Transcript
00:00:00Why should anyone listen to anything that you guys have to say?
00:00:04I mean, you've brought in an interesting group, right?
00:00:06I mean, whenever people don't want to read something and they just want to watch something
00:00:11to understand falling fertility, inevitably I'm like, well, there's this movie you can
00:00:15watch online about how fertility is falling, why, what's going on?
00:00:20And I reference your work and I pass them basically to you.
00:00:24I mean, I'm a demographer.
00:00:26At some point today, I will, during this conversation, I will probably try to draw a graph in the
00:00:31air with my hands.
00:00:33You can, you can, you can like lunge and slap my hand down when I do it.
00:00:38But so, I mean, for me, there's that.
00:00:41And then of course the Collinses are like practically the people who've like made this an issue for
00:00:47a lot of people.
00:00:48With a punchable face of pronatalism.
00:00:51So I guess I'm trying to be sure we're like multiple people here.
00:00:55And then you're like, it's so true.
00:00:58It's so true.
00:00:59I don't want to punch you, but it's, uh, yeah.
00:01:02Yeah.
00:01:02Simone, have you got, this just a passing interest, a passion for you?
00:01:06What is this?
00:01:07We are, we're heart effective altruists.
00:01:09We care about the long-term future of humanity.
00:01:12And you can actually see this among many people who are famous pronatalists, like Elon Musk,
00:01:15right?
00:01:16Like his interests track with what appear to be existential threats to humanity.
00:01:20He's concerned about the environment.
00:01:22He, he works on Tesla, right?
00:01:23He sees these things.
00:01:25Now he's trying to get humans to space.
00:01:26Um, so people who are very interested in long-term human flourishing are naturally likely to care
00:01:32about demographic collapse because it is one of those things that is a civilizational level threat.
00:01:37I mean, when, when Steven mentioned, for example, that this does affect everyone.
00:01:40Yeah.
00:01:41Boomers who are like, ah, like not my problem.
00:01:43They're still in just a few years going to be receiving only like under 80% of their expected social security payments, which are being paid for by Gen Z, who's not expecting anything.
00:01:53So everyone is affected by this.
00:01:55And yeah, this is something where basically, even if you don't care about the long-term future, you're affected.
00:02:00But because we do care about it, we care about humanity in 100, in 1,000 years, we're, we're at the precipice of a tipping point that could either take things in a very cool direction or a very bad direction.
00:02:12So we care about it from that perspective.
00:02:14And you've been working on this for two decades flying around the world.
00:02:18Um, it's just over one decade.
00:02:20It feels like to, you know, I come from a very different perspective.
00:02:23I came out of the commercial world, uh, where I ran a data science company doing advanced data modeling for 20 years.
00:02:32And I could have, and maybe should have continued in that line.
00:02:36But once I saw in January, 2016, that the birth rate issue wasn't just limited, as I thought at that time to Japan and Italy, that effectively it was spreading globally and had been spreading for 50 years.
00:02:50And I didn't know about it.
00:02:52And for sure, I was bringing up my kids at that time as teenagers, as they were for a world where birth rate decline was not going to be a factor for their, the entirety of their future.
00:03:02I got scared that why do we not know about this?
00:03:05And then going to research to find out, well, what's a common factor?
00:03:09Because we can't have independent factors alone explaining why this happened in Italy and Japan and Germany and Spain and Austria, et cetera, at effectively the same time.
00:03:21And I find that no one was looking at it from that way.
00:03:23So I, you know, I really have devoted, uh, 10 years into what I would call reproductive dynamics.
00:03:29What are the patterns?
00:03:31So rather than looking at demography from the point of view of how do we explain changes or rather what levers can change things?
00:03:41Is it linked to salaries?
00:03:43Is it linked to housing apprises?
00:03:46I come at it from a different point of view is what's the same?
00:03:49What are the underlying structures across societies and over time that are really locked in or mostly locked in?
00:03:55And so it's an interesting, I would describe it really as, yeah, reproductive dynamics or structural demography.
00:04:03One thing that I think is worth, uh, noted noting is that for all three of us, uh, your backstory, I know your all's backstory.
00:04:10None of us like grew up as kids and we're like, I hope someday that I study low fertility.
00:04:15Um, like, and, and also like, none of us are actually coming out of the tradition of academic demography.
00:04:22Okay.
00:04:22I started writing on low fertility and then went and got a PhD because it was like a, like a, a necessity of the job.
00:04:29Right.
00:04:30The reality is on the question of low fertility, by and large, academic demography has to a considerable extent been missing in action.
00:04:38Um, yes, that you kind of noticed this was a thing and then got into it from a very different background.
00:04:43You all, you all were like living in Korea.
00:04:45Right.
00:04:45And kind of freaked out by no one having kids.
00:04:48Um, for me, I was working on totally different, like regional economic development stuff.
00:04:52And I kept bumping into fertility and being like, this is this weird, super powerful, slow moving force in the background of everything I'm writing about.
00:05:00Maybe I should just write about that.
00:05:02Um, and I think that that's the story for a lot of people who are concerned about following fertility is that.
00:05:08None of us just woke up and said, I'm deeply concerned about following fertility.
00:05:12There were other things we loved in the world.
00:05:14And we gradually woke up to the fact that if no one's having kids, the other things we love don't last.
00:05:20Global fertility is projected to keep falling, reaching around 1.8 by 2050 and 1.6 by 2100.
00:05:26By 2100, only six countries are expected to still be at or above replacement level.
00:05:32The U S recorded its lowest ever fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman in 2024, around 710,000 fewer children were born in the U S last year compared to the nation's peak in 2007.
00:05:45Since 2007, the general fertility rate has declined by 23% and in the UK being childless at age 30 is now the norm rising from 48% to 58%.
00:05:55Yeah.
00:05:56And I think those numbers really don't even do a justice to the reality of what that means for a society.
00:06:04Um, you know, people often still think many still do that there are too many people on the planet and having fewer people is a good thing.
00:06:12But when you look at the dynamics of this, I like to talk in the periods of time in which births will half and then half again and half again and half again.
00:06:23A curious one I was looking at the other day is if you have a fertility rate of 1.0, that's very low, but it's above what we're seeing right now in Korea and Taiwan, Hong Kong, et cetera.
00:06:35If you take 1.0 and if that doesn't change, the total births in a given generation is equal to the total future births of all future generations, because you keep halving and halving and halving and halving and you add up all those halves of halves of halves and you get no more than the total of the current generation.
00:07:00Now that's 1.0.
00:07:02That's a fun homework math problem.
00:07:04Right, right.
00:07:05You're like intro to demography students.
00:07:06Well, let me give you another one.
00:07:07Can I?
00:07:08I've only got two of these and I haven't shared these before.
00:07:11But if you take a fertility rate of 2.0, almost replacement level, and 1.0, and I were to ask you, what's the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0?
00:07:23Well, it's actually two answers to this question.
00:07:26If you're talking about, well, today's generation, you know, the number of average children people have, of course, is 1.5.
00:07:33But if you're looking at the future, the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0 is 1.92.
00:07:42Yep.
00:07:43Because at 2.0, births are going to half every 800 years.
00:07:48You get down to about 1.92 and they're going to half every 400 years.
00:07:52You've half the length of time for births to half already.
00:07:55When you get down to that 1.5 point, 1.6 point, like the US and Europe and, yeah, well, you know, frankly, I think we're all on the path to South Korea.
00:08:05Maybe we'll get to that at some point in the conversation.
00:08:07But where we are right now, births are halving in the industrialized world every 50 to 60 years.
00:08:12What happens if the population declines?
00:08:15I think a lot of the time people ask the question, why should I care?
00:08:18They've maybe got some defenses.
00:08:19We're worried about climate change or overpopulation or this or that or the other, trying to get women out.
00:08:23We'll get into that.
00:08:24But like, what happens to the world?
00:08:27Forget individuals, forget happiness and connection and stuff like that.
00:08:31What just happens to, what's the impact of having fewer people next generation than now?
00:08:36Well, I think there's so many answers to that.
00:08:39I mean, economics and the social side.
00:08:41I mean, I spent seven years in Detroit, Michigan, around the time of its bankruptcy in 2013.
00:08:46And there was a city built for 2 million people with only 700,000 living in it.
00:08:51Very different reasons.
00:08:52But you have the same issue of a society, a city in this case, built for a certain number of people.
00:08:59And you look over a period of decades, what it's like for a city, a community to be hollowed out.
00:09:05I remember as filming for the documentary and driving around and you see some clips of this, but there was one moment driving down this street of what would have been very fancy houses in then a very scary area, not far from the center of Detroit.
00:09:20And there's just decay everywhere, except towards the end of this one-way street, there was a family having a picnic on the garden outside, young kids running around.
00:09:31And for me, that was just the image of this is the future.
00:09:35So that's a book chapter opening, right?
00:09:37Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:09:38Right.
00:09:39You know, you've got this joyous moment for a young family surrounded by decay.
00:09:44And you know what?
00:09:45I bet you now that family isn't living there.
00:09:47I bet you that.
00:09:48Well, Detroit has kind of re-energized itself.
00:09:50It's come back.
00:09:51But that's not going to happen while fertility is low.
00:09:54I hope we come back to the question of what will happen in terms of people's individual experiences and happiness.
00:09:59Because personally, that's what I care about most.
00:10:01But there is one area of this that I think is dramatically under-appreciated in terms of the effects of falling fertility.
00:10:09Fertility doesn't fall evenly everywhere.
00:10:11And as we just heard, it is the case that small differences in fertility, once you're below replacement, small differences in fertility, quote unquote small differences, can create radically compounding differences in military age recruitable populations.
00:10:27The result is, in the 20th century, we worried about how large groups of young men would impact internal stability of countries.
00:10:35Too many young men, they start a civil war, you get communist revolutions.
00:10:38And the US built a whole foreign policy apparatus around managing communist revolutions and civil wars in other countries.
00:10:45The 21st century, we already know, is not like that.
00:10:48Civil wars are not the problem.
00:10:49Interstate conflict is, okay?
00:10:51We're seeing an explosion in conflicts between states.
00:10:54Why?
00:10:55Well, one very plausible reason is that when fertility decline becomes very rapid and becomes very differential, you get a lot of countries that realize, one, this is their last chance to make a go at it before they don't have a fieldable army anymore.
00:11:09And two, that the guy beside them declined way before them, that they're a generation farther down the path.
00:11:15And so, a lot of countries in the next few decades are going to be at a place where they realize that they will literally never, ever have a better time to strike ever again.
00:11:24That being the case, 21st century, fertility decline.
00:11:27I mean, you can think about this North and South Korea.
00:11:29North Korea's fertility rate is something like two times that of South Korea.
00:11:32China has low fertility, but still has this big age bump that Taiwan does not have.
00:11:40And Taiwan's already smaller.
00:11:41Now, you can say, well, you know, automated weapons will fill the gap and all these things.
00:11:45And that is happening in Ukraine.
00:11:47Ukraine's trying, but Ukraine's also showing how hard it is.
00:11:50Even with the full support of lots of industrialized technological societies helping them innovate and develop, it's still taking a brutal, ghastly cost for their entire society just to barely cling to their turf.
00:12:04So, I would say that one of the real realities of low fertility will be the resumption of zero-sum interstate conflict.
00:12:14And we know that because stable population societies or even declining population societies have existed many times in the past.
00:12:21Most of human history was a situation where there was no long-run population growth.
00:12:26And it wasn't peaceful.
00:12:28The idea that as countries decline, they'll get so freaked out about war that they stop fighting is nonsense.
00:12:35Instead, they will realize, now's our moment.
00:12:39But it's even more local than that.
00:12:41Because, I mean, basically, our government and most developed countries' governments are set up like a Ponzi scheme.
00:12:47And you're not.
00:12:48You're bought into it.
00:12:49Like, this is a problem because you're bought into a Ponzi scheme.
00:12:52And even if you're trying not to.
00:12:54Like, let's assume that you're like, well, I know I'm not going to get my Social Security.
00:12:57Well, I know I'm not going to get Medicare or Medicaid if anything's hard for me.
00:13:00It still matters because hospitals are going to start shutting down when the government stops re-worsing them.
00:13:06Your 401k?
00:13:07Yeah, if you're bought into the stock market, if you have a 401k, if you have a state-based pension fund.
00:13:11Also, keep in mind that as cities start to spend more and more of their budgets just paying for pension funds,
00:13:16where is the money to pay for their existing police forces, for their fire departments?
00:13:20Who's going to come to your house when it's burning down?
00:13:22A lot of these things that we've come to depend upon that we're like, well, obviously, I'm going to get this.
00:13:26These are relatively new inventions.
00:13:28United States is a socialist utopia.
00:13:30And people don't even realize it.
00:13:32And we're like, oh, you know, China is socialist.
00:13:34No, they're not.
00:13:35We're way more socialist than China.
00:13:36How so?
00:13:37Well, you have to pay for school in China.
00:13:39All the health coverage that you get in China.
00:13:41Yeah.
00:13:42You don't get, like, if you're poor in the United States, if you're out or near the poverty line, especially if you're a parent, you typically have childcare paid for.
00:13:49You typically have healthcare totally paid for for your kid.
00:13:52You have food assistance for your kid.
00:13:53That doesn't exist in China.
00:13:54That exists here.
00:13:55And it's not going to exist much longer if demographic lapse keeps playing out without serious intervention.
00:14:01Why?
00:14:02Well, we already see this in a lot of towns.
00:14:04I mean, I'm from Kentucky.
00:14:07Eastern Kentucky has massive population decline over the last few decades.
00:14:11And whole communities, municipalities that just disband.
00:14:14Mm-hmm.
00:14:15And they say, okay, we're just done as a municipality.
00:14:17There's not enough taxpayers.
00:14:18What really does is you get to point -- they'll abandon the school.
00:14:21They'll abandon the roads.
00:14:22The town disbands when there's not enough taxpayers to pay for the salaries of the bureaucrats.
00:14:27Okay?
00:14:28And at that point, they're like, well, we'll disband.
00:14:29And I'm like, I think most people would have preferred if you fired yourselves and kept the school a little longer.
00:14:34But, I mean, you can buy towns in Kentucky, school, fire station, everything.
00:14:40Now they're grown over with weeds and vines and all that.
00:14:43But it's a great place to start communes, right?
00:14:46But ultimately, you can see this all over the country.
00:14:50I mean, Chicago, Illinois, where teacher pensions, okay?
00:14:54This is like a microcosm that's going on.
00:14:56Teacher pensions are driving this massive, constant run-up in educational spending, even as actual money spent on instruction.
00:15:03is not rising.
00:15:05And surprise, surprise, people are like, well, all this education money is not getting better outcome for kids.
00:15:10Yeah, because the education money is just pension money.
00:15:12We just file pension funding as education funding.
00:15:15And I'm like, no, pension funding is welfare.
00:15:18Okay?
00:15:19There's a classification issue here.
00:15:21But, so like, ultimately, localities are already having this problem.
00:15:26States localities are having this problem where the needs of the old are cannibalizing the futures of the young.
00:15:32And just, I mean, to put a point on it, now you see more and more older property owners then saying, well, we shouldn't have to pay property taxes once we've paid off our mortgage because we don't have kids in the school system.
00:15:46And I'm like, first of all, you went to that school system, you can pay it back.
00:15:49Second of all, you did have kids in it and your property taxes didn't pay their full cost.
00:15:53And third of all, we discovered during COVID when you shut the schools down, the youths burn your city down.
00:15:58So pay your protection racket.
00:16:00I remember we had a conversation and I said, what happens if you have a country's population decline?
00:16:06What does that look like?
00:16:07Is it just that towns are half the size?
00:16:09That's not the case.
00:16:10It's that small towns that are less desirable to be in just disappear entirely and become abandoned.
00:16:15New York will be the last bastion of wherever the population decline goes to.
00:16:21Is Tokyo suffering?
00:16:22Right.
00:16:23I mean, you look at Japan right now and you look at the forecast for population movement within Japan and the rural areas are absolutely dying, but the growth within Tokyo is continuing and will continue for a generation more.
00:16:36I call these magnet towns or magnet cities.
00:16:39Young people will gravitate to where there are jobs, where there are supermarkets, and the older people will be left, sadly, in these rural dying communities.
00:16:48They call it population triage, right?
00:16:51People look and they realize this town has no future.
00:16:53So they move to the places that will survive.
00:16:55Which are more expensive.
00:16:56Which are more expensive.
00:16:57And which have lower birth rates.
00:16:58And lower birth rates.
00:16:59And then they move again and again and again.
00:17:02And so you get...
00:17:03It's actually...
00:17:04And you can see this everywhere.
00:17:05It's not just Japan.
00:17:06I mean, in Bulgaria, Sofia is doing fine.
00:17:09I mean, in England, London does okay.
00:17:13Around the world, once you see it, you can't not see it.
00:17:16That low-fertility societies often have thriving primate cities.
00:17:21Because what's happening is all the people who can get out, there's this incredible filtering effect.
00:17:26That everybody who has the ability to look ahead at the future, everybody who's kind of a long-term planner, an investor, a builder, looks and goes,
00:17:35I don't want to be here when the stuff hits the fan.
00:17:39And they move to the big city.
00:17:40Why is it the case that declining fertility impacts the economy negatively?
00:17:45What's the reason for that?
00:17:46Because you said 401Ks, we don't have the money to be able to put into the system.
00:17:49But people might not naturally just understand why that's the case.
00:17:53I mean, when you have growing fertility, you have growing population, growing demand, you have more people paying into a system.
00:17:59Also, we didn't set up things like our social services in a way where, you know, you actually pay money to Social Security and it stays there.
00:18:07No, we first created Social Security and we paid people out immediately and we're like, we'll just keep funding it as we go along.
00:18:13What could possibly go wrong?
00:18:15So when you stop that, again, because it's a Ponzi scheme, just like the basic design, is you have to pay people in and then you pay someone out.
00:18:22And then whoever's last holding the bill is going to have to.
00:18:25So you need to feed more young people in the bottom in order to be able to pay for the old people at the top.
00:18:29Yeah.
00:18:30Because we've got an aging population, this inversion means that there are fewer and fewer young people with more and more old people.
00:18:37Yeah.
00:18:38And that is going to be the problem.
00:18:39So the point here.
00:18:40So, but I mean, that's 100% true.
00:18:43But when I think about the real economic problem of low fertility, you know, I benefit so much from the existence of Albert Einstein.
00:18:52Okay.
00:18:53He invented things that everyone in the world benefits from ideas, concepts, or.
00:18:58Um, uh, or we could say Elon Musk.
00:19:01Okay.
00:19:02Or any of these high productivity geniuses who have done things that have revolutionized the world.
00:19:08Innovation is non-rivalrous.
00:19:10Everybody benefits.
00:19:11The odds you get a genius are just a function of population times education times, you know, some latent genetic difference, but times capital density.
00:19:21Okay.
00:19:22So if a super genius is born in a country with no education and no capital density, they don't live up to their potential.
00:19:27So basically as fertility is falling, particularly in industrialized societies that have deep capital markets education, where a genius could rise to their potential.
00:19:36Everyone loses a bigger population, particularly in those countries yields innovators for the entire world.
00:19:43The fundamental engine of economic growth is not population structure.
00:19:48It's just ideas.
00:19:49It's productivity.
00:19:50It's, it's division of labor.
00:19:51It's innovation.
00:19:52And that stuff slows down.
00:19:54Even on the consumption side.
00:19:56When a new, what are we drinking here?
00:19:58Newtonic.
00:19:59Newtonic.
00:20:00A productivity drink.
00:20:01Um, and this is a relatively new product.
00:20:04It's only been around for.
00:20:05Couple of years.
00:20:06Couple of years.
00:20:07Okay.
00:20:08Um, I would bet if you did a marketing survey on your consumers, most of them aren't 65.
00:20:13They're probably relatively young, partly because your market is young, but also because the market for every new product skews young.
00:20:20Demand for innovation skews young.
00:20:22Older people are fine with what they have.
00:20:24So it is not just that a higher fertility population makes more innovators.
00:20:30It's the higher fertility population wants more innovation, demands more innovation, can absorb more innovation.
00:20:37As fertility falls, we will simply not have as much innovation.
00:20:41I know Robin Hanson, an economist who writes on this argues that we're basically facing the end of innovation.
00:20:47That we're going to see essentially the end of human progress, or at least a dramatic foreshortening and pace.
00:20:52Maybe AI revolutionizes that.
00:20:54But when I think about the economic costs, yeah, there's, there's the wasted consumption of reallocating young people's savings towards old people's consumption.
00:21:03That that's, that's a real burden on the economy, but you just, you need those innovators and you need people who buy their products.
00:21:10I think there's several ways to try and, to me, crystallize this.
00:21:16Um, national debts.
00:21:19We've all got them.
00:21:22National debts are there to be paid off somehow, or their interest to be paid off.
00:21:28If you, if you have fewer people in future, those debts don't just disappear.
00:21:33You're going to have your national debts as they stand now paid off by fewer and fewer and fewer people.
00:21:39So it's not just pensions.
00:21:42A lot of this skews to the problems that we're going to have when people get older, but the tax system is there to support the entirety of how societies operate.
00:21:53And national debts are a very real tangible thing.
00:21:56I think that everybody should be focused on.
00:21:58Now you're right.
00:21:59We're going to lose human capital talent.
00:22:02I'm less concerned about that because I think the problems are, you know, if you're a young person today thinking of setting up a business, any business, whether it be a cafe or a spaceship company.
00:22:18And you're looking at a business plan and you're looking for investors and if you're a cafe or your drinks company is dependent on a certain number of people and growth.
00:22:33And you're actually looking at, let's take a cafe in a town with falling birth rates.
00:22:38The investor is going to be much less likely to say, I want to invest in that.
00:22:43I'll keep my money in my pocket.
00:22:44I think you're going to have a massive move away from entrepreneurialism, the investment in time and funding to create innovation.
00:22:56And then we haven't even touched on capital markets.
00:22:58The whole entire bond market, which most people are unaware of.
00:23:04We don't go around thinking about what the bond market is going to do today, but the bond markets are what drives economies.
00:23:11And when governments issue bonds, they issue bonds for new projects to support their national debts, etc.
00:23:20There's a cost to that.
00:23:22And those bonds can be today, 20 years out, even 50 years out.
00:23:27And those bonds get traded.
00:23:29So you can go today and you can buy probably a 20 year bond that's got 15 years remaining on the city of wherever in Kentucky.
00:23:38Or the country of Japan.
00:23:40The cost of those bonds, the interest of those bonds is effectively going to be negatively impacted massively in the decades ahead.
00:23:48And what does that mean?
00:23:49It's going to be harder and harder and harder for governments to raise more money, which means again, less investment.
00:23:55And this goes back to my passion for this project.
00:23:58We haven't even, even if you were to think there's too many people on the planet.
00:24:03And if you were to think you don't want kids, this is going to impact you.
00:24:08It's going to impact societies in ways that we aren't yet talking about.
00:24:11We'll get back to talking in just one second.
00:24:13But first, tell me if this sounds familiar.
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00:24:17You eat reasonably well.
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00:25:39This sounds like quite a left-leaning idea that we're worried about the welfare of people.
00:25:45We're worried about especially helping people who are more disadvantaged.
00:25:48That it's really important to ensure that there is enough in the pot to be able to support the people who really need it,
00:25:53including the old and the poor and the people that are injured, etc, etc.
00:25:57If you ever want a nationalized health service, you're going to need to have money to be able to fund that as opposed to just relying on the wages that people can put in
00:26:04so that they can pay their insurance so that everybody else can get it redistributed like that.
00:26:08Why is it the case that having this conversation is so unpopular on the internet and immediately gets thrown the right-wing conservative misogyny, the fascism?
00:26:22Why do those arguments get thrown around so quickly?
00:26:25I think people understand correctly that there certainly can be and often, in fact, there is a tension between sustainable fertility rates
00:26:40and the gender egalitarianism that I think most of us cherish.
00:26:45I'm not like a radical left feminist, but I do want my wife to be able to vote and own property and have the right to the police hear her out if I'm beating her or something.
00:26:58I'm little e egalitarian in that sense.
00:27:03And a lot of people fear very sincerely.
00:27:07They say, "Well, I do worry about low fertility."
00:27:10But I would never say so publicly because, you know, I stand with women and the pronatalists want to force women to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
00:27:22And I mean, I'm sympathetic to that.
00:27:24And unfortunately, some varieties of pronatalism have tended to play into that.
00:27:29The reality, and there's genuine tension.
00:27:32I mean, it is true that a lot of the most sexist countries in the world have the highest birth rates.
00:27:37It is true that within society, people with more traditional gender attitudes have higher birth rates.
00:27:42These are all true things.
00:27:44There's real tension between certain gender models and high fertility.
00:27:48Now, does it have to be intrinsic tension?
00:27:50Can we find a way through it to the other side?
00:27:52I hope so.
00:27:53And I think that's what you all have talked about as well, is that you want your progressive fence to be having kids so that their values can survive in the future, too.
00:28:01And so, I think there's a lot of people who feel, rightly or wrongly, feel trapped between two things they want, okay?
00:28:10They don't love the idea of a low fertility future, but they also feel like they don't have an option other than to, like, well, if a low fertility future is the only way to protect the fact that, like, I'm a woman and I basically want to have rights, then, like, screw fertility.
00:28:26Who cares?
00:28:27Or, you know, trust that it'll get solved somehow and just don't think about it.
00:28:32So, and I think on some level, pronatalists have not always done a great job, and I probably count myself in this to some extent, of trying to communicate that, yes, right now, feminism broadly construed is pretty strongly negatively correlated with fertility.
00:28:52It is, on almost any metric.
00:28:56But we don't know that it has to be.
00:28:59We don't know that there's not a future version of feminism that's pronatal.
00:29:03We don't know that such an ideology couldn't be invented.
00:29:06The problem is, most of the people who self-identify as feminists won't even try.
00:29:11So, they won't even try to come up with a version of the ideology that's pronatal.
00:29:15So, and there are people who are, like, Lea Sargent has a great book on this, where she's trying.
00:29:22But, so I would say, I agree with what Lea you're saying, but I'm a little more sympathetic to people who feel between a rock and a hard place on this.
00:29:35Well, I think the other point here is that it's obvious what you need to give up now, and it's not obvious what the costs will be in future.
00:29:41Sure.
00:29:42And for the most part, you're not going to pay them, right?
00:29:44And if you're not intending on having kids, or if fewer people around you are intending on having kids, then you're not even attached to people who might be having to pay them.
00:29:52So, it's having to give up something that you want in order for something that you're being told that future people need.
00:29:57But we're not good in a society at doing that at the moment, at the old staving off of the delayed gratification.
00:30:02Imagine you really value gender egalitarianism, and then you have daughters, and then you learn that the future is going to be one where, like, all the crazy far-right people had all the babies, and they're going to outvote you, and now your daughters live out Handmaid's Tale.
00:30:15Okay, like, as silly as that sounds to, like, my rational brain, I personally know people who really think that's what's going to happen.
00:30:22That any kid they have is just going to be, like, governed by zealots.
00:30:26And so they're like, "Well, I don't want that for my kid. I'm not going to have that."
00:30:29Yeah, but if feminists stop having kids, there will be no feminists left.
00:30:32I'm like, "Be the change you wish. Only you can prevent forest fires."
00:30:36This is the gap, the mean children by ideology, conservatives at 1.67,
00:30:43which has actually gone up since the 1980s.
00:30:46Yeah.
00:30:47And liberals from 1.29, which was nearly the same, 1.44 to 1.29 in 1980, conservative to liberal, to now 1.67 to 0.87.
00:30:58It seems to be the case, from well-put-together surveys, that let's say 90%-ish of people at some point in life either have or want kids.
00:31:10That's not all right-wingers. 90% is pretty much everybody.
00:31:15I think the issue here is that the left have found it more challenging, because of the frictions, with some of their traditional beliefs,
00:31:26to come up with a narrative here that enables them to come up with some form of voice.
00:31:31And I think people on the right, and I will say also, I'm not pronatalist.
00:31:36That surprises a lot of people.
00:31:37I'm a researcher.
00:31:38I call myself pan-natalist.
00:31:40And a pan-natalist is someone who supports people to have the kids they want to have, but also respects people who choose not to.
00:31:49Oh, we do too. It's great.
00:31:50Okay, I think that's pan-natalism.
00:31:51I would call that pronatalism.
00:31:52Yeah.
00:31:53No, we only want people who like kids to have kids.
00:31:56I think pronatalism, to me, is interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as people who would encourage others to have kids.
00:32:04And I would encourage people to think about it. I don't know if that's a nuance.
00:32:07That is a fetish on the left. That is all these women being like, "Oh, Mr. Trump, don't send me to the Mar-a-Lago breeding pens."
00:32:14Why are they wearing those Handmaid's Tale costumes? Because it's hot.
00:32:18When you look at what women read in romance novels, "Don't breed me, sir."
00:32:23It's not real. No one is asking progressive women to have kids.
00:32:28When you look at far-right conservative men who are marrying women, they're marrying women from Latin America.
00:32:34They're not marrying women from Eastern Europe. They're not marrying progressive white women.
00:32:38There's that return to land colony in the Ozarks. It's for whites only.
00:32:43And they have to keep saying to the men, "Sorry, you have to actually marry a white woman if you want to come here."
00:32:47And they can't get any men who are far-right conservative white nationalists who have married white women because they're not there.
00:32:54I'm just saying this is fake. This whole prenatalism of, "We want you to have kids."
00:32:58No, don't have kids. If you want kids, have them. But otherwise, you can just not inherit the future.
00:33:03All right? Because they've screwed it. They've screwed it. This is a toxic culture.
00:33:07We have to wash our hands of it. We have to take through the stars and leave them behind. That's it.
00:33:10So I think... So I would... What you call pan-natalism, yeah, I would... That's how I would describe pro-natalism, okay?
00:33:17I don't think pro-natalism means forcing people to have unwanted children.
00:33:21I think it means pro-natalism, pro meaning in favor of, natal meaning births. It means you're in favor of births.
00:33:29In practice, I would say you're a pro-natalist if you support actually doing things that helps people actually have more kids.
00:33:35I think the problem with that, Simone, is that there's... It's all well and good kind of victim blaming people and saying you believe in ideology that's self-defeating.
00:33:44Because of your belief in it, you have been psyoped or gaslit into not wanting something or having a life that doesn't permit you to have this thing, despite the fact that 90% of women have or want kids.
00:34:01So it seems to me that... I understand if you've been in the trenches, as you and your husband have for a long time, that you go, "All right, I'm fucking done."
00:34:11I can't... The project to try and change hearts and minds, I've kind of lost faith in that.
00:34:16I get it. I understand why you might be exhausted at doing that, but that is condemning a huge swath of women who are left of center...
00:34:24And men.
00:34:25And men. Yeah, of course. Because for each, you know, two to tango. Like, you are condemning those people to kind of be at the mercy of an ideology that you think is bad.
00:34:35And I don't know, I would like to think that we can try and sort of stir the pot to bring some of the silt up and go, "Hey, maybe what you believe is good in many ways for the world, but also perhaps it's got some side effects that even the people that are espousing it aren't going to embody."
00:34:55Like, these people are endorsing beliefs that they don't embody and they're leaving you behind and it would be important to get you on side.
00:35:01One of the things I worry about if you say, like, "Hey, if you're on the left and you don't think that kids are good, go fuck yourself because my kids are going to inherit the earth."
00:35:08Like, I get it, but that's not actually what would be true if you were to continue to try and do the hearts and minds change thing.
00:35:18And again, for every step that you take forward, there's ten people saying, "You're trying to take rights away, force handmaids, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
00:35:29And I get why that would be exhausting, but I think trying to work out how to bring people into this, because if you really care about birth rates overall, you should be trying to get as big of a bucket as possible to scoop everybody up in.
00:35:42Market forces are going to bring them in.
00:35:44You can already see this, the rates of women who are, like, supportive of the concept of a girl boss have gone way down.
00:35:50A lot of more women are interested in becoming a trad wife.
00:35:53We're seeing, because of AI, this bottoming out of email jobs, bureaucratic jobs that were disproportionately staffed by women.
00:36:00And I think women are going to college--
00:36:01That's really uncomfortable.
00:36:02People don't realize, this is like cutting edge normie realization.
00:36:05Yeah, it's happening, it's tipping.
00:36:07The first jobs, it's called the lanyard class.
00:36:09The lanyard class are the first ones that are going to lose their jobs to AI.
00:36:13Yeah.
00:36:14And unfortunately, this is the exact sort of job that women who have got soft skillsy HR marketing stuff, they've worked hard.
00:36:21They've done the career thing.
00:36:22They've done the socioeconomic thing.
00:36:24They've done the education thing.
00:36:26And now, five guys and a lot of code has come and taken a lot of things.
00:36:32I think it might be the opposite, though.
00:36:33I mean, Claude can replace your hard skills.
00:36:36Claude can't replace the human touch, right?
00:36:38And I mean, I say this as an avid Claude user, like, I am hiring people now.
00:36:45We're staffing up at IFS.
00:36:47We don't need to think about their hard skills as much, right?
00:36:50Because Claude will do it or Claude will train them.
00:36:53But their soft skills really matter.
00:36:56Because if I'm going to put them on camera, if I'm going to put them in front of a journalist, if I'm going to do, like, that stuff matters.
00:37:01So I'm not-- we don't know exactly what's going to happen with AI.
00:37:06And there's some things AI will replace soft skills on.
00:37:08I mean, apparently, AI is, like, replacing a lot of people's girlfriends and boyfriends.
00:37:11Well, and maybe also, like, art and maybe also writing and books and, you know, therapy.
00:37:17Just, like, all the soft skills that even if you ask an AI now, it'll say no.
00:37:20It'll be disruptive in a lot of industries.
00:37:22But I think there's a reason that programmers in particular are freaked out.
00:37:26Yeah.
00:37:27Because it definitely replaces AI.
00:37:28It's not programmers.
00:37:29It's women.
00:37:30And their sentiment is already shifting.
00:37:32And what's going to happen is women are just going to be driven by simple economics.
00:37:36There is less opportunity for me in the job market.
00:37:38Maybe I will start treating homemaking as a career.
00:37:41They're going to jump off the sinking ship that is our current economy and start moving back into family-oriented businesses.
00:37:47And that's not bad.
00:37:48I mean, history for the past 2,000-plus years has been families working together.
00:37:52And this isn't women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
00:37:54This is women, you know, the husbands out there, like, you know, butchering pigs.
00:37:58And women are, you know, in the front selling the meat, right?
00:38:00These are businesses that families work on together.
00:38:02And I think we're going to see a return to that.
00:38:03And I think it's really cool.
00:38:04And I think women are already leaning in that direction.
00:38:06And this isn't about saying, women, screw you.
00:38:09I don't care about you.
00:38:10We're leaving you behind.
00:38:11They're going to come to this on our own.
00:38:12But I think this is not about me trying to proactively go out and change their minds.
00:38:16It is about me being like, it's okay for you to do this.
00:38:18It's okay for you to like this.
00:38:19And just letting market forces play out.
00:38:21I was one of those women who were like, I'm never going to have kids.
00:38:24I'm going to live on forever.
00:38:25I'm not going to get married.
00:38:26The most progressive you could possibly imagine.
00:38:29And when I discovered like, oh, I'm allowed to have different feelings.
00:38:33I'm allowed to want this.
00:38:34And there are ways that I can do it that allow me to still be very intellectually engaged and high achieving.
00:38:40But also have a whole lot of this whole other thing unlocked in my life.
00:38:43Like it's super doable.
00:38:44I just, it's a tactical thing.
00:38:46So I asked Grok to scrub the most common reasons given on X to explain why birth rates are declining.
00:38:52Economic pressures and affordability was by far the most cited.
00:38:55People repeatedly argue that raising children has become financially impractical due to high costs of housing, childcare, inflation, stagnant wages, and the need for dual incomes.
00:39:03Single salary no longer supports a family, making kids a luxury many can't afford.
00:39:08Variants include asset price inflation favoring the wealthy, gutted job prospects for young people, and wealth inequality like billionaires driving up the costs.
00:39:15Around 25 to 30% of people in the UK cite money as a reason for not having children.
00:39:21And lower income individuals are twice as likely to intend to remain childless.
00:39:25So economic pressures and affordability.
00:39:27Is it the cost of housing?
00:39:29Is it the cost of living that's stopping people from having kids?
00:39:31For every one of those examples, true as it may appear, wherever you're living at, you can find counterexamples around the world.
00:39:40I mean, housing, for one, for sure, I understand housing is a major challenge.
00:39:44It's a challenge for my growing kids now.
00:39:48You look at Tokyo with birth rates as lower and lower than most places in the world.
00:39:55You've had mortgage rates of less than 1% for over 30 years.
00:39:59You have a society that doesn't necessarily crave more space.
00:40:05I have never met any Japanese person.
00:40:09I've been to Japan nine years now.
00:40:11I've never met any young Japanese person who said that the barrier to them having kids is housing or income.
00:40:18They say, no, it's gender imbalance.
00:40:21It's life-work imbalance.
00:40:24So I think it's easy for societies to become programmed and assume that, oh yes, life is expensive here, or there's some other imbalance, or there's too much youth unemployment in, say, Italy.
00:40:36That must be the reason.
00:40:38That's my reason.
00:40:39But what I've noted in these surveys often is that you ask those same people, the 20-whatever percent who blame finances, do they have a partner?
00:40:48And the answer is, well, no.
00:40:51So would the answer to the question be different if they did have a partner?
00:40:54And really, how much more expensive is it for two people living independently to live together and have a small infant?
00:41:02Well, why is it the case then that so many people on the internet and so many people, when we talk about this, it's obvious.
00:41:08It's obvious it's impossible to afford a child and raise a child in this economy.
00:41:13Why is that response given if you're saying that it's not the case?
00:41:16Costs do matter.
00:41:18And I think there's two ways to help think about this.
00:41:20The first is, let's say you have bad eyesight, okay?
00:41:23And the reason you have bad eyesight, ophthalmological traits are overwhelmingly genetic, right?
00:41:27The reason you have bad eyesight is because your parents have bad eyesight.
00:41:30What we would say is, you have bad eyesight because of your genes.
00:41:33There's a lot of people who would say, okay, so if genes are causing bad eyesight, you have to fix it by changing your genes.
00:41:39But I would say, no, you could get LASIK or wear glasses, okay?
00:41:43Costs are not the root underlying cause of low fertility.
00:41:49It's not like in societies where costs are a bit better that, like, they just have no fertility decline, because fertility decline is happening all over for cultural reasons and technological reasons, all kinds of things.
00:42:00But they are locally a cost, they are locally a factor everywhere.
00:42:05And we see that there's ludicrous amounts of evidence that costs matter.
00:42:09A lot of times people say, well, if costs are such a factor, why do higher income people have lower fertility?
00:42:14They don't.
00:42:15That's an error.
00:42:16That's a statistical error caused by looking at women's income instead of household or husband's income.
00:42:21Fertility is positively correlated with income and has been forever.
00:42:26Even in non-human primates and non-primate mammals, like, social status predicts higher fertility everywhere.
00:42:32So costs do matter.
00:42:34The eyesight analogy is a nice way of understanding causes and responses, causes and how you fix a problem are just not always the same thing.
00:42:43Second way to understand costs is what I call the blueberry problem, okay?
00:42:46When I was growing up, if I said, hey, mom, I want some fruit, she would go into the cabinet and she would pull out these plastic cylinders that inside them had some kind of chunks of, I don't know, maybe it was peach or pear or some kind of fruit in like a liquid, like a sugary liquid.
00:43:03I don't even really know what this stuff was.
00:43:04It was probably plastic rolling off a thing, but it was like 15 cents for a little cup of fruit.
00:43:10You can still buy them at the store.
00:43:11They're still there.
00:43:12I see them.
00:43:13I don't buy them for my kids.
00:43:14My kids get fresh blueberries.
00:43:16They'll knock back like $10 of blueberries in like five minutes.
00:43:19Why do I do that?
00:43:20Because social norms changed, okay?
00:43:23Because the social norm now is if you're the parent of the bargain, you're not giving your kids real berries.
00:43:27I mean, what are you?
00:43:28And also it's not just social pressure.
00:43:30I like the idea of my kids eating fresh blueberries or fresh blackberries, whatever.
00:43:34It's a curse of knowledge in that way?
00:43:36Yeah.
00:43:37Okay.
00:43:38But when you think about it, is that cost or culture?
00:43:40Well, they're the same damn thing.
00:43:42There's no difference between cost and culture.
00:43:45The demand curve is shaped by culture.
00:43:47And also culture itself shapes the demand curve.
00:43:51If you ask what's the price of a prostitute, it's going to matter what people-
00:43:55Jared knows.
00:43:56It's going to matter what people think the appropriateness of using a prostitute is, okay?
00:44:02Any price contains in it both material supply and demand factors and culturally normative judgments.
00:44:09And so when we think about the cost of kids, people say, well, it's not that having kids got more expensive.
00:44:14It's that your social norm of raising kids changed.
00:44:17But look, if all people want is to have kids, you can donate to a sperm bank.
00:44:21Your genes will get out there.
00:44:22But people don't want to have kids.
00:44:24People want to have a family, a partner who loves them, children that they get to share their life projects with, a house of a certain type.
00:44:32They want to have a package of goods that go together, and that package is defined by prevailing cultural norms.
00:44:39And it is the case that the prevailing cultural norm of what a middle-class family wants to have is really freaking expensive.
00:44:48And you see it on Twitter.
00:44:49Comparatively.
00:44:50Yeah.
00:44:51And you see it on Twitter.
00:44:52Like, just yesterday, there was this thing about people shared this, like, farmhouse with, like, a kid running in a field.
00:44:55And they're like, this used to be affordable.
00:44:57And I'm like, that farmhouse was definitely, like, a planter aristocrat's house.
00:45:01Like, 200.
00:45:02This was not affordable.
00:45:03The other factor going on here is because fertility has always been status correlated for men, every generation of kids is basically the children of the top 80% of men.
00:45:14Which means everybody's expectations intrinsically ratchet upwards.
00:45:19Because the bottom 10 or 20% of men filter out of every generation.
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00:46:41But you've touched on the core wicked problem of falling fertility.
00:46:45I mean, this began not in the 70s, like a lot of people tend to think if they're looking at this as outsiders, but in like with the industrial revolution.
00:46:53And that is when we fundamentally changed the way that we lived.
00:46:56We shifted from living in family units with cottage industry businesses to working in cities to working in factories and suddenly everything about the family that used to come from within the family.
00:47:06You know, your food, your clothing, everything was made more or less within your family or community to suddenly being bought piecemeal.
00:47:12Everything was atomized.
00:47:13And that is a fundamentally unsustainable lifestyle and it makes kids very difficult to have.
00:47:18And now kids are being raised like they're aristocratic millionaires.
00:47:21I mean, even the children of noble families in the past would be raised in a way that would have CPS called on those families today because the kids are off running in like the garden.
00:47:31They're down in the kitchen, like almost getting burned in the fire or something, right?
00:47:34Like the parents were like, go away and leave me alone.
00:47:36And like come presented to me dressed up by your sometimes present governess at the end of the day.
00:47:41And that, God forbid, no, we have to chauffeur them everywhere.
00:47:44We have to buy them fresh blueberries, you know, like this.
00:47:46And to a certain extent, too, this has been legalized.
00:47:50You know, you can't even legally raise your children sustainably anymore.
00:47:55So it makes sense.
00:47:56Basically, there is no affordable way to have children, especially a lot of children, and opt into mainstream society.
00:48:04You have to be a weirdo Mennonite Amish person.
00:48:07You have to be off in some, you have to live off the grid in some way.
00:48:10You have to be in some high-fertility Catholic community where everyone kind of takes care of each other's kids and keeps quiet with CPS and stuff.
00:48:16Like, that is a really tough thing, is you can't now really opt into a high-fertility lifestyle and opt into modernity.
00:48:25You're talking about a non-typical volume of kids there.
00:48:30Well, yeah, but I mean, like, you know, keep in mind, most people aren't having any kids at all.
00:48:34But the outliers for not having kids is coming from people not becoming mothers, not from people not going from twos to sevens, right?
00:48:43It's non-mothers as opposed to family size overall.
00:48:47Once you have one, you're likely to get to, like, a relatively similar number.
00:48:50Yeah, but they're not going to sustain the rest of the population.
00:48:53Like, you know, if just a few people are going to have none, you have to have a bunch of people having eight.
00:48:56I understand this is how you look at it from a population-wide perspective, right?
00:49:00Yes.
00:49:01We need to compensate.
00:49:02So, hey, you guys, you can go over here, start your commune, do the thing, and the kids can run around in the dirt.
00:49:06The reason, I'm trying to get it back to, people say that the reason they don't have kids is because it's too expensive.
00:49:12Mm-hmm.
00:49:13That, what it seems like is the current culture has made people think that they need a very high level of income in order to be able to-
00:49:22I just think, it's believe, like I said, like if you-
00:49:24They do it in their guts.
00:49:25Yeah, no, no, but, like, literally, CPS will be called on you if you're like, "Hey, son or daughter, can you walk home from school today?"
00:49:32Literally, like, when our son was in public school, he couldn't walk from the school bus to our house.
00:49:39We had to be out there.
00:49:41There's no such thing as latchkey kids anymore.
00:49:43Right.
00:49:44But, surely, there's still a problem here, which is dual-income households, it is hard to support a family on a single parent's income.
00:49:53Yeah.
00:49:54That didn't used to be the case.
00:49:55So, it's not just material changes in terms of lifestyle inflation, and I've watched too much Instagram, and now I think that I've got to have the newest stroller and the best car seat and all of these things.
00:50:06It's not just that.
00:50:07There's material changes that have occurred, too.
00:50:09A great example is, actually, in building on what was just said, we could, you know, and CPS is coming up a lot here, so, you know, don't call it on me.
00:50:16But, a lot of times, I like housing for this, because housing is interesting.
00:50:21Unlike the price of blueberries, housing might also shape marriage in really interesting ways, and coupling in interesting ways.
00:50:26But, a lot of people, when you talk about housing, they say, "Well, back in the day, people used to put, like, five kids in one bedroom.
00:50:31Why not do that?"
00:50:32And the answer is, "Because it's illegal."
00:50:34Because now, in most states, there are occupancy rules that say no more than X number of people per room.
00:50:41Sometimes, there'll even be things like, "Boys and girls are legally prohibited from sharing a sleeping space."
00:50:46And it's kind of one of those, like, wink and a nod laws, where, like, as long as you're white and educated, and you don't make trouble, it's not a real law.
00:50:55But, as soon as somebody calls CPS on you, now the law applies.
00:50:59Or, if you get CPS called for something else daily.
00:51:02There's some jurisdictions where it is illegal for CPS to deem that your children need to be removed for no other reason that they are sharing a bedroom with the wrong sex, or that there's too many of them in a room.
00:51:15So, when we say, like, "Oh, social norms changed, and people want more space for their kids," it's also a crime to not give them that space.
00:51:24Is this what most young people are thinking about, though, or are they not looking at it?
00:51:28No, they're looking at, like, the cost of daycare, which is insane.
00:51:31You know, they're looking at really basic things.
00:51:33And, again, you can't opt into modern life and also do this sustainably.
00:51:38I'll say the CPS stuff is very prevalent for people who don't share our skin color.
00:51:42Yeah.
00:51:43In the U.S., it's quite a concern.
00:51:45So, all of these things that are going through young people's minds is in the context of misinformation that it's easy to start a family at age 35.
00:51:5940, no problem.
00:52:00I've got time.
00:52:02And if you're in that context where you believe you have time, you can easily see where you're going to think, well, if I just get that little bit farther in my career, or maybe I'll meet a more attractive girl next week, next month, next year.
00:52:20I got time.
00:52:21Or a more stable, more successful man.
00:52:25And this, to me, is, you know, I've started a nonprofit, I hope you don't mind me saying, called XY Worldwide.
00:52:32And we're setting up volunteers around the world to simply go and talk to younger people about the reality of the timing of when people realistically can start families.
00:52:45Can you explain what this graph is, please?
00:52:50Sure.
00:52:51Oh, yeah, that's one of ours.
00:52:54Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:52:55Well, yeah, and I have my own way of deriving it, but I saw that.
00:52:58It's the same thing.
00:52:59Yeah, same thing.
00:53:00So, you know, the way I like to state it is, for each individual country, at what moment in time does a woman have a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother?
00:53:12And that means you look at the people who have already become a mother, and in the U.S., this is around age 27.
00:53:21So if you look at American women who have become mothers at 27, and then look at all other women currently childless at 27, how many would be expected to become mothers at current prevailing fertility rates?
00:53:35And in the U.S., that's 50/50 at age 27.
00:53:40That shocks a lot of people.
00:53:42And back to your point, I do sense a shift you were saying about the idea of things are starting to change and maybe prioritize, and maybe we will see people deciding to prioritize becoming a mom again over a purely career.
00:53:58But one of the things I think is so important that will help this is people understanding, not just women, that the window is actually much, much shorter, and the likelihood of childlessness at age 35…
00:54:09And it's a linear decline.
00:54:10It's not like you're good all through your 20s, and then it falls.
00:54:12It's just…
00:54:13Yeah.
00:54:14Well, to be honest with you, I think this plays into an explanation of the political differences that we've seen.
00:54:22I don't know, but I imagine that conservatives, Republicans in the U.S., are having kids at a younger age.
00:54:28They are, yes.
00:54:29And if that's true, it makes sense that more are going to become parents, and that the liberals, the left, given again that the vast majority of people do want kids.
00:54:40I think what's happening there is that more and more are leading it to a point in time where they still think there's time to have children.
00:54:47What are some of the other realities around the timing stuff?
00:54:49So, you know, this will really shock you, Chris, to hear this.
00:54:54I know you're not very familiar with this topic, but there are some problems in dating right now between men and women.
00:54:59Why'd you say, why'd you look at me and say problems in dating?
00:55:03I just, I know that you haven't really written about any, or talked about masculinity or anything like that.
00:55:08I know that's unfamiliar terrain to you.
00:55:10But, so, yeah, I mean, people are marrying late.
00:55:15They are not just marrying late, they're coupling late.
00:55:18The rate of people who are, you know, have no partner of any kind, not having any sex or anything like that is declining, or the rate that are not is rising.
00:55:27And I think there's a lot of different ways of thinking about this.
00:55:31One is, okay, people think they have all the time in the world.
00:55:34Fertility knowledge is really low.
00:55:36There's a lot of great work on surveying fertility knowledge, figuring out what people really think.
00:55:41It turns out people's knowledge about fertility is not much better than storks.
00:55:46And so people postpone because they think they have all the time in the world.
00:55:50Or they think IVF means there's no clock at all anymore.
00:55:53People postpone because they think they need to have a ton of money saved up.
00:55:57I'll admit, I actually had my first kid before I learned that people save up money before having kids.
00:56:05I was like, after I had my first kid, somebody was like, oh, you all must have been saving a lot.
00:56:10And I was like, I mean, we paid down our student debt, but wait, what?
00:56:14And they're like, yeah, I mean, you know, you need like, USDA says it'll be like $250,000 of spending over the course of a kid's life.
00:56:19So you probably want to have like a big chunk of that saved.
00:56:21I was like, oh, no, we didn't do that.
00:56:24Hold the pen and fertilize this thing.
00:56:27But then the other, the dynamic under all of this is, it used to be, when I say used to, I mean, as recently as the 1950s, but certainly back in the 1700s or something, that a guy who was 20, 22, 25, was at his peak income, his peak earnings ability.
00:56:44He basically, that guy, you know exactly what his social status is going to be for the rest of his life.
00:56:50Partly because also-
00:56:51Yeah, but he also started working at like age 11.
00:56:52Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:56:53Yeah, yeah.
00:56:54So he's way into his career.
00:56:55Been a fucking chimney sweep for two decades.
00:56:56No, but this thing, also, he's going to inherit the family's farm.
00:56:59So you already know what his real assets are going to be.
00:57:02Now, determining a man's trajectory is harder at reproductive ages because his peak is later.
00:57:08Peak income now for most men is at like 47.
00:57:11Okay.
00:57:12And you think that people are pricing that in?
00:57:14There absolutely are.
00:57:15Men and women.
00:57:16Women, because the ability to bet on a man's future is a higher volatility bet now.
00:57:21And so men are just not as safe a bet.
00:57:24You've seen this new data.
00:57:25I only got sent this today.
00:57:26There's some new data showing that women who wait longer to couple with a man do get a man of higher mate value.
00:57:33Yeah.
00:57:34But they trade that at the risk of never having kids at all.
00:57:36Yes, exactly.
00:57:37Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:57:38So it's this sort of game of chicken, higher or lower, where you just keep on going and going.
00:57:42Exactly.
00:57:43Okay, I'll pull the pin now.
00:57:44Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
00:57:45So there are incentives here in order to prioritize what you want.
00:57:48And men have the same incentive.
00:57:49Yes.
00:57:50Because men know that-
00:57:51If I wait, I can maximize-
00:57:52My key earnings-
00:57:53Yeah, we just go to 47.
00:57:54Right.
00:57:55And so you get this situation where, you know, it's not like 23-year-old girls are like fending off thousands of suitors.
00:58:01Right?
00:58:02That's not happening.
00:58:03In terms of marriage, at least.
00:58:05That's good.
00:58:06It depends-
00:58:07Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:58:08But in terms of marriage, yeah, I should stipulate that.
00:58:13Because again, men have incentives to wait when they can most clearly demonstrate their own mate value.
00:58:21And so it's not even a question of like, "Oh, are young people richer or poorer than in the past?"
00:58:26They're richer.
00:58:27Incomes have gone up.
00:58:29They're not as rich as they will be.
00:58:30So as peak income shifts, as the extent to which your early life income predicts your peak, you become a more uncertain marriage bet, and people have every incentive to kick the can.
00:58:41What are some of the realities of trying to do it later?
00:58:43I mean, you have less time to hit your desired family size.
00:58:46In fact, one of the best predictors of having fewer kids than you said you wanted, we had these longitudinal surveys where we asked people, "How many kids do you want to have when they're like 18 and 22 and 25?"
00:58:57We'd follow up for decades.
00:58:58And so then we can see who hit their goals, who didn't.
00:59:01And one of the best predictors of hitting your goal is the age at which you marry.
00:59:07And if you marry before age 27, on average, you have basically no gap between your desired family size, early life, and your final family size.
00:59:15Married before 27, you're before 26 maybe, and you're pretty much going to have your desired family size.
00:59:22Married later than that, and your odds fall and fall and fall and fall and fall.
00:59:26Because the reality is, now if your desired family size is one, you might do it, but if it's three, it's going to be harder.
00:59:31Because the reality is you're trading off time, but it's not just number of kids.
00:59:34Get married at 35, maybe you have the number of kids you want, but by the time they want to play soccer, your knees hurt.
00:59:42By the time their grandkid comes along, your ability to remember your grandchild's name is not as good as you might have hoped.
00:59:49Walking your grand, you know, being there for your grandchild's wedding, not going to happen.
00:59:54Later doesn't just mean you have fewer kids.
00:59:56It means you spend less of your quality years with your kids, with your grandkids.
01:00:00And that is just, I said earlier, I hope we get to the happiness problem.
01:00:05Yeah, all these like social effects of falling fertility are bad.
01:00:08But to me, the reason I care about this, the reason ultimately I've chosen to devote my life to this at the Pernatalism Initiative,
01:00:15is because there's just a lot of people who are going to die miserable, because they don't have the families they want.
01:00:20And as a Christian, I'm called to love my neighbor, I don't have an option in it.
01:00:24And I think that this is one of the most severe problems in our society,
01:00:27that so many people are foregoing one of the great intrinsic goods in life, one of the most meaningful parts of their life.
01:00:32The great project that they will build, as much or more than any company, is going to be the company of their family.
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01:01:45What is the truth around happiness, marriage and kids?
01:01:50Parents are happier, you get happier when you get happier.
01:01:52Nah, not true.
01:01:53They are 100% true.
01:01:54Especially human take a happiness hit when they have kids in diapers.
01:01:56They do not.
01:01:57They do not.
01:01:58Yes, they do.
01:01:59No.
01:02:00Intentional fertility causes a rise in happiness.
01:02:01The problem is we mix unintentional and intentional fertility in the data.
01:02:05It's very difficult to separate because you don't have preferences.
01:02:07I guarantee you, in longitudinal data, happiness rises short-term.
01:02:12In the long run, it's a little more ambiguous because happiness scales reset over time.
01:02:16Happiness rises with engagement.
01:02:18That is, it rises before marriage, basically, but then marriage locks it in.
01:02:22If you don't get married, the happiness of a cohabiting union rapidly returns to baseline.
01:02:27The happiness of a married union tends to remain above baseline as long as you remain married,
01:02:32which people don't always.
01:02:34But widowage and divorce tend to return you to your premarital happiness level.
01:02:39There's three different longitudinal surveys I can demonstrate all this in.
01:02:42Having kids that you want to have, which is a big stipulation.
01:02:46Unwanted kids, unintended kids is a different dynamic.
01:02:49Having kids you want to have increases happiness in the most robust models we know of.
01:02:55Unintended fertility is a different beast.
01:02:57And it is true that in almost every survey, unless you add like a million controls where
01:03:03you're basically controlling away the effect of having kids, people with kids are happier.
01:03:07And one reason is because happier people have more kids.
01:03:09Especially when there's like abundant childcare in that country.
01:03:12But women do in places where there's less social support, which is like the modern developed country,
01:03:18like in the United States where you're not really getting a lot of help,
01:03:20especially if you're a middle class or above woman.
01:03:22Women especially do take a short-term hit per the research that I've seen.
01:03:26And then it goes up over the long run.
01:03:28But I think this focus on hedonistic happiness is overwrought.
01:03:31And again, it's cultural.
01:03:32You have to look for meaning beyond that.
01:03:34And I mean, we also have to look at really problematic solutions here.
01:03:37Yeah, I agree with that for what it's worth.
01:03:38I would say meaningfulness is more important.
01:03:39We can talk about broken dating markets.
01:03:41But like, what are we-- we can't fix it.
01:03:43I mean, my husband and I literally have an index of other parents with kids close to our age
01:03:47who are going to intermarry our children.
01:03:48My new way of skeezing on people is like, I want our children to intermarry.
01:03:51Like, we're-- parents used to be very involved in matchmaking their children.
01:03:54And so we have to talk about what are we actually going to do?
01:03:57Because we can't fix the swipe-based dating model.
01:04:00That's gone.
01:04:01It's done.
01:04:02What we're trying to do now is just manually matchmake again.
01:04:05Maybe bring back the Linden scene.
01:04:06Oh, matchmaking is coming back.
01:04:07It is totally coming back.
01:04:08It is totally coming back.
01:04:09Arranged marriages.
01:04:10People are like-- I mean, Zoomers are like, sign me-- where do I sign up for the arranged
01:04:13marriage group you guys have?
01:04:14Like, it is a real big thing.
01:04:16Mine is called church.
01:04:17Church is a big thing.
01:04:18Honestly, like, Catholic colleges, religious colleges are like the new hottest place to
01:04:23find a spouse.
01:04:24I mean, we need to look at what practically to do.
01:04:26Because we can talk about this big problem.
01:04:28The whole thing is like, so what?
01:04:29I guess I'm going to, like, die alone and without any sort of support or I'm ever going
01:04:33to marry.
01:04:34There are many things that people can do now.
01:04:36And that's what's important, too, is this is a wicked problem.
01:04:39It's very scary.
01:04:40But, like, with every endemic and existential problem, there are manageable things that you
01:04:44can do.
01:04:45Like, if you're worried about, you know, changing sea levels, like, maybe we should look at,
01:04:48like, managing a mass migration and getting people off coastlines and shifting the home
01:04:53insurance market and shifting regulation, expecting it to happen.
01:04:57We need to look at how we, on a micro and macro level, are going to manage falling and declining
01:05:03fertility rates and our own personal lives based on the expectation of that.
01:05:08And I think too much of the discussion around demographic collapse is like, is this a real
01:05:11problem?
01:05:12Like, how bad is it?
01:05:13Let's all, like, ruminate on that.
01:05:14When, really, it's like, okay, well, what are we going to do?
01:05:16And some of the solutions are very radical.
01:05:17Like, literally, arranged marriages sounds kind of crazy.
01:05:20But this is what we've come to.
01:05:21And I think very similar to COVID, people are like, oh, this will, like, blow over in a couple
01:05:25months and, like, the world shuts down.
01:05:27This is another COVID.
01:05:29You think this can't possibly get super bad.
01:05:32It's not going to be so crazy.
01:05:34It's going to be profoundly more crazy than COVID.
01:05:37This is cities crumbling.
01:05:38This is pension funds falling apart.
01:05:39This is people dying on masks.
01:05:41Millions and millions of people.
01:05:43We need to realize that, but then also just actually plan for that.
01:05:46No more performative prenatalism, actual prenatalism.
01:05:49Can we comment on the dying on masks?
01:05:50I just want to mention, because I don't know if all listeners will get this.
01:05:54In industrialized countries, our social support systems are probably good enough, probably,
01:06:00that for the most part, most old people will kind of get through.
01:06:04It's places like Thailand, where fertility is below one, and the money is not there to support a big social security system for old people.
01:06:14That's in where the health system is not as strong.
01:06:16Or like India, or increasingly African countries, those are the places where the death toll will become apocalyptic.
01:06:23Well, I agree.
01:06:25Places like Thailand are in for an extraordinary level of old age, loneliness, and challenges.
01:06:31India, my gosh, my worry about India population right now is its aging population two, three decades from now.
01:06:37No one's thinking about that.
01:06:38That's a humanitarian crisis.
01:06:40It's a ticking time bomb.
01:06:42But in terms of happiness, I think one of the things we have to isolate out here is the 10% of people who don't want children.
01:06:52Now, in making the Birth Gap documentary, I interviewed five, six women, 40s, 50s, who had never wanted a child, ever.
01:07:02Yeah.
01:07:03And they're completely happy.
01:07:05Yep.
01:07:06That's why I emphasize wanted children.
01:07:09Right.
01:07:10So when you average happiness across women and don't separate those out, you're kind of missing something.
01:07:16Now, those people who don't want women, who don't want children, I believe it's almost binary.
01:07:26Now, you change from not wanting kids…
01:07:28It's highly conditional.
01:07:29Everyone has a price.
01:07:30But a life that's hedonistic and single and childless can be perfectly fun, and we should design around that.
01:07:36Super fun.
01:07:37I mean, it's incredibly fun.
01:07:39I think, though, that the people who never, ever, ever have the desire, there is something that means that they will be happy.
01:07:47Yeah.
01:07:48Whether they have kids or not.
01:07:49Yeah.
01:07:50That does not manifest itself.
01:07:51The people who are just postponing it.
01:07:52The people who are just postponing it.
01:07:53They're going to be super happy.
01:07:54Like, we're big pronatalists.
01:07:55All of our time now is in developing, we're building an AI platform.
01:07:59It's called RFAB AI.
01:08:00We're trying to replace humans, replace employees, replace husbands and wives.
01:08:04Like, you can see this all happening with other people who are in AI as well, who are also pronatalists.
01:08:08They're investing in all this reprotech.
01:08:09They're having a lot of kids themselves.
01:08:11Meanwhile, they're also replacing humans for all the people who choose to not create new humans, to not own the future.
01:08:18But I think AI can be this literal deus ex machina that's coming in and going to correct for a lot of this.
01:08:25A lot of the loneliness, a lot of the lack of happiness.
01:08:28These people are going to die in their little pleasure pods with their fake families or their fake realities.
01:08:33And they're going to be happy.
01:08:34And I want them to be happy.
01:08:35And we're literally trying to build things to make them happy.
01:08:37Do you want them to be happy?
01:08:39I was going to say, I don't necessarily want them to be happy.
01:08:42I think it's gross when people aren't happy.
01:08:44It's very disruptive.
01:08:45Their cries are annoying.
01:08:46So I do.
01:08:47I want them.
01:08:48I believe in, for example, euthanasia.
01:08:49I love this.
01:08:50I love euthanasia.
01:08:51No, I think it's terrible.
01:08:52Oh, it's beautiful.
01:08:53No, it's terrible.
01:08:54Made is the smartest thing Canada ever did.
01:08:56No.
01:08:57That's going to be the solution to healthcare in the future.
01:08:59No.
01:09:00I think it creates a society where I already see it.
01:09:04I've heard it from young people in Japan who are looking at older people saying, why are they still here?
01:09:08No, really.
01:09:09They, they need to, we need made in Japan.
01:09:11We need made in, we need all of it.
01:09:12Without defending euthanasia.
01:09:13I think it's worth noting, like just a second ago, I was saying, well, kids might make happiness.
01:09:18And you said, well, we shouldn't prioritize happiness so much.
01:09:20Yeah.
01:09:21But when it comes to euthanasia, well, people shouldn't be unhappy.
01:09:24But I would say, no, old people, you know, suffering people, their unhappiness is not a problem.
01:09:28Meaningfulness is ultimately the greatest value.
01:09:32And I think we can argue, is suffering meaningful or not?
01:09:35But earlier you said, you know, suffering, the avoidance of, you know, negative utilitarianism,
01:09:40the avoidance of suffering is a kind of bankrupt view.
01:09:43And I would agree.
01:09:44I would just strongly agree and say, whatever the broader wisdom of euthanasia.
01:09:48And I think that's a whole debate, which we can do.
01:09:51I want to see, I want to see that book be written, the wisdom of euthanasia.
01:09:54But whatever it is, I would just say that it's not about suffering or happiness.
01:09:59Because ultimately what truly makes human lives worthwhile is not the quotient of their suffering
01:10:04or the number of their utils.
01:10:06It is meaningfulness.
01:10:08And it is the things that they build of benefit for others.
01:10:11Well, then let the ones who lack meaning get out of the way.
01:10:13All right.
01:10:14And this is not like, I will die by my own hands.
01:10:17If I'm lucky enough to live long enough and I'm no longer useful, I will end myself.
01:10:21Happiness is probably not the metric.
01:10:22It's not.
01:10:23So one of the problems that I see with that, again, is that there are certain people who
01:10:28have, not through really any fault of their own, had 90% of women want to have kids, right?
01:10:34Around about four in five childless women who breached the top of their reproductive threshold,
01:10:39that didn't have kids, say that they wanted to.
01:10:4210% can't.
01:10:4310% don't want to.
01:10:4480% did.
01:10:45It seems to me that we kind of have a duty to try and help people live the better lives
01:10:53that they can.
01:10:54It's the same reason that we tell people that smoking is bad for them.
01:10:56It's the same reason that they tell people that they should moderate their alcohol.
01:10:58It's the same reason that we tell people they should get seven to eight hours of sleep a
01:11:01night.
01:11:02And that, to someone that's in a health desert or someone that's in the equivalent of an
01:11:07information desert, this is the same for 80% of women who reach menopause, can't have
01:11:15kids and didn't have kids.
01:11:1680% of them.
01:11:17Is this still correct this data?
01:11:19Yes.
01:11:20So, and to me, even if we were to solve this phenomenon through, let's say, people having
01:11:27larger families, those who do have families, and we still have this contingent, large contingent,
01:11:32of people who dreamed of having families and end up childless for life, that's still a major
01:11:37crisis to me that we still need to address.
01:11:39They don't want it bad enough.
01:11:40No, I don't agree.
01:11:41I don't agree.
01:11:42I don't agree.
01:11:43I'm super infertile.
01:11:44I have five kids.
01:11:45How does that work?
01:11:46We made it work.
01:11:47We slept on a mattress on a floor for years.
01:11:49But you had someone to do that with.
01:11:51You can do it by yourself.
01:11:52And we've met so many people who have.
01:11:53No, no, no, no.
01:11:54Well, but hold on.
01:11:55You can do it by yourself, but let's go back to this.
01:11:57People don't just want kids.
01:11:59They want a specific kind of family.
01:12:01They might want it very, very badly.
01:12:03So, and what you all have is beautiful for you all, but it's not what everyone is going to
01:12:07want.
01:12:08Then they can go out and get it.
01:12:09But my point is some people's version of family data is not something you can just take.
01:12:14So let me put my vitality curve on the table.
01:12:18So I heard you with Richard Reeves giving a really good talk.
01:12:22I managed to molest your great idea and get it a little bit right.
01:12:26Yeah, you did.
01:12:28So if you look at the age of motherhood and almost certainly fatherhood, if we had the
01:12:34data, if you look at the age of motherhood, it falls into a bell curve shape.
01:12:40What does that mean?
01:12:41It means that if you take a society and most societies today have a peak age of motherhood
01:12:47of around 30 South Korea, 33 U S little younger, there's a curve and that curve is almost perfectly
01:12:57smooth.
01:12:58If you want to throw our squares at it.
01:13:00And then we're not getting too scientific here, but it's like 98% R squared matched to
01:13:04a perfect bell curve.
01:13:06Um, now that curve has stretched over the decades.
01:13:10It used to be the peak was really high when everybody was having kids around the same time,
01:13:14early twenties.
01:13:15And as the timeline has stretched out, the curve has got flatter and flatter and it's fallen
01:13:21by a faster rate than it's stretched.
01:13:24So you can look at this coldly because I'm not talking to people to ask them, do they want
01:13:29to have five kids, even though they don't have a partner.
01:13:31Um, I'm just looking at data saying, do you know what?
01:13:34You can actually predict what the fertility rate in any country is going to be, any cohesive
01:13:41society by simply knowing the average age and the width of that curve with very high accuracy.
01:13:46It means that in effect there, there is a constraint.
01:13:49There's a limit here.
01:13:50And to the number of people in a society who could ever become parents.
01:13:55And that's quite a chilling thing.
01:13:57Even for me, when I first saw this data, I don't need to know the name of the country, the year.
01:14:02I don't need to know what the house prices are, the level of unemployment, et cetera.
01:14:06You can simply predict what the rates of motherhood are going to be in any society from age alone.
01:14:13Well, the vitality curve is essentially everybody's at a dance party and the music is playing.
01:14:18Yeah.
01:14:20And people who want to leave the dance party used to want to all leave at the same time,
01:14:23which means that if you want to leave and I want to leave, we can leave together.
01:14:25They called, they called last call and they walked out.
01:14:27Yeah.
01:14:28However, this new vitality curve, which is flatter.
01:14:32So there's more variety.
01:14:34The likelihood of you being ready and the person that you meet being ready at the same time is less.
01:14:37And also right shifted.
01:14:39So it's later means it is harder for you to find someone compared to where it would have been in the past.
01:14:44So I don't think it's fair to say that they don't want it hard enough.
01:14:49Given that right now, I'm going to guess the vitality curve is also kind of a measure of difficulty.
01:14:53It's kind of like a measure of family formation difficulty, mating difficulty, mating crisis issues, changing dynamics between men and women, men's mate value.
01:15:02Men might want to have a family.
01:15:04I'm being outstripped by some changing demographic socioeconomically here.
01:15:09Like, yes, they could David Goggins it and get up at 4:30 AM and like triple their net worth and try and do that thing.
01:15:16But it doesn't deny the fact that the difficulty of doing that has become significantly greater.
01:15:22And like that just causes casualties as you go along.
01:15:24So again, I worry about saying they don't want it badly enough because all it results in is sort of people being left behind.
01:15:33I think we can also just look at the honesty of people's suffering in another way.
01:15:40And that is, again, I've mentioned longitudinal surveys before.
01:15:43We can just look people who hit their desired family size.
01:15:47That is the number they said when they were young and then they get older.
01:15:50Are they happier or in a, yeah, okay, happiness, blah.
01:15:53Yeah, it's not a great measure.
01:15:54But unfortunately, in this case, I'm actually not talking about happiness.
01:15:57It's the CESD scale.
01:15:58It's a scale for depression, basically.
01:16:01So how depressed are they?
01:16:02Are people who hit their desired family size from earlier in life, are they more depressed, less depressed?
01:16:12In general, there's some exceptions.
01:16:15But in general, the people who are the least depressed are the people who hit the number they said when they were a late teenager or young adult.
01:16:24If you overshoot or undershoot, you're just more likely to be clinically depressed.
01:16:28And moreover, in IVF, we can see that when people go in, everybody who goes in for IVF wants kids.
01:16:34Almost nobody's like, oh, crap, I fell into an IVF clinic.
01:16:37I was bored and I just had to get a haircut and freeze my eggs.
01:16:41Yeah.
01:16:42So that's not what happens.
01:16:43If you're getting IVF, you want kids.
01:16:44But some people succeed and some people don't.
01:16:47And it's not totally random, but it's kind of random.
01:16:50Some people succeed faster.
01:16:51And we can see what happens to people who succeed versus people who don't.
01:16:54And what we know is this from like Nordic data where there's no privacy.
01:16:57So researchers can see all your medical data, which is super fun.
01:17:01We know that if your IVF fails or if it takes just longer than expected, you're like almost twice as likely to be prescribed antipsychotics or antipsychotics.
01:17:09No way.
01:17:10Yeah.
01:17:11So I think we can just say that a significant source of suffering, of misery, of depressive symptoms in midlife, in late midlife.
01:17:24In this case, particularly for women, because that's who we have data for.
01:17:27But I suspect it's true for men as well.
01:17:29Is failure to hit fertility goals.
01:17:31Either overshooting or undershooting.
01:17:33Overshooting actually has a more severe negative effect.
01:17:35Like having a kid you don't want can be fairly negative.
01:17:38But undershooting is so much more common in terms of having fewer than you want.
01:17:43And so I think that tells us that when people say they want something, they're not bullshitting us.
01:17:48Because when they don't get what they want, they're like sad and miserable and need antipsychotics.
01:17:52They haven't manifested their own depression to say, I'm going to prove them right.
01:17:56Yeah.
01:17:57Screw you researcher.
01:17:58I'm going to get depressed now.
01:17:59Yeah.
01:18:00On your behalf.
01:18:01There's consequences.
01:18:02Now, you know, I do agree that if people wanted it harder, they might have tried harder sometimes.
01:18:07So I'm not going to say like everyone who says they want two kids is statistically identical to each other.
01:18:12They're not.
01:18:13There are some people who want two kids and they want it so hard.
01:18:16And there are survey questions.
01:18:17I've pioneered some survey questions to try and get at the intensity of numeric preferences, but it's hard to measure.
01:18:24So I'll grant not all numeric preferences are created equally, but the reality is they do matter.
01:18:31They do matter and they are a reflection of a late psychological state.
01:18:34Someone, what do you think?
01:18:35I'm aware you've got your like long-termism EA hat on in a big regard.
01:18:42Does any of that land with you?
01:18:44Look, when we're all getting on spaceships and heading out somewhere else, like to Mars, I don't know if I want to be sharing a spaceship with the person who couldn't get their act together and plan early, right?
01:18:54Like we used to lose a lot of humans to infant mortality.
01:18:57That was tragic.
01:18:58I think it's a lot less sad that maybe, you know, someone couldn't get their act together.
01:19:02Maybe they just didn't have what it takes.
01:19:04You know, they're not humanity's best and brightest or whatever.
01:19:06They were too much of a victim to culture and then they're just not going to inherit the future result.
01:19:11Like I, I, I'm okay with only the most big go-getters, most ambitious people who are going to push through no matter what being the ones to inherit the future.
01:19:20It is unfair, right?
01:19:21It's deeply unfair, but the world is relatively less unfair today than it ever was before.
01:19:26That's like how I learned to love fertility decline.
01:19:29That selection pressure is incredibly novel.
01:19:32And I don't know if it's actually what you want everybody to be selected for in the future.
01:19:36In any case, do we want everyone to be like hyper-autist agency maxes?
01:19:39I don't mind it.
01:19:41Yeah, I'm sure.
01:19:42But I don't think that that is necessarily what you want an entire civilization to be filled with.
01:19:46Well, we're not going to have that.
01:19:47We've got novel selection pressures.
01:19:48So to be clear, ASD spectrum, symptomaticity, and genes related for it are associated with much lower fertility.
01:19:54All right.
01:19:55I'm using the colloquial version of autism, not the real version.
01:20:00It's like the autism I have, not the autism that like-
01:20:03Not the autism I have.
01:20:07Look, I'm just, my point here is that the novel selection pressures thing, like people aren't hard charging and driving enough.
01:20:13Like executive function was essentially only required fucking a hundred years ago.
01:20:19Yeah, but we're in a new world now.
01:20:21We can't go back.
01:20:22Okay.
01:20:23So if you're going to be one-shotted by modernity, you're not going to be here anymore.
01:20:25What if the future version of modernity, because there would never have been a period of selection pressure that would have changed as rapidly toward the direction of, you very well may have been killed.
01:20:39Yeah.
01:20:402,000 years ago.
01:20:41Oh, I would have died like at least five times.
01:20:42I died in childhood.
01:20:43Yeah, me too.
01:20:44Scarlet fever, 100%.
01:20:45And then childbirth again, and then child-
01:20:46Got you.
01:20:47Oh, yeah, yeah.
01:20:48You were killed multiple times.
01:20:49Oh, so many times.
01:20:50Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:20:50So many times.
01:20:51You're five times dead ancestrally.
01:20:52For real.
01:20:53No, this is true.
01:20:54And this is actually one of the first things that got us into prenatalism.
01:20:56One of my kids would have still died in like 1970.
01:20:58Yeah, no, for real.
01:20:59Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:21:00No, no, no, no, mine too.
01:21:01Yeah.
01:21:02It's so real.
01:21:03And I acknowledge that.
01:21:04I mean, we wouldn't have either.
01:21:05Yeah.
01:21:06Well, and also like one of my kids would have died like right when my water broke.
01:21:10Like all these things, right?
01:21:11But my kids would have- none of my kids could have been born before 2003.
01:21:15Yeah.
01:21:16All of you motherfuckers shouldn't be here.
01:21:17No, it's true.
01:21:18Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:21:19For exactly this reason is why we got into prenatalism because we were less concerned
01:21:23with like, look, there are going to be fewer people for a while.
01:21:26It is inevitable that the population is going to decline, that a lot of people are going to die,
01:21:31governments are going to fall apart.
01:21:32We want to prepare people.
01:21:33We want to raise awareness.
01:21:34But there's no stopping that.
01:21:35Maybe AI can help, but there's no stopping that.
01:21:37What we were most concerned about, honestly, is it only like white conservative Christians
01:21:43and some Jews and some weird like space autists are going to inherit the future.
01:21:46And then we're going to have this monoculture.
01:21:48And when the environment changes rapidly again, what if it like kills the space Mormons and
01:21:53the space autists?
01:21:54That's exactly what I'm saying.
01:21:55And you only have space Jews left.
01:21:56So you need space liberals.
01:21:57Yeah.
01:21:58I want space Koreans.
01:21:59I want space Emiratis.
01:22:00I want space Native Americans.
01:22:01And right now they're going extinct, like quite literally.
01:22:03Yeah.
01:22:04And so the first reason we got into this is we're like, well, can we at least have some
01:22:07kind of Noah's Ark, right?
01:22:08Like enough people taking to the stars or surviving on Earth somehow where we don't have this very
01:22:14dangerous monoculture.
01:22:16And that, I think it's possible because what we're looking at is logarithmic growth.
01:22:21You only need like 14 South Korean families to make it through.
01:22:25We probably already lost indigenous Americans.
01:22:28I think that's what's left.
01:22:29Yeah.
01:22:30Basically.
01:22:31South Korean fertility has risen from under 0.7 to just over one in the latest numbers.
01:22:37How the fuck did that happen?
01:22:38Money.
01:22:39They dropped massive marriage.
01:22:40So it is money.
01:22:41It is money.
01:22:42The marginal amount of money they spent on it is just going to accelerate their demographic
01:22:45collapse.
01:22:46Marriage, the marriage rate began rising for the first time in decades immediately after
01:22:50they put into marriage subsidies.
01:22:51They can't afford it.
01:22:52They can't afford it.
01:22:53It's, it's, I mean, all South Korea.
01:22:54Spend the money.
01:22:55South Korea.
01:22:56They spend the fucking money.
01:22:57Make the money print.
01:22:58By all means.
01:22:59Just like leave the country after.
01:23:00South Korea will be at replacement rate fertility if they put 12% of GDP into child benefits.
01:23:04I'll put down a mark.
01:23:05I just hope they don't have to pay their pension funds then.
01:23:07It would only require them giving seven years of annual wages and a baby bonus.
01:23:11Only.
01:23:12Bargain.
01:23:13That's a bargain.
01:23:14It's a bargain.
01:23:15Right?
01:23:16That kid's going to work for like 40 years.
01:23:17Deal.
01:23:18I'll take it.
01:23:19Yeah, exactly.
01:23:20Right?
01:23:21They're going to have like a 40, 50 year career.
01:23:22I mean, Koreans live forever.
01:23:23So like they're going to have a long career.
01:23:24They pay seven years of their wages right now.
01:23:25You're born into debt.
01:23:26Oh, you have to do.
01:23:27Born into debt.
01:23:28Also, Korea's government is already like half the size of the U.S.
01:23:31With an extra 12% of GDP on top.
01:23:34They'd still have lower spending as a percent of GDP than we have right now.
01:23:38Yeah, I wouldn't mind nuking the government apparatus here.
01:23:40That's a right thing.
01:23:41I'm just saying, it sounds like a lot of money and it'd be like, wow, it's a baby bonus worth
01:23:46seven years of work.
01:23:47Yeah.
01:23:48So that every South Korean mom never has to work again.
01:23:49It's still not going to work though.
01:23:50This is a cultural problem.
01:23:51In terms of half-wise.
01:23:52With enough money, you can't change culture.
01:23:54Everyone has a price.
01:23:55It's true.
01:23:56I just don't think we can pay that price.
01:23:58No, I grant these are obscene amounts of money in terms of any kind of public finance.
01:24:03It is less money than we spend on old people benefits right now.
01:24:08But it's a lot.
01:24:09But we should be clear.
01:24:11There is an amount of money.
01:24:13The number I quoted, by the way, is not made up.
01:24:15It's from a meta-analysis that's in review right now on over 150 studies of cash incentives.
01:24:20So it's not fake.
01:24:21But the point is, yes, the amount of money is very large.
01:24:24But there is an amount of money that just solves.
01:24:26That's fine.
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01:25:33So going back to this age structure, in terms of being able to predict birth rates
01:25:40without knowing the country, without knowing anything, even whether they're offering IVF or not,
01:25:46what shakes out of it is that about 90% of the dynamics of birth rates are age-related.
01:25:53And about 10% is money and everything else on its own.
01:25:56So unless you channel that money or childcare policy or whatever else it is into having children younger,
01:26:03it's probably not going to work.
01:26:06And with South Korea now, the average age women are starting families is age 33.
01:26:11So they've got a problem not only at that point in time, are you way behind the curve.
01:26:16Yeah.
01:26:17We're seeing a huge increase in the incidence of one-child families increase.
01:26:21What does starting a family mean?
01:26:23Getting with a partner?
01:26:24Well, for most people, that's a key element.
01:26:27That's a key barrier.
01:26:28Is that what starting a family means?
01:26:29No, no.
01:26:30It means having a child.
01:26:31First child.
01:26:32Right.
01:26:33Okay.
01:26:34Wow.
01:26:35So you're getting in a relationship at 28, getting married at 31, having…
01:26:37That's the average.
01:26:38I love that your modern timeline there was, "Well, of course you dated for three years."
01:26:43Is that unrealistic?
01:26:44I mean, I think that's probably what a lot of people do, but it just is always shocking
01:26:48to me that that's normal.
01:26:49So I'm Zoom-a-brained, sorry.
01:26:52Wait, what do you think is appropriate?
01:26:54What do I think is appropriate?
01:26:55I don't know.
01:26:56I would say maybe dating for 18 months, two years, get engaged, one year, marriage.
01:27:02Okay.
01:27:03That's totally reasonable.
01:27:04Okay.
01:27:05Sorry.
01:27:06That's a bit more, all right.
01:27:07I'm fucking twisting the numbers a little bit.
01:27:08I guess 18 months plus engagement, but engagements are too long, so…
01:27:11So…
01:27:12Cohabitation effect.
01:27:13We've got to be careful.
01:27:14Yeah.
01:27:15I mean, we're talking around the idea of age being important.
01:27:17I think we all agree, it seems to be that age is a big factor here.
01:27:20Don't start early, don't get done.
01:27:21Yeah.
01:27:22Well, and stop infantilizing society.
01:27:23I mean, we should have kids working in their teens.
01:27:26We should de-emphasize people getting university educations, and we should shift high school
01:27:30back to doing what universities used to do.
01:27:32I'd like to see…
01:27:33You should graduate high school ready to work, ready to grow up.
01:27:34Somebody had a tweet where they're like, "You shouldn't encourage women who are 23
01:27:38to have kids.
01:27:39They're barely adults yet."
01:27:41And I was like…
01:27:42Bring back teen pregnancy.
01:27:43They've been adults for half a decade.
01:27:45Yeah.
01:27:46I would not go that far.
01:27:47But I know you would.
01:27:49And I respect that.
01:27:50I'm ready.
01:27:51I'm ready.
01:27:52Is there a relationship between female education and fertility rates?
01:27:56A causal relationship?
01:27:57Not causal.
01:27:58No.
01:27:59It's correlated.
01:28:00It's messy.
01:28:01Because what I've done with the…
01:28:02I've tried to do it, although it took an hour.
01:28:04The first big reason that people give it's too expensive typically comes from the left.
01:28:10This reason, which is women are getting educated, bro.
01:28:15Slow life strategy, cum, careerism, workism, etc.
01:28:20Although this one's specifically around female education.
01:28:23Like, that's usually what comes from the right.
01:28:25Yeah.
01:28:26But when Iran started curtailing female access to higher education, their birth rate continued
01:28:29to plummet.
01:28:30Okay.
01:28:31So I'm asking, what's the relationship?
01:28:32There are a couple of studies that use credibly causal variation.
01:28:37So they're looking at places where mandatory school enrollment was raised by a year or two.
01:28:43Primary school education does have a causal effect.
01:28:46When you go from like, oh, you had six years of education to eight, that does reduce fertility.
01:28:51Tertiary education, college education doesn't appear to be…
01:28:55Which is usually what people are pointing the finger at now.
01:28:57Usually we aren't like, those women should have stopped at fifth grade.
01:29:00Yeah.
01:29:01Like that…
01:29:02But that does matter.
01:29:03Like just getting people basically literate and agential in the world does matter.
01:29:07If anything, it helps now because it's how women are finding their partners.
01:29:10Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:29:11But tertiary education doesn't seem to have…
01:29:14To my knowledge, there's not a credible study showing that expansion of tertiary education reduces…
01:29:20Okay, so the most used reason for people left of center is wrong.
01:29:27There's a grain of truth, but it's more complicated.
01:29:29And the most used reason for people right of center, as long as you believe that kids up to the age of 16 should be educated, is also largely wrong.
01:29:37Yeah.
01:29:38This entire conversation is fucked, isn't it?
01:29:40I mean, we've touched on this.
01:29:41It's mostly the declining marriage issue, right?
01:29:43And this is the first challenge.
01:29:44Okay, so is it just a coupling problem?
01:29:46Not just, but largely…
01:29:48Mostly a coupling.
01:29:49It's a cultural problem.
01:29:50It's…
01:29:51Either you value this kind of lifestyle or you don't.
01:29:53But if you buy into mainstream society, you're gonna fail.
01:29:56Like, you have to go off the grid sort of memetically to a certain extent.
01:30:00And some people…
01:30:01Like, a lot of people are getting into that.
01:30:03And what I'm so excited about with AI disrupting a lot is it's gonna jar people awake or force a reckoning.
01:30:08It could get a lot of, like, more people just interested in doing this.
01:30:11So, you know, like, nothing makes sense anymore.
01:30:13I'm gonna find a partner and have a family.
01:30:15Cause that does make sense.
01:30:16It's…
01:30:17It's good.
01:30:18We'll say the supply of tradwife propaganda was dramatically increased by high-quality image generation models.
01:30:23Yeah.
01:30:24Cause there aren't actually enough, like, tradwives to supply them.
01:30:26Sundress, baking cake.
01:30:27Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:30:28Like, real tradwives are terminally offline.
01:30:29Right.
01:30:30Like, the tradwives that you see now are not actually tradwives because…
01:30:32They're in the fucking grass.
01:30:33They're too busy touching grass.
01:30:34Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:30:35They need to come back and get on Instagram.
01:30:36Yeah, yeah.
01:30:37So we don't see that…
01:30:38But AI propaganda is filling the gaps.
01:30:39Yeah.
01:30:40I see.
01:30:41So, marriage and mating is a big part of it.
01:30:43And you can see this in all your work on, like, declining motherhood.
01:30:45That first births are the locus of most fertility decline in the industrial…
01:30:49Total maternal rate.
01:30:51Yes.
01:30:52So, or what, you know, nerd demographers would call the first parity progression rate.
01:30:59Can you explain what that is?
01:31:00First parity progression…
01:31:01Total maternal rate.
01:31:02Oh, it's your concept.
01:31:03Do you want to walk through the math?
01:31:05Yeah, it's very simple.
01:31:06If you take the numbers that we traditionally use, we've used them here.
01:31:10Total fertility rate is the average number of children that a woman would have in her lifetime
01:31:15in a given country if birth rates remained the same.
01:31:18So, pick an easy number.
01:31:19Let's say that's 2.0.
01:31:21Much higher than most nations today, the ones that we're talking about.
01:31:24Well, it may be that underneath that, you may have some countries where almost 100% of
01:31:30women are having children, and they're having an average of two each.
01:31:34Or maybe only half of women are having children, but they're having four each.
01:31:37So, the first case is like the Soviet system, where almost all women had kids, but they had
01:31:42exactly two.
01:31:43Right.
01:31:44But you don't know what's in behind that, because it could be that, or it could be only
01:31:48half of women are having children, and they're having four kids.
01:31:51You still get two.
01:31:52The total maternal rate is looking at the incidence of motherhood, basically.
01:31:57How many women, and effectively, therefore fathers, to how many men are becoming fathers or women
01:32:03becoming mothers.
01:32:04And a lot of the decline we've seen around the world is at that first parity.
01:32:08That is, the odds at which somebody with two kids chooses to have a third have really not
01:32:13declined very much in industrialized countries in the last 20 years.
01:32:16The total, the TMR is like 2.6 to 2.4 in America, right?
01:32:20The CPM, children per mother.
01:32:22Yeah.
01:32:23Sorry.
01:32:24Children per mother.
01:32:25Yes.
01:32:26It's around 2.6.
01:32:27In fact, it's slightly increasing since the-
01:32:29Meanwhile, the total number of women not becoming mothers has just fucking gone through the roof.
01:32:34What is it now?
01:32:35Yeah.
01:32:36It's 57.5%, the last one.
01:32:38So, effectively, we're getting to a state in the United States-
01:32:41This is synthetic.
01:32:42That's not the share of women who-
01:32:43Won't become mothers.
01:32:44That's not the most recent cohort that won't.
01:32:45Yes.
01:32:46It's like a synthetic cohort.
01:32:47It's a moving average.
01:32:48Yeah.
01:32:49Fucking synthetic cohort.
01:32:50Nerd.
01:32:51Guilty.
01:32:52Guilty.
01:32:53Yeah.
01:32:54Look, maybe a way to think about it is if you're 15 years old today in the US, and
01:33:01if you live the next 25 years throughout your fertility window, just like fertility patterns
01:33:07right now in the US, pretty much 6 out of 10 will become mothers, and 4 out of 10 will not.
01:33:15No way.
01:33:16Yes.
01:33:1740% of 15-year-olds today won't become mothers.
01:33:19That's the most fucking insane stat that I've heard.
01:33:22It's pretty nuts.
01:33:2340% of 15-year-olds will not become mothers.
01:33:25Yes.
01:33:26And the reason they won't is because, well, I mean, non-marital pregnancy is declining.
01:33:29That is part of it.
01:33:30But the biggest one is people just aren't getting married.
01:33:33And they're not cohabiting either.
01:33:35They're just living.
01:33:36They're waiting.
01:33:37They're waiting until they've got until they're 35, 40.
01:33:41IVF.
01:33:42And that's where it goes wrong.
01:33:43This is when we're talking about what's to do with education.
01:33:46It's to do with employment.
01:33:48Those things can matter.
01:33:49Okay.
01:33:50So, like, let's, on the whole, like, you don't want it enough point.
01:33:52So, there's a grain of truth to this.
01:33:54One reason people might not get married is because a lot of people decide they want to get married
01:33:59because they feel ready to have kids.
01:34:01Okay.
01:34:02So, if people are never feeling ready to have kids, the pressure to marry declines.
01:34:05But if you make kids super attainable, people might get married more.
01:34:09So, like, I'll be honest, like, I'm, like, I'm very much a promoter of the idea that, like,
01:34:15it's really about marriage.
01:34:16Okay.
01:34:17And I've sometimes been criticized for ignoring this, like, backdoor method through which kids
01:34:22reshape, like, kids walk back in time and shape the marriages that form around them.
01:34:27But that is a real effect.
01:34:29And so, same as the eyesight thing, it might be the declining marriage or bad dating markets
01:34:34or whatever is the cause of low fertility.
01:34:37It also might be that fixing dating markets is really, really, really hard.
01:34:40And there's a lot of anti-marriage propaganda.
01:34:42Yeah, exactly.
01:34:43Like, women are given the impression that they're going to take a significant hit to their lifestyle
01:34:48if they marry, that the women are happier after they divorce.
01:34:51And men are told that once you marry, then, like, the exciting times of your life are over.
01:34:56Yeah.
01:34:57And now, like, you're done building the exciting things.
01:34:59Oh, but there are way more men when you look at, like, the priorities of young men.
01:35:02Marriage is up there.
01:35:03Kids are up there.
01:35:04Women are like, "No thanks.
01:35:05I don't want that."
01:35:06But do you think that's the case?
01:35:07Why do you think that we've got this sex difference now in desire for marriage and desire for kids?
01:35:11I mean, I would say, personally, not being a Zoomer woman, that it seems a lot of it is related to emergent norms of what we call low, like, small-f feminism.
01:35:26And what I mean by that specifically is the convergence of things like #MeToo giving a lot of women the impression that men are fundamentally unsafe.
01:35:33Just yesterday I saw some saying men do 95% of intimate partner violence.
01:35:39That's not true.
01:35:40Men do about 57% to 60% of intimate partner violence.
01:35:44Maybe not even that much if you trust the raw CDC data.
01:35:47So you get this idea that men are like a deep danger to women.
01:35:52I mean, yes, men do most of the crime in the world.
01:35:55But specifically on intimate partner violence, it's actually way more equal than you would think.
01:36:02Or you get things like women being told that, like, when you get married, you know, it's like your individuality is done.
01:36:09I mean, on some level, yes, that's true.
01:36:12It is.
01:36:13No, it's our modern culture that basically has shifted our values in favor of individualism and hedonism.
01:36:19But men get told the same thing about the end of your individuality.
01:36:22It's true.
01:36:23But I think women have a lot more to lose.
01:36:24So it's sort of men feel like they become complete when they have their wife and their kids.
01:36:30Whereas women, what you're being sold is you're going to lose yourself once you have kids and your husband.
01:36:35You no longer exist as an identity.
01:36:37And in a world where everything is about you, you, you, that's terrifying.
01:36:42Also, women are raised to want to always be 20, to always try to look 20.
01:36:47When you see, you know, older female actresses now, they still look or they're trying to look like they're 20.
01:36:52Like, there's no model for, like, a matronly middle-aged woman who has a lot of kids who's kind of cool.
01:37:00That sort of thing can't be flexed on Instagram.
01:37:03So I think the way that...
01:37:04I mean, it can be.
01:37:05It can be.
01:37:06Is it?
01:37:07But the current market dynamics aren't exactly rewarding that, right?
01:37:10People aren't showing the diaper changes at three in the morning, other than to say, look at how horrible this is.
01:37:16And I think that this is, it's an important thing to kind of give compassion to women about, which is the things that you are rewarded for and are most visible have changed rapidly over the last 30 years.
01:37:27And what is now being valued more than ever is youth, fertility, freedom, status, the opportunity to do what you want, independence.
01:37:35And that is not just something that you have always kind of wanted a bit of in the right doses, but it's the sort of thing that your entire world is going to feed back to you.
01:37:43And if most of your communication and most of your integration is mediated through the internet, mediated through social media, which is where most of this is because you're in an atomized, non-religious, non-pangenerational house, this is the only way that you can get some sense of semblance of belonging and recognition from the people around you.
01:38:01So you're obviously going to play into that game. And it's tough because you go, what you have been psyoped and gaslit into believing, and that's not to say that every woman wants to have kids, et cetera, et cetera, fucking caveats and throat clearing out of the way.
01:38:15For the women who do, there is this market that they're existing within, which doesn't allow you, okay, put the glasses on. I can tell this is going to get good.
01:38:24There is a market that you're existing within, which penalizes lots of the things that come along as a byproduct of becoming a mother.
01:38:31Well, and there's no market for hag-maxing. No one's going to make money by selling hag-maxing.
01:38:36You know, you can't sell--
01:38:37It's not sexy enough.
01:38:38It's not. Well, and who's going to make money from it? Like if you invest like hard--
01:38:41Sundress companies?
01:38:42Sundress companies? No, not even that because they emphasize, you know, your busty youth, right?
01:38:46The milkmaid dress is all about perky breasts. If you've got saggy pancakes, you're not wearing a milkmaid dress, okay?
01:38:51Like it's just, there's no one's going to make money from a woman stepping back and investing in her family and supporting things from behind the scenes.
01:38:59So this year, so like last year for the Pronatalism Initiative, most of our work was focused on housing.
01:39:04We thought housing was super important, and we think it is, and we still have some more on that.
01:39:07This year, most of our work is going to be on non-material drivers of fertility culture.
01:39:12So looking at culture, because we all know culture matters, but what is it about culture specifically?
01:39:17And there's one norm that comes up a lot in surveys I do, and I didn't take it seriously for a long time,
01:39:22but I'm gradually coming around to, you didn't have tinfoil for me to put a tinfoil hat on, so I'm going with the funny glasses.
01:39:28And it is that we've underrated the extent to which travel has fundamentally rewired particularly young women's sense of identity.
01:39:36That's a great point.
01:39:37What I mean by that is globalization, cheaper airline tickets, Instagram, all this stuff has actually changed the world.
01:39:44Like vacation is different, leisure is different specifically, and there's also, we can like point to a technology shock.
01:39:50Basically deregulation of airlines, improved airline technology for like better fuel usage.
01:39:55We can say, like, isn't it weird that the share of Americans with a passport has like tripled in a generation and a half?
01:40:02Isn't it weird that everybody vacations in all these countries, like the end of the Cold War, deregulation, all this stuff.
01:40:09And in surveys, one of the things that shows up repeatedly over and over is when you ask people, you know, okay, you say you want to have kids, but you're like not.
01:40:17What is it?
01:40:18And one of the most commonly volunteered responses when we don't give it as an option is, I want to keep traveling.
01:40:25And once you have kids, you can't travel.
01:40:26And I'm like, here's a picture of me with my kids at like a mountaintop in Georgia.
01:40:31Here's me and my kids in Vietnam.
01:40:32And yes, granted, I'm a high earning man with a flexible job who can give my children an elite aristocratic upbringing.
01:40:38And it's a bit more of a nightmare than doing it on your own.
01:40:40It is.
01:40:41Honestly, I love it.
01:40:42And I tried to bring my kid here.
01:40:44We were just talking about this before.
01:40:45I was going to bring my kid here, but she wanted to stay at home and go to the racetrack with mama and put on fancy dresses and watch the thoroughbreds work out.
01:40:52So I love traveling with my kids.
01:40:55I had a speaking gig in Hong Kong a few months ago.
01:40:57I brought two of my kids with me.
01:40:59We had so much fun.
01:41:00It is more logistical challenges and it's way more expensive.
01:41:03It's so much more expensive.
01:41:04And it changes the type of trip, but I genuinely love it.
01:41:07And I see so many people who really believe, and again, cost stuff stipulated.
01:41:11It's expensive.
01:41:12But I see so many people who really believe that like once you have kids, travel's not fun anymore.
01:41:17When it's super fun.
01:41:18You see the world through a kid's eyes.
01:41:20You go to a place and there's a green taxi.
01:41:22And there's a green taxi.
01:41:23And you're like, yeah, it's a green taxi.
01:41:24And they're like, it's a green taxi.
01:41:28And again, like I see this time and time again that travel, particularly there's a sex difference on it.
01:41:35Women increasingly see this as how you find who you are.
01:41:39You go and sample all these cultures and this tells you who you really are.
01:41:42What kinds of things you're like.
01:41:43Eat, pray, love generations.
01:41:44Yeah.
01:41:45And you build this like cosmopolitan multicultural identity.
01:41:48Whereas men are like, is there a cliff I can jump off?
01:41:51Can I like shoot a rocket launcher in this slightly regulated African country?
01:41:55Like, and they do things that are fun, but it's a whole different thing.
01:41:59What men are looking for in travel to the extent they do it at all.
01:42:02And young men controlling of income travel way less than young women.
01:42:05And in particular, as women age, travel becomes more and more associated with childlessness.
01:42:12Like middle-aged childless women travel a lot.
01:42:14And so travel culture starts to cater to them.
01:42:17You get this whole thing where, again, I have these on because I will admit the empirical basis for this argument is not fully fleshed out.
01:42:242026 is the year where I have a research budget to flesh it out a bit more.
01:42:28But I really think, as we think about culture, a specific cultural norm we should be thinking about is the extent to which, for young women, international travel has become a fountainhead of identity that they see as hostile to them.
01:42:39It's antinatalist, though.
01:42:41We've literally had close family members say, "Well, but if you have more children, how will you be able to travel?"
01:42:47And we're like, "Okay, so which of our future children are you gonna just say that to?"
01:42:52Like, we're literally gonna have another kid and be like, "Hey, why don't you tell them that you thought they shouldn't have existed?"
01:42:57Vacation was better than you.
01:42:58Because we could have gone on a cruise.
01:43:00We could have gone to Thailand.
01:43:02Like, it is so antinatalist.
01:43:04And I get that there are great experiences.
01:43:06Our kids lose their minds when they just see an airport shuttle with polka dots on it.
01:43:10Like, "Oh, my God, like, Valhalla."
01:43:12But it's not actually that rewarding.
01:43:15If you go on a trip now, you see a lot of people who look hot and tired and dehydrated going and taking the picture and going to the hotel and paying too much for real.
01:43:23I was hot and tired and dehydrated in Vietnam.
01:43:25I mean, like, it's really not as rewarding as you think it is.
01:43:30And people are literally making trade-offs between bringing a whole new life with the entire range of their experiences and a whole new generation into the world versus one international trip a year.
01:43:41So I want to endorse that.
01:43:43And I agree.
01:43:44But I will say there's swimming upstream and then there's, you know, trying to just divert the river a bit.
01:43:50Swimming upstream, all in favor of it.
01:43:52Fight the travel bug.
01:43:54Okay, I'm not going to because I actually really like traveling.
01:43:57So I'm child of my generation.
01:43:59But I think that's a place where you can say, okay, a gigantic baby bonus that costs 10% of GDP might be expensive.
01:44:06But, like, allowing people with children to skip all the lines at the airport literally costs nothing.
01:44:13Or requiring airlines to seat you together no matter your fair class.
01:44:17Provided you buy all the same fair class.
01:44:19You have one business class seat?
01:44:21Fuck you, everybody.
01:44:22I've got crying children.
01:44:23Or, like, bassinets in business class.
01:44:25A lot of airlines literally don't have them.
01:44:27Or don't allow.
01:44:28Or don't allow them.
01:44:29Yeah, yeah.
01:44:30So, like, there are choices we could make that might...
01:44:31Not the issues of business class.
01:44:32Or, like, there's a lot of things you could do to make...
01:44:35And, actually, Secretary Duffy has done stuff on this.
01:44:37Like, trying to get more playgrounds inside of airport terminals.
01:44:41Unfortunately, the U.S. is so litigious that we suck at airports.
01:44:45So you're trying to make child travel more child-friendly.
01:44:50He's a false god.
01:44:51Don't do it.
01:44:52I endorse the attempt of the Collinses to just fight back.
01:44:55Fuck that.
01:44:56Let's make an alternative culture.
01:44:58Endorse.
01:44:59Also, for those of us too weak to do that, I think we should make our lives easier.
01:45:01Speaking of someone that did 100,000 miles around the world in 72 flights last year.
01:45:05I'm in that.
01:45:06One thing that was interesting.
01:45:07On the sort of loss of identity point that we were talking about.
01:45:09There was this new Statesman article that came out last week.
01:45:11And one of the quotes in it said,
01:45:13"It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers."
01:45:15This is a group of girls that they're interviewing.
01:45:17"It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers.
01:45:18We have to get rid of our career.
01:45:20I'm not fully against kids.
01:45:21I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother.
01:45:26I want to still be me.
01:45:28And I will probably lose that."
01:45:30That final sentence.
01:45:31"I'm not fully against kids.
01:45:33I just don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother.
01:45:36I still want to be me.
01:45:38And I will probably lose that."
01:45:39I think that that like, yeah, travel and Instagram and all the rest of it.
01:45:43This hits really close to the center of what it is that women viscerally feel.
01:45:48It's real.
01:45:49Right.
01:45:50That like, holy fuck.
01:45:52I spent a long time getting myself into education and employment and really, really pushing the limit.
01:45:57And like the world recognizes me.
01:45:59And maybe I've got followers on Instagram and my Instagram is going up.
01:46:02And maybe I've got my own business to a degree or whatever it is that I'm doing.
01:46:06I don't want to become just a mother.
01:46:09I want to still be me.
01:46:11And I will probably lose that.
01:46:13Why is that a new or novel identity shift challenge that women are facing?
01:46:17I'll tell you what, like the one thing that convinced me to have kids.
01:46:21Second date with my future husband.
01:46:23He's like, I want to have a lot of kids.
01:46:24And I'm like, I'm never going to have kids and I'm never going to get married.
01:46:26And he's like, well, what would have to change, you know, to change your mind?
01:46:29I'm like, I don't want to give him my career and identity.
01:46:31Exactly that issue.
01:46:32And he's like, well, what if you didn't?
01:46:34What if by default in our relationship, if anyone had to step back, it would be me.
01:46:38And you would never have to do anything you don't want to.
01:46:40And I'm like, well, I'd have infinite kids then.
01:46:42And I think a lot of women are the same way.
01:46:43And they're not presented with that opportunity.
01:46:45I think another issue here is that now women are--
01:46:47Can I just say, I really hate the crap you all get in the media when Malcolm is like,
01:46:52paradigmatically the thing that a lot of like feminists would say they want is like a man who will be like,
01:46:58I would like to have kids.
01:46:59I'm willing to take the hit for it.
01:47:00I'm willing to take the hit for it.
01:47:01Like, that's something I have always admired about him and about your old story.
01:47:04So Malcolm's a stay-at-home dad.
01:47:06Well, he's right now with like all the kids, right?
01:47:08Stay-at-home army fucking platoon commander.
01:47:11While--
01:47:13Sorry, I interrupted you, but I just wanted to do some--
01:47:15No, no, no.
01:47:16But the fact that he does that, but you guys get kind of castigated as the conservative trad con,
01:47:21despite the fact that--
01:47:22Well, because we like to troll.
01:47:23No one's gonna pay attention to us if we give the nuanced perspective,
01:47:27because no one likes nuance in the end.
01:47:29You gotta catch them with the candy, but--
01:47:31Identity. Don't wanna become just a mother.
01:47:32Well, but women in the past used to complete their identity to fully become themselves by being a mother.
01:47:39You know, people would--
01:47:40You know, all the arts like the Virgin Mary with--
01:47:42You know, that's like pro-natal propaganda.
01:47:44Like all the most beautiful women always have a baby in their arms, right?
01:47:46Like this--
01:47:47This was so endemic in sort of the culture that women grew up around,
01:47:51that they were willing to die in childbirth, because that happened a lot.
01:47:53You know, they would know someone who died in childbirth, who lost babies.
01:47:56You know, this was clearly something that was very dangerous.
01:47:58Women were willing to endure that anyway.
01:48:00And it just happens to be now that we live in a culture where all that we're presented with is a loss.
01:48:05And we've grown up with mothers who've done that.
01:48:06I mean, the reason why I really felt this way is I saw how it hurt my mother to basically sort of fall back and become this caretaker.
01:48:14And then I think she kind of gave up on getting cancer treatment because she didn't really have an identity left anymore.
01:48:21She just decided to stop treatment because there was no one for her to care for anymore.
01:48:25She was done caring for me.
01:48:26She was done caring for her parents who died.
01:48:28Like what left was there?
01:48:30Because she lost her identity in that wash.
01:48:33And I didn't want that for myself.
01:48:34And I think a lot of women feel the same way.
01:48:37We need to fix that in society.
01:48:38And I do think that...
01:48:39Does that mean, therefore, that somebody needs to lose their identity now in the modern world?
01:48:43We need to shift to a new way of living, but we will.
01:48:46We're about to enter such a period of massive disruption with demographic collapse, with AI, with all these other things that are going to happen.
01:48:52And I feel like it's going to shake out for the best.
01:48:54But people need to be aware of the dynamics at play.
01:48:56I mean, I'm glad you're having this conversation with people.
01:48:59Can I just...
01:49:00Sorry.
01:49:01We've talked a lot.
01:49:02You're getting into that.
01:49:03Yeah.
01:49:04I mean, for me, at the risk of repeating myself about the importance of age, we're going through a lot of shifts right now.
01:49:11So maybe now is a good time to look at the progression of education, career development, because the way societies are set up right now...
01:49:20And you're absolutely right.
01:49:21I mean, women absolutely do and should want to establish themselves in some way on the career path.
01:49:28Of course they should, because they've just spent N years studying, going all the way back to elementary school, all those exams, right the way through college or training or whatever it is.
01:49:38Of course, career development is a natural thing.
01:49:41So as societies, what we have done is effectively formalize a system that is antenatal.
01:49:51Yeah.
01:49:52And unless we start having conversations with all respect, truly, I mean, the travel question is, you know, as a dad who divorced dad traveling with three kids around the world.
01:50:01And can I tell you a little story?
01:50:04I was flying between LA and London with three children under the age of seven on my own.
01:50:12We who are about to die salute you.
01:50:14Yes.
01:50:15And my daughter, she was two at the time.
01:50:18I mean, she's so sweet.
01:50:20She started playing peekaboo, but not saying a word, just looking at the man behind her.
01:50:27And it was a little annoying, I'm sure.
01:50:29And I tried to stop her.
01:50:30But at one point the flight attendant came and said to me, would you please tell your daughter, stop looking at that man.
01:50:36Oh.
01:50:37And I said, what?
01:50:38And the flight attendant was saying this in a way that she wasn't comfortable.
01:50:42The man had complained.
01:50:44And my response was, who's going to pay his pension?
01:50:50Correct.
01:50:51Nice.
01:50:52Correct.
01:50:53Nice.
01:50:54And the flight attendant, what do you mean?
01:50:57A baby crying on the plane is the sound of a healthy society.
01:51:00Right.
01:51:01As the one person sat at the table who doesn't have children here, I feel like I'm having to pay a cost that everybody else gets to benefit from.
01:51:11My sleep is being damaged.
01:51:13What about my sleep?
01:51:14It's hard.
01:51:15You got plenty of sleep.
01:51:16You don't have a kid waking up at 3:00 a.m.
01:51:17Oh, okay.
01:51:18That's true.
01:51:19I'll get back.
01:51:20I'll get back into business class.
01:51:21If I can, if I can.
01:51:23I, the part where it says just a mom.
01:51:26Um, this is a, I hate this so much.
01:51:31Um, so my wife is a stay at home mom.
01:51:34Um, she wasn't when we, you know, when we, uh, the first several years of our marriage, she actually earned more than me.
01:51:40And then we were kind of equal.
01:51:41And then we had kids and she stepped back and we, honestly, we didn't really discuss it at first.
01:51:46It just kind of happened, which is what happens for a lot of couples since we've discussed it.
01:51:49And she's like, oh no, no, no, no.
01:51:50This is what I wanted.
01:51:51This is great.
01:51:52You go and earn money.
01:51:53And I get to like raise my kids the way I always dreamed of this.
01:51:56Perfect.
01:51:57Um, but, uh, and once our kids grown, maybe she'll go back, go back and restart her career.
01:52:02But it infuriates me when people are like, oh, you're just a mom.
01:52:05And it's like, hold on.
01:52:06My wife is a business manager for a complicated business called our family that has a lot of complicated financials.
01:52:14And, um, I mean, I'm not the one like handling all of that because I'm a nerd who says things like parody progression ratio in wide audience podcasts.
01:52:26Clearly I'm not the guy who's going to like sit down and solve day to day life problems.
01:52:30Not me.
01:52:31My wife manages that because a complicated high income family needs a business manager.
01:52:36My wife is an educator.
01:52:37We homeschool our kids and she organizes personally three different homeschool co-ops that she thrives at.
01:52:43And they give her a chance to plan curriculum, to oversee other people, to manage things, to lead projects.
01:52:49She is a huge contributor at our church community where she's functionally a center of social life for a lot of people.
01:52:55My wife is living.
01:52:57She's, she is a girl boss in a sense.
01:53:00She's a mom boss.
01:53:01Okay.
01:53:02Yes.
01:53:03She doesn't get paid for it, um, by an outside employer.
01:53:07Um, and she doesn't, unfortunately, she doesn't get the recognition she deserves because what she's doing is a complicated skills intensive career of raising people who are going to be incredible adults.
01:53:22And look, there's a lot of stuff that's genetically baked in.
01:53:24My kids are smart because they have my wife's genes and some of mine.
01:53:28Um, my kids are, you know, decent and pleasant people to be around because they have my wife's genes and they're unpleasant because they have some of mine.
01:53:35Um, but they're cult, they're acculturation.
01:53:39The specific manners they use a lot of their culturally specific morals and values.
01:53:45I would love to say a lot of that is me.
01:53:47And some of it is me.
01:53:48Um, the fact that they enjoy archery and hatchets and swords is me, but they're actual like day-to-day functional operative practices and values are because of my wife.
01:53:59She is building civilization every day in our house.
01:54:02And it blows my fucking mind that there are all these childless people who are like, well, I don't want to give up my identity and become a mom.
01:54:11You get to transform from a cog in civilization to building it, to being the person who defines what the future is.
01:54:20How is that not a promotion if you can land it?
01:54:23And we just, we don't get that.
01:54:25It infuriates me that my wife's career is treated as a demotion when she, like we upgraded her to a, what I see as a higher status career.
01:54:35There was a conversation I had with a friend who had two kids while she was still working, very high powered job at Google.
01:54:41And then one kid after COVID, uh, where she decided she was going to be a stay at home mom.
01:54:46She kind of missed a good bit of the, done the daycare thing previously.
01:54:48This time I'm going to be a stay at home mom.
01:54:50She's an awesome one.
01:54:51She's a, she's a sick, she's a sick mom.
01:54:53Um, and she went to a local mom meetup thing.
01:54:58I love parenting thing.
01:54:59And, uh, one of the moms said to her, it's a while after she moved into this new place.
01:55:03When the moms turned to her and she says, you know what?
01:55:05I wish I'd known you a few years ago when you were still working, you know, when you had a lot going on.
01:55:11Oh, and she rang me after this and was like fucking distraught that basically these other moms who were also working moms saw her as less than they, they saw her.
01:55:26And what she said to me, this was a real kicker.
01:55:28She's like, do you know what it is?
01:55:30And she's mom, right?
01:55:32Mom mode left the big pain job at this company behind.
01:55:35I'm so jealous of people that had kids during COVID, you know, cause they didn't feel like they were missing out on anything.
01:55:42So even her as somebody who's made.
01:55:45Having kids during COVID was kind of.
01:55:46I bet it was fucking.
01:55:47Maybe not necessarily for the reason that it didn't feel like you were missing out on what was going on.
01:55:52Yeah.
01:55:53But like, this is the point that to me, having a population that's not this shape and upside down fucking Giza pyramid shape seems like the sort of thing that would be good if you cared about social redistribution and you cared about looking after people that were in worse situations than they would like to be in because you've got enough money to be able to pay for them.
01:56:13In the same way as pedestalizing mothers who decide that they're going to raise the next generation of humans seems like the sort of thing that should be a pro-feminist policy and seeing only independent women who are careerism working their way through things, which they are free to do.
01:56:36And they should do if they want to do, but them being the only women that are seen as ones worthy of respect, that seems to be the most misogynistic thing that I can think of.
01:56:46Oh, the thing that you naturally can do with your body, the thing that you were literally built to do is of less status than something which is more coded as that of a man and what men typically have done throughout history.
01:56:58Like is that, am I fucking insane here?
01:57:00Or is that not the most like misogynistic viewpoint that you could think of?
01:57:05It's not, it's a systemic problem.
01:57:06It's not misogynistic per se.
01:57:07It's not personally misogynistic.
01:57:08It's that this doesn't, how can you measure this in terms of GDP?
01:57:11How can you measure this in terms of output?
01:57:13What we've lost, it's a silent death of this huge amount of utility that just wasn't sufficiently measured.
01:57:18But keep in mind, like even in the-
01:57:19And this is the joy of building a family?
01:57:21Well, but I mean in the 40s and 50s and even 60s, there were home economics classes.
01:57:25Women were taught about managing household finances and about cooking and about family care and nutrition and all these things.
01:57:31It was treated like a career.
01:57:32I'd have taken that class.
01:57:33No, it's like I really want to bring it back in auto shop.
01:57:35I would love that.
01:57:36Some schools still have, but they're like electives.
01:57:38Yeah, well, I've never seen a school that does that.
01:57:41But I mean, we used to as a society do that.
01:57:43And to a certain extent, it just isn't, it isn't captured.
01:57:46It's not measurable and therefore it's not valuable.
01:57:48It's not flexible.
01:57:49Right?
01:57:49We can't see it, so it must not be valuable.
01:57:51And it's not just this parenting and all this community support.
01:57:54It's all the philanthropy and community support and elder care and all these invisible services that women who are like in your wife's position.
01:58:02She's not just raising your kids.
01:58:03She's also contributing to the, I'm sure she's also contributing significantly to our community.
01:58:06She's like carrying society on her back.
01:58:08But no one's measuring it.
01:58:09Exactly.
01:58:10If no one hears it, did it happen?
01:58:11And is this why it's low status?
01:58:13Yes.
01:58:14I mean, right now, status is sort of measured by like, did you take a picture of it?
01:58:17Like, is it online?
01:58:18Like, is it measured in GDP?
01:58:19Is it making money?
01:58:20This is how we decide in our society now if something's valuable.
01:58:24And all these intangibles, you know, as the world becomes increasingly online, people are being rewarded for what is tracked.
01:58:30Also, you think about elder care.
01:58:33There's an older woman in our church who's in cognitive decline and knows it and needed help and didn't know who to ask.
01:58:41She got talking to my wife at church.
01:58:43Me and my wife were over there a couple nights ago setting up a Roomba for her that can clean her house for her.
01:58:48My wife is helping arrange her like pickups for church.
01:58:51My grandpa who's in his upper 90s and is in memory care.
01:58:54My wife is over there one or two times a week with the kids to sing to him and read the Bible with him.
01:59:00Like, a lot of the labor of caring for, it's like, oh, we need these women to be in the workforce to generate tax revenue to care for, to do old age pensions.
01:59:07You might want some of those women who are not doing 40 hours a week at work because they might be doing some elder care.
01:59:13And the inefficiency, right?
01:59:14Instead of doing that, the state's like, oh, well, let's pay all these other services to provide elder care, except like, like 90% of it goes to fraud, apparently.
01:59:23A friend, a friend made a good point the other day.
01:59:25If you took two women who both ran a bespoke daycare service and looked after each other's kids for the same amount of money, the net result would be the same as if they looked after their own kids full time.
01:59:35Except they'd be respectable because they have jobs.
01:59:36In the former case, the women would be seen as girl bosses and in the latter case, they'd be seen as an ambitious.
01:59:40Yes, yes.
01:59:41Isn't that hilarious?
01:59:42Also, as long as you incorporate them as a business, that's actually currently legal and you could get a tax credit for it.
01:59:47Oh!
01:59:48But if you want your own kid, it's not.
01:59:49Sick.
01:59:50Now, the IRS would come after you if they found out it was purely one-to-one, but if you had like 12 parents and you all took turns, you could, that'd be perfectly legal.
01:59:57And so, I'm not gonna lie, I've brought this up at my church, like we could come up with like-
02:00:01Childcare laundering.
02:00:02Daycare that's really just like a-
02:00:04Yeah.
02:00:05Like a child, it's just a mom.
02:00:06Are there enough Somali people around to run this?
02:00:07Yeah.
02:00:08No, no, no.
02:00:09Oh!
02:00:10No, no, no, but like for the, even just like for the childcare tax credit, like then we could all pay into this.
02:00:14Yeah.
02:00:15The same amount, all claim the same amount out.
02:00:17Yeah.
02:00:18And we all get a tax credit.
02:00:19Yeah.
02:00:20Look, if they're doing it, we should do it too.
02:00:21I think, you know, with huge respect to your wife, huge, and also to you for raising five kids so far.
02:00:30But most people don't want those lives.
02:00:32Most people want a smaller family.
02:00:33They don't know they don't want those lives.
02:00:35Yeah.
02:00:36And most women do want careers and do want a dual identity.
02:00:38And my wife had one and probably will again.
02:00:40Right.
02:00:41So, we need to engineer societies in a way that enables that.
02:00:45And we're just not right now.
02:00:46That's how society mostly was though.
02:00:48There was never this world in which women were always not working.
02:00:51Women have always worked.
02:00:53Your wife is still working now.
02:00:54She worked before.
02:00:55And this is very natural.
02:00:56And I think we've, I think there was this, I think a lot of it has to do with this golden age of media.
02:01:01Like when TV first came online, we had this very short period of the nuclear families where women were a leisure class.
02:01:08And because we all anchored to that, because that's when TV first came online, we had these like foundational shows.
02:01:13Everyone was like, this is what tradition is.
02:01:15When really, no, it's never been like that.
02:01:18What we saw was this weird aberration.
02:01:20And it's always been that women have worked and also raised kids.
02:01:23And it's very dynamic and kludgy, but we don't, we're very, we're not very creative.
02:01:28We have to see a model for it.
02:01:29And there's no model left.
02:01:30There's no model left.
02:01:31That's absolutely right.
02:01:32But what we've done is put, um, career paths, which involves education and training in place that mean that the jump off point where you can now consider realistically both being a mom and working in some form, uh, is really impossible for, for most people to get their, their mind around.
02:01:51And I, you know, okay, we talked about finance and I want to go back to that, but there's a lot of financial vulnerability to young people.
02:01:58And with divorce rates as high as they are, as one example, for sure, a young woman is probably going to want to think things through if things don't work out.
02:02:07So if I'm right that the age is the key determinant of the level of childlessness, the TMR in the country, we need to be thinking of ways for mass re-engineering of societies to make careers and education and pathways to parenthood simultaneous at a younger age.
02:02:30But there's no, there's no conversation around that.
02:02:32Yeah, there should be though, because the coolest thing about prenatalism is this is the lowest stress cause in the entire world because everyone on a family level can make this possible.
02:02:42You can match make your kids.
02:02:44You can help them start their careers in high school, earlier.
02:02:47Like everyone on a micro level has the capability of creating an intergenerationally durable culture where they're all about high fertility and starting families early.
02:02:55You can do this on your own personal level and other people can do it.
02:02:58It can be medically spread.
02:02:59Let's say we're successful collectively in that people should become more aware of the risks of delayed parenthood.
02:03:07That the likelihood of becoming a mom in the US, I think at age 35 or older is around 15%.
02:03:12Once people start to understand that.
02:03:14And if we imagine that, okay, not just the US, this is becoming more of a global problem.
02:03:19We're thinking en masse that younger people do want to start have families again at a younger age.
02:03:25There's nothing in this conversation that I think we've really approached yet.
02:03:28Yes.
02:03:29That'll actually enable that.
02:03:30Absolutely.
02:03:31And that's where conversations, including ours, I think needs to go.
02:03:35Yeah, absolutely.
02:03:36Simone does have a solution for this, which is, fuck 'em.
02:03:38Yeah.
02:03:39That's your solution.
02:03:40Yeah.
02:03:41Currently.
02:03:42But as with travel, Simone's like, ah, screw it.
02:03:43Travel norms are bad.
02:03:44It's overrated.
02:03:45There is a bell curve also at the table too.
02:03:47And Simone happens to be toward the tail.
02:03:50But for those of us, you know, for people who are not, are going to have a hard time saying, ah, fuck the norm.
02:03:57I'm going to just do my own thing, which I think that's a great thing to do.
02:04:00But if that's not you, I do think talking about compatibility of career trajectory and family trajectory is really important.
02:04:07And I think during COVID, we all woke up and realized a big one, remote work.
02:04:11And there's growing evidence that remote work unlocks a lot of fertility.
02:04:15And so, great.
02:04:16But it's unlikely that remote work is literally the only technology out there to do this.
02:04:21Yes.
02:04:22One of the big ones, and I actually have an article that's going to come out about this, I think, tomorrow, is that just being able to take a break for like four years in a career.
02:04:32The problem is when women exit the career force, they take a huge hit and reentry is often almost impossible.
02:04:39Mm-hmm.
02:04:40Right?
02:04:41It's so hard to reenter.
02:04:42Mm-hmm.
02:04:43Is the same thing true for men?
02:04:44I'm going to guess not to the same extent.
02:04:45Well, men never exit.
02:04:46Probably, yeah.
02:04:47They just don't exit.
02:04:48For those that do exit, I'm not sure.
02:04:49But reentry is so hard.
02:04:52That is the place where we can make a huge difference.
02:04:54Because the reality is, it's not just that a lot of women exit the workforce when they have kids.
02:04:58Most women do not want a demanding career when they have a one-year-old.
02:05:02Some do, but most don't.
02:05:03And in surveys, we see this.
02:05:04When you've got small kids at home, most people are like, I might work a few hours to keep my toe in the market.
02:05:09But if you're told, look, you got four years where you don't have to have a workplace job.
02:05:14If you want to work a little, you can.
02:05:15But basically, we expect you to just like pour into your kids.
02:05:18I think 80% of women, if they knew they could return at a comparable place as they left, would.
02:05:25The problem is, we don't have that.
02:05:27And maternity leave doesn't solve it.
02:05:29And from what we're saying, mothers of young families are highly skilled at organization, dispute management, time management, et cetera.
02:05:40Hostage negotiation.
02:05:41There you go.
02:05:42And if I were an employer today, I would be, you know, here's what I'd love to see employers get to.
02:05:50That in annual reports and hiring fairs, employers state the number of their staff that become parents.
02:05:59Yes.
02:06:00Like the, you say how many board members are minorities and how many of your new hires or whatever.
02:06:06Or your environmental footprint.
02:06:07You have to do that legally right now.
02:06:08Report the total fertility rate of your employees.
02:06:10Yeah.
02:06:11And then you see where college young people gravitate towards.
02:06:14Those who don't want kids may well go to the employer who, you know, has highest salary and everything else, but very low rates of motherhood.
02:06:23I was at a conference with a, there was a Chinese businessman, actually a couple of them who run large companies.
02:06:28Um, and, uh, and I was listening in translation.
02:06:32So this might not be entirely, I might have the exact details wrong, but basically they were like, we've started doing this.
02:06:38We're tracking the fertility of all of our employees.
02:06:41When they have a baby, they get a huge bonus.
02:06:43If they're a woman, they get like, you know, a certain amount of, you know, they get way more than like the maternity leave that China provides.
02:06:49Um, because we feel like it, that, um, if they have kids first, one of them said, well, better people have kids and I want the best people.
02:06:58And I was like, okay.
02:07:00Are you sure that wasn't Simone?
02:07:02No, but like, it was funny.
02:07:04These like Chinese, these were unusual.
02:07:06Okay.
02:07:07These were self-selected by Chinese businessmen worried about low fertility.
02:07:09Okay.
02:07:10But like, they were being very blunt about like, oh yeah, we've started in like hiring interviews for like our junior, like executive fellowship things.
02:07:16We ask about their family plans and we hire the ones who want more kids.
02:07:20Well, what about, what, what about free college tuition for mothers?
02:07:23Okay.
02:07:24So this is an interesting one because you could say when people have kids, they tend to drop out of college.
02:07:29We want to encourage women's educational attainment by providing free tuition for moms.
02:07:35So it's interesting.
02:07:36Cause you're saying we want to encourage education when obliquely, what you're actually doing is you're encouraging fertility for students.
02:07:43And I think it's a fantastic idea.
02:07:44Yeah.
02:07:45School is a great time to have a kid.
02:07:46Yes.
02:07:47Your schedule is easy.
02:07:48I mean, I had three kids during my PhD.
02:07:49Smart.
02:07:50Okay.
02:07:51Sorry.
02:07:52I had arguably, I had four kids during my PhD.
02:07:53My first was while I was applying.
02:07:55Um, it's a great time.
02:07:57But first of all, you have a lot of young peers who can watch your kids.
02:08:00Um, second of all, most universities have onsite childcare that you might be able to get into and is often discounted for students.
02:08:06Third, you're pretty young.
02:08:07Fourth, your schedule's like flexible in different ways.
02:08:10If you are married during graduate school, that is your time.
02:08:14Crank them out.
02:08:15Yeah.
02:08:16It also means that free college tuition for mothers would allow somebody who's 35 to go and get an education.
02:08:22Yes.
02:08:23Oh, so you mean going back.
02:08:25You could get, you could have like a VA or like a GI bill for moms.
02:08:28Yes.
02:08:29Yeah.
02:08:30Yeah.
02:08:31I think it's not a terrible idea.
02:08:32I like it.
02:08:33Yeah.
02:08:34GI bill.
02:08:35Um, medical student about fertility or make making birth gap.
02:08:41And, uh, I didn't realize, but she already was a mother at age 21.
02:08:46So I was interviewing her as a medical student thinking it was going to be asking her about
02:08:50her future fertility plans and no, she's already a mom.
02:08:54Um, by the way, she was traveling and, um, so that wasn't never a problem to her, but her
02:08:59data point for starting a family young was she looked at all the other doctors and so many
02:09:05were childless.
02:09:06Yep.
02:09:07And she talked to some of them and said, well, there's just never been a moment in time.
02:09:10Life just sped up and sped up and sped up.
02:09:12So she decided, well, let's, let's do it.
02:09:15And she ended up cohabiting with a group of other young people who all the kids.
02:09:20And you know, so there is something for it.
02:09:22It's not for everybody clearly, but you know, these pathways to make education, training careers,
02:09:30career development, um, parenting something that are entirely compatible is I'll go further.
02:09:37I don't think nations are going to survive this.
02:09:39No, unless the age of parenting becomes much younger and you know, so this isn't a marginal
02:09:48idea.
02:09:49It's something that goes to the core.
02:09:50The point that you mentioned there, which I think is really important is this sort of
02:09:53felt sense that women have, especially now of that loss of identity and the fear and the
02:09:57uncertainty cost of living is higher for a lot of people, especially at the lifestyle that
02:10:01they think that they're supposed to have, which is what it is, right?
02:10:05Regardless of whether or not you would just inflation.
02:10:07Social norms or imposed.
02:10:08Correct.
02:10:09You don't choose your social norms.
02:10:10No, so you're, you're suffering in this thing, regardless of whether it's true on a spreadsheet
02:10:16when you would come for inflation and all the rest of it.
02:10:18That's what it feels like.
02:10:19And one of the re one of the things I've been thinking about, I got in a lot of trouble
02:10:21at the start of this year, uh, for talking about birth rate decline.
02:10:24It's interesting when it kind of breaks out into the real internet, right?
02:10:28Not the people that are maybe a bit more familiar with this, and I hadn't done the appropriate
02:10:31land acknowledgement, throat clearing that I do usually.
02:10:34And that means that if you don't, and it hits kind of like the normie net, you get in a lot
02:10:38of trouble.
02:10:39It made me reflect on things.
02:10:40I'm like, okay, if I'm, if I'm interested in this topic and I don't want to have to take
02:10:45a ton of slings and arrows when I do it, how do I do it without having to do this sort
02:10:49of unnecessary landing in Australia thing each time before I start talking about it?
02:10:54I think one of the problems that I encountered was the cost of having kids to a woman is
02:11:00so high, like physically incredibly high.
02:11:04They're the ones that risk it.
02:11:05They're the ones that their mate value changes way more than the father.
02:11:09Give a dad a kid and get him to walk around a park, like his mate value has probably gone
02:11:14up.
02:11:15Yes.
02:11:16As opposed to a woman who your beauty, your sense of self-worth, all of this stuff that society
02:11:20is imposing on you and is now trying to extract and monetize.
02:11:23monetize from you.
02:11:24To say nothing of health complications.
02:11:26And the physical, the cost, the pain, the uncertainty, the fear, all of these things.
02:11:30And I think what happens is if you're a guy who is talking about that in anything that
02:11:35approximates flippancy or dismissiveness, you come across as being very callous.
02:11:41If you talk about this topic without the appropriate level of sensitivity, and it's all well and
02:11:46good and me steaming in and going, well, look, we know that da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
02:11:49It's like, hey, hey, I don't think that you're fully appreciating the gravity, the felt gravity
02:11:54of the situation.
02:11:54When we're talking about lost identity for women in their careers, which are now a more important
02:12:00part.
02:12:00It's the thing that's imposed, self-reinforced from all of the people on the internet.
02:12:05This is your primary source of self-worth, your work, your career, your education, your
02:12:10independence, your freedom.
02:12:12And then there's real legitimate reasons to worry about it too.
02:12:14You say, well, what if I get left?
02:12:16What if we get divorced?
02:12:16I don't want to be a financial prisoner to my husband.
02:12:18You mean a relationship that I can't leave?
02:12:20How many marriages stayed together 75 years ago because the woman had literally nowhere
02:12:24else to go?
02:12:25All of these things together have created a situation where this conversation is really
02:12:29fucking hard.
02:12:31And the conversation is always about women.
02:12:34The conversation always lays this at the feet of women and goes, because, as I asked you
02:12:40this question over WhatsApp, I was like, why do we, why is it like total children per mother?
02:12:46Why is it mother, mother, mother, mom, woman, woman?
02:12:49Because men lie about their fertility.
02:12:51Never.
02:12:52They don't know how many kids they have.
02:12:54And Sweden actually tracks this data pretty aggressively.
02:12:57And the total number of children born by administrative data matching to fathers is about 8% less than
02:13:07to mothers.
02:13:08Sorry, it's about 6% in Sweden.
02:13:09In the US, it's about 11%.
02:13:11About 11%.
02:13:13Actually, I think in the newest data, it's 10%.
02:13:14But about 1 in 10 kids have no medically acknowledged paternity.
02:13:19Well, also, like the ONS just collects data about mothers.
02:13:23Yeah.
02:13:23There is no data about fathers.
02:13:25No, the ONS has father data, but it's missing for, I want to say, 7% of births.
02:13:32But it is there.
02:13:33But in terms of the regular fertility data around the world, we focus on mothers because it's
02:13:38easy at a hospital to get a birth record and ask some questions to their mother.
02:13:43Age, birth order is nice to have.
02:13:46I think we found it uncomfortable, or we did in the past, to ask you as a mother, by the
02:13:51way, who's the father here?
02:13:52Or it might be in some, and we've stayed away.
02:13:55I think that's changing.
02:13:56I know there are initiatives around the world to collect more timely, meaningful fatherhood
02:14:00data.
02:14:00But one interesting thing, back to this curve.
02:14:02Except in California, where they're phasing it all out.
02:14:05Okay.
02:14:07You know, this timing curve in countries where we do have data on the timing of fatherhood
02:14:12really is just a slight delay of the same curve of mothers.
02:14:17A little flatter, a little stressed.
02:14:19A little flatter, especially at the high end.
02:14:20Yeah.
02:14:21So, again, the idea that men think that they can wait.
02:14:26They're in the same race, as I've called it, that women are.
02:14:31For now, listen.
02:14:32I mean, this is going to be centered on women for a while.
02:14:35And then we get in vitro cometogenesis, and we get artificial wombs.
02:14:38And that tech is in development today.
02:14:40It is.
02:14:41It's not going to work, though.
02:14:44You'll see.
02:14:44If you look at fertility treatments, which have been in place.
02:14:47Look, okay, it's going to work for a small population.
02:14:48But once this scales, it scales.
02:14:50So, you know, I'm looking.
02:14:51I'm far future, right?
02:14:52So, I see this as a viable solution.
02:14:54There's another really important part of this, though, is there's this big sort of psyop
02:14:58with women in pregnancy that it's like this horrible thing that destroys your body.
02:15:02Which clearly isn't necessarily true.
02:15:05But it's one of those sort of self-fulfilling prophecies.
02:15:08I think when women buy into this and come to believe it, they're way more likely to have
02:15:13actual and very real perceived worse pregnancies and worse complications and worse recoveries.
02:15:17Because they expect it, and they live it.
02:15:19Like, spoonies, you know, these people who sort of believe they're deeply sick online
02:15:22actually experience real symptoms.
02:15:25Spoonies, they, they, it's like Munchausen's.
02:15:28It's like new, new Munchausen's.
02:15:30And there's like whole social networks where like they post the pills they take and they
02:15:33sort of buy into it and feed into it.
02:15:34And they're feeling real sickness, but it's not real.
02:15:38And I think a lot of this does happen with pregnancy.
02:15:40And there's just, there's the amount of women who think that this is going to destroy your
02:15:44body and it's going to be painful and horrible.
02:15:46When you expect that, it's going to happen.
02:15:48And so I appreciate that it needs to be acknowledged and that this does fall to women and that pregnancy
02:15:53isn't easy, but I mean, also people run marathons, people climb mountains, people, honestly, the
02:15:59travel that you do is so, I vomited more times acquiring businesses and traveling around the
02:16:05world than I ever did in any of my five pregnancies.
02:16:08Also, there's actually a cure for morning sickness that's in trials because we identify the specific
02:16:13protein combination that causes severe morning sickness.
02:16:15So like a couple of years, that's going to be gone.
02:16:19I will say my, you know, all of, all of my wife and I's pregnancies have been high risk
02:16:24and my wife, my wife is missing a considerable part of the portion of the vision in one of
02:16:29her eyes because of a, of a unique pregnancy complication.
02:16:33So I'm very aware of the incredible, uh, I mean, pregnancy is not just like a, a minor medical
02:16:43thing, right?
02:16:44It's not, it's, um, and yes, there's also definitely psychosomatic post-pregnancy
02:16:48syndromes that, you know, is this really going on or, um, but, uh, I think that that makes
02:16:56it just one, it's so much better than it used to be.
02:17:02Like it blows my mind that like tok, the term is tokophobia, which means fear of giving birth,
02:17:09fear of pregnancy.
02:17:09It blows my mind that we are living in such a tokophobic age when we are, we are finally
02:17:14in a period where when you correctly measure maternity, the, the causal effect of pregnancy
02:17:19on women's mortality, we're at an age where it's not detectable.
02:17:23That is women who experience pregnancy do not have detectably higher mortality rates than
02:17:29age mat, age and race matched women who are not pregnant.
02:17:33But think about what, what the rest of life is like.
02:17:36Right.
02:17:36So think about how sterilized everything else has become.
02:17:39This is now the scariest thing you're ever going to do in your life.
02:17:41We live in a time, we live in a time where as best we can tell, there is no causal effect
02:17:45of pregnancy or birth on mortality of women.
02:17:49Maternal mortality is deaths linked to a maternal cause, but it's not always causal in the sense
02:17:56that that might've been a woman who has higher risk of dying of other things anyway.
02:17:59Okay.
02:17:59But, and yet we live in this massively tokophobic age where we're so afraid of all the things
02:18:04that can happen.
02:18:04And it's because everything else has gotten so good, right?
02:18:09Like nothing happens to you hardly.
02:18:12And, and so on the one hand, it's like, I want to recognize the risk women take on that
02:18:17my wife has chosen to take on.
02:18:19And I'll, and if she were here, she would say this, that I'm the one who's like, are you
02:18:24sure we, like, we're debating if we're having a fifth, right?
02:18:26And I'm like, are you sure you want to do this again?
02:18:28Like, yeah, I've got to beat the Collinses.
02:18:30I need to, we need to fucking beat those fuckers.
02:18:32That's the way that we're going to do it.
02:18:33But, you know, we can't lose to this, but, um, but my wife is the one who's like, I mean,
02:18:39honestly, like if we did, like, suppose we got pregnant unintentionally, like, would you
02:18:44want to tell that child that you hemmed and hawed on whether we had them because you were
02:18:49worried that like, I might have a complication there's probably medicine for.
02:18:54Yeah.
02:18:54And I'm like, wouldn't you put it that way?
02:18:56But on the other hand, what if you died?
02:18:58It's like, well, but the risk is, is quite low of it.
02:19:00I mean, we're so time-locked though.
02:19:02I mean, the thing is like, if you, even for like a brother, uh, an uncle or, you know,
02:19:06a parent, people are willing to donate organs.
02:19:09They're willing to possibly even die to save them.
02:19:10You know, if a bus is coming for them, are you going to-
02:19:12But a prospective person.
02:19:13I know it's very hard to think in the abstract of like this future human you've never met.
02:19:17When like the marginal risk of a woman takes on.
02:19:20Now, if she could somehow meet that child, you know, or the parents, I mean, like, it just-
02:19:25Well, it's just anchoring bias.
02:19:26Yeah.
02:19:27It's on policy costs, right?
02:19:29The most expensive estimates suggest that the cost per life year added of pro natal cash incentives
02:19:36is like, you might have to pay as much as $25,000 to $30,000 in total policy costs per life year you add.
02:19:45So if a person's going to live 70 years, you add 70 life years for each marginal child.
02:19:49Whereas like the best, most efficient government programs like Medicaid, Medicare, are like $35,000 to $75,000 for each life year you say.
02:19:57So I'm like, so you're saying that adding life years through this is too expensive, but these other programs that it would be like grossly immoral to cut are half as efficient?
02:20:07I just want to chip in-
02:20:09Though death prevention has its own benefits.
02:20:10From a personal perspective, I mean, there are risks and I know I nearly lost my ex-wife during childbirth.
02:20:16It was very close.
02:20:17It's terrifying.
02:20:18Oh, the worst night of my life.
02:20:20And would have lost my, well, one of my children too.
02:20:24So the risks are real.
02:20:25And then you talk to people who go through that.
02:20:29And a lot of it, well, I know a lot of it.
02:20:32In my ex-wife's case, it was related to the fact of the number of cesareans she had had.
02:20:36And people don't understand that these risks, you know, cesarean becomes just the elective choice of norm.
02:20:43And I think a lot of people would be best doing some research on that before necessarily go down that route.
02:20:48Anyway, I don't want to get too personal, but there are risks.
02:20:51I would love to come back to something you just said, because you did take a lot of stick in February.
02:20:55In fact, you blew the internet up because I did searches for-
02:20:58How did I miss this?
02:20:59Yeah, I missed it too.
02:21:00What interview got you in trouble?
02:21:02So I did, I was on Stephen Bartlett's podcast.
02:21:05So it was number eight in the world with number two in the world.
02:21:07Stephen's got a very female audience.
02:21:10And we did two and a half hours on how to do a good New Year's resolution.
02:21:15And I did 10 minutes on mating dynamics and maybe three minutes or so on birth rates.
02:21:23So for two hours, you hectored women about having babies is what I did.
02:21:27It is essentially what happened.
02:21:28I got in, look, I got in an awful lot of trouble.
02:21:31And I mean, it's one of those times where Scott Galloway rang me and he spoke to me on the phone
02:21:38in the same way that someone consoling a person that's recently bereaved.
02:21:43He's like, hey, buddy, how's it going?
02:21:48And I was like, well, I thought it was fucking fine.
02:21:50What's it?
02:21:50And he's like, you haven't been on TikTok, have you?
02:21:52I'm like, no, I haven't been on TikTok.
02:21:53Should I go?
02:21:53And he's like, do not go on TikTok.
02:21:55So that happened at the beginning of the year.
02:21:59That's definitely the biggest furor that I've been in around this topic.
02:22:02If you look at searches on Google for the word childlessness, right at this time, it rockets.
02:22:10I impacted the fucking Google search trend.
02:22:12But you mean child-free, right?
02:22:13Because only a bigot would say childless.
02:22:15Exactly.
02:22:16Well, that's a whole other thing.
02:22:17I don't want to get it.
02:22:18I just hate that term.
02:22:19But you said something then that you're not thinking how to kind of not draw in that anger.
02:22:25Is that something you-
02:22:25If you activate sort of the immune response, you don't change minds.
02:22:30People dig their heels in.
02:22:31And again, Simone's fucking more on a spaceship thing aside.
02:22:35First off, it's just not that enjoyable of a situation to get in.
02:22:39I understand there are some people that there is no amount of sanitizing that I can do to
02:22:44talking about this topic.
02:22:45But there is.
02:22:46And maybe I have a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed hopefulness that I shouldn't.
02:22:50And it's going to be eroded by just spending more time with you and Malcolm.
02:22:53But I'm like, okay, I really think that the conversations that I've had with you and with
02:22:59you and with your other half have moved the needle and helped people to become aware about
02:23:05what delaying family formation, the challenges of coupling, what this really means, what sort
02:23:10of a limit have you got, how much planning do you need to do in future, all of this stuff.
02:23:13Like, I really think it's made the world a better place, even if it's taught people some
02:23:16things that they really don't want to hear.
02:23:17And it's kind of antithetical to the world that they think that they want to live in.
02:23:20And some do want to live in, but they're the loudest people on the internet, et cetera.
02:23:24Like, I don't want to have to take flack for doing something that I think is really good.
02:23:28If that's the cost, then so be it.
02:23:30But I'm like, I reckon I can be more effective.
02:23:32You know, I think I can be more effective with the way that I talk about this stuff.
02:23:35We also probably hadn't fully priced in this, like, callousness response system that women have
02:23:42when it feels like a man, especially one that presents like me, is being flippant about what
02:23:47they're going through or about the fears that they have in this new world, right?
02:23:51Because we're often happy to give men, or I try and push to give men, hey, they've lost a lot
02:23:57of their roles.
02:23:57They don't really understand what they're supposed to do.
02:23:59How are they supposed to add value in this way?
02:24:00They're falling behind.
02:24:01The school system and the work system don't seem to be designed in the same sort of way for
02:24:05someone that can't be a highlighted girl.
02:24:07They're rambunctious.
02:24:08They get fucking put on meds because they've got ADHD, which is just them being forced to
02:24:12sit in the classroom, et cetera, et cetera.
02:24:13And I'm like, I want people to understand that in the modern world, there are mismatches
02:24:18with how these creatures, the boys and the men, previously would have been able to operate.
02:24:24The same thing is happening to women.
02:24:26And I'm like, right, okay, I just don't fully understand.
02:24:29All of that being said, many of the criticisms that were levied at me,
02:24:35we've gone through today.
02:24:36It's stuff to do with one of the ones I want to get onto, which is housework and childcare.
02:24:42There's a kind of a very obvious playbook that happened, but most of them were, this guy
02:24:48wants to strip women's rights away.
02:24:50He's disregarding how hard and challenging it is for women.
02:24:53And he's making an assumption that women who don't want to have kids want to have kids.
02:24:59Now, the third one is really interesting because a lot of those points were being made by women
02:25:05who still could have kids, which means that you don't need to put your money where your
02:25:10mouth is.
02:25:11You have no skin in this game.
02:25:12You can say, I'm not going to have kids right up until the point that you can't.
02:25:16And then you can rug pull everybody else where you've got your, I'm promoting what is currently
02:25:22kind of the trendy thing in feminism thing.
02:25:23And then I'm going to pivot last minute.
02:25:25There's a lot of very well-known women that have extolled the virtues of no strings attached,
02:25:31casual sex, where you don't need to have kids or do family formation to then do a kind of
02:25:35surprise announcement that he got down in one knee in a rose garden.
02:25:38Wasn't it so beautiful?
02:25:39Also, when it comes to the housework and the cost of living thing, you go, hang on a second.
02:25:46You're single.
02:25:49You're single.
02:25:51And you're saying that the reason that people aren't having kids is because of the cost of
02:25:56because the cost of living, but you're not in the situation where you could have kids.
02:26:01So what the fuck are we talking about?
02:26:03So I'm like, right.
02:26:03Okay.
02:26:04I understand that these are some of the sort of like early onset trigger points around this
02:26:09conversation.
02:26:10So I want to approach them appropriately, gently and say, Hey, coupling seems to be the big
02:26:16issue.
02:26:16As far as I can see.
02:26:18Yes.
02:26:18Age related stuff.
02:26:19It's people are not in relationships.
02:26:21So you talking about how hard it is to have kids, the cost of childcare, where are we going
02:26:26to get the money from and the living crisis and the housing and all the rest of it?
02:26:29It's like, that is a wonderful hypothetical, but until you're in a relationship, until really
02:26:35you're married for most people, like this is kind of just mental arithmetic that doesn't
02:26:41actually have a result at the end.
02:26:42Unless the mental arithmetic is demoralizing you from pursuing a serious relationship.
02:26:46It has real world effects.
02:26:47It's self-defeating cope.
02:26:49Yeah.
02:26:49But you know, if it's one of these things where you're like, well, having kids is never
02:26:52going to be attainable anyway, so why bother with a serious relationship?
02:26:54I don't think that's what people are saying.
02:26:56I think for some people-
02:26:58That might be what it nets down to effectively.
02:27:00That might be how reality-
02:27:01Anyway, you said, I got in trouble.
02:27:03Where were you going?
02:27:04Oh, well, I was just going to respond to that one point first.
02:27:06That I think for a lot of younger people, the idea of why bother dating seriously is
02:27:12absolutely true when you meet someone at age 18, 21, the person you start dating now-
02:27:17You're not going to marry them.
02:27:18No, you can't imagine that they are.
02:27:19So why are you going to take that seriously?
02:27:21One of the great misfortunes of the modern world is to find a person that would be good
02:27:26for you to marry when you're 17.
02:27:27Because what are you going to do, actually marry them?
02:27:31Bro, one of my really good friends just got engaged.
02:27:34It'd be great if you did, but it's not normal.
02:27:37One of my really good friends just got engaged, and his fiance's workmates were fully aghast.
02:27:43And apparently the first thing that all of them said to her was, how old are you?
02:27:47Oh, God.
02:27:48She's 28.
02:27:49Oh, God.
02:27:52That was their response.
02:27:53Like, what are you doing?
02:27:56You're highly educated.
02:27:58You've worked your entire life too.
02:28:00How could you?
02:28:01And I'm like, hey, I'm saying this as a 38-year-old guy.
02:28:03I should have put this fucking disclaimer up top.
02:28:05I understand 38 unmarried without kids.
02:28:08That can be the fucking header of this podcast.
02:28:11I get it, okay?
02:28:13Where I was going to go with that was-
02:28:15Working hard on it.
02:28:16I think all of us, I imagine, have taken arrows for this.
02:28:21Well, you certainly have.
02:28:22I certainly have.
02:28:24Yeah, but did anybody else impact Google Trends data?
02:28:27No, I've never seen that.
02:28:28No, that's a different level.
02:28:30But I think back to this 10% who not only don't want kids, but I would suggest don't understand
02:28:37why anybody would want kids, are always going to be voices trolling not anyone having this
02:28:44conversation.
02:28:44No, they're not, they're not, they're not.
02:28:45Because I, this is so, this is so interesting.
02:28:48I feel like most of the people who are involved in the I'm childless, I'm child-free, sorry,
02:28:54debate are feeling some cognitive dissonance.
02:28:57Because when I was in my child-free era, which was like basically up until I met Malcolm,
02:29:03my husband, I was like, yeah, I'm not going to have kids.
02:29:06I'm not going to do it.
02:29:06I was like, that's great.
02:29:08I was celebrated for it.
02:29:09No one ever questioned that.
02:29:10And I was not involved in the debate.
02:29:12I felt super secure in my choice.
02:29:15No one questioned it.
02:29:16I think that a lot of it comes down to people really feeling ambivalent about it.
02:29:20And that's because we live in a society where like, if you are kind of interested in it,
02:29:24you still feel punished for that.
02:29:26And I think this comes from a place of interest.
02:29:29So what would you have done back in those years if you'd come across Chris's podcast on this topic?
02:29:35Would you have been ambivalent?
02:29:36Or would you have gone in a drawer?
02:29:37I'd be too busy watching my cottagecore content.
02:29:40You know, just like, oh, fantasy stuff and books and manga.
02:29:44One of the, you know, I will take our own.
02:29:46I mean, that is how it is.
02:29:51We ought to talk about child care.
02:29:53Sorry, housework.
02:29:54Because this is something that really bothers me.
02:29:58And it's something that will build so much false resentment among women.
02:30:03And here's the thing.
02:30:05Women do disproportionately a lot more housework and cleaning and everything.
02:30:09It's not because their husbands are forcing them to.
02:30:12It's because their personal standards are higher.
02:30:14Women are like, well, you know, if we didn't exist, who would organize all the parties for the men?
02:30:18And who would put the doilies on their tables?
02:30:20And who would wash their sheets every week?
02:30:22And the men are like, wait, I thought you just wash sheets like once a year.
02:30:25You know, like women just, they want these high standards.
02:30:27What's that thing that guys supposedly do?
02:30:29Feigned incompetence?
02:30:30Is that what it's called?
02:30:31Oh, weaponized, weaponized incompetence.
02:30:33It's not, it's lower standards.
02:30:35And women feel like they have to.
02:30:36I am always, I am all around the house.
02:30:39I'm cleaning up and I'm grumbling.
02:30:40And my husband is literally like.
02:30:41To the stay at home dad.
02:30:42Is it going to make you sick?
02:30:44No, then leave it there.
02:30:45Like, that's just how it is.
02:30:46What about, okay.
02:30:47So for a lot of the, a lot of the comments that I got, and there was one lady who I think
02:30:52had written an entire book basically on parody at home, parody on housework.
02:30:55Oh, oh, she's the one who made that deck of cards?
02:30:57I'm not sure.
02:30:58The divorce deck.
02:30:59It's so stupid.
02:31:00Men don't fare as much.
02:31:02Fair play.
02:31:02Fair play.
02:31:03Oh, God.
02:31:04It's disgusting.
02:31:05It's this deck of cards that ruins marriages because it builds all the spots.
02:31:08It's supposed to be a conversation game where you, you distribute cards that represent family
02:31:13tasks and they, functionally speaking, what it's supposed to do is it's supposed to give
02:31:17wives a way of obliquely communicating to their husbands how shitty their husbands are.
02:31:22More efficiently resenting their husbands.
02:31:24Building resentment where it doesn't have to be.
02:31:27There's, there's, there's people who believe there's a, that it really helps couples.
02:31:32I'm, I'm not one of those people.
02:31:34Um, uh, but it's, uh, yes.
02:31:39I also, my wife and I have also referred to it as the divorce deck.
02:31:42Maybe, maybe it's just, maybe it's just cause I'm British, right?
02:31:45But I, I tend to try and give people at least like the, uh, a little bit of room.
02:31:51I tend to give them the best, uh, interpretation of their work that I can.
02:31:55A lot of women say that men aren't prepared to assist enough around the house.
02:31:59They're not prepared to help enough with child care.
02:32:00They're happy to assist because they're really bad at it.
02:32:03If men contributed more, women would feel more confident in starting a family.
02:32:07Men are contributing more than they ever have.
02:32:09And they're, they're super happy to.
02:32:10The, the share of domestic work being done, which means chores, child care, all in, being done by men has risen every decade for the last 90 years.
02:32:21Okay.
02:32:22It is at all time highs.
02:32:24American dads do something like four times as large a share of domestic work as the most involved pre-agricultural society dads that we know of.
02:32:34Well, even when you look at it, like 1950s mothers, uh, now basically the, the average American dad spends as much time on child care as a 1950s stay-at-home mom.
02:32:44There's, so part of that is a change in classification of, of what people mean when they say child care.
02:32:48But it is true.
02:32:49There's been a huge change.
02:32:51Men are doing way more than they ever have.
02:32:52We're still doing less than our wives on average, that's true.
02:32:54But they prefer doing that stuff more and they have higher standards, which is why they, they go into it.
02:32:59And the way we know it's a preference difference is because if you look at single men and women of the same age and the same race, and you look, who live alone, and you look at their time spent on housework, those matched controls, those women already do 200% more housework.
02:33:18No fucking way.
02:33:19So like.
02:33:20Well, look at Asmongold's house.
02:33:22I mean, come on, like the standards.
02:33:23He cleaned it up.
02:33:24Leave him alone.
02:33:25Well, yeah, and it's fine.
02:33:26Occasionally, right?
02:33:27But like, but like, this is the point is like, yes, there are preference differences.
02:33:30Yes.
02:33:30And you do sometimes get the odd couple where actually the man is, is more.
02:33:34Neat for it.
02:33:34Cleaning intensive.
02:33:34But like, um, what you often get actually is a man who values tidiness, but doesn't want to do himself because his mom was very tidy.
02:33:41And that's a real problem.
02:33:42Some couples have is, is you get mismatch on mom versus wife, but, um, and in which case he probably just needs to like deal with it and accept that his wife isn't his mommy.
02:33:52But, um, but like, it blows my mind when people are like, if men did more housework, fertility would be higher.
02:34:00And I'm like, we are living through the largest increase in male housework humanity has ever experienced.
02:34:04Yeah.
02:34:04And fertility is collapsing.
02:34:06Yeah.
02:34:06Has it occurred to you that having a baby involves both people's choices and often men are the ones who kind of are open to having more kids because they don't bear as much of the costs.
02:34:16If you shift more of the cost onto the men, the person in the couple who's more ready to start the conversation and say, have we considered this?
02:34:24We'll not start the conversation.
02:34:25Like societally, it's not clear that men sharing more of the burden increases fertility.
02:34:33What might is women having more broader support in society, whether it's from government provided benefits or community organization provided benefits or just individual choice to do like, you know, various kinds of help with friends and family and stuff like that.
02:34:49Basically, alloparenting, that does help.
02:34:52But when the total bill of work in a couple has not changed and you're just shuffling around who does it, that's not boosting fertility because couples make choices together.
02:35:03But also, these conversations were often done by people who weren't in relationships again.
02:35:08Yeah.
02:35:09It's all hypothetical.
02:35:10I understand that the housework might be something that you've seen online.
02:35:14I think when you actually add in emotional containment, have you heard of that?
02:35:19It's the task that men end up taking where there is some kind of emotional perturbment that's gone on either in the wife's life or around the home or with something that's happening close to the home.
02:35:35And the containment of that, when you factor that in, you almost basically zero out the work around the house.
02:35:42I don't know whether that's...
02:35:43I'm fascinated how you quantify that.
02:35:45Whoever's the voice on this topic is going to take arrows.
02:35:48I mean, there's no avoiding that.
02:35:50And I just want to say, I mean, I think it's three years since we first did a podcast.
02:35:55And at that time, no one was talking about fertility.
02:36:01It was...
02:36:02Except for weirdo pronators.
02:36:03Right.
02:36:04Right.
02:36:04It was almost an unspeakable topic in the mainstream media, except once a year when the fertility rate came out.
02:36:12And that would be it.
02:36:14I went through both U.S. Congress and U.K. Parliament records of speeches.
02:36:22Fertility or low birth rates was not mentioned once in any of those Congress parliaments.
02:36:30If you look now, and it changed very quickly, and it changed very quickly since you started talking about this.
02:36:35I mean, truly, I mean, politicians started talking about it.
02:36:38I know some of those directly map back to what you were saying and the podcast that you aired.
02:36:43So I guess I'm saying I'm hoping...
02:36:44It's also the Elon effect.
02:36:46Yeah.
02:36:46Yeah, but Elon wants to be talking about this back to 2015.
02:36:49I saw him on CNN.
02:36:50So even in his early days talking about this, the media weren't prepared.
02:36:55So I think you've done a huge favor to society to at least allow people to talk about childlessness.
02:37:04I mean, that was completely unspeakable.
02:37:07And so when I saw the internet explode with the word childlessness taking off in a way it never has in February,
02:37:14you know, well, I mapped it to you, and I'm pretty sure it was you, but that's a good thing.
02:37:18Because even those people who say that they don't want children, at least they're thinking about it.
02:37:28And at least they're able to talk to their friends about it, even if it's...
02:37:31It's not an unspeakable conversation.
02:37:32No, it's good.
02:37:33Right, right.
02:37:33But as a woman, like there are many times when my husband will say the sensible thing,
02:37:39and I'll get super mad about it, and I'll be like, no, you're wrong.
02:37:42And then I will, you know, I will spike the Google trends of our household.
02:37:46And then I go and I sit and think about it, and I let it sit, and I ultimately see the reason in his argument.
02:37:52I think that sometimes when people have a very strong negative reaction to something,
02:37:57it's just the first reaction, and they need time to sit and think with it.
02:38:02And sometimes it's good to get a strong emotional reaction.
02:38:06When people are offended by something, it's only because something is credibly threatening their worldview,
02:38:11which means that basically they think there's some weight to that point you're making.
02:38:17They wouldn't be offended by what you said if they didn't think that what you said might have a kernel of truth,
02:38:22that maybe they're wrong.
02:38:23And it's terrifying to be wrong.
02:38:25It's terrifying to think maybe all the decisions I've made up to this point,
02:38:28to be childless, to focus on my career first, maybe that's wrong.
02:38:31That would make me mad.
02:38:32That would make me scared.
02:38:34And so the fact that you got all that anger, that is an incredibly good sign.
02:38:39You want to see people offended because they're starting to think.
02:38:41I agree.
02:38:42You know, where this manifests itself, one of the most difficult things I've become aware of
02:38:49is the attacks on women from other women about whether they want to have kids or not.
02:38:55People who choose a life without children, I refuse to call it the CF word.
02:39:01I mean, child and free should not be put together.
02:39:04It's childlessness.
02:39:04People who choose childlessness attacking other women who do want children saying,
02:39:09but why would you want to do that?
02:39:12You can travel where you want.
02:39:13You can get up anytime you want.
02:39:15And seeing women on women attacking each other, that's the most sad thing in all of this.
02:39:21But again, you're right.
02:39:21At least people are being told.
02:39:23So you're saying if I identify as a woman, I might be able to-
02:39:25If you couldn't awake.
02:39:27I know.
02:39:27I love what people are trying to do.
02:39:28They don't want to say childless.
02:39:30They don't want to say child free.
02:39:31As you see with demographers, so they say nulliparis.
02:39:35What?
02:39:35Which is the technical term, but I'm like, I feel like calling a woman null is actually
02:39:40way worse than less.
02:39:41Yeah.
02:39:41Is this not a good thing because the climate's fucked and fewer humans would be-
02:39:45Look, we are not the first species by a long shot to cause global climate change.
02:39:51This is just a normal thing that you can plan for and plan around.
02:39:54This is very different from climate change.
02:39:56I'm curious.
02:39:56Sorry.
02:39:57What other species-
02:39:58When biological life first came onto the continents?
02:40:00Oh, yeah.
02:40:00Fair.
02:40:01Yeah.
02:40:01I mean, just the advent of life here.
02:40:02Yeah.
02:40:02No, like when you study historical geology, you're like, oh, God.
02:40:05Like this-
02:40:06Look, climate change is normal.
02:40:08We just have to plan around it.
02:40:09Similar to demographic lapse.
02:40:11You can't change it.
02:40:12With climate change, we can't stop climate change.
02:40:14Like everyone was like, oh, well, if we meet these emissions limits, then we'll be okay.
02:40:17And then COVID came.
02:40:18We met them.
02:40:19It wasn't enough because you can't stop it.
02:40:21Similar with demographic lapse.
02:40:22You can't stop it.
02:40:23You have to plan for it.
02:40:24So that's an interesting difference, I think, between your corner of the table and
02:40:28ours, that the-
02:40:29I want to stop it.
02:40:30Yeah.
02:40:31It's not going to happen.
02:40:33You might be right, but I'm perfectly happy to die trying.
02:40:34We're like five inches from the iceberg on the Titanic.
02:40:36It's going to sink.
02:40:37Are you going to get on a lifeboat or not?
02:40:39I think I can keep that boat floating.
02:40:40Sure you can.
02:40:41You're fucking blind man bad to you, baby.
02:40:43I got it.
02:40:43I can get that boat through the Suez Canal.
02:40:45Okay.
02:40:46Give me a couple of guys and we can do it.
02:40:48Okay.
02:40:49So on climate change, I think, like, I'm a climate change cautious optimist.
02:40:55We have the technology, okay?
02:40:58Or we're getting very close to it.
02:41:00No, like, solar panel, like, we're about to get, there's a different type of solar panel
02:41:04that is about to come, like, the first commercial version of it is about to come online.
02:41:08It's like 40% more efficient than the other ones.
02:41:10Nuclear power is coming back.
02:41:11We're getting, like, small nuclear reactors.
02:41:13Like, this is happening.
02:41:14We are getting, Kentucky has one of the, like, reopened nuclear sites in the U.S., which
02:41:19I'm super excited about.
02:41:20We're reopening the Paducah plant.
02:41:22I think we're going to beat it.
02:41:24I think, though, that a lot of climate declinists or kind of climate population declinists honestly
02:41:29just don't understand the math because they are Ehrlich brained on the iPad equation, which
02:41:35is impact equals population times affluence times technology, okay?
02:41:38And so they see that as a causal relationship.
02:41:41If population goes up, impact goes up.
02:41:43Impact on the climate, that is.
02:41:44If affluence goes up, impact goes up.
02:41:47But this is not, this is an accounting diagram, not a causal one.
02:41:50The reality is we can look at countries that implemented population control programs in the
02:41:5560s, 70s, and 80s, because the U.N. has been collecting data on this for decades, and
02:41:59we can say, what happened to their carbon emissions?
02:42:02And the answer is the harder a country cracked down on population growth, the faster their climate
02:42:07emissions rose.
02:42:08Now, there's a variety of reasons that cracking down on population growth tended to be associated
02:42:12with really aggressive industrialization strategies.
02:42:14But it turns out population just isn't the driver.
02:42:18It's actually all technology.
02:42:20The entire equation really just boils down to T, technology.
02:42:24If the technology is right, you solve the problem.
02:42:27Which means all you really care about, literally the entire question for climate change, and not
02:42:33just climate change, climate change, habitat production, species production is technology.
02:42:38Now, sometimes that's literal technology.
02:42:40Sometimes it's governance technology.
02:42:42Okay.
02:42:42So like the quality of government policy, particularly for like wildlife protection, that's the whole
02:42:46ball game.
02:42:47Population growth doesn't predict habitat destruction and wildlife destruction after you add any kind
02:42:53control for governance quality, which is to say, all you want is good technology or good governance.
02:43:02So how do you get that?
02:43:04Well, I mentioned earlier in this conversation, we know that larger populations innovate more.
02:43:09We know this.
02:43:11This is not ambiguous.
02:43:12It is a solved economic question.
02:43:15Therefore, if you know that your future depends on tech maxing, and you know that more people
02:43:20gets you more tech, then the green future is a high population growth future.
02:43:27That's the only equilibrium it solves.
02:43:30I think a lot of people are hopeful, people who don't care that much about birth rates, but
02:43:37still kind of like white-pilled on the fact that we're going to get through it is, well,
02:43:42it's going to be fine because we've got AI and AI is going to answer all of the problems.
02:43:47And we're struggling to sort of comport those two worldviews because what that does mean is
02:43:52that an awful lot of wealth will be concentrated in the hands of like eight people who all own
02:43:57those particular AI companies. And that doesn't seem to be typically the worldview that people
02:44:02who are not bothered about birth rate decline are interested in. It seems to be people who
02:44:08would typically not want to have eight people with 50% of the world's wealth, but also people who
02:44:15don't care that much about AI is going to solve the problem, but the solving of the problem results
02:44:21in another thing that they also don't like. So I think, yeah, the rubber is going to meet the
02:44:25road here at some point soon. I think there is a lot of natural dissonance,
02:44:29cognitive dissonance among societies who have been educated rightly that population totals are
02:44:38increasing and increasing and increasing. We've not been told at all, despite knowing it for many
02:44:43decades of its leveling off. So I get the reality that people need a moment to stand back and say,
02:44:49wait a minute, I've been told all my life that there's a population explosion. And now it looks
02:44:56like that's over. If there ever was one, what does that mean for everything else, including the
02:45:01environment? But the topic of the environment is different ways you can come at it. But imagine that
02:45:07the crisis had not been population growth. It had been a meteor due to hit Earth. And imagine that we
02:45:16managed to successfully divert this. So maybe a near miss, the meteor is not going to hit us anymore.
02:45:22It's gone. Would we be still sitting here talking about a meteor hitting Earth? No, that was then.
02:45:27And for me, when you look at the population growth challenge of the past, total births on the planet
02:45:37peaked around 2013, I think at 145 million in one year. It's way down already. That's total births,
02:45:45including Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. We're already past the point of a risk of populations going up
02:45:52further. So it is what it is. And the challenge we have now is, how do we come out of this? Because,
02:45:58I mean, you can see here, none of us have come up today to say, here is the singular solution.
02:46:03Well, I did give a cost estimate. We could just buy our way out of it.
02:46:06An example of how we could travel in some way. Yeah. And cost estimates. But yeah. The reason I
02:46:13believe this is a bigger topic for humanity to grapple with is the simple fact that there are potential
02:46:22solutions to every other crisis that I know of. We might not like some of those,
02:46:26but at least we can talk about solutions. So what are the solutions? Yours aside of,
02:46:33fuck it, spaceship. We can buy our way out of it. No, no. We don't have the money for that.
02:46:38We do. We do. Okay. If the US added, it'd be about five, six percent of GDP a year,
02:46:45max for the US to buy our way out of our current fertility situation back to 2.1. If we added that
02:46:51amount of spending and taxation, we would still be spending... Oh, and tax. Oh, because that's
02:46:55going to happen. We would be spending and taxing less than almost any European country still.
02:46:59The incentives aren't aligned. Okay. I agree with you. Politically,
02:47:02it's unlikely. But the question is, what could we do that could be done if we all...
02:47:08Where would that money go, just for clarity?
02:47:10Baby bonus. You have a baby, you get a check. How big does the check need to be?
02:47:14In the US, I want to say it's about $150,000 per baby. And what if you don't already have a partner?
02:47:19So, I don't believe... Have a baby, get a check.
02:47:23With whom? Find a partner, have a baby.
02:47:24Have a baby, get a check. Right. Okay. But you do need to find them.
02:47:27It sounds like a rom-com plot. Why are we not just eliminating income tax?
02:47:30You have a one-night stand and don't tell them you're not using protection.
02:47:34You could just eliminate income tax for families.
02:47:36That is a real racket. That is a real racket.
02:47:38I actually agree. You could do things that are maybe a little bit less blunt.
02:47:42That would only be to mothers as well, right? This would actually be a very sexed bonus.
02:47:45The interesting... Obviously, the reason I quote it that way is because to get simplified,
02:47:50condensed modeling estimates, we have to convert policies across all these studies into a common
02:47:55baseline. So, the common baseline is a one-time, per-child, unrestricted baby bonus. But you
02:48:00could do it otherwise. Yeah. Like France's quotient system, where each additional child multiplies your
02:48:04tax brackets. Or you can think about, instead... Actually, one of my favorite ways to do this,
02:48:09the Heritage Foundation kind of teased this idea, but I think it's worth exploring more. They're like,
02:48:13"Okay, what if you do an investment for every child when they're born, and then when they marry
02:48:19or have kids, they get the realized return on it?" So, suddenly, you have these big payouts
02:48:24that the government only put a little money in. But after 30 years of investment, it's actually real
02:48:29money. You've got Trump accounts. We're kind of... But it's not for kids. It's for, like,
02:48:31when you hit 18 or when you... So, it's not a kid match. But I thought when I asked you earlier on,
02:48:36is cost of living the problem, you said no. No, and see, that's the thing, is money's
02:48:39not gonna solve the problem. Cost of living didn't cause it in the same way that, you know,
02:48:45bad genes might cause bad eyesight, but that doesn't mean you have to fix the genes to fix the
02:48:48ice. Well, why are we gonna throw money into a broken system? Cost of living didn't cause the
02:48:50decline, but... It can fix it. No. Enough... Everybody has a price.
02:48:55Yeah, well, the price... No. Most people think the real price is, like, $300,000 or above,
02:49:00and you're saying $150,000, and that's already too much. I think there's a lot of people who do it for $150,000.
02:49:04Will those people be contributing enough in their future tax income to make up for that?
02:49:09Maybe. Maybe not. That's why income tax is more compelling, but it's still not gonna fix it.
02:49:12Also, would this incentivize people who shouldn't become parents to become parents because they don't?
02:49:17No, that's why income tax is a better solution if we're talking that type of solution.
02:49:20I'm not saying that a gigantic single baby bonus is the optimal policy. I'm saying,
02:49:24could we do anything? I am ready to Genghis Khan my way to a billion dollars.
02:49:27There you go. At the extreme level, could we do something? Yes, we could.
02:49:32But we won't, because it's not gonna happen. But should we? You didn't stop to ask if you should.
02:49:36Like, okay, I agree. $150,000 baby bonus, probably not the optimal way to do this.
02:49:42It'd be better to start by just eliminating all the marriage penalties and the tax welfare.
02:49:45That is big. What's that?
02:49:46So if you're middle class and you get married in the United States...
02:49:49More if you're working class.
02:49:50Yeah, working class. Well, but that is kind of the middle class now. And you have a salary.
02:49:55You're gonna take a tax penalty when you get married.
02:49:57Or a welfare penalty. So there's a lot of people, like there's a lot of single parents in the US,
02:50:02who they have one kid, maybe, and now their kid is on welfare for their health care. They're getting
02:50:07housing benefits, they're getting food stamps. They're getting food benefits, yeah.
02:50:09And if they marry the baby daddy, they lose all of it.
02:50:11We know a lot of people who are, well, because then you're married.
02:50:14Now his income is included in your calculation for welfare.
02:50:15You don't qualify anymore.
02:50:16Because you're only getting these benefits based on household income.
02:50:20Yeah, the United States is a socialist utopia if you are a single woman living near the poverty line.
02:50:24Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:50:25Yeah.
02:50:26Right, okay. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:50:27So, but every country has this, particularly if two people have similar incomes. So talking
02:50:31about work-family balance, marriage penalties for middle and upper earners are highest when the two
02:50:36partners have similar incomes. For somebody like me, who's a breadwinner with a zero-earner wife,
02:50:42I get a huge bonus for being married. Like, if I was not married to my wife, my taxes would be way
02:50:47higher. But I get a benefit from being married because my wife has no income. But if two people
02:50:52have similar incomes in their middle or upper income and they get married, they have huge penalties.
02:50:57It's even bigger for lower income people.
02:50:59Which is insane because these people would be raising the highest taxpayers in the future.
02:51:02So in principle, like, solve marriage penalties is item one.
02:51:06Now, that does cost money because, like, you can do it in a revenue neutral way, but doing so
02:51:11creates a lot of losers from the policy change. So to do it in a way that gives you politically
02:51:15viable numbers of losers, you do spend money. But like, yes, that's your highest impact thing.
02:51:19And notably, South Korea's increase in fertility in the last three years, which is like, they've
02:51:23increased fertility by like 0.2 or 0.3 kids in three years. Like, that's nothing to sneeze at.
02:51:28And yes, it's still only at one, but that's a lot better than 0.7.
02:51:31Partly they did increase child benefits and child cash stuff. But the big change they did is they
02:51:36created an explicit marriage bonus and marriage rates rose for the first time in 25 years.
02:51:41Okay. Even though it's a bad luck year in East Asian culture right now.
02:51:45So I would just say, like, dealing with marriage, we already know marriage is a big factor.
02:51:50We know marriage. We have tons of studies showing marriage penalties reduce marriage rates.
02:51:54Um, solving marriage, getting rid of marriage penalties is a basic first step.
02:51:59Okay. Dealing with housing supply, dealing with educational timing,
02:52:02that's something we've talked about. That's related to age in a powerful way. There's all these things
02:52:06we can do. Yeah. The housing crisis is basically manufactured because zoning laws restrict people
02:52:11who want to build houses from building houses. If we were able to build houses wherever we wanted,
02:52:15there would no longer be a housing crisis. Or they only allowed them to build celibacy cells.
02:52:19Yeah. Like, basically, like studio apartments in giant libraries.
02:52:22You can never raise a family. No one wants to raise a family. No one wants.
02:52:25And it's not conducive to a couple who may be living together in a studio apartment for going,
02:52:31"We should really start our family here." Well, they might not be allowed to. There
02:52:34are many apartments that you can apply to that are like, "Sorry, we're capped at this number of
02:52:38occupants." So if you have a family of six, there are so many, like, getting an apartment that will
02:52:43take you in a city is incredibly hard. Okay. Okay. So money is one of them in variety of different ways.
02:52:48And I disagree with that, by the way. Agreed. Yeah. I don't see enough evidence,
02:52:52given the amount of spend. And Hungary, for example, did spend 6% of GDP.
02:52:56Which is about the amount that we spend on defense.
02:52:58They claim to, but it's a lie, to be clear. They're not telling the truth about how much they're
02:53:02spending. Sure. All right. If you look at the-
02:53:05Sorry, they're counting the face value of the loans that they will underwrite if people fully comply with
02:53:10the conditions. Many people will not fully comply with the conditions. And counting face value of loans
02:53:14you're underwriting on the day- So what percent did they spend?
02:53:17I'll take your number. About 2 or 3%.
02:53:19And South Korea? South Korea is like 1%.
02:53:23South Korea is way below the OECD average. All the Asian countries are.
02:53:27Which is one reason why they have low fertility. Imagine that it's an economic issue to be solved
02:53:33to some extent. You've got this thing called the law of diminishing returns, which means the incentive
02:53:41prioritizes people who are in relationships and we're thinking of kids anyway. It's like,
02:53:46well, we were thinking about it anyway, so why not now? Let's-
02:53:50So there's something called the Swedish rollercoaster in demography, which goes back over decades,
02:53:55which shows that when they brought out incentives to have kids, that indeed the birth rate went up.
02:54:00And then afterwards it went down, and it often went down below where it was before. Because what
02:54:05happened, you had an acceleration of people who were going to have kids anyway.
02:54:07But you know what happened to completed fertility? It rose 0.3 children above a plausible synthetic
02:54:13control. The policy created tempo effects that over time became cohort effects.
02:54:18And what's Sweden's birth rate now though?
02:54:20Yeah. It's higher than Italy's.
02:54:22But it's not enough.
02:54:23No, you're right. No, I agree. It's not enough. Also, they're not spending that much.
02:54:26They're- Okay. Remember, I said you could get there by spending an additional anywhere from
02:54:31two to 12% of GDP. Sweden's spending is like three total.
02:54:34You're blindly discounting the other end of the equation, which is like demographic collapse is
02:54:38accelerated by two things: more government spending and fewer births. And if you just
02:54:43increase your government spending, you're going to need even more births to make up for that.
02:54:47It just doesn't make sense to me.
02:54:48I don't understand the link between government spending and demographic collapse.
02:54:53If we run out of our funds as a government faster, we can't pay our pensions sooner.
02:54:57Yeah. It's a problem for small-budget constrained countries,
02:55:00like a Euro country, but it's not a problem for the US where you can just print it.
02:55:03But eventually, we're going to end up with hyperinflation. I know that right now,
02:55:07we're the default currency of the world, but the faith is shaking more and more every year.
02:55:12It is. I mean, it is. But with super powerful AI productivity growth,
02:55:16it's going to be high enough to pay.
02:55:17Well, I certainly hope so. I would love that. And we're certainly betting on that.
02:55:21But I think that in the end, the solution isn't going to come from government. It's going to come
02:55:25from culture and from individual families.
02:55:26I agree that trying to solve it purely through cash would be a fool's errand. I'm saying,
02:55:32theoretically, you could. I literally have discouraged a government from trying to solve
02:55:37it just that way. But I would say, going to a public in a modern welfare state and saying,
02:55:43we're going to try and solve this, but we're not going to give you any extra cash. We'll never
02:55:47succeed.
02:55:48Well, you could just start by taking your foot off the net.
02:55:49I agree with that.
02:55:50Yes, I agree.
02:55:50You could change the rules and the laws and the regulations at roughly no cost.
02:55:54I agree, that's the right place to start.
02:55:55And that would make such a huge difference.
02:55:57Pension plans. Some countries give care credits. When you step out of work to watch your kids,
02:56:02you get a bonus to your pension calculation.
02:56:05Again, it would be so much more efficient if we didn't launder our child care and elder care
02:56:10through a ton of fraudulent businesses and instead kept it. Also, the quality of care is much better
02:56:16for a child or for an elder person if they're being taken care of by a family member. The alignment's
02:56:21just better. And so you're losing tons of money. You're losing tons of quality. We can just tighten
02:56:26up the government a little bit without spending that materially more money. It's just that right
02:56:30now to untangle that from a policy perspective, to get politicians to actually do it, we also just
02:56:35have to practically accept that it's not going to happen. So we have to look at what we can do to show
02:56:39individual people how to take manners into their own hands. We're going to see a drop in fertility.
02:56:44We're going to see that. A lot of people are going to disappear. Cities are going to crumble.
02:56:48Social services are going to fall apart. But in the end, like any given population whose
02:56:53perspective in the future I don't want to lose can just logarithmically grow into the future,
02:56:58as long as enough families that share that culture. As long as you've got 14.
02:57:02Yeah. It's fine. So this is, again, very low stress. A couple people are going to get it from
02:57:07every culture. Again, we're losing indigenous Americans at the very least, maybe Jane's too.
02:57:12But a lot of people, there's going to be enough and they will be there. And so I really am more
02:57:17interested in them because functionally, anyone else who can't get their act together is not going to
02:57:22matter. Well, are you saying, though, that we don't need to
02:57:27focus on policies to increase the likelihood of people becoming parents at a younger age? I mean,
02:57:33it can't only be about encouraging people to have five, four kids.
02:57:35I'm all for increasing those policies. I mean, even if you just care about government deficiency,
02:57:40those policies are favorable. And I'm also all for making this as pleasant of a transition as possible.
02:57:46One of the remarkable things to me, I don't think I'm overusing it, is that when you look at the
02:57:54stability of family size over decades. So in the US, it's actually gone up from around 2.4,
02:58:032.5, 2.6 children per mother, free focus on mothers. But underneath that, the number of one-child
02:58:09families, two, three, four, five. In Japan, 6% of mothers were having four or more children in 1970.
02:58:19And it's the same today. You seem to have this really ingrained structure that throughout changes
02:58:26in political environment, through crises, mothers just keep on having the same typical number of
02:58:33children as their mother's generation. And in the case of some nations now, their grandmother's
02:58:38generation. Now, some societies have taken longer to get down to that lower level of two, maybe three.
02:58:46I can't see us as societies, therefore, easily going back to a situation where five becomes a norm.
02:58:56Well, we can when all the other types die off, which is going to happen.
02:59:00I don't think it's about type. What do you mean by type?
02:59:05Cultural, inherited culture. So when all the low fertility cultures die,
02:59:09and when also all the low fertility genetic sets die off, what do you have left?
02:59:15The reality is, if we as our cultures continue on the path we're going on, we're going to keep
02:59:20halving every few decades. And those cultures are going to be overtaken by-
02:59:23Except the Amish.
02:59:24Well, that's the point. That's my point.
02:59:26They don't matter.
02:59:27They don't matter.
02:59:27Other cultures or subcultures who don't follow that trend will increase.
02:59:32But they don't have drone storms. So when the government falls apart, who's going to defend
02:59:35their way of life, right? You have to look at what technophilic populations have high fertility.
02:59:40So Israel, very interesting. I'm interested in going to space with them,
02:59:43because they're going to be high fertility and they're maintaining a technophilic culture.
02:59:47But they're having trouble. I mean, even amid this dramatic security crisis that Israel has right
02:59:52now, the Hasidim are one of the most militaristically voting populations, and yet they're still
02:59:59not conscripting them. They're still not sharing the security burden. And so even Israel, I think
03:00:05there's a very open question about whether their model is even long-run technophilic, so to speak.
03:00:13That's for them to figure out. I think that there is if the Hasidim feel like their way of life is
03:00:20threatened by their technophobic nature, I think we have very good reason to believe that they will
03:00:25do what they need to do to survive.
03:00:27I think the strongest case is probably actually the Lishtadians, right? Because they're
03:00:31high educational attainment, fully integrated. They're political participants in Finland.
03:00:36I mean, they've had prime ministers. They're a fully integrated community that still maintains six
03:00:41kids, so five, six kids a woman. But they do have high attrition rates. I mean, they lose,
03:00:48I want to say, 30 or 40 percent of their kids outside of the sect.
03:00:53Well, that's another — here's another thing, though.
03:00:55I would go to space with them because I already commune with them.
03:00:57We're at the same church.
03:00:58They sound cool. No, like when — the coolest thing, too,
03:01:01about pronatalism is that the cultures that are going to survive long-term, they're technophilic,
03:01:07they are high fertility, but also they give the kids the best possible upbringing. This is something
03:01:13you win through love, through giving people such good lives that they're like, "I love this so much,
03:01:17I can't wait to give this to my kids." And that's so cool. And in the past, we used to conquer
03:01:22countries and nations and continents through war, through death, through killing, and now the entire
03:01:27world is your oyster if you just love better, if you give better lives, if you help humans flourish.
03:01:33And that's just another one of those things that's so great about this movement. Like,
03:01:36when I was raised, like, in a very environmentalist mindset, and it was always like, "Step back,
03:01:40sacrifice this, you know, do this," and it just wasn't very fun. Prenatalism, for those who practice it,
03:01:47it's fun. It's about optimism for the future, a love of humanity, a love of life. And that's super low stress.
03:01:53But I imagine it's also about having children at a younger age.
03:01:56Yeah, no, totally.
03:01:57And I bet you in Israel, it's not all of Israel because I know birth rates are very
03:02:01divided between the different groupings there.
03:02:03But they do start earlier.
03:02:04But they're going to start earlier.
03:02:05Yeah.
03:02:06So all maps, every way you look at this, so back to incentives and solutions, for me,
03:02:11the benchmark for any potential solution, whatever it is, is how can this in any way see people who
03:02:18want to have kids have them at a younger age? Because if it can't, for me, move on, find something else.
03:02:22Yeah.
03:02:23I'll just say, again, not to harp on cash, but I think cash is misunderstood as a benefit.
03:02:30Well, then put kids to work earlier and have them earn their own money.
03:02:33But the effect on studies that look by parity. So we're looking not at how did this policy increase
03:02:40the birth rate, but how did it increase first birth or second birth or third birth rates?
03:02:44Effects were biggest on first birth rates. That is to say, people going on to a third birth,
03:02:49if you already have two kids or you're going on to a third or fourth or fifth,
03:02:51you have intrinsic motivations for fertility.
03:02:53Economies of scale.
03:02:54Right. Well, but also at that point, the person who's considering a fifth kid like me or like you
03:02:59all were not too long ago, I guess, they already have reasons to have kids. They don't really care
03:03:06about the money. They've already demonstrated they can afford the first four and that they just,
03:03:11they like kids.
03:03:11Well, the marginal cost as well, the complexity, the additional complexity.
03:03:14No, not really. Like after four, it's just so much easier.
03:03:17No, but that's my point. Going from four to five.
03:03:18Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:03:19Economists have always said that money should matter more at higher parities because the marginal
03:03:24kid is so cheap. But in reality, the empirical estimates show the opposite. That actually money
03:03:30is most influential on first births.
03:03:31Well, you need to get them over the line because once you've got somebody to become a mother.
03:03:34That's true.
03:03:35But this is my point. Money, for the people who are hesitant about a first kid, about marriage,
03:03:40money does sway them. For people considering a fourth kid, it doesn't.
03:03:44I don't know. I don't know.
03:03:45Because fourth kids come from values. First kids come from feeling secure enough to make
03:03:51the choice when you're 25.
03:03:52Katherine Ruth Pakalik did a lot of research.
03:03:55Yes, and she's studying highly values-motivated people who already have four.
03:03:59Yeah, well, educated. So college-educated women who had five or more kids.
03:04:02She's a great example. Money doesn't matter for her.
03:04:03No, no, no. What she found when she interviewed these women was for so many of them, and this is
03:04:09to your point, their experience with their first child was really the tipping point. None of them
03:04:14planned on having a lot of kids. And what happened that she noticed again and again was these women
03:04:18had such a great experience with their first kid, they were like, "I can do more." And honestly,
03:04:23the hardest number of kids to have, I don't know what your experiences were,
03:04:25but for us, it was just one. That was the hardest number to have.
03:04:28As an only child, that hits home.
03:04:29Yeah, well, I mean, it's the biggest life change. It's hard.
03:04:32Your parents thought you were really hard, man.
03:04:34You must have been a handful. I was a handful. I mean, it's tough. And I don't think that money
03:04:41solves that. You can pay for all these things. And we found, at least personally,
03:04:45that throwing money at the problem didn't solve it at all, that community ultimately did.
03:04:50What about, none of the interventions that I've heard yet.
03:04:53I agree. I mean, community is going to out, pound for dollar, community is going,
03:04:58getting more pronatal, more alloparentally supportive communities is going to be a thousand
03:05:02times more efficient than just throwing cash at it.
03:05:04Yeah. Yeah.
03:05:05I would just say, it's hard for those communities to form in a modern, those communities are having
03:05:10a hard time forming in our society, giving them a leg up by giving the community the ability to say,
03:05:16hey, look, I know you're nervous about having a kid, but dude, the government's literally going to give
03:05:20you $10,000. Like you probably can't afford it.
03:05:22Surely the, although it might be the most difficult thing to do, the most effective thing to do would
03:05:28be to change what is high and low status. If you make it high status to become a mom again,
03:05:33if you make it high status to have a family again.
03:05:35Oh, and I introduced this idea of having a medal for motherhood. And what do they do?
03:05:39They call me a Nazi.
03:05:41What happened? What was this? I didn't say this.
03:05:43Stalinist. Right? Well, no, and I think France did it first.
03:05:46No, actually a lot of countries have done it.
03:05:47Yeah.
03:05:47Um, the, the studies on, I mean, I have no opposition to motherhood medals
03:05:52in principle. There's only like two studies on them and they both seem to find null effects,
03:05:57but I think.
03:05:57Yeah. I don't, I don't think they'll actually change.
03:05:59I mean real status, not a, not a, not a.
03:06:01But here, here's my thing. If you, if you're a country that has a monarchy,
03:06:04there's a really easy way to do this.
03:06:06Let's say the royal family, every two year old born to citizens will be entered into a lottery.
03:06:13For their second birth, for their third birthday, if they win the lottery,
03:06:17they get their birthday party with the royal family.
03:06:19That sounds cool.
03:06:20Okay. And you choose 50 kids a year for each royal.
03:06:23If you've got a royal family, including all the random cousins, you've got maybe 30 royals,
03:06:27you could get a couple hundred, a couple thousand kids every year. That's a pretty good lottery.
03:06:31Does that work?
03:06:32We don't know because no one's tried it.
03:06:34But that pastor in, uh, where was he?
03:06:36Uh, Georgia?
03:06:37Georgia. Yeah.
03:06:38Okay. I wrote the paper on this, right?
03:06:39And it worked.
03:06:40Good paper.
03:06:40When he, when he, uh, the leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church, when he started
03:06:44personally baptizing third or higher children, fertility rose directly in response.
03:06:48People fucking speed ran pregnancy, dude. I want to get baptized by that guy.
03:06:52Sacked women that, women that he was targeting. And the reason it worked is because he was
03:06:55beloved. He was a figure of national identity. And he was offering to become a godparent,
03:07:00which in that theological tradition means he's literally your family.
03:07:03So like, uh, our discussion that we had about K-pop stars, in order to be a K-pop star,
03:07:07which is the most influential for all of Korea, you can't have kids and you have to be celibate
03:07:11for the entire time.
03:07:12Korea did this to themselves.
03:07:13Invert it. Say the only way you can become a K-pop star is if you already have a child.
03:07:16I love that.
03:07:17I have advised multiple governments that ha, that hosts lots of con,
03:07:21small, small countries that host a lot of concerts,
03:07:24that have low fertility or that they're worried about fertility. Simple solution.
03:07:27It's illegal to publicly perform music unless you have children.
03:07:30Mm-hmm.
03:07:32Well, I mean, but look at, so Japan, for example, like relatively has a pretty good birth rate.
03:07:36The amount of anime that is pro-natal at this point is just off the chain.
03:07:40Like, I think it, it, it doesn't not help. I think we should have more of that.
03:07:43The problem that you have- Japan's birth rate is 1.25.
03:07:45It's sad that we're living in a time when that's considered-
03:07:48I know. Positive.
03:07:49They're holding onto it.
03:07:50So one of the things I'm interested in is how ostensibly pro-natalist policies
03:07:55that incentivize mothers are interpreted when people put them out.
03:07:59Have you seen this?
03:08:00So guys, if you now live in the UK and you don't have children,
03:08:03you now may be subject to the no kids tax or the child free tax,
03:08:06of which may be implemented now under a reformed UK government.
03:08:10You see, under this new policy, people who do not have children should pay more tax.
03:08:14You heard that right.
03:08:16Instead of actually helping those or giving benefits to those who have more children,
03:08:20let's penalize those who chose to not go down that financial and mental route.
03:08:24It's the same thing.
03:08:25But Goodwin, a reform UK candidate, actually proposed this as the negative child benefit tax.
03:08:30And the purpose is quite literally in the name.
03:08:31It's to tax anyone without any offspring.
03:08:33And to actually remove personal income tax to any woman with more than two children.
03:08:38He frames this to reinforce family values alongside reinforcing the nuclear family.
03:08:42Now already, don't you think it's very interesting how they surround this entire thing around women,
03:08:46not men and women?
03:08:47It's almost as if they know that this is going to be specifically and disproportionately targeting women
03:08:53with this tax.
03:08:54And so if you need any more of a reason to vote against this godforsaken party,
03:08:57that's actively trying to poison this country.
03:09:00And if you want to respect the autonomy of your own body and not feel pressured to do anything else
03:09:04with it, maybe, just maybe you should vote against this madness.
03:09:09What do we, uh, what do we, what do we?
03:09:12I mean, there's, there's no difference between a child benefit and a childlessness tax.
03:09:16However, messaging does matter.
03:09:18So it's, you know, there's a couple of studies that look at cash benefits in developing countries,
03:09:24and they've just, they've studied if you rename the benefit you're giving,
03:09:27does it change how people use it?
03:09:29So if you tell people this is a benefit for having kids, does it change how they,
03:09:33or this is a benefit because you're poor, does it change what they use it on versus if you tell
03:09:36them this is a benefit to pay for your child's education?
03:09:38What they found is yes.
03:09:40Literally just renaming a child benefit substantively changes how people use it.
03:09:45So I do think things like renaming the child tax credit, the parenting wage might be useful.
03:09:50That said, I do think there's a, there's a problem with status based approaches to fertility.
03:09:57Influencers talking about how great family is, is probably a good thing,
03:10:01but not because it only operates through status.
03:10:04It also operates through perceptions of joy.
03:10:07Okay.
03:10:08Status can be very alienated.
03:10:09I would argue right now, motherhood is already extremely high status.
03:10:12Okay.
03:10:13A lot of.
03:10:14To who?
03:10:15To many people.
03:10:16And what I mean by that is a lot of people aspire to motherhood and see it as something
03:10:19they'll never be able to achieve because it's so expensive and so hard.
03:10:23It is high status.
03:10:24It is an aspirational, costly good.
03:10:28When we say status, status is this like catch all term.
03:10:31What do we really mean?
03:10:33What we really mean is we want people to see it as an accessible way to gain.
03:10:38Attainable and aspirational.
03:10:39No, that's so true because also so many people have grown up never having held a baby.
03:10:44Yes.
03:10:44The number of only children that have grown up.
03:10:46And this is another thing that Dr. Ruth Bacolic has pointed out, right?
03:10:49That like most people, it's just, there's, there's no, they can't, they can't imagine what it's like.
03:10:55Yeah.
03:10:55And so it's very hard to make it happen.
03:10:57I had a, I had a conversation with my housemate last year and his sister gave birth.
03:11:01And this was the first baby that he's held as an, as an adult.
03:11:05And it's his kin.
03:11:06Did he change him?
03:11:07His uncle.
03:11:08And he said, he held this baby in his arms and he said, I understand why men go to war.
03:11:13He experienced chemistry.
03:11:14Yeah.
03:11:15And he was like, oh, I understand why, I understand why men fight and die in wars.
03:11:19Yeah.
03:11:20First baby I held was my, was my now wife's first nephew.
03:11:24Um, he was also the first baby I babysat and like all this stuff.
03:11:28Basically they, they were like boyfriend conscripted childcare.
03:11:30Um, yes, it's absolutely a thing.
03:11:33And there's actually like mimetic sort of self-reinforcing.
03:11:36There's a lot of studies that show that fertility is a contagious behavior on both sides.
03:11:41When someone in your social circle, um, adopts a long delay strategy for fertility,
03:11:47like they, um, they, they have an abortion or they adopt a long acting reversible contraception
03:11:53or sterilization, or they simply take a long time to have a kid.
03:11:56It affects your odds of having a kid in a negative way.
03:11:59Same thing happens with divorce.
03:12:01Well, and a lot of things like being fat, having certain careers, like it's all about,
03:12:05you know, what you see and how you, I mean, things are contagious.
03:12:08So you're saying if you are the, uh, boyfriend or girlfriend of a girlfriend or boyfriend,
03:12:14and you want to have kids with them relatively soon, a good idea is to pick someone whose friends
03:12:20around them are moving towards marriage and family.
03:12:23Yeah.
03:12:23Babysitting your nieces and nephews is a great third date.
03:12:26Yeah.
03:12:27Like, honestly, like.
03:12:29That's a fucking wild third date.
03:12:31No, like seriously, like.
03:12:32It's great.
03:12:32Like.
03:12:33Oh my God.
03:12:33Getting kids involved earlier.
03:12:35Yeah.
03:12:36Is a really, a really solid filtering mechanism.
03:12:40Apart from the fact that almost no one lives within 50 miles of their parents anymore.
03:12:43No, actually 60% of people do.
03:12:45Okay.
03:12:45It's just like, like highly educated people told.
03:12:48Oh.
03:12:48Awkward.
03:12:49I'm on the other side of the fucking Atlantic.
03:12:51Okay.
03:12:51So, uh, money throw money.
03:12:53It's one potential solution.
03:12:55Like, is it before we get on to, and I am interested in the long-term ism solution for this.
03:13:02What do you propose?
03:13:03Because people always say, what are we going to do about it?
03:13:04How do we do it?
03:13:05And you can equivocate all you want and talk about this.
03:13:07What would you put forward as some incentives, some, uh, uh, uh, policies that could work?
03:13:16Yeah.
03:13:17For me, forget incentives.
03:13:18Interventions.
03:13:19Um, for me, the core issue to address is pair bonding.
03:13:24If you don't have pair bonding, you don't get couples.
03:13:26You don't get couples.
03:13:27You don't get children.
03:13:28I knew I was right.
03:13:29And, um, everything I'm hearing, I, I don't completely disagree with any of it,
03:13:36but for me, it's in the margins and we're being.
03:13:42How do you get more pair bonding?
03:13:44That's the question.
03:13:45That is the question.
03:13:47So for me, everything comes.
03:13:48Incentivize the baby.
03:13:49You get the bond.
03:13:50Well, there is one real advantage that societies appear to hold,
03:13:59which is that the vast majority of people do want to become parents one day.
03:14:03And that people today simply do not know that if you wait to 30, apparently it seems universally,
03:14:13the likelihood based on outcomes is less than 50%.
03:14:17And I know for a fact that once young people are told that, especially women, something goes,
03:14:23what do you mean it's only a 50% chance?
03:14:26I thought 35% was fine.
03:14:27There's a couple of like randomized controlled trials on this showing this.
03:14:31Yeah.
03:14:31Well, yeah.
03:14:32But, but also, I mean, if you look at outcome results, I mean, I've got a website coming up.
03:14:36That's got the average age of the likelihood of childlessness by country.
03:14:40And it's shocking even to me, and I've been sitting with this data for a long time.
03:14:46If we do not open up pathways, no matter how much financial incentives we offer to enable young
03:14:54people, particularly women, to still continue the careers they want to have and the education.
03:15:00So to be specific, we've got to reinvent education.
03:15:04That's where it starts.
03:15:05I think lifelong learning is a great thing.
03:15:07I'm a lifelong learner myself.
03:15:08I go back to college.
03:15:10I have done throughout my forties and fifties.
03:15:13And it's to take courses that I want to study.
03:15:16Not everybody's a learner.
03:15:18Not everybody's super keen about the idea of long-term education.
03:15:21Some people can't wait to get out of it.
03:15:23That's fine.
03:15:23But why compress three, four plus years of young people's lives into studying things
03:15:29that they will probably never use?
03:15:31And for what purpose?
03:15:34What else do you do?
03:15:35What do you do instead?
03:15:36Well, earn money.
03:15:37Get out and become an adult.
03:15:38At what, 13?
03:15:40Yeah.
03:15:40Well, I think society should be engineered.
03:15:43Child labor laws are ruining this country.
03:15:44Right.
03:15:45The children yearn for the mines.
03:15:46I will say there actually is a study showing that child labor laws in U.S. history do reduce fertility.
03:15:51I think we can take two years of education.
03:15:53That's not an endorsement, by the way.
03:15:55Two years.
03:15:55Yeah.
03:15:56A year out of high school.
03:15:57Ten years.
03:15:57I will say there is a study.
03:16:00So Quebec is the great test case for this.
03:16:02Okay.
03:16:02Because Quebec actually finishes education a year earlier through a unique program where
03:16:08high school is three years.
03:16:09And then there's like a two-year community college thing for people who want to do that.
03:16:13And then it's a three-year university.
03:16:14So if you finish university, it's at the same time as other people.
03:16:17But everyone who goes to university does CEGEP for two years before.
03:16:21And a lot of people are done at CEGEP.
03:16:24And so the total show you like go on university is lower.
03:16:26And there's been some suggestion.
03:16:28And the result is Quebecois, on average, finish education a year earlier.
03:16:32Now, earlier I said I'm not aware of a study that says that tertiary education
03:16:36shapes fertility in a big way.
03:16:38And that's true.
03:16:40Quebec is an interesting case because what they do is they have really high tertiary
03:16:46educational attainment.
03:16:47Lots of people get it.
03:16:48They also have some of the highest fertility in Canada, but the way they do it is they
03:16:54do compress the length of the tertiary education.
03:16:56So lots of people get these CEGEP degrees and they've essentially got a technical degree
03:17:0318 months faster than people in Ontario would get the same degree.
03:17:07So attainment, Quebecois people on some level are like better educated by some measures.
03:17:14It's a little complicated.
03:17:16And you have higher fertility, but it's because they hit similar milestones like
03:17:21six to 18 months earlier.
03:17:23And it seems to be in, I know there's some studies exploring this.
03:17:29Nobody's conclusively demonstrated, but it does seem to be that compressing the educational timeline,
03:17:34like same credential, shorter time, might be part of why Quebec has higher fertility
03:17:40than the rest of Canada.
03:17:43There's some other good variation to explore with this in Canada because they've changed
03:17:46educational timelines several times.
03:17:48And I'd love for somebody to do a study on it more extensively.
03:17:52But so I think that that goes to your point that, yes, like any way to compress would be a good idea.
03:17:59Yeah.
03:17:59And I think young people would be in favor.
03:18:01Like, hey, less schooling.
03:18:02That's good.
03:18:03Earning money sooner.
03:18:04That's good.
03:18:04Employers able to hire more people and train them.
03:18:07That's good.
03:18:08But I would add in this lifelong learning aspect, which is, it's like you get two-thirds way through
03:18:13studying something and you get some recognition for that.
03:18:15That's important.
03:18:16Well, the best learning you do is on the job.
03:18:18That's how you learn best.
03:18:19It's applied.
03:18:20And you learn what you like and what you don't like and you may well shift.
03:18:23So for that last third of your education, split over summer school, over three, four years,
03:18:28have employers and then government support people going back once they've fine-tuned
03:18:32their education into something that they truly want.
03:18:35No, this doesn't fundamentally change the reward paradigm of the longer that I wait, the higher
03:18:39my sexual market value, the better a partner I can get.
03:18:42It doesn't change that.
03:18:43No, no.
03:18:43Which is ultimately like, that's like starting the race sooner.
03:18:47Yes.
03:18:47But the finish line doesn't exist.
03:18:49There is no finish line.
03:18:50No, there is.
03:18:50You just choose when you're going to give up.
03:18:52No, you choose when you're going to exit.
03:18:53If you think the finish line is at 40 and you find out actually it's probably at 30, 32.
03:18:58So the information shock, that is, I'll say I actually, so for a variety of reasons,
03:19:04education on fertility information is probably an effective and cheap strategy for some marginal
03:19:09changes.
03:19:10And maybe big ones, it remains to be seen, but you're right that the educational timeline
03:19:15doesn't change the age earnings gradient.
03:19:17But I want to point out on some level cash does, right?
03:19:22Because if I told you, you get a $150,000 nest egg for having a baby at 23, okay, like maybe
03:19:32the man won't have great earnings, but like, you'll be okay.
03:19:35Yeah.
03:19:35Now, what are some, just talking on that, if it's information shock is a strategy.
03:19:40Yeah.
03:19:41What are some of the pieces of information that you've found shock people the most?
03:19:47I mean, for, I mean, just age gradient of decline is one.
03:19:50Another one, in this one, I find it blows up men's mind.
03:19:52Hold on there.
03:19:53So like, I give you a bunch of different billboards around the world free.
03:19:58I can put them anywhere that you want.
03:20:00What are the three or five things that everybody around the table is going to put on the billboard?
03:20:05My wife has told me that I'm bad at understanding how normal people think.
03:20:08And so I'm not a great judge there because I would just be like a graph and there would be a line
03:20:13going down that is showing women's odds of conceiving in a given month of active sex by age.
03:20:19And then on the other hand, it would be a line going up.
03:20:21And it's the number of mutations in a man's sperm by age.
03:20:26And the point of it would be like, it's a free con because she doesn't have time to conceive
03:20:34and he doesn't have time to conceive the kids that he's dreaming of having.
03:20:39So people talk about this as a woman's problem.
03:20:43It's true.
03:20:43A man can conceive children for a very long time, but it is male age.
03:20:48That's most predictive of most de novo, of most pathogenic, de novo genetic mutations, basically
03:20:54like bad stuff in your genes.
03:20:56Now, women's age also matters for stuff like down syndrome.
03:21:01So that's what I would want to communicate somehow.
03:21:04I'd work with a marketing company to figure out the best workshop.
03:21:06Copywriting needs a little bit of work.
03:21:07But in my mind, it's just a graph that's an X.
03:21:08What would you put on?
03:21:09Well, it's a refined version of what probably we're saying here, but it's a very simple one
03:21:14that in every country, I love the idea of billboards because it's simple.
03:21:18The probability of becoming a mother at age 30 is X or the probability falls to 50% by what age.
03:21:29And just that alone, I mean, I've said it here.
03:21:31If you don't have a kid by age 30, your odds of ever having a kid are only 48%.
03:21:35Don't waste your life.
03:21:36They don't care.
03:21:37They don't care.
03:21:38No, they do care.
03:21:39They care.
03:21:39Oh my gosh.
03:21:40Randomized controlled trials say they do care.
03:21:42When you give, when you sit two classes of students in different rooms and you give
03:21:46one of them fertility education seminar and the other one, just like a
03:21:50general informational movie, it creates a large effect.
03:21:53And there's only one study that's done like a two year follow up on like,
03:21:56it was like married couples who did it.
03:21:58And they found this, the group that got an educate, that got the education
03:22:01had twice as high.
03:22:02Married couples.
03:22:03Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:22:03They were already married.
03:22:04The coupling's been fixed.
03:22:05Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:22:06I've received letters from high school classes that have been presented
03:22:08in pronatalist and antenatalist debates.
03:22:09It needs more research.
03:22:10They have zero interest in kids.
03:22:12It needs more research, but all of the randomized controlled trials that have been done,
03:22:17mostly on college students or this one on married couples suggests the values do
03:22:24change in response to information.
03:22:25And the only one of behavioral follow up, which is this married couple one,
03:22:29the behavior's also changed.
03:22:30It could be-
03:22:31Married couples.
03:22:31Marrying is the first step to having kids.
03:22:33That's-
03:22:33It could be that the values change in the college students would not translate into behavior.
03:22:40That could be, but right now the evidence we have is consistent with the behavioral effect.
03:22:44I would love to see a bigger study on this.
03:22:46It blows my mind.
03:22:46Yeah, I'd like to see it too.
03:22:48I would.
03:22:48I would change my mind with the information for sure.
03:22:50I agree it's not a slam dunk yet, but it's worth studying.
03:22:53Yeah, sure.
03:22:54Simone, I want to share why I'm so confident that people will respond to this message,
03:22:58particularly women.
03:22:59You know, I made the Birth Cat documentary and we were in editing during COVID for like two years.
03:23:07And during that, whenever it was allowed in Japan, I would have these home parties.
03:23:12And I'd screened to people, Japanese, international people, men, women, mainly 30s, 40s, some 20s.
03:23:22I even invited a group of feminists, I would say, who came, or I wanted to hear those voices too.
03:23:30I got all parts of the spectrum, but I noticed two things.
03:23:34After watching the early copies of the documentary, I couldn't get people to talk about anything else.
03:23:41And these were events where I was like tired of making this birthday.
03:23:45You know, let's talk about the weather.
03:23:47Like, could you give your spiel again?
03:23:48Yeah, yeah, no, but they actually didn't even need me.
03:23:51They were talking to each other about how it is that they can meet their dreams of having kids,
03:23:57or if they don't want kids or whatever else.
03:24:00Here's where that goes wrong though.
03:24:01You were speaking to the Japanese people who go to parties.
03:24:05What about the hikagomori?
03:24:06Okay.
03:24:07What about the vegetarian men?
03:24:08They didn't show up.
03:24:09You don't hear from them because they're in their apartments, not leaving for months on end.
03:24:12Yeah, but I think that's downstream.
03:24:14I think we've created environments where particularly young men give up on the possibility of ever marrying.
03:24:19Young women too.
03:24:19What about the four bees?
03:24:20Sure, sure, sure, sure.
03:24:21All you're saying is that the effect size in the population will be smaller than he's describing,
03:24:26not that it will be zero.
03:24:27Because if it's effective for a subgroup, that's still something.
03:24:31Yeah, that's good power to the people.
03:24:32Right?
03:24:33Yeah, that's great.
03:24:33Yeah, I mean, you're doing really good, important work.
03:24:35And I love, I mean, you have probably caused so many families to have children.
03:24:39I get photographs of babies sent to me quite a lot.
03:24:41I love that.
03:24:42I love that.
03:24:42That's so cool.
03:24:43Gotta be careful with the Epstein emails.
03:24:44So, but on information, like, I think fertility information is a big one,
03:24:48but I think we should, it's worth talking about reprotech a little bit,
03:24:51because a lot of people have good and bad, a lot of people have bad information in different ways
03:24:55about reprotech.
03:24:56One is they overestimate the effectiveness of IVF often.
03:25:00But the interesting one to me is, like, so my wife and I, we had a lot of miscarriages.
03:25:06And we, like, did genetic testing to figure out, like, what's going on?
03:25:09Do we have, like, some kind of incompatibility or condition?
03:25:12Nothing was identified conclusively.
03:25:15My wife had, like, blood tests.
03:25:16We didn't find anything specific.
03:25:18There were some, like, maybe indicators of something called antiphospholipid syndrome,
03:25:22but it wasn't a slam dunk.
03:25:24But finally, our OB, who was a university research OB, was just like, look,
03:25:29next time you're pregnant, we're going to start you on the drug for this condition, like,
03:25:32prophylactically.
03:25:34It's called inoxaparin.
03:25:35It's a huge pain in the butt injection that my wife has to do every day of the pregnancy.
03:25:39He was like, just prophylactically, we're going to try this, see what happens.
03:25:43We've had zero miscarriages in three kids since.
03:25:46We had the first kid before it in between some miscarriages.
03:25:49And she barely survived infancy.
03:25:53That drug is still not standard of care in any country in the world,
03:25:56even though it's been around for 30 years.
03:26:00Even though recurrent miscarriage, if all we did using clinically demonstrated effectiveness
03:26:05was get every person using that drug after their first miscarriage, or even after their second,
03:26:11we would have in the U.S. somewhere between 2,000 and 15,000 extra babies every year.
03:26:15Wow.
03:26:16And miscarriage prevention is, like, very obviously just a good thing.
03:26:21Because it's so traumatic.
03:26:23And yet we're very-- yeah, it's traumatic.
03:26:24Yeah.
03:26:25And yet we are so hesitant about experimenting on pregnant women,
03:26:28about being, like, risk-taking with pregnant women.
03:26:31Does that make sense?
03:26:32It seems like it would be a good idea to be--
03:26:34Okay, it is.
03:26:34But, like, at the end of the day, when you're dealing with someone who's had recurrent miscarriage,
03:26:38or recurrent infertility, they usually want to shotgun blast.
03:26:42They usually want to try everything.
03:26:43And if it's opt-in and informed consent, they should allow it.
03:26:45Throw everything, throw everything in.
03:26:45But doctors won't do it.
03:26:46Why is it that we haven't spoken about the impact of hormonal birth control
03:26:50and reliable contraception?
03:26:52Is that not the line in the sand?
03:26:53It's just not that correlated.
03:26:55It's just so downstream of everything.
03:26:57Really?
03:26:58Yeah.
03:26:58Because this is usually, from the guys that are more manosphere red-pilly,
03:27:02This is the first thing that they throw out.
03:27:04I know, it's just a rhetoric.
03:27:05So, below replacement rate fertility in the U.S., not even controlling for mortality,
03:27:09just below replacement rate fertility in the U.S., is first directly observed in the 1920s.
03:27:14And if every single married woman in America today conceived at the rate of Amish women of the same
03:27:22age and marital status, fertility in the U.S. would still be less than three children per woman.
03:27:28Okay?
03:27:28Because there's just not enough reproductive age women who are married.
03:27:32Okay?
03:27:32So, the difference between us and the Amish is mostly about marriage, not birth control.
03:27:37Okay?
03:27:38So, like, birth control, it's not that it has no effect.
03:27:41It does have some effect.
03:27:43But people use birth...
03:27:45Birth control was invented when it was because that's when people wanted it.
03:27:49Okay?
03:27:49The technology to invent it existed decades earlier.
03:27:52It was not actually that, like, breakthrough at, like, a chemical level.
03:27:56It's just that that's when the demand for it was there.
03:27:59So, but my point about the miscarriage thing was not to sob story about my own family.
03:28:04I'm very happy about my family.
03:28:06But because we didn't know.
03:28:10Okay?
03:28:10We didn't know.
03:28:11No one told us how common miscarriage could be.
03:28:14No one was telling us there are options for miscarriage.
03:28:17There's options for these things.
03:28:19And so much Reprotech research goes into IVF.
03:28:23And that's...
03:28:24For people who want IVF, that's a great benefit.
03:28:26But there are so many conditions that make it hard for people to conceive or to have healthy children.
03:28:30Or that prevent them from even trying.
03:28:32Yes, yes.
03:28:32Like, I was told that if you have a C-section, you can't have more than three.
03:28:37And then you have to stop.
03:28:38But you can.
03:28:38The world record is 11.
03:28:40Yeah.
03:28:40Like, my surgeon who did my last one, her record is eight.
03:28:43Like, but everyone I talked to was like, "Well, I know you can't have more than three C-sections."
03:28:48Is this not the same sort of justification that's put forward by people who go,
03:28:51"Well, my cousin, she had her first kid when she was 43.
03:28:54And she had a second when she was 46."
03:28:56No, no, no.
03:28:57What she's saying is there are risks to subsequent births after C-section.
03:29:02But for many women, they are manageable with modern surgery and support techniques.
03:29:08The risks are trivial.
03:29:09What I'm trying to say is there is a huge belief that it is impossible to have more than three
03:29:15kids.
03:29:15Or that the risk is gigantically high.
03:29:18Yeah, that if you do some--
03:29:19It can be for some women.
03:29:20But for many people, the risk of a V-back is not totally random.
03:29:25It is somewhat predictable.
03:29:27And risk of repeated C-section.
03:29:28V-back.
03:29:28V-back.
03:29:29Sorry, vaginal birth after C-section.
03:29:31So doing a vaginal birth.
03:29:33But even in the risk of repeated C-sections, it's not like a doctor looks at a woman with prior
03:29:38C-sections like, "Well, gosh, we have no way of figuring out if you could have another one."
03:29:42Yeah.
03:29:42There are so many ways.
03:29:42The problem is doctors are very risk-averse.
03:29:45Yeah.
03:29:46So they often won't even tell you what they think your risk is.
03:29:48Yeah.
03:29:48But the point is, even things like GLP-1s, like Ozympic and stuff.
03:29:54Like, when people go on GLP-1s, they're suddenly more likely to have kids.
03:29:57Now, one reason is because GLP-1s interfere with absorption of hormonal contraception.
03:30:02The other one is they lose weight.
03:30:03Yeah.
03:30:03So you're hot.
03:30:04You're hot.
03:30:05But also, when you lose weight, you also tend to have just like a healthier balance of hormones in
03:30:11your body.
03:30:11Super underweight or super overweight.
03:30:12You're less likely to get pregnant.
03:30:14Yeah.
03:30:14Yeah.
03:30:14Yeah.
03:30:14I get all of this is interesting.
03:30:16Clearly, it's interesting.
03:30:17But it's in the margins, you know, and all of these things can...
03:30:21But enough margins is a big thing.
03:30:22I don't think, unless we find a way to fundamentally open up society for people to pair bond at a younger
03:30:29age, any of this will have a long-term...
03:30:31Does that shit?
03:30:31Well, look, the societies that do that, and there are micro-societies that are doing that,
03:30:35they will inherit the future.
03:30:36Like, I don't see what the big problem is.
03:30:38It's happening.
03:30:38It's going to happen.
03:30:39It's done.
03:30:40It's done.
03:30:41Problem solved.
03:30:42Well, that sounds kind of antinatalist to me if you're saying it's done.
03:30:45It's not, because the pronatalist cultures are going to win.
03:30:47Yay.
03:30:47It's pronatalist just over a longer time, time horizon.
03:30:50Yeah.
03:30:50Yeah.
03:30:51Look, I'm not going to force people who don't want to have kids to have kids.
03:30:54And also, if they're not going to get their acts together and do it, and if they really
03:30:58don't care that much, then I don't want them to have kids.
03:31:00I mean, look, I do.
03:31:01So I understand where you're coming from here, which is like, look, guys, no one...
03:31:04And this is your whole thing, right?
03:31:06I want women to be able to have the number of children they want.
03:31:09And much of the conversation...
03:31:11Spike me too, for the record.
03:31:12Yeah, of course.
03:31:12Yeah, I agree.
03:31:13But a lot of the conversation is that the number of children that you think you want isn't the
03:31:17number of children you think you want, at least at the age that you're at at the moment.
03:31:20Right.
03:31:20Because maybe you've got culture, maybe you've got other things in the way, maybe you've got fear...
03:31:23People tend to revise the number up as they age.
03:31:25Yeah, I fucking bet they do, which is the opposite of the way that it works.
03:31:29So I understand why that would be the case, right?
03:31:32Every single person around this table is not saying at all to anyone, you need to become
03:31:36a breeder, because there will be breeders in the future, and they will be the ones that inherit
03:31:41the earth.
03:31:42I think what we're trying to do here is go, "Hey..."
03:31:44And this is where it comes back to the information thing.
03:31:46I like the idea of an information shock.
03:31:48I do think it's, you know...
03:31:49You are the information shock.
03:31:52Keep going.
03:31:53Brilliant.
03:31:54Look, I used to work in nightlife, right?
03:31:58And that was 18 to 22-year-olds, a thousand of them in a nightclub, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
03:32:05Everybody was sleeping with everybody, and nobody was really thinking about this sort of stuff.
03:32:10But it wasn't as if there was an antinatalist approach there.
03:32:13That was just like the fledgling, nascent, first beginning of the moving of that kind of free
03:32:18sex sort of thing that was happening in the modern era.
03:32:21You go, "Okay, at some point, people are going to have to face biological reality."
03:32:27Until we can IVG, you know, like pluripotent stem cell our way through a fucking herocyte
03:32:34check of all of the different embryos that we've got.
03:32:38People are going to end up with the future that they lay for themselves.
03:32:44Yeah.
03:32:44And I think that educating people so that as few people as possible regret it.
03:32:51I think that's kind of one of the outcomes that we should all be focusing for.
03:32:54As few people as possible getting toward the middle end of their life and going,
03:33:00"I fucked it on the family thing."
03:33:01Yeah.
03:33:02I messed up on the family thing.
03:33:03That's why I can't say fuck it.
03:33:04That's what regret minimization.
03:33:05That's why I can't.
03:33:07Because I think there's going to be a ton of people who regret it.
03:33:09That was my point.
03:33:10That I owe them something.
03:33:11That was my point earlier on that there are people who are in the middle.
03:33:15They're not going to be changed, right?
03:33:16Chelsea Handler has her, "I went on Raya and slept with this guy in Paris and
03:33:22ate a croissant and drank white wine and it seems to be having a great time and that's great for her."
03:33:26There are some people who look at that lifestyle and think, "Well, that's the thing that I want."
03:33:29Not knowing that they might get there and regret it.
03:33:32And it's really difficult to walk this tightrope without sounding like you're trying to pull people
03:33:37back from something that's obviously rewarded and obviously very fun in the moment and what
03:33:41everybody else seems to want.
03:33:42And I've outsourced my thinking to the group and isn't that cool?
03:33:47Without sounding like a fuddy-duddy that's coming in and sort of like clamping down on top of
03:33:50everybody's fun and what they want in life.
03:33:52And it's like, "Who are you to tell me what I want? I know what I want."
03:33:55And you go, "I think that what you think more is I can have what I want and in future I can also
03:34:03get this other thing. That I have this get out of jail free card. I have an ejector seat button."
03:34:07And if all of our goals is, "Hey, as few people as possible regretting the decisions that they made
03:34:16around family formation, I think that's a pretty fucking good outcome. But how we get there is
03:34:23still, I don't know."
03:34:24Raise awareness. Let people think about it.
03:34:26It's fun.
03:34:26That's why information is so important.
03:34:28Yeah.
03:34:28Right? Like there's probably going to be people who will listen to this and be like,
03:34:32"What? Ability to conceive declines linearly for women from age 20? Men's mutations in their sperm
03:34:39start rising at age 18? What? Blew my mind. Okay, hubby, wifey, time to do this."
03:34:46Can you try and put your best marketing hat on for me?
03:34:52What are the biggest headline stats that you think would change the most people's minds?
03:34:59The number of people who when they get to their late 40s will regret not having had more kids is
03:35:05about 10 times as many as the number who regret having had too many. There are some who regret having
03:35:10had too many. About 90% of the people who have any regret about their family size regret that they didn't
03:35:16have more. That's going to be you if you don't get on it. And then in terms of marriage, people worry
03:35:30a lot about their finding a spouse, and I'm sympathetic to that. It is hard.
03:35:42But a bird in the hand really is often better than two in the bush. That is to say,
03:35:50waiting until you think you're at peak mate value may mean that the marriage you have is never the
03:35:57one you dreamed of. Ultimately, arbitrage is the name of the game. Finding somebody who sees the
03:36:05value in you that nobody else does, and finding someone that you see the value in them that other
03:36:10people don't. And I'll be honest, I mean, my wife definitely saw that in me from like a, you know,
03:36:16nerdy, weird, not quite showered college freshman. She pretty much like stuck a marker on my back and
03:36:22was like, one to watch. Like, we'll keep that one in the stable.
03:36:25Bitcoin at five cents.
03:36:26Yeah. And likewise, I mean, like, you know, pretty early on, I was like, okay, she's, you know, she's a
03:36:33little on the extroverted side, but we can work with that. And I just think so many people,
03:36:40they have the paradox of choice. They, they, they see all these things, but more importantly,
03:36:45they invest deeply in these relationships with somebody who's always looking for two in the bush.
03:36:51And you'd be better off having the hard, hard conversations on the first date and, you know,
03:36:57and, you know, proposing when you're 90% certain.
03:36:59What does that look like hard conversations on the first date? What should people ask on a first date?
03:37:03Number of children, views of divorce, what religion children will be raised in if they are born.
03:37:08Yeah.
03:37:08Um, go babysit your niece and nephew's kid. What do you think about spanking?
03:37:13Um, kids, not sexually. I mean, sexually too, if that's your thing, but, um, these are hard
03:37:18conversations and I think they're great first date conversations because you shouldn't waste your time.
03:37:21Agreed. The sooner you get to know, the better.
03:37:23Yeah. Also like, so yeah, I mean, my advice on, on marriage is a bit less pithy because I think it's,
03:37:29in some ways it's a more complicated conversation. Um, but you, you are very likely to regret having
03:37:38too few kids. The number one predictor of too few kids is late marriage and marriage makes people
03:37:45happier. They get happier after, after they're engaged. Okay. People like, well, it's not after
03:37:50they're married. That's just, it's not an effective marriage. It's selection. God dammit. It's after
03:37:54engagement. Okay. We know this, we can see in the, in the data when they get engaged. Um, so, uh, when you,
03:38:00uh, when you realize that you're going to be with that person for as long as you can
03:38:07both, as long as you can both stand it, it's not that the wedding ceremony makes you happy.
03:38:12It's that the wedding ceremony is a lock in. It's like you wait to get the good interest rate
03:38:17and then you lock it in. And yes, you could wait forever, but ultimately the people who got,
03:38:21you know, a 2.9% interest rate during COVID, maybe they're a little worse off than the people who got
03:38:26a 2.7% interest rate, but they're both way better off than I was at my 7.9% rate. Okay.
03:38:32Which I realized that just sounds like I dunked on my wife right there in the metaphor, but I'm not,
03:38:36I got a great interest rate wife. Um, but like, you can hold out for a while, but at some point,
03:38:42you just have to say, this is a great house. I'll buy it. Whatever the interest rate may be.
03:38:47Stephen, give me a couple of information shocks.
03:38:49There's data and data is important, but it's the personal stories upon personal story upon personal
03:38:56story of people. But women want to talk about this more, but it's men and women who,
03:39:02age 30 something are on that cusp and they realize that they're probably not going to have kids.
03:39:10And I think, you know, it's true to say that people probably approach me, you know, when they're
03:39:16feeling, because they feel they can because of, you know, the documentary, et cetera.
03:39:23Even if it was just a minute percentage of people who get to 32, 35, having been sure that they were
03:39:30going to come parents because everything was mapped up, mapped out. They even had the partner.
03:39:35And then there's that breakup. And then they're back starting again, age 32 to try and find someone
03:39:41and realizing that the math means maybe waiting a year to find the right person to start date,
03:39:48two years to be sure. And it's that, you know, luncheon I had with a Japanese woman,
03:39:5634, having gone through exactly that saying, I don't want the flowers. I don't want the, you know,
03:40:01I don't care about the honeymoon. I don't care about fancy dates or dinners. I just want a family.
03:40:08And you go back to the 20 something year olds you're talking to and the realization,
03:40:15when you tell them that the chance of becoming a mother beyond age 30, or in the case of Japan,
03:40:22it's 25 or the US 27, the likelihood of ever becoming a mother in today's society is less
03:40:29than 50%. And you map those two things together and you realize that, you know, this isn't a marginal
03:40:36economists talk about children as normal goods. I don't know if you've heard that, you know,
03:40:41a normal good is like a TV because the more affluent you are, the bigger TV, the more TVs you can have.
03:40:48No, children is not anything normative that can be described in the sense of any other product.
03:40:55It's something deeply emotional, deeply passionate that most people want. And seeing that transition
03:41:03from an aspirational 20 year old, still believing we have time and understanding from data that that
03:41:10might not happen to the reality of that 34 year old going through that transition. That's the story I
03:41:17want everybody to know about more than anything. And, you know, and then make the right decision for them.
03:41:23Simon, what else haven't we said?
03:41:25I think people should, we haven't talked about how people should be questioning
03:41:31if things are not working for them, then what should they be doing? Like a lot of people are
03:41:36are pursuing all these things that made them happy when they were kids. Like,
03:41:39they're still playing video games. They're still traveling the world, but they're experiencing
03:41:42severe diminishing marginal returns. Like they're just not getting the same high from that they used
03:41:46to. And they're not realizing that they're in a different phase of life and that's just not going
03:41:49to make them happy. Or a lot of people who are also very euphorically child-free and against
03:41:55per natalism are very critical of capitalism. And yet they're like, well, I'm just going to buy
03:42:00more into the dank lifestyle and the capitalistic lifestyle, but that might not be making them happy.
03:42:05So I think people need to information shock themselves too. Like, is seeing a therapist
03:42:09helping me with my anxiety and depression? Or is maybe there's something fundamentally wrong about
03:42:15the way I'm living my life? Am I chasing a false god and just severely questioning their own lifestyle
03:42:20and their own way of life if it's not actually making them happy and contented?
03:42:23That's really interesting to think how many people are super unhappy, how many people have got
03:42:28depression or anxiety, what percentage of young girls have persistent or regular feelings of
03:42:32hopelessness and depression?
03:42:33I had that. I could barely leave my own house. I have the potential to be an extremely dysfunctional
03:42:39and neurotic person. And there's something about, like, kids just gave me something bigger to care
03:42:45about. They filled the void. And they burn away your selfishness. They get you out of your head.
03:42:51We're all so in our heads. And it's torture. I don't want to be stuck with my own thoughts.
03:42:56Yeah, I'm an asshole. You need to fill the void with meaning.
03:43:00One of my really good friends, very smart friends, got this line, Bill Perkins. When somebody proposes
03:43:06a life strategy that he can see is maybe not getting them the results that he wants, he always asks
03:43:11the same question. He says, "And how's that working out for you?" Everyone should ask themselves that.
03:43:18And how's that working out for you? So guys, you're all awesome. I appreciate you all individually and
03:43:22having you together as a group has been really fun. This is one of the first roundtables that I've done.
03:43:26I'm sure we're in tons of fucking mad... I'm going to put these on. We're in mad trouble in the
03:43:31comments. TikTok's gone crazy. But I think you're all trying to make the world a better place. So
03:43:36thank you all for being here. I appreciate you.
03:43:37Thank you.
03:43:38Thanks for having us.
03:43:39Take care.
03:43:39All right. Goodbye, everybody.
03:43:40Yo! Longest one in the new studio.
03:43:43Wow.
03:43:44Here you go.
03:43:45Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are
03:43:51deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one even more. Go on.
03:43:55Press it.
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