052. Louise Perry: Artemis II and populating the solar system

Summary

---

Anglofuturism Podcast Episode 52: Louise Perry – Artemis II and Populating the Solar System

Date: April 9, 2026

Hosts: Tom Ough & Callum Drysdale
Guest: Louise Perry

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the excitement and controversy surrounding the Artemis II lunar mission and its implications for Britain's future in space exploration and beyond. Tom and Callum welcome writer and podcaster Louise Perry for a discussion blending romantic nostalgia for exploration, the limits of modernity, gender and societal trends, and the prospects of populating the solar system. The conversation traverses deep themes with a distinctly British sensibility—wry, contemplative, and occasionally self-deprecating.

---

Key Discussion Points

1. Romanticism and Resistance to Space Exploration

• Louise's Space Enthusiasm

  • Louise describes herself as a “passionate romantic” about space, relating her childhood obsession with Apollo missions and Captain Cook to a specifically Anglo instinct for exploration and adventure.
  • “You can be a reactionary feminist and also be interested in reaction mass.” (Callum, 01:27)

• Critique of The "Whitey on the Moon" Argument

  • Louise expresses frustration at the recurring criticism that space exploration wastes resources better spent on domestic problems, calling it an argument that's “quite difficult to articulate, but which provokes such a negative emotional response in me. I can't even tell you.” (Louise, 03:13)
  • Tom and Callum attempt to present both sides but ultimately align with Louise on the glory of exploration (04:22–05:02).

2. The Anglo Drive for Exploration

• Space exploration as an “Anglo game”:
  • Louise references the “anthropological pathology” of Anglos for boundary-pushing, noting that other cultures both admire and resent this impulse (08:02).
  • Discussion about Polynesian and Aboriginal exploration as exceptions, but why modern drive remains primarily Western (09:26).

3. Technological Progress, Modernity & Faith

• Techno-Optimism vs. Techno-Pessimism
  • Louise: “I’m like a techno theocrat. I basically think that we should be orientating scientific innovation towards the good. And as a Christian, I think the Christian good … during the greatest periods of scientific innovation, that is exactly what was happening.” (16:23)
  • She highlights the necessity of aligning technological expansion with moral aims and critiques unchecked “innovation for innovation’s sake.”
• On Modernity’s Allure and Limits
  • Most people prefer the comfort, safety, and riches modernity affords, despite side effects. “You can't persuade people to give up what is so obviously good.” (17:58)
  • Only through continued innovation—and not regression—can challenges like climate change be addressed.

4. Gender, Risk, and Space: The Patriarchal (and Matriarchal) Pathways

• Space as a (Mostly) Male Preoccupation:
  • Tom and Callum note limited female enthusiasm for Artemis and space generally.
    • “No, they didn’t care, Tom.” (Louise, 22:40)
    • Acknowledgement that risk tolerance and physical requirements skew astronaut demographics.
• Cultural Creation:
  • Callum asserts: “Young women are far greater creators of culture … men tend to seek where women are, which is a sort of driver of behavior.” (24:40)
• Britain’s Colonial Example:
  • Louise connects the British model of successful colonial reproduction to British women’s willingness to emigrate: “If anyone is going to colonize Mars … it will have to be the British.” (36:32)
• Settler Colonialism, Female Participation, and Legacy:
  • Success on Mars would require persuading whole families, not just adventurers—a historical British specialty.

5. Settling Space: Glory, Incentives, and Demography

• Settling Mars—Heroism or Historical Anomaly?

  • Louise draws comparison between her ancestors’ emigration to Australia (with high child mortality) and potential Martian settlers: “Basically, most people, the way to actually settle Mars would probably be to force people to go.” (40:43)
  • Modern safety and low tolerance for risk/mortality make large-scale expansion unlikely under current cultural conditions.

• Private Enterprise and Frontier Incentives

  • Callum raises the “East India Company” model: can profit motive reinvigorate risk-taking at the frontier? (45:20)
  • Young men still possess adventurous drive, channeled differently depending on incentives/status—potentially revived by new opportunities like space colonization.

• Demographics: The Birth Rate Bottleneck

  • Louise: “The people who make it to the other side of this bottleneck are the people who can get on with each other.” (56:50)
  • She predicts profound social change due to collapsing fertility—a bottleneck through which only families with strong cohesion, often religious/conservative, will pass. These groups may drive the next wave of expansion and innovation.
  • “Modernity has been a hell of a ride … I’m rooting for modernity and I think it probably will survive.” (59:56)

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Emotional Power of Space:

  • “I just find space incredibly romantic … I would never, ever have the courage to go into space … but it makes my admiration for the astronauts profound.” (Louise, 03:13)

• On Gender & Space:

  • “If a gentleman, you're a fan of Louise.” (Callum, 16:05)
  • “It's difficult to be anti white men and pro space struggle.” (Louise, 29:55)

• On Birth Rates & Legacy:

  • “The best decision that you can make now … is to have several children, if only because … there is going to be no pension waiting for you … your best hope is to be supported by your children.” (Louise, 72:49)
  • “Do you feel horror at the idea of your genetic line being extinguished? Is it the same impulse [as the urge to explore space]?” (Louise, 74:38–75:02)

• On Ideological Survival:

  • “Wokeness is such a, like, it's very destructive at the moment but it's not going to last because the people who embrace that ideology most enthusiastically are socially sterile.” (Louise, 65:26)

• Religion in Space:

  • “There has never been an atheist on the moon.” (Louise, 84:39)
  • “The Bishop of Orlando is also the Bishop of the Moon.” (Louise, 85:44)

