for good reason. Men are typically the more more the aggressor or the more kind of active participant in sexual settings. And so it makes sense that men um that men get treated a little bit differently around these kinds of things. It's too bad that it makes it so he wants to cry and so forth. If you just watch some porn, some sort of amateur porn, you'd probably get the sense that um that ah there are many different experiences that can happen after a guy orgasms. If you specifically search on Pornhub for hookers or prostitutes giving, say, blowjobs, look, you're going to see a lot of like
[00:16:41] Mike: women in cars giving a blowjob. and And then as soon as the guy comes, she like opens the the door on her side and spits it out. right ah One of the commenters was saying something like that that on this post, ah that the first time he got a blowjob, ah yeah, the first time I got received a blowjob to completion, my girlfriend spit my semen back onto my stomach and literally said, yuck. I don't know if I've ever had that happen before, but I can vibe with that experience.
[00:17:06] Mike: I wasn't mortified, but it obviously wasn't the reaction I would have wanted, ah but we talked about it and she explained she wasn't anticipating it. And it was her first time tasting, feeling semen in her mouth. So I understood her reaction. I mean, also, you know, it's importantly in most settings when the woman, when you orgasm in a woman's mouth or she gives you a hand job, like you've just orgasm, but she hasn't, she's in a completely different mind state ah than you are. And so it's not, ah yes she's not, she doesn't view the situation as kind of emotionally or kind of as reaching as deep into her experience as you do. And vice versa, you know, if you um as a guy and a woman
[00:17:49] Mike: you're helping her reach orgasm. I mean, if you're not particularly aroused or if you're not kind of also kind of on that arousal, the plateau pipeline toward orgasm, I mean, you can, you, you would view the sex act a little more um kind of rationally and less, you know, less emotionally. And so she's probably, look, I mean, this would be the normal thing if someone squirted semen on your body or, you know, the yeah, I mean,
[00:18:14] Mike: if if you were just totally unaroused and gave a hand job or whatever to somebody or masturbated a woman, like you might not be that excited about what happens because it kind of relies on you actually being in the mood ah for this to be exciting.
[00:18:30] Mike: So I don't think that's that surprising. Um, and by the way, I, I wanted to mention something that I've, I've noticed and I've noticed people talking about it, the mention of hooker and prostitute porn made me think of this. I think that there is a very significant, uh, decrease in the quality of porn happening, uh, right now. And I believe it's a consequence of only fans. Um, so I, uh,
[00:18:59] Mike: I saw a post online specifically talking about this. And so I might as well read it here. um I'm fed up with porn on Reddit as everything feels like OnlyFans promotion. And then he asks what subreddit actually has something actually new and unique. Tried NoFans, which is a subreddit specifically for yeah people that don't do OnlyFans. And he said he tried it, but it has the same type of post, just uglier, which is true. I've had that experience as well. Um,
[00:19:27] Mike: And yeah, I mean, somebody points out they miss the old gone wild days of actual quirky non-commercial exhibitionism. And now he describes the Reddit situation as an only fans flea market.
[00:19:40] Mike: but I think is a fair point. i mean Basically, you have an enormous amount of postings that either ah have like a little text tag in them indicating that they're only thererefore their therere advertising for OnlyFans or that kind of thing. One thing I've noticed along along the same lines is that with my subreddit, curated amateur porn, which I'm glad to say like in this same thread, somebody posted an NSFW list and got 60 upvotes and in my subreddit was in there. I guess I've hit the big time.
[00:20:09] Mike: I have about 35,000 subscribers now. So that's nice. I've actually slowed down the amount I've been posting to it because of this problem. So I think it's become more acute. It could be because of the summer months or something. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's actually becoming more difficult kind of quickly for me to find high quality content. But another thing I've noticed along those same lines is that if you post, uh, you know, these are the life of a person running an SFW subreddit, but if you post, uh,
[00:20:39] Mike: a link that's not to this site Redgifts that basically has short form like under 30 second or under 60 second porn clips, basically nobody will view it. So what this tells me, and you yeah and I know that because you don't get any upvotes, sometimes you get downvotes. So like for instance, if you post something from Pornhub,
[00:20:56] Mike: So like a longer form piece of content, even if it's pretty good. Like, for example, I think yesterday I posted on Curated Amateur Porn, I posted a um ah clip of, ah like I mean, it's fake, but it was a pretty well done porn of a woman pretending to be blowing and having sex with her partner in a bathroom during maybe, I mean, she's she's dressed, let's see, she's a um bridesmaid. And so it's like maybe during the wedding or It's not during the wedding, but after the wedding or something like that you know during the reception. And I thought it was pretty well done. It's only like 10 minutes or less, 10 minutes or fewer long.
[00:21:36] Mike: um but Yeah. I mean, basically no, no love for that posting. So you have, and and I, oh, and the reason I think this is going on is because people are, uh, generally consuming porn more on mobile devices. Right. I mean that, and people are more and more used to Tik TOK and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. He's like this, these terrible experiences that ah train your brain to only be able to tolerate video or, you know, experiences that last 30 seconds or less.
[00:22:03] Mike: um you know This also impacts the podcast industry, but I'm still here because this is what I do. Anyway, so you know what I've done is I've started just posting stuff from Red Gifts because you get into this nasty situation where people will downvote you or you you just you're not getting any love. ah People don't want to see ah ah porn that that is longer form.
[00:22:30] Mike: um And yeah, I agree completely with this that you have this sort of OnlyFans thing. And and one of the one of the concerns that I, one of the things I wonder about relation to this is who are these guys who are paying women on OnlyFans. Obviously, ah there's enough money in there two um you know yeah i mean to to to enable that women to make a a significantly good living. there's There was one guy who sort of white knighted this in the comment thread saying, oh, well, you know, I like to pay for
[00:23:08] Mike: i like to I like to pay for the porn that I use. I don't want to just ah just um use it for free, you know go to Pornhub or whatnot. Okay, fair enough. But ah the problem with OnlyFans is that you're you're actually paying. It's it's not very it's it's not sort of cost efficient. I would say that it it reminds me of the situation with um downloaded music before Spotify came out. And so basically, you're paying 99 cents a song. ah You're paying you know some significant amount. You're paying monthly for a particular porn actress. But look, I mean, she's not going to have that much. I've never subscribed to someone on OnlyFans, but i'm I'm skeptical that she would have that much content on there to sort of make it worth your while. You're going to wind up having to spend a lot of money on kind of racing around
[00:23:57] Mike: picking all these different ah people um and maybe ah ah like what happened with the great history of Napster being sued by Metallica. Maybe there's some porn actress that would take the role of Metallica and sue someone, but you know you could imagine there being an equivalent. I mean, obviously there are things like Napster out there, but you could imagine having somebody set up a subscription site that basically ah demolishes the OnlyFans business by pirating all the content off OnlyFans and then selling subscription services to them. I actually don't know if such a thing exists. If it does, you know someone can let me know and someone can send an email and let me know. But it would be believable to me that such a thing would exist because you have an extremely inefficient market. All that being said, you have these folks that are compensating you know these these these women for making OnlyFans porn
[00:24:48] Mike: um and They should be able to see that it's a race to the bottom. i mean By doing that, they're basically making the problem worse um because they that incentivizes people to post less and less high-quality content on the free sites.
[00:25:04] Mike: So i mean there's there's a serious problem in the porn ecosystem. One thing that's relatively like really honestly new, ah so I would say in the last year on Pornhub, is porn that are basically like cliffhangers.
[00:25:17] Mike: ah were basically ah you know They take the most important part of the porn, let's say the guy nutting or or something like that, and they put it they basically you know fade out the sound and switch to an advertisement picture ah when you get to that point in the porn. um And of course, there are other important parts parts of the porn where they might do that as well.
[00:25:37] Mike: uh, the key being that they, you know, they're trying to get you to go and subscribe to their thing. So basically moving, uh, the tube sites over to just a flat advertising medium, which isn't great. I mean, it doesn't suggest good things for a company like Pornhub either, because I mean, they already are challenged by the fact that, uh, I have a really hard time but imagining that their ads ah generate a lot of conversions for advertisers, given that um people beating off probably aren't going to buy a lot of stuff. ah But then on top of that, you have porns that are themselves advertisements. It would be like if you had i know porns that started having lots of product placements in them or something, although I'm not exactly sure what the product would be that you would place in there.
[00:26:19] Mike: So anyway, ah this is this is a you know problem I'm seeing, and I bet the listeners who consume porn, which is probably virtually all of them, are seeing a similar similar trend.
[00:26:31] Mike: um Yeah, I mean, there was you know six months or a year ago, there was ah a move by Reddit to shut down a lot of the and NSFW um subreddits under the guise of, oh, these subreddits are unmoderated.
[00:26:49] Mike: which I think just meant that they might have had moderators, but the moderators hadn't done enough recently or something like that. but i mean that you know So there's also that kind of narrowing the field of where you can have porn posted. So discovery then gets worse. um But the the issue with that is, of course, you know that at the same time you have the problem that unmoderated subreddits are going to naturally attract just a deluge of this OnlyFans promotional content, which is not very good. And so it basically is porn spam. And so that's where you where you wind up with that situation.
[00:27:34] Mike: Now this is all ah maybe a ah precursor to the Shangri-La, which is likely to appear soon and actually has already really appeared, I think, in terms of AI-generated porn videos.
[00:27:48] Mike: um I tried one of these services recently um that will undress a celebrity basically they or whatever it' undress a picture you give it. um It was okay. i mean it ah They give you three credits or two credits for free. You can easily find one of these sites. um It did a fairly good job. um you know there's ah We've talked about on the podcast before that there are famous women who are incensed by this. There is a push to make, a political push to make this kind of content illegal, um which I'm not even sure I understand ah how you could make it illegal because it's not
[00:28:33] Mike: Well, I guess you can make anything illegal, but there's, I think there's like a, there's significant free speech questions there. Uh, I mean, for example, if I took, if I did it, if I, if I painted it, let's say I was an excellent painter and I decided I wanted to draw a painting of a female celebrity in the nude, would that be illegal? Um, probably not because I would think that would be kind of fair use. And so this is kind of the same thing. Um, and ultimately,
[00:29:00] Mike: You know, this AI porn kind of targeted at famous people thing is a ah situation where you were Look, it reminds me of the time when Jeff Bezos, somebody attempted to blackmail Jeff Bezos with because he had sent them dick pics or they somehow had pictures of his penis. And he basically responded and said, hey, go ahead and release the photos. I don't care, which is the proper response. I mean, that kind of wins the day. And I think you're in kind of a similar situation with this AI porn. I don't think you're really going to be able to stop it. And so
[00:29:40] Mike: ah It might be better for people to just grow comfortable, try to grow comfortable with the reality that people are going to pass around this stuff. Now, I think an interesting topic comes up there, which is, you know what are women supposed to do? As a man, it's kind of easy to say that. like I could say, hey, I don't really care if there's AI porn of me because you know I'm a guy, like people don't give that care that much, but but a woman is in kind of a different situation. and You could break that into a couple of pieces.
[00:30:11] Mike: ah You could say, well, the woman is more vulnerable by virtue of being a woman. I think that society would kind of roundly reject that thinking. You know, she's more vulnerable because women are more vulnerable vulnerable or something like that. I don't think society is likely to kind of take that position just because of the general kind of feminist energy and push toward equality that do you have going on. A second, I think, and better argument that would be could be made is basically like, look, you you have a person who It's just you're making content that's going to be a lot more popular when it's when it's woman. So a picture of me with my penis out is going to be a lot less popular in a picture than would be a picture of Taylor Swift, nudified by an AI. And so because of that, it poses a much more
[00:31:01] Mike: clear and present a problem for a woman because basically she's going to have all this content pushed out there. Now that being said, you could say, look, why does it matter? I mean, yeah to first order, everybody's parts kind of look the same. And also the AI is guessing what the parts look like. So I mean, you know, her breasts aren't going to look exactly right. You actually don't know what her labia look like and so forth unless you have like, you know, ah an ex-boyfriend or a gynecologist who's going to give you a report on that so you can then program that into the AI to to to lean into that so it knows more what to do. And I was thinking about this the other day, and I think that the real issue is that women don't there there is that society judges men and women quite differently.
[00:31:49] Mike: um when we do something sexual and make it public, right? So if a guy, it's it's analogous to the situation where if a guy is able to get lots of female partners, that's like a high five moment for him. And if a woman has lots of partners, she gets slut shamed, which is actually, I would argue, kind of a rational reaction, society-wide, because the former is challenging for a guy to do and the latter kind of isn't, if you're an attractive young woman.
[00:32:15] Mike: So it it makes sense to kind of give out the kudos the way they get given out, even though it's not great for the people involved. They might not enjoy that experience. Similarly, ah a woman who posts ah nude content of herself online ah that's viewed a certain way. It's like, oh, now now you're viewed as the sort of person that would post ah this kind of content online. And you could see that being significantly more harmful for a woman than for a man because ah the because the simply the the, well, I mean, there's first of all, there's kind of the value delta there.
[00:32:53] Mike: in that the woman could actually make money doing it or kind of be prostituting herself in a certain way. a man kind of But secondly, you know men and women are just judged very differently. I would argue that it's downstream of that economic element.
[00:33:07] Mike: And so a woman doesn't want to be perceived as the type of woman who would post these pictures online. And in fact, I suspect that a lot of the women that were impacted, a lot of the celebrity women who were impacted by the fappening, one of the things they dislike the most, I mean, it's one thing, it's kind of creepy to have guys out there who have access to your photos. But I mean, the reality is guys could beat off to closed photos of you and plenty of celebrity women have had men do that. They're delusional if they think they have it.
[00:33:35] Mike: um but
[00:33:39] Mike: they don't like I would imagine that they wouldn't like the idea that people now know that they're the sort of person who takes nude photos of themselves, nude videos, and sends them to other people. That puts them in a little bit of a different category, which then could be a little bit pejorative ah because yeah I mean, women are held to a different standard in regard to this, whether rationally or not or what reasonably or not. And so I can see why, ah given that, a woman would really object to AI porn being distributed of her because that implies she's the kind of person that would do that sort of thing. Now, the same reasoning does not at all apply to sort of pedophilic AI porn, which is also like and something that's significantly issue. And you have the same questions, right? I mean, if ah if an artist
[00:34:25] Mike: depicted a young boy naked. Is that illegal? I actually don't know if it's illegal to draw such a painting and an AI could be perceived as kind of just a ah different kind of of of brush and canvas to put these things on. And so there's there are there are debates that society will have to do. and and anytime you know but But anyway, the point is that ah the pedophilic thing is really more about um Two things, one that you might be victimizing somebody, right? If you take a child and you make a porn of them, that's not great via AI because you are sort of victimizing them. ah There's no question of like the kid, the kid being the sort of person that would share this stuff. ah But for a full grown woman, I mean, everybody knows that full grown woman women have sex, right? So it's not, you know, they, it's not that it's that they're not all full grown women.
[00:35:16] Mike: send out new pictures of themselves. Anyway, for the so for the child, you have that. And then the other thing is that you know you always worry about this kind of stuff encouraging um actual exploitation of a kid. right so So you say, well, if if this content becomes available, what's going to be the downstream impact of that? I don't know if that's a valid concern or not, but I know that's kind of in the air as a potential concern there. All that being said, I don't think there's really going to be a way to stop these AI tools. And so ah That's probably the thing that will be the ultimate pushback against the only fans ah experience is yeah it's like okay so you're you know women have figured out that they can monetize doing this stuff better and now are no longer willing to post it on on. on
[00:36:01] Mike: sites just to kind of get a few sales or whatever. I actually am not entirely sure why. Maybe maybe just exhibitionist reasons, but ah for whatever reason, they're posting much less quality lower quality stuff on porn sites. Eventually, you're going to get this the situation where you have AIs that create this stuff and then invalidate the whole the whole business model. It just won't work. um and I would expect the same thing to happen with Litirotica audio erotica and the like. um in fact it wouldn't be a you know there's a lot of porn First of all, there's a lot of porn on red gifts that has no audio.
[00:36:35] Mike: um it actually wouldn't be a bad idea for somebody to make an AI that just constructs an audio for it. It would make those much more compelling. And you could also imagine alternate audio tracks being applied to ah normal, yeah quote unquote, full-length porns that are on Pornhub and the like. And the rationale just being that porn actors and actresses are terrible. Like the sound they make is not is often kind of off-putting.
[00:37:02] Mike: and Not well done. And so just having something make match it to their lip movements, but make much more compelling Audio seems seems like a decent um like a decent idea to me Now as I promised at the beginning of the show I kind of want to veer off from the sexual topics ah for a little while and talk about Talk about some other stuff involving taboos. We've been hassled a fair amount by commenters reviewers and so forth and people we've talked to about ah some of the sexual taboos that they, I guess we're breaking, but like people would argue we're perpetuating stereotypes or something like that. ah ah The most prominent example that we get hit with is squirting, like the fact that at least I've taken the strong position on the podcast that female squirting is um just urine, which it is. um And they're also a kind of normative.
[00:37:56] Mike: ah stereotypes that I think that I tend to propagate on the podcast ah that are viewed as taboo these days ah because um because that's the direction society's going. So I wanted to sort of talk about what i think is what I think lies at the heart of that. um you know There is a something that you can see in surveys ah these days, which shows that there is a growing gap between ah young single women and kind of everybody else in terms of their thought processes about various social issues.
[00:38:33] Mike: um ah So, married women tend to sort of have a different kind kind of perspective, and men are more similar and probably even pushing further than women. I mean, long it's long been the case that if only men got to vote, every president would be a Republican. That's been the case for decades.
[00:38:53] Mike: um So that's already kind of a a trope, but you've seen a more profound shift. And I think it relates to this issue of tabooing and free speech and the like censorship. um What I think it is is that the um Most importantly, usually usually I think throughout history, people have kind of settled on um kind of protecting life, protecting quality of life, um family, things like that are their highest values that people target.
[00:39:29] Mike: But I think that there is a special ah problematic um value that specifically appeals to young women, young single women, particularly ones who spend a lot of time on social media, which is basically all of them. And this is, they don't want to offend anybody.
[00:39:51] Mike: They don't want to make anybody feel bad. I remember as a young man figuring out that I could get kind of a rise or a different reaction out of women by using the word hurt. So I could say um that hurt me.
[00:40:07] Mike: Well, you could just use the word hurt and it was like this kind of magic word because they didn't want to hurt anybody. the most and like One of the most important things was not to hurt somebody. Maybe they wanted to be happy and enjoy their life too, but hurting other people was really deeply problematic. And so you could use that to manipulate young women sometimes. So I remember kind of discovering that and playing with it.
[00:40:26] Mike: Along the same lines, ah you get this group dynamic, and particularly reinforced by social media, where ah young single women, and it and it's not just young single women, of course, there's like ah kind of a grown sociological movement around this, of kind of wanting to taboo conversations or topics which are viewed as potentially hurting somebody.
[00:40:51] Mike: or hurting their feelings. so how does this i mean you know this is the The relation to something like squirting is obvious. ah You have a woman who is certain that squirting that her squirt is ejaculating, that this is what's happening in her body. This is her experiences her lived experience, as they would say. and so If your highest value is to not make someone feel bad,
[00:41:11] Mike: right then you know it would be viewed as a pretty bad thing to tell this person, hey, like what you're saying you're experiencing is not well supported scientifically. like What you're saying is happening is not actually what's happening. There's something else happening and using data and statistics to back that up doesn't really make it any better because it's the feelings of the person that you're that you're you're bringing this information to that are paramount.
[00:41:38] Mike: Similarly, ah you can see us you can see this at play with ah politically charged topics like this thing that Matt Walsh brings up. Now, I don't necessarily think Matt Walsh is the smartest, the sharpest tool in the shed. I actually think a lot of the folks that um people ah listen to that are thought leaders in our society are not the sharpest tools in the shed. And yeah, I mean, I'm talking about someone like Matt Walsh or Elon Musk or Joe Rogan or Rachel Maddow, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, like these are not smart people. They're okay, but they're not smart, like whatever.
[00:42:15] Mike: ah And you know, mostly what they're doing is they're sort of coming up with a pattern that kind of gets people's emotions ah going in a certain direction. It actually makes it hard ah to want to participate in the kind of great story of humanity when you when you hear that these are the people that are listened to in any event this guy Matt Walsh who's a conservative commentator had wrote a wrote or rather made a movie called what is a woman and basically he went around and ah hassled a bunch of left leaning people, progressives about you know what a woman is. And of course his definition is a woman is a biological female, which is an adult biological female, which is kind of ah the historically valid definition. It's something, you know, if you went and asked somebody, basically anybody in the year 1800, what they thought a woman was, that would be, they would say, yeah, that's the, that's the right answer. um And what's interesting is,
[00:43:11] Mike: When he poses this question to large groups of people, or rather, there's large groups of people who, when confronted by this question, simply won't answer. There is an answer to this question that isn't adult, what is it, adult, human, female.
[00:43:28] Mike: ah that kind of gets at ah what more progressive leaning people want to think of. ah What they want to do is they want to allow a space or yeah you know a place for somebody to kind of say, look, I'm extremely of um a man, a person with born male or maybe born intersex to say, look, I'm i'm i'm feminine.
[00:43:48] Mike: you know, I have very feminine traits. I would like society to consider me a woman, right? So they want to sort of include those people under the umbrella. And so you could have some kind of a definition that I think, you know, very progressive people would not have too much of trouble with, which is like, look for, you know, 99% of cases or some vast majority of cases, it's an an adult biological female, but a woman also, you know, is an umbrella term that, you know, a certain small group of people who are very feminine or have feminine traits that are born intersex male, some other, you know, is with with hormonal difficulties, whatever it is, but may may have a penis, would like to be considered under the woman umbrella or something like that. There's some way you can kind of open it up.
[00:44:30] Mike: and not have this be particularly controversial. um And it's actually sort of astonished me. It actually has kind of astonished me that ah when he talks to people, when this guy Matt Walsh talks to people, nobody ever just gives that answer. He says, look, let's let why don't we just sort of break this down? like They get aggressive with him and kind of refuse to answer. They say, why are you asking that? This kind of stuff. And I think it comes back to that ah trait ah that I mentioned before, which is prevalent among single young women, ah which is that they don't want to offend anybody. and so The concern is that the definition that I just gave, which admittedly was long-winded and I sort of came up with it off the cuff, ah anything you do like that is going to leave somebody out.
[00:45:15] Mike: And so these folks don't want to leave anybody out. And so they refuse to answer the question and basically taboo the question. They say, look, you can't even ask this question. And then of course, Matt Walsh creates all these sort of logical ah
[00:45:28] Mike: creates all these logical problems for them by you know paradoxes by saying, well, look, you know, yeah you since you can't define the word woman, then you sort of, if you use it in a sentence, it kind of doesn't mean anything. Or you say, you know, what is a woman? Oh, it's whatever a woman says it is. Well, what is that? What is a woman? I mean, you wind up in this like circular logic reasoning trap, but the folks would rather get into that than take the risk of offending somebody. And I think that's pretty problematic. And, uh,
[00:45:56] Mike: is is concerning. um i I read a series of tweets ah by Elon Musk, our great Lord and Savior, a few days ago where he was saying, hey, you guys should vote for Donald Trump because of this sort of censorship First Amendment issue. And there's a relationship between um censorship and this tabooing things that make people uncomfortable, right? There's a strong relationship there because um that's it's kind of the end state of it. It's sort of the Orwellian end state of it. And I thought, oh, well, you know that's you know if if I was going to think of any reason to vote for Donald Trump, who I also think is an idiot,
[00:46:35] Mike: ah and and not great for the country or the world, ah that might be that might be a good argument. They're like, hey, you you this this guy is, at least he's not in favor of censoring things. Although to be fair, he probably is in favor of certain kinds of censorship, but this sort of institutionalized censorship where you basically taboo things that make people uncomfortable seems particularly pernicious to me.
[00:46:58] Mike: Now there are other topics that are taboo and censored. Uh, I mean the, what is a woman one and the squirting one are both sort of sex and gender related. So more on the topic of this podcast, but look, there are, there are other, there are other topics, um, that where this kind of is employed and it makes it so people can't have legitimate conversations. Um,
[00:47:25] Mike: And that makes me think of Matt Walsh's movie that's about to come out, which is called Am I Racist? And he's basically playing on the same, he's playing he's he's playing playing the taboo game again, where he basically becomes a DEI. I looked it up and you can pay like 1500 or 2000 bucks and become a DEI educator, which is obviously a scam. I mean, that doesn't mean anything, but he he went and got one of these certifications.
[00:47:51] Mike: And then hijinks ensue presumably because he's going to run around and, uh, take the position that he, uh, you know, he's just going to sort of play games with, play verbal games with people about whether he's a racist or not. But I, you know, sort of like to give you, dear listeners, like a different way to think about these, these kinds of top that kind of topic, very socially charged topic. Um, people like to, uh, view,
[00:48:21] Mike: whether it's gender-related or not, people in sex-related or not, people like to view ah whats what is moral, what's right, what's ethical as emerging from some kind of ah thought process about what's the best way to to you know what's what's what's the best way to preserve a certain value.
[00:48:43] Mike: um in society, but I'd like to suggest that you think about it differently. and I think that um the best way to understand human history, and this goes across the board, is through economics and not through history or political science or sociology or any of those um any of those ways of thinking.
[00:49:06] Mike: And so what that means is that what people call morality ultimately is just what worked in terms of providing people with the goods they needed to live, to survive, to have sort of a ah fruitful life. So you can talk about this in terms of sex. There's actually a series of um YouTube videos that I will post in the show notes that I found very illuminating and I might talk about ah in the future, um particularly if I figure out how to play audio and then comment on it, which is something that I'd like to do on the podcast. um i'm I am a software engineer, but I just haven't sat down and figured out how you do it in terms of a platform to have the best way of doing that. In any event, this gentleman talks about ah he he he he he talks about an understanding of sex and and male-female relationships.
[00:49:55] Mike: directly from what, where people are best allocating their time and money. So for example, if a woman is super attractive, he says, it doesn't make sense for her to be on Tinder. And it's just because it economically doesn't make sense. Like she, ah she's just going to be wasting her time and time ultimately is you know fungible because um she's so attractive that she can kind of ah better allocate the scarce time she has to finding higher higher quality, more compelling men. ah and you know of course Of course, he's looking at male-female relationships economically, so looking so you know looking at the reality that historically the woman
[00:50:40] Mike: ah bears the children, and so therefore she has a lot more invested in who ah she has children with, whereas the man can impregnate many, many different women, and so he has a different incentive structure. Similarly, he looks at men who are ah very wealthy in what they would do.
[00:50:57] Mike: And his point is basically that a very, very wealthy person man, you know spending an hour with a woman might cost him $1,000 just in terms of you know lost profits or wages or interest, I guess interest he would get regardless, but but that kind of thing. like So he's dealing with numbers where it's like, look, why would he do this? And the guy makes the argument that you know a very, very wealthy man might be better off if he's if he's not looking to start a family, might be better off just using high priced escorts, which I actually think is a fairly interesting argument.
[00:51:26] Mike: But in this context, I just want to point out that you know he's he's looking at it economically. So it's not a question of like what's right or, hey, let's sit around reading you know philosophical tracts. Instead, everything's downstream of economics. ah These rules and processes get set up culturally in order to do whatever economically is going to be optimal for a society. so i mean you know In terms of taboos, ah let's see Matt Walsh is making this thing, am I a racist? and it's like you know What does that even mean? yeah um Economically, what what is what is racism?
[00:53:32] Mike: So I'm not going to get into the specifics of ah what know Matt Walsh is doing with the Amiracist movie and sort of how one could look at that economically right now. I would probably get into it at a later time.
[00:53:45] Mike: um but you know all of these topics you can sort of understand in that regard and people fall in these sort of pits ah because of not wanting to make other people feel bad, which unfortunately is this kind of value system that's leading to a difficulty in our society of kind of communicating about important topics.
[00:54:07] Mike: um so As I mentioned, I had the misfortune to watch a significant amount of the coverage of both the Republicans and Democrats. I realized that people who don't ah really fit into that dichotomy are often ah you know people people think of someone like Alex Jones, kind of these crazy guys who who say horrible things and are conspiracy theory minded and so forth. But I don't think that at this point,
[00:54:35] Mike: um
[00:54:37] Mike: I don't think that's a fair way to characterize the way that I look at the situation where I dislike ah both of the candidates and both the parties. and I think that there is a better way that kind of comes out of this economic ah perspective to view what's going on in the United States and kind of worldwide.
[00:54:59] Mike: um you know i'm I'm unusual in the set of people that I interact with and really disliking Barack Obama. People think that guy is really smart and did some great things for our country. Obamacare might have been a reasonable thing, but I think that there's an important ah aspect that people disregard. um When I lived in France for a year,
[00:55:23] Mike: um It was 2017, 2018, and I was asked frequently, kind of how why why did our country elect Trump? like How did that happen? What's going on? um and It's funny because that's a question that basically never gets asked in the United States. It gets tabooed out in the same way female squirting is tabooed.
[00:55:42] Mike: um People just you know assume, look, it's because there's these horrible people out there that, 60 million or 70 million, 80 million of them apparently, who vote for this horrible man. And he is a horrible man. But I think that you have to go back a little bit further to understand ah what happened. And I do think that you can lay a lot of the blame for the guy that preceded Trump. um And it's economic.
[00:56:10] Mike: ah Coming out of the 2008-2009 recession, um you know we our country had already experimented. and And when I say our country, ultimately, ah the rest of the world winds up having to follow suit because they don't have the the United States kind of runs directs the economy in a large large measure for the world.
[00:56:33] Mike: largely because i mean it's for a few reasons, but one of the main we're we're the biggest consumer market, but also because of our military and the fact that we can force various types of transactions to happen in US dollars and force countries to participate, ah to to kind of have free trade with our country with our companies.
[00:56:51] Mike: ah And there's also the fact that with technology, I mean, the reality is that you know the the vast majority of the large technology companies that have formed since like the 1990s have been in the US. So that kind of forces the forces the matter. In any event, ah in 2003 and 2004, after the dot com crash,
[00:57:16] Mike: the United States lowered interest rates to close to zero. And I remember when you know having to put money in savings accounts ah that earned 2% interest or something like that, just to have any kind of return on money that I didn't have invested in equities and so forth, real estate. um After 2008, 2009,
[00:57:40] Mike: The United States decided to run interest rates at to zero for an extended i mean an extremely extended period of time and also conducted monetary operations where we had the central bank purchase debt of our federal government.
[00:57:57] Mike: ah to keep longer-term interest rates down. Now, the fed the the our Federal Reserve would normally just set them for um three three months at a time. the The three-month Treasury note would be set more or less by our Federal Reserve, but they wanted to set it for when they borrowed money for five years or 10 years. ah Those impact mortgage rates a lot more.
[00:58:15] Mike: um So that was great for people like me who are rich. It was great for me because it made it so the stock market went up way faster than the value of goods and services produced in our country did ah for an extended period of time. It also made it so that um you could get interest you could get very low interest rate mortgages. So for instance, I have two mortgages on houses that are 2.5% interest rates because of this policy they enacted.
[00:58:43] Mike: um It's always able to sort of multiply my wealth as a result of that and I'm not uncommon in fact There's you know I would actually say that I'm sort of at the low end of the amount of multiplying that happened for a lot of people So essentially the way you can look at it is if in 2008 you had a bunch of money You did really well like the money that you had money if you had a lot of assets you did really well and At the same time, however, ah there's this large set of people in our country, more than half, who in 2008 didn't have a lot of money. And so these policies basically didn't help those folks. Now, the way you can look at it is ah the goal on some level was to, you know, after 2008, 2009 was to sort of stabilize the economy.
[00:59:34] Mike: But the only tool that the government really employed, the the main tool they employed was something that multiplied the value of assets. This by the way is why for an extended period of time there was no inflation in our economy. Because if you give a person who's already got $10 million, dollars an extra $5 million, dollars they don't run out and spend it on something. right To the extent they do spend it on something, they spend it buying ah capital assets like stocks and bonds and real estate. And of course, those things did inflate. But when people talk about inflation, you know they're talking about food and gasoline and you know car parts, stuff that normal people buy every day. But you see, ah by only enriching the rich people, the government did not ah cause that kind of inflation.
[01:00:25] Mike: now Across years and years and years, you then ah created this situation where what we would traditionally call the middle class and what Kamala Harris talked about is the middle class she's going to restore during her speech tonight. You basically made it so that fewer and fewer people were in that class because basically If you were above a certain line, you got richer and richer. And if you were below a certain line, you stay the same or got poorer and poorer. And meanwhile, things like houses, ah stocks, things like that got much more and more expensive. So you know people that were poor poorer to start with ultimately became poorer and poorer. And so you know it's not that surprising in light of that.
[01:01:10] Mike: that in 2016, when it came time ah for obama President Obama's successor Hillary Clinton to run for office, that ah people in large sections of the country voted for Donald Trump.
[01:01:27] Mike: um Now, I mean, there are other aspects that go on here, like there are segments of the country that are more poor ah that the Democrats were able to sort of appeal to and historically have been good at appealing to, whether it's certain minority groups, ah people that have you know really care about non-economic or at least seemingly non-economic topics like abortion. ah So they were able to sort of appeal to those folks. And so that keeps it close. um But you have this kind of realignment that took place.
[01:01:57] Mike: And I think that's interesting because when people look at ah when they look at how to explain what's what went on there, ah they typically want to basically say, look, there's this ah half of the country that are a bunch of people in the South that are white supremacists, deplorables as Hillary called them.
[01:02:16] Mike: ah And look, they're just bad people. you know So what are you supposed to do about them? i mean They're just bad. They're sort of people clinging to their guns and their religion. um And look, all those things may be sort of true, ah but at the same time, like that's not actually the problem. The problem is that you set up this heads I win, tails ah tells you lose situation in the economy where only rich people did well.
[01:02:36] Mike: And that's that's sort of difficult to fix. Now, at the same time, of course, ah the government was running massive deficits, which didn't matter at the time because they had interest rates set to zero. ah So the government debt has ballooned out, ballooned out, ballooned out. And you'd say, well, hey, if the government was spending all this money that it was and it wasn't taking in via taxes, shouldn't that have kind of filtered down to the middle class and the the the poor in the economy. And yeah, maybe it could have, but there's another aspect of what the government does that's sort of supposed to ah fight for these folks at the bottom end of the spectrum and the middle end of the spectrum. And that's ah
[01:03:19] Mike: that the government's supposed to fight against things like monopolies, they're supposed to regulate the economy to kind of ah make sure that wages keep pace with you know with the amount of money that's available in the economy. ah But unfortunately, you know basically none of that stuff happened either from 2008 to 2016. And look, it may not have happened before 2008.
[01:03:40] Mike: But this period when they had interest rates set to zero and we're spending money like drunken sailors is the is the key kind of ah moment. And so what you had was essentially where where in the past maybe with a well-regulated economy, you'd have a bunch of money that flowed around from different small businesses to other small businesses. ah When you have this deficit spending, instead you have these gigantic monopoly companies like Google and Amazon and the like.
[01:04:10] Mike: And so the money kind of very quickly went to these monopoly companies, which ultimately ultimately means they were just enriching, it was just enriching the shareholders of those companies even more. And of course the companies spent a lot of that time ah repurchasing their own shares with their cash reserves. So not even really reinvesting it in the economy.
[01:04:30] Mike: So, you know, essentially what you have, uh, is, uh, a political party that wants you to think that they're like the political party of like Bruce Springsteen in 1985, but they're not actually, they're just the rich people's party and that's the Democrats. And then you have the Republicans that are just kind of crazy, uh, with, uh, but, but ultimately they're the, they're the people that are kind of championing these people who've been left behind more distressingly though. Uh,
[01:04:59] Mike: It's not necessarily true that you can do anything about this anymore. The United States has run up such massive debt ah that it's not, and it's been sort of co-opted so, the government's been co-opted so completely by these wealthy people, meaning these wealthy people now are donating so much money that they kind of run everything. They run the show. It's not clear that there's any way that you would get kind of back to equilibrium.
[01:05:23] Mike: And specifically ah with the debt that's been run up, yeah, it's just, night day's it's it would be very difficult to to ever sort of ah address or approach paying that off. A good friend of mine calls this the casino economy. You have things like crypto, ah kind of a stock market that only ever seems to go up, housing market that only ever seems to go up. um And so essentially what's happened is you've disincentivized people from having prudent behaviors.
[01:05:51] Mike: Um, it reminds me of, uh, I played briefly this game called second life, uh, that probably still exists. And I remember they added an economic component to it, meaning you could convert us dollars into in game currency and like almost overnight in the game, like the game originally, like I would always do things like of course, uh, join and then like make it so I had a gigantic cock attached to my body and go around and make people upset with that. So I thought that was kind of funny. And there were other people that did similar things.
[01:06:21] Mike: but when they added a convertibility of currency to US dollars in there almost overnight. The entire world there became like a giant casino. It reminded me of the movie Back to the Future 2 where Biff sets it up so that a Hill Valley just turns into a gigantic casino. and That's what's happened to our country and ultimately the world is that you you have this kind of casino mentality. and funded by it's It's been funded historically by the fact that the government backstops the financial markets at a return.
[01:06:52] Mike: Uh, everybody kind of quote unquote knows that if the stock market drops a meaningful amount or housing drops a meaningful amount, they'll just take interest rates back down to zero, start handing out money again, only to rich people. And then it'll, then it'll be all better. There's just one other thing that I wanted to bring up that is another example of this kind of tabooing censorship, not making people feel bad, et cetera. That's infected the discourse and that's around ah the insurrection and Trump's claims that the election in 2020 was stolen. ah I don't and even know what that means to say an election is stolen and that guy's just a cry baby. So, you know, and also it's one of these things where like, look, I mean, even if the umpire makes a bad call in ah in a game, you know, you just have to, there's nothing you can do. You can fix it for the, you know, whatever fix it means, but you can do it for the next game. But like, look, if you lose, you lose. I mean, ultimately you've got to just leave the field.
[01:07:47] Mike: um and And I'm grateful that the guy did leave the field. Ultimately after all the bullshit they put us, he put us through. him But um you know, a fact that I haven't seen discussed, okay, this is what I want to say. I think what he means when he says that it was rigged is not what people pretend or people in the media pretend ah that he's saying. I think people in the media think or want want want you to think that what he's saying is Look, I don't know what he's saying, but like they they they want they want the narrative to be, oh, look, there was some you know election worker.
[01:08:23] Mike: uh, in some County who cheated, who like literally stuffed the ballot boxes full. And that's not like, I don't know, that that doesn't seem particularly plausible to me. And even if it happened, it would happen on such a, you know, it would happen on a small scale and you could have corruption going both directions. They probably sort of cancel out. and So I don't think that's a particularly interesting avenue. But one thing I didn't know is tonight I, when I was waylifting, I asked chat GBT how many votes were cast for president in 2016 and how many in 2020.
[01:08:53] Mike: And the answer was 120 around 128 million in 2016 and around 155 million in 2020. That's a huge jump. So basically in 2020, the number of votes cast for president jumped ah by close to 30 million ah versus 2016. And then I asked chat GPD, well, why did that happen? And it came up with like various stuff. um But ah the most The one that I think actually is is what kind of created this argument that something that something nefarious happened is that a lot of states basically, because of under the guise of COVID,
[01:09:35] Mike: under the guise of, because of COVID, you know for maybe very reasonable reasons actually, ah expanded dramatically absentee voting. So they um sent out ballots to people without the people requesting them. Maybe they had lots of extra early voting and you know you can very reasonably say, look, you know it's ah isn't it a good thing to have more people vote? And I can see that argument. um But at the same time, you know what if you know that if you just get more people to vote than that favors one side versus the other, which it in fact does. um And so then it's like you're changing the rules of the game, right? It's like it's so you found a cheat code. um Now, admittedly, the cheat code makes it sort of arguably more democratic. know you could You could imagine having a situation where you say, look, if you don't vote, you have to pay $1,000 tax. And so then basically everybody would vote, or hey, if you vote, we'll give you $100.
[01:10:29] Mike: um They would never do that because then that would cause inflation. The money would go to poor people, they would buy stuff in you anyway. but but But you could imagine something like that and then you would get even more democratic. ah So it's hard to argue against it.
[01:10:42] Mike: Um, but I wanted to bring it up because it's, I think that's the actual answer to this kind of thing that people go in circles about, uh, was it stolen? Was it not stolen? What it's meant here. And I think that's what's, I think that's actually the issue, uh, that, that, that nobody that sort of this gets, gets hidden in there. And it's, it's a valid thing to talk about, right? Like, is it, is it cheating? If you come up with this way to sort of get more people to be able to vote, knowing that that will favor your side. Um,
[01:11:12] Mike: ah Or you know is it is it just more democratic? like it's ah you know The more people you can get to vote, the better. um And I think that's sort of a valid question. And I also think that um it's i think it's at least valid to say, hey, you know to for to people on Trump's side to say, hey, you guys basically changed the rules of the game by using COVID to to change the electorate, you know to change who's in the electorate, whether it's more democratic or not. It's a little weird that you changed the rules of the game.
[01:11:41] Mike: um you know this is this is sort of an ah I know I'm going a little long here, but this is sort of a ah an example of a general principle that I think people would do well to to see in the world, which is that when there's something that's at issue, there are always two sides.
[01:11:58] Mike: You know, so it's like if, if somebody says, look, there's just no, you know, like, uh, like Roe versus Wade, you say, Oh, look, how could you be against pro choice? And it's like, or, you know, how could you be, you're just hurting women. And it's like, okay, but you know, there is, there is another side to that. Um, namely, I mean, even I as a pro choice person, I'm, I was in favor of abolishing Roe versus Wade.
[01:12:21] Mike: ah But I'm pro-choice and you'd be like, well, how's that possible? And the answer is because I think there should be a vote about it. I don't think it's great to have these things solved by kind of an unelected body like the Supreme Court because it politicizes, politicizes the Supreme Court, which is exactly what's happened and delegitimizes it. And then you, you have problems. Yeah. Ironically, I think the delegitimization of the Supreme Court is much more, a much more dangerous threat to democracy than anything Trump's done.
[01:12:47] Mike: And the delegitimization is driven by the left because they don't like the constitutional process that was followed, which adhered completely to the constitution, to get people on there would that would overturn that thing. And they don't like the idea that people get to vote on abortion, which is silly. like They should get to vote. But the point, my main point here is that, and by the way, I hope the vote goes pro-choice. I am pro-choice.
[01:13:10] Mike: But you know I think it's better. I think i think it it settles things better ah for your country if there's a vote on them. But ah the point is that there's there's always two sides. And if you think that there's a topic where there's only one side, where there's only right one right side or one side that's arguable, then you probably haven't researched it well enough.
[01:13:31] Mike: Okay, i think that's I think I'll stop with my long-winded political rant here. um As always, you can send in comments or feedback at ymmvpod at gmail dot.com. ah We're also on Twitter. ah You can join the subreddit, created curated amateur porn.
[01:13:53] Mike: Uh, we also have a YouTube channel, which just posts the podcasts to it. So you could always go there and join. I actually exhorted people to listen to go subscribe there and like nobody did. Uh, so we still have very few subscribers there. Uh, it's hard to get podcast listeners to do anything, especially the sort of codgers that listen to this podcast in any event. Uh, that's this episode of YMMV episode one 76 of your mileage may vary and I will catch you next time.