---

Notable Sections & Timestamps

• Opening and Arguments Over Space Funding: 00:58–05:37
• Space as Exploration, Cultural Pathology: 08:02–12:08
• Techno-theocracy and Innovation: 16:23–18:49
• Personal Courage vs. Support for Exploration: 18:49–20:25
• Women and Space, Settler Colonialism Analogy: 22:26–36:32
• Colonizing Mars: Historical Lessons: 36:32–41:00
• Private Enterprise vs. State Space Ventures: 45:20–46:56
• Demographic Collapse and Evolutionary Bottleneck: 56:50–66:05
• Advice to Listeners: Children as Legacy and Pension: 72:49–74:38
• Religion, Space, and Future British Optimism: 84:39–87:13

---

Tone and Style

The episode is intellectual, playful, and introspective—mixing earnestness about civilization’s direction with wry British humor and a keen sense of history. All three speakers hold strong opinions but are open to uncertainty and nuance, particularly on tough societal questions.

---

Final Thoughts

The conversation concludes with mutual encouragement for space enthusiasm, pronatalism, and an affirmation of cultural and personal legacy—whether through raising children or reaching for the stars. The hosts and Louise share a recognition that the “Anglo” drive for exploration and the practical realities of birth rates, gender dynamics, and faith will profoundly shape who gets to populate the next frontiers—whether lunar, Martian, or right here at home.

---

Recommended for listeners interested in:

• Britain’s future and global identity
• Tensions in space exploration (public vs. private, glory vs. cost)
• Gender, culture, and demographic changes shaping Western society
• Reflections on modernity, religion, and legacy

---

Transcript

[Callum]

Who now has anything to say about the deindustrialization of this country?

[Tom]

Georgian townhouses on the moon, the highest

[Callum]

GDP per capita in the Milky Way.

[Tom]

Small modular reactors under every village green.

[Callum]

This is Anglo Futurism,

[Tom]

Listeners. Welcome back to the anglofuturism podcast. We are here, as usual, on the King Charles III space station with a friend of the show, Louise Perry. So you might think of Louise as a reactionary feminist. In fact, she is also a space spurg. And listeners, you can be both.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, hello. Thank you for having me. I don't want to represent myself as an expert on space in any way. I'm more just a passionate romantic about space. That's what I'm bringing to the subject today.

[Callum]

Well, there you go. You can be a reactionary feminist and also be interested in reaction mass.

[Tom]

No, I've got a bad plan I want to make as well.

[Louise Perry]

Okay, got it.

[Tom]

So we should heartily recommend Louise's podcast, Maiden Mother Matriarch. But such is Louise's enthusiasm for space that we propose it be renamed Maiden Mother Mission Specialist.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, my goodness.

[Tom]

Just keep going.

[Callum]

Just keep going. We. We brought you up, Louise, sitting here in the bar with us on the Chesterfields to. To talk about the. Well, what is. What is historic occasion? A historic occasion. It is the furthest that man, and that is. That is potentially a relevant category, distinction to make man has ever gone. And yet at the same time, we have a sort of a torn. A torn discussion about it at home because some people are extremely excited about it. They see this as a great accomplishment for humankind, and yet others see it as a sort of frightful waste of money. They see it as actually downright sort of cruel to be celebrating this whilst there are people in poverty, starving, suffering in the sort of myriad ways they might. What, what. What attracts you about space? And I think I'm probably begging the question, but which side do you find yourself on?

[Louise Perry]

I'm. I'm a space enthusiast. I mean, I. Not that I know anything about space, really. Like, I don't have any, like, scientific knowledge as such, but I just find space incredibly romantic. And as a child I was really obsessed with Apollo and also really obsessed with the Age of Sail and particularly Captain Cook. So that I think that you can see a kind of a theme there, that my enthusiasm is for the sort of Faustian Anglo. Even though I myself would never, ever have the courage to go into space, I actually am quite afraid of flying. So the idea that I would be able to go into is unthinkable. But I think that actually makes my admiration for the astronauts even more profound. And it's purely emotional, I think, but I just fully come down on the side of. I find the sort of whitey on the moon position which we've heard like regularly reproduced this week in the media, but which has obviously been present since Apollo, provokes such a negative emotional response in me. I can't even tell you. But it's quite difficult to articulate.

[Tom]

Well, yeah, I suppose that the wise you on the moon argument is that instead of, instead of enacting these incredible civilizational feats, we should instead be throwing these billions down the infinite money. Piers.

[Callum]

No, you're being ungenerous and you're being unchristian. The actual.

[Tom]

Let's have 24 hours of celebrating.

[Callum]

No, sure, sure. But you know, I know we are total hacks already, but come on, let's at least try and present a reasonable, reasonable position here that we should be

[Tom]

throwing money down the finite money pit. But

[Callum]

it is clearly an exercise in sort of, that if you cannot understand the glory of this, you can understand why it would seem barbaric because it is sort of the most vainglorious self aggrandizement if you can't see the glory of it. Right. That is the key point. And Louise, I mean, we were talking that it was on the moral maze, wasn't it recently where this position was most recently discussed in the British media?

[Louise Perry]

Yes, which did make for an interesting, if frustrating listen. So BBC moral maze, for those who don't know, is a sort of flagship debate program on radio. And so the strongest arguments against Artemis to, and indeed against space exploration in general that were offered were mostly to do with, wouldn't it be better to spend the money on scientific exploration which would aid in the fight against climate change, which I, I just find silly because I think, well, like all things considered, the cost of Artemis 2 is pretty trivial. And these things aren't in opposition to one another. The weakest arguments that were made, I mean, they got on an American academic whose name I now forget, who said that it's wrong to think that space is uninhabited and therefore that space colonialism doesn't harm anyone. Because actually there are indigenous. I kind of, as I start laughing, but she really did say this. There are indigenous groups who think that their ancestors live on the moon and therefore. And therefore think that by touching the moon, the astronauts or approaching it even as they are today, the astronauts are defiling the moon and therefore that this is, you know, a further act of European colonialism. It's a good. Which is

[Callum]

a way of avoiding us actually having to pay money for our own space program. We could simply declare it already our own sort of ethnic birthright and thus claim it without. Without even having to send a rocket up there.

[Tom]

Yeah. I mean, it's very much in the spirit of Cecil Rhodes.

[Callum]

What's that.

[Tom]

What's that line? You know, I sometimes look up at the. At the stars.

[Callum]

Yeah. I would conquer the stars if I could. Yeah.

[Tom]

They're so. So clear yet so far. I would conquer the stars if I could. I would annex the stars if. So, in a way, it is the Anglo birthright.

[Callum]

Yeah.

[Tom]

Actually rampaging into the stars, actually.

[Callum]

Louise. The Maori. The Maori is. Or whichever ethnic group it is that thinks they come from the sun, it's

[Louise Perry]

actually the Navajo, I think it was a very, very.

[Callum]

A very futurist position, really.

[Louise Perry]

So, I mean, I guess to Steel man, this. Not this specific claim about Navajo people living on the moon, but the more general claim about this being in kind of the spirit of colonialism. I think that's true. And a point that was made on the Moral Maze and has been made elsewhere, which I think is true. Is that a preoccupation with space exploration or deep sea exploration or climbing to the top of mountains or. Or any of these things is. It really is overwhelmingly an Anglo game, either actual Anglos in Britain or the Anglo diaspora in America and elsewhere. And it does seem that this interest in pushing natural boundaries is not human, universal. I think it was described by one of the panelists on the Moral Maze as an anthropological pathology, which made me laugh, but actually, she's kind of right. I think that there is a peculiarity about the Anglos in all sorts of ways, and is most evident when it comes to this kind of risky exploration, which other peoples seem to find somewhere between confusing, admirable, or it makes them seethe with fury. But it did. I think the anthropological pathology point is actually sort of.

[Tom]

I find this bizarre because if you think about the aboriginals who are the products of like. Or the Polynesians who are the product of amazing generations of seafaring people who got on these tiny boats, these tiny primitive boats and sailed hundreds or thousands of miles before they got to the next island, presumably not knowing what they would find, they must have had whole families there as well, so they could reproduce. Like, why aren't they doing this?

[Louise Perry]

That's true.

[Callum]

Although this is backed up, right, by the whole weird idea, right. The Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. It's also interesting that because it was also, it was this week that the. The donut model. Are you familiar with this? The donut come up by Kate? I think it's Rosworth. Which was the kind of key economic argument behind degrowth, which was the idea that you could extend yourself out in sort of many directions, that is, along the axis of having enough food, exploiting fossil fuels, having a big population and being too close into the center was bad. That is, you know, you at risk of dying, there was starvation, there was hunger, quality of life was too low. But actually, if you went too far out, there was another problem, because we live on a finite planet and this produces the excesses of capitalism and environmental damage that everyone talks about. And what was interesting was this was used as the sort of core tenet behind this idea. And there's just been a big meta analysis published that has actually found that this is not true. That countries that are more economically developed that sort of sit further out on this sort of doughnut, this sort of spiral.

[Louise Perry]

Right.

[Callum]

That the idea being that there's a sort of green doughnut of acceptable levels of development beyond which you either, you know, you fall below a social floor or above an economic ceiling. Countries that have extended further out actually are better at things like water conservation, better at fossil fuel usage or lower fossil fuel usage and things like this. So I think it's a. It's a sort of interesting case where a lot of these ideas that have been around for a long time, actually, increasingly there is academic evidence to support what people have felt for a long time against these sort of whitey on the moon kind of arguments. Right.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. I mean, I think it all does, in the end come down to something much more spiritual and less empirical. I think that people and space is a very useful divider. Do you instinctively feel that maternity is good and innovation is good and exploration is good and all of these ideals? Do you find space romantic and exciting or do you feel that we have. The Industrial Revolution was a mistake and we have overstretched ourselves and we're inviting punishment, Divine punishment or environmental punishment, no punishment from Gaia. I think in some senses that's a. A central division within modern society which we just see bubbling up when it comes to the question of how many billions, if any, should be spent on

[Callum]

Artemis 2, which is actually not that much. Right, people, that Peter Hague has made the point.

[Tom]

Yeah, it's a few days of NHS spending.

[Callum]

It's a few days of NHS spending. But that's.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, right.

[Callum]

Of course, if we had, we could have literally, if we diverted our international aid budget into space exploration. We could be doing this ourselves. So a very direct exchange there and choice of preferences.

[Tom]

Wouldn't it be incredible doing this ourselves? Well, no, it could be us in a parallel universe. A very gentic medium sized country with 10 technical acumen is, is actually the leader in space.

[Callum]

Well, because. Because you could just take the initiative, right. You could say we, we, we move faster, we're more nimble. We could just coordinate effort and, and achieve this. Yeah.

[Tom]

And there are actually extremely good space startups in this country, as you probably know.

[Callum]

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't think they're building.

[Tom]

No, no launch system, like difficult technical satellite stuff. There's another startup that's doing a kind of fusion rocket engine that did. They conduct a successful test the other day on some components of it. So it could happen.

[Callum]

Louise. I mean, I, I wouldn't necessarily have put you wholly on the side of modernity though. And I, Maybe this is this time to bring up because Louise, when I joined this call, said, oh, very nice to meet you, because Louise has already interviewed Tom. But Louise, we have actually met once before because I was one of four young people invited to your, I think, first and only dating event, singles event.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, my gosh. So I was there.

[Callum]

I was there.

[Louise Perry]

It was one of four people.

[Callum]

There were lots of people. There were lots of people, but I was one of sort of four young people and.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, okay.

[Callum]

There was a sort of small young contingent that, that most people were kind of late 20s, early 30s. And I think I was. I think I was 23 or something.

[Tom]

Callum was gamely looking for love.

[Callum]

I was looking for Mrs. Drysdale.

[Tom]

He came straight from the Anglo Futurist Club.

[Callum]

And I'll never forget, Louise, you stood up on a chair and you said, if one marriage comes out of this, it will be a great success, but none of you are allowed to sleep together. And I also, I also, I was reading.

[Louise Perry]

I don't know if there was a magician.

[Callum]

Yeah, I was also reading your book actually, when I. The first time I met an ex girlfriend. So, you know, I feel, Louise, you've actually.

[Tom]

Oh, my God. The sensitive young man, like using Louise's books as a prop.

[Callum]

So I think you've been sort of more present in my life, Louise, than you, than you, than you might imagine.

[Tom]

But it's also a huge green flag if I meet a woman who is one of your fans, Louise, and it's just like a very good.

[Louise Perry]

I would say the same of any gentleman.

[Callum]

Yes. If a gentleman, you're a Fan of Louise.

[Tom]

The first few days might be a frustrating experience, but in the long run, she might be a keeper.

[Callum]

But I'd like to actually bring this round. You're not a wholehearted lover of modernity, Louise.

[Louise Perry]

I know. Honestly, I can't tell you actually how much I've wrestled with this question. I think I've. Not that it's a binary. I mean, you don't actually have to come down fiercely on the side by the techno optimism or techno pessimism. But I think that increasingly, actually, I am a techno optimist and. But I guess what I am, and I'm kind of half joking when I say this is. I'm like a techno theocrat. I basically think that we should orient. We should be orientating scientific innovation towards the good. And as a Christian, I think the Christian good and that. It seems to me that actually during the greatest periods of scientific innovation, that is exactly what was happening. That was, that was, that was basically the, you know, that's how I think we could describe the Victorian England as a techno theocracy in some sense. Right. And it seems to me that the key errors that have been made in terms of technology that has made life worse for people. I mean, obviously you can't always foretell exactly what technology will do, but technology that I particularly dislike, like Internet porn or something like that, child sex, robots, those kind of things, the problem with them is not the stuff itself. It's not the, you know, the actual, like silicon or whatever that's gone into making these things. It's the. It's the fact that they're orientated not towards the good. And I don't. I'm like, I don't. But there's no obvious political program that falls out of that. But I do feel that the revealed preference of almost everybody, with the exception of, like, Uncle Ted, is that actually people like modernity and they will move heaven and earth to, so to speak, to get to it and to have access to it for their children and to have more of it. And I think that the techno pessimists have a hard time actually in persuading anyone to agree with them because actually being safe and comfortable and rich is so obviously good, even if it causes other, like, psychological side effects, but the psychological side effects are surmountable. Or like climate change. Obviously, climate change, yes, is a product of industrial revolution, but also I think that the solutions to climate change can only be arrived at through more innovation. And the dark green people have no answer to that, except for, like, obliterating Most of humanity.

[Tom]

I wonder whether we can make this kind of more concrete and less abstract. Would you want to be on one of these long term missions to Mars? Would you want to be torn away from the loving breasts of Mother Earth because it would seem consistent in some ways with your views? And yes, you're sighing and shaking your head

[Louise Perry]

no, because I am not personally courageous enough to do that. But can I support it in the abstract? I want someone to go to Mars.

[Callum]

Well, Louise, you could put out a call to your listeners.

[Tom]

Would you send a sun, Would you send a sun to Mars?

[Louise Perry]

I have thought about this and I mean, I have two of them so far.

[Callum]

I,

[Louise Perry]

I would hate it. But then I also think I am, I am descended from a lot of people who went to the Antipodes. Both of my parents are from Australia and New Zealand and my ancestors have been in the southern hemisphere for centuries. And that's basically what they did, is they got on a boat, very dangerous, you know, at certain points, like child mortality on the trip to Australia was like 25% and they rocked up at this place which basically could have been Mars. And they never expected to see their families ever again and mostly didn't. And that's amazing, right? I guess I must have that dog in me. Like I'm descended from these people. I mean, there must be circumstances in which I wouldn't.

[Callum]

Although in some ways actually Mars would almost be easier, right? Because you could have video messages, there'd be a bit of a lag.

[Louise Perry]

But the letters more hostile environment than New Zealand.

[Callum]

Possibly, possibly.

[Tom]

Dear mom, the sun's gone out for another, another six months.

[Callum]

Louise, what do you, what do you say to the, to the idea though, that a lot of this is sort of quite psychosexual, that actually it's this, a lot of the same instincts that drive man to say pornography and to sort of what's the correct way around polyamorous or sort of polygamous, you know, sex, wild oats spreading that also drives you to the moon. Like, how do you answer that?

[Louise Perry]

Well, I guess those instincts should be correctly channeled. I mean, yes, I think that the, the youthful energy of young men is like the most powerful substance in any society. And it can either make a society or it can destroy it. And so the question of how you channel that energy is one that we have always faced. And at the moment I feel like part of what's causing malaise in our society is that we channel so much of that into video games and pornography, which, yes, does kind of make young Men less dangerous in some sense, but also makes them completely miserable and unproductive. Other societies, I guess, kind of let them rip in a way that I also don't think is a good idea in terms of disorganized violence, but either channeling them towards organized violence. I mean, in some sense that's what the British Empire did for many centuries, or channeling them towards. Or channeling at least some young men towards science and adventure. It's great. I'm very pro men in the sense.

[Tom]

I mean, don't we also need women to enjoy this kind of thing, the ultimate missions as well? What did your female friends make of the lunar flyby? Did they care?

[Louise Perry]

No, they didn't care. Tom. I keep trying to discover. I keep asking my female friends, are you really excited about Artemis? And the answer is always no. Despite Christina Koch, of course, the first. What's her exact title? First woman to orbit the moon.

[Tom]

I mean, she's the first woman as

[Louise Perry]

well as, of course, these are the four humans who've ever been this far away. Yes. Right. I think she's so cool. I've been watching all these, like, edits of her interviews and stuff, and they got. I loved how NASA got them to do these, like, really cool photo shoots where they got them all in their spacesuits and they, like, step up to the podium and I just thought, oh, this is cool. Great. I. I've really, really enjoyed all of the PR from this mission.

[Tom]

I mean, you.

[Callum]

You'd like. You'd like her tongue because she's. She sort of rotated between Antarctica and the Arctic On. She was. She was a sort of polar.

[Tom]

Oh, yeah.

[Callum]

No, no, no.

[Tom]

Yeah, yeah.

[Callum]

No, this.

[Tom]

She has an amazing backstory. Yeah, she's very. She's very cool. I mean, on. On the theme of.

[Louise Perry]

By the way, I think. I think that she is probably Anglo in terms of background, because Cock is her husband's name. Look at her. Her parents. Her parents both have, like, English names, I assume.

[Tom]

She'd never have taken her husband's name. Slight. Although I looked up the ancestry of the other. Both of you.

[Callum]

Both of you Anglovested.

[Tom]

Yeah, I was Anglo. Investigation.

[Louise Perry]

Just desperate for a win.

[Callum]

Yeah.

[Tom]

Reid Weisman. Check.

[Callum]

Yeah, I think the.

[Tom]

What are the other names? So Glover. Like, maybe he's got some English ancestry. Like, it sounds like it. And then I think the. What's the name of my fellow Canadian? Jeremy. Yeah, Jeremy Hansen. So, I mean, that sounds a bit German, but anyway, Reid Wiseman, I thought was Anglo. You think that Christina Cock might also have Some Anglo ancestry.

[Callum]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom]

Here it is. Maiden name Hammock.

[Callum]

Gotcha. Christina Hammock. It's a. It's a. It's a sort of topic, Louise, that is kind of dear to a lot of people's hearts because. Particularly in these sort of circles, because, you know, there's so the counterbalance to this idea of, you know, the. The dynamic energy of the young man, which is that actually, and I think I'm quite a strong believer in this, that young women are far greater creators of culture in that, you know, the slang generated and popularized massively comes from young women. Men tend to sort of seek where women are, which is a sort of driver of behavior. Why? I suppose there's two questions. Why do women not like these kind of things? For one, why don't they want to hang out with us?

[Tom]

Why don't they listen to our podcast?

[Callum]

Yeah, exactly. No, no, no, no, no. Don't you remember Tom? Tom, We've had a big surge in female listeners.

[Tom]

We have had a big surge in female listeners. Nothing to do with the idea that we think kind of peer pressure will invite more women.

[Callum]

Yeah, exactly.

[Tom]

All the cool, hot girls are listening

[Callum]

to the Anglo Feudalism podcast, also the intelligent, independent ones as well. You know, nothing. Good point. But. But the second question is kind of like, how does that. How do those two forces balance, I. E. You have this sort of male energy and kind of. But. But actually now, maybe, as in sort of more modern way, far more creative female energy.

[Louise Perry]

I think that it would be kind of surprising, to be honest, if women were not less enthusiastic about space exploration, because I think the nature of it. One of the areas where there's quite a big sex gap in terms of personality is risk tolerance. And there is. I mean, so you would expect, in general, astronauts and fighter pilots, from whom astronauts are often drawn, to be just so much less likely to be women, even though it doesn't. Well, I don't know, actually. Good question. I'm assuming that being a pilot doesn't actually demand a great deal of physical strength. Although, actually, I have heard that Formula One drivers do actually require a surprising level of strength. Well, they've got huge necks, so maybe I'm wrong.

[Tom]

Yeah, they train tr.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's more physical than I'm giving credit for. But you would expect astronauts to be primarily male, and you would expect fans of, in general, this kind of adventurous exploration to be primarily male. It doesn't mean that women are necessarily opposed to it. I mean, of female Friends, I've asked about this. Their response isn't negative. The response is just, I'm not really interested. Like, in the same sense that they're not, like, they don't watch the World cup or something. They're just like, cool, fine, like, let that. Let. Let the boys do it. I guess that does, though, become a problem. And Tom, we spoke about this when you came on my podcast a while ago with public funding for space exploration in democracies, because, of course, women are half of the voter base and might not be very bad, might be persuaded by the whitey on the moon position. And I mean, to the extent that actually I'd be wondering, you might know better than me why we've taken such a long time to go back to the Moon. And I know part of the reason will be that it was. It was a race with the Russians that the Americans won. So, like, why keep at it? And maybe it didn't seem as obviously useful for some. For some decades. I don't know. And some, like, I believe Trump is a big space fan, so. And presumably a listener to your podcast. I can only assume. And so one of the great. He, I think, is like, personally. Yeah. Right. And a great Anglo futurist in some sense. He has personally, I think, encouraged NASA to do.

[Callum]

Yeah.

[Tom]

In his first term. Yeah. So.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. Right.

[Tom]

And now he's getting to reap the benefits. So.

[Callum]

Yeah, but it's also, I mean, I think there's also a point here of, like, NASA dysfunction. So if you read like the Casey Hanmer blog about, like the.

[Tom]

Well, it's all a big port barrel thing.

[Callum]

Yeah, it's a big port barrel thing. Massively overspend, and it's been just running on for years.

[Tom]

Where you go from? Where do you go from? I mean, it's a. I think, I think one of the kind of implicit reasons is it's a much bigger deal technologically to go to Mars than the Moon. So it's this huge jump. So, like, they may have thought that realistically the option was to just keep doing the same expensive thing over and over again or try this even more expensive thing when it was already quite unpopular for them to be spending lots of money on it. And I can, I can see why.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Tom]

Successive presidents didn't have this at the top of their list of priorities.

[Callum]

Yeah, but, but, well, and actually, so go, go.

[Louise Perry]

And on the. So on the ideological point about it being unpopular and expensive, space travel is, in some ways the like. I'm phrasing this carefully. It is very Strongly associated with white American men. And white American men are on the wrong side of the political revolution that's occurred since Apollo. And I think it's almost inextricable. I felt like this was oozing through constantly in the moral maze conversation and in other negative comments on Artemis too. Like Zoe Williams went on the telly to talk about this and there'd be lots of other examples of this. It's difficult to be anti white men and be pro space struggle. Like the two are kind of inextricably linked. I mean, obviously we do now have a more diverse crew on Artemis too. But like everyone kind of knows that these are in some sense this is a project of white men and particularly American men. And I just can't see wokeness ever really progressivism, whatever you want to call it, ever really being at peace with SpaceX.

[Tom]

Honey. Kunny Druckpa tweet on, on this where he explains that, you know, typically it would be the, the Anglo man who would, who would entirely stop any mission to, to the moon. In this case it is one Anglo man and then all three other races. Black, Canadian and woman.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, Star Trek liberalism.

[Tom]

Right. The Anglo's dream to be at the head of this rainbow coalition of all three races. So in some ways it is of the Anglo vision. I think there's actually something in that because, you know, it was like created this woke mess which. Yeah, which, which I, which created the kind of anxieties and resentments that I think these commentators are, are drawing on.

[Callum]

I, I'm, I'm interested because I mean, it's a sort of common refrain, oh, you know, why don't young women care about the things that I care about? But it's not really any kind of answer. Right. It's a sort of throwing your hands up and you know, and then you get sort of people saying, oh well, you know, the thing we need to do is remove the franchise or something. Which is sort of ridiculous. Right. Like we're right. Don't both nod too enthusiastically. But like we have to get on. How do you, how do you see, how do you see a route through this? Or do you think it's just, it's something where maybe you have to say, look, you boys can have 50% of the money and the others could, you know, we can have 50% to do the things that we care about. Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, even if you remove the franchise from women, women and particularly like hot women would continue to have so much social influence that it almost doesn't matter. I mean, that was the argument that was used by anti suffragists at the time. Like women already have loads of influence through other ways. They have influence on their husbands, they have influence in civil society, they don't need to vote. And in a sense that's kind of true, but I think actually should be used against the repeal the 19th lads at the moment, it just seems like a sort of pointless enterprise to me. Also, to the extent that I think that the problems with democracy in general are much, much graver than like female whimsy. So how do we make, I mean, do we have to make women enthusiastic about space? Does it matter? I mean, particularly if it's a private enterprise like SpaceX.

[Tom]

Okay, here's a theory. It might be one of those sectors like academia or the law where men have to make it good first and then women will follow and then maybe it'll end up being stultifyingly woke and the men will have to go and leave and I don't know, do deep boreholes into, into the center of the moon or something to escape it. But there probably is a pathway to making it more China centric.

[Louise Perry]

Well, but then also, I mean, one of the, you know, to echo Jermaine Greer, like whenever women enter any kind of profession en masse, it tends to decrease its status and make it less attractive to men. So actually, arguably the last thing you want to do is to fill NASA with loads and loads of women because it will lower its status. I mean, like just being practical about it. Right? Like if you want the highest, the highest skilled young minds to be interested in space, then you should keep it a boys club.

[Callum]

I like how you're creating basically here a sort of blanket around the earth of womanhood that you or sort of other men would be terrified of crossing. Oh no, we couldn't possibly leave the Earth. There's women with chintzy curtains out there. Oh no. Terrifying.

[Tom]

There are so many hot girls on Mars.

[Callum]

Yeah, exactly.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, if we're actually thinking about like colonizing Mars in the same, like a settler colonialism on Mars, then yes, you have to persuade women to go. And actually, I mean, just thinking again about the British Empire, that is in some senses the defining feature of the British Empire. In contrast to other empires that, including the French and especially Spanish and Portuguese, that British women were willing to become settler colonialists and were and were willing to women, British women were courageous enough to get on these ships and go to the other side of the world. And actually persuading women of other nations to do so proved to be almost impossible. Which is why South America is populated by the. By like mixed race people, mostly like the children of Spanish and Portuguese men who went out and then had children with native women. Whereas Canada, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera, were settled, were like reproductions of British society in a very different kind of model. So what I'm saying is that if anyone is going to colonize Mars, like do settler colonialism on Mars, it will have to be the British, because historically they're the only people who've ever had desire to do that. Whether it's still in there, I don't know.

[Tom]

Callum. So, you know, spoiler alert, Callum did find love, albeit not in the making. But I wonder, do you think Jesse would come with you to go forth and multiply on Mars?

[Callum]

I think potentially we'd have to see if we could sort of prefab heaven and the gay heaven, the gay club, and kind of pack it up into ISO containers, ship it to Mars and then

[Tom]

no offense to our gay listeners, but maybe they're not going to be the most.

[Callum]

No, I know.

[Tom]

Maybe this is wrong.

[Callum]

Maybe this is wrong. No, no. Yeah, I apologize to the gay community. You're underestimating the, you know, to who would sort of, you know, this is a parlier point, right, this suppression of desire that is necessary for creative energy and creative work. That, you know, actually heaven could be sort of hidden. Hidden in a, in a crevice somewhere. And that only, only, only those, only those particularly closeted men who had sort of achieved the largest agricultural yield out of the regolith would be sort of granted a chit to go and bump and grind in the crevasse.

[Tom]

Wow, you're really, really selling it.

[Louise Perry]

This is vividly imagined Mars.

[Tom]

Not the first time he's thought about that crevasse. Is Jesse Cumming, Is Jesse Cummings Shoot his question.

[Callum]

Well, you know, I could sort of imagine a sort of, you know, Mr. And Mrs. McCorber style fleeing, fleeing debt to, to the new World. I think that would be, that would be rather nice. But.

[Louise Perry]

I spend a lot of. One of my. I'm. I am related to a woman who was on the second fleet into Australia. So a convict woman who was 19 and was convicted of stealing some clothes from somebody and was packed off to Australia and she was on a ship. So in the second fleet, one of the ships contained exclusively women, the youngest of. And girls, the youngest of whom I think was like 11 or 12. Right. And again had been convicted of something, some fairly trivial theft. And these people were essentially, you could technically return after the end of your, your sentence. But people in practice didn't.

[Callum]

And

[Louise Perry]

the, this, the women's boat on the 2nd Fleet was, was basically, I mean, I don't know if anyone in Whitehall actually spelled this out, but these women were basically sent out to be prostitutes or to be, you know, a source of sexual relief for the men and for the guards in particular. And my ancestors did end up marrying a guard and then have like 10 children. I raise this because what strikes me in looking at the history of the British Empire is that it coincided with two things happened simultaneously. One was a period of incredible scientific innovation and energy and youthfulness and all of this stuff and desire for exploration. But the other thing that co occurred was an actual incredible cheapness of life and a real cruelty and tolerance for the suffering of the masses. You know, including, you know, 12 year old girl. I mean sex, labor's overstating it, but like what was, what was done to the Transported conflicts was truly awful and we would never, ever, ever have the appetite to do that now, ever. And it's, I think that maybe in order to have that kind of like. What I'm trying to say basically is most people, the way to actually settle Mars would probably be to force people to go.

[Tom]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, and I don't know if we, I don't know if we have that. I basically don't think our mortality salience, whatever it does to your brain, like your tolerance for death and risk of suffering is anywhere near high enough to actually affect that kind of.

[Tom]

This is once again the kind of Louise Perry infant mortality theory of everything. So if we saw kind of.

[Callum]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

Or mortality in general theory. I do genuinely think that people behave completely differently in a society that TFR

[Tom]

would be much higher if we saw death. So, so if we saw a bit more, if we, you know, hanged people at the gallows, perhaps we would have more children. We would be sending people to Mars.

[Louise Perry]

Well, but I mean, kind of.

[Callum]

Yes. Yeah, I mean, I mean you're not gonna.

[Tom]

Everyone's a winner.

[Callum]

You're not gonna, you're not gonna sort of swell out across a, a planet if you're having 2.1 children. No, no, no, no, no. But Louise, how does that match up with the sort of the falling birth rates in sort of the, you know, everywhere from India to Latin America, you know, sub Saharan Africa, like these are, these are places where, I mean, life is not quite. You're not seeing human death, I suppose. Maybe. Yeah, I suppose you have human death.

[Louise Perry]

They have, they have. Surprisingly, they all have surprisingly low mortality rates, actually. All of these places because of Western medicine.

[Tom]

Yes.

[Callum]

Life is still pretty cheap, though. I mean, I'm basing this off a few samples. I lived and worked across West Africa for sort of a year and a bit. And, you know, we, you saw, I think probably the worst thing I saw was sort of street children getting there, like hands caught in car doors and just sort of becoming, you know, mangled and screaming and just people ignoring them. But I suppose that's not quite mortality, is it? That's a sort of, we have homeless people here and it, and it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make us, you know, hyper fecund. I don't, I don't see someone so smelly on the tube and, you know, I don't know, get an erection, but

[Tom]

maybe you would if it was a close family member who had died.

[Louise Perry]

What a smelly family member.

[Callum]

That's revolting.

[Louise Perry]

My, I, I, I guess my, I think that the, I don't want to be a downer because obviously I'm very excited about Artemis too. And it's come as a real, like, it feels like a genuine moment of optimism and it makes me agree with Elon Musk's take that. Actually, one of the good things about going to Mars, aside from all of the economic benefits or whatever, is it offers a kind of psychological renewal and it will make us feel good and excited. And I think he's right about that. And I feel good and excited about, about space basic exploration. But I do think that if we can learn anything from, like, the last great period of expansion, I'm like, I'm arguing against the, argue against the moral maze. The moral maze episode was touted as, like, do we risk making the same mistakes as, like, the colonial past? I'm seriously engaging with that question. In all, I just don't know if we have the social ingredients right now necessary to actually replicate anything like that at scale. I mean, it might just be completely different because we, I don't know, we have AI at our disposal or, you know, all of these things, but actually, like, what the, what the astronauts and Artemis 2 are doing right now is an act of astonishing physical bravery. And in a society like ours, which is thanks to modernity, thanks to the efforts of people like this throughout history, very safe and comfortable, and we all expect to live to a ripe old age, et cetera, and have, you know, 0.7 children, if that People, people, people don't have that dog in them now. It's so much rarer I think that kind of recklessness and I mean I believe like in the Age of Sail exploration, I read the other day it was like 50, 50 mortality rate would be a completely reasonable expectation for say the exploration of the Americas. And that's like almost unthinkable now. I just, I'm not sure if we can be a really expansionist society when we have so little, so little tolerance of an experience of mortality.

[Callum]

Do you think private, private enterprise offers almost a way out in that you, you get less of a, less of a, what's the sort of parallel, less of an Apollo mission and more of a, an East India Company style dash where if there's a profit motive actually that people will still, you know, a state isn't, isn't sending them to their deaths, they're sort of sending themselves to their right, you know, it's that there's, there's tungsten in, in, in them, you know.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Callum]

That you know, means you spend another three hours out with your oxygen filter failing because the promise of, you know, returning as. I don't know what the space equivalent of a nabob is but you know, is there.

[Tom]

Well, I think people, people respond to incentives. Right. So if, I don't know if, if there's a lot of money on offer for people to go to the frontier, they get paid some fee or they can cover themselves in glory somehow I feel surely that would access some part of you know, the young person's or the young male's psyche that is, that is otherwise dormant. And then of course it'll be all over TikTok and social media. And then I like to think some sort of flywheel effect whereby like the young men will know that this is like a source of glory. And because they're young men, like the fundamental biological architecture hasn't changed, like they will still be inclined to take some risk to earn that status. Although, although.

[Callum]

Can I ask maybe a provocative question? The most adventurous people at the moment, the ones who we would probably say are taking the most risks, being most dynamic in their lives are the like Afghan refugees. Surely that, that actually, surely that is the most equivalent.

[Tom]

Like yeah, they level across the world to get their end away.

[Callum]

They are putting in containing themselves at huge physical danger in order to. Right that actually, you know, you say that the biological machinery is still there. Surely this actually supports your point, Louise, more that you, you get a bit comfortable. These like this adventurous, adventuring, frontier seeking attitude is actually largely a product of a sort of surplus of young men that you need to get rid of and a new technology that opens up new frontiers. You know, that actually maybe the demographic demographics mean that you don't ever need to because, you know, there are always going to be fewer children than there are sort of old people. So the housing will. Housing spaces will open up and actually it could be all right.

[Louise Perry]

I, I think the reason that we're seeing these, by the way, they're proving the point that actually people love modernity and they desperately seek out modernity. Is it strange? It's almost paradoxical, I suppose, that you people have a very, very strong desire to seek out modernity and will take enormous risks in order to gain it. And then once you become modern and live in a modern society, you lose all of that. You apparently lose that spirit of adventure and, you know, and you become like, lazy and comfortable and whatever. This is weird things that wealth and safety do to our brains. I mean, why not give it a go, though? Like, I mean, if Mars does, in our lifetimes, become this new frontier society, like, let's see, maybe there will be those of young men who are actively excited by a 50% death rate as their ancestors have been throughout time. What's the famous ad for?

[Tom]

Shackleton.

[Callum]

Yeah, Shackleton.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, right. Very little chance of return, etc.

[Callum]

Yeah.

[Tom]

Long hours.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, exactly.

[Callum]

Uncertain chance of return.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, if we have. I may be being way too despondent about the. How subdued we have become as a population. I'm sure that there are. I'm sure that there are people out there who would try it and, yeah, maybe it would become glamorous, exciting, whatever. I don't want. I don't really want my sons to do this. I don't fancy. I have two sons. 50% death rate doesn't sound very good.

[Callum]

No, you still got one. Well, yeah, and you have to just hope that they're not drawing from a random distribution and that you've, you know, that you've imbued them with the, with the, with the character and spirit that will mean that they will come out on top.

[Tom]

So you're going to be saying, no, no, don't learn to fly a plane. Just don't, you know, keep doing art subjects.

[Callum]

Exactly, exactly. You know, like Tom, you know, maybe you should read some more poetry.

[Louise Perry]

They both become podcasters. What we should aspire to.

[Tom]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's also, you know, this worry, I suppose, that you'll know about the overview effect, and probably most of our listeners do as well, but the overview effect is when you go to Space and you see the Earth and you're struck by its fragility and beauty. And it seems to make people think, oh my God, like borders are meaningless and, you know, we're all one. And so it imbues people with a kind of sense of utopian universalism. And I fear that this is actually quite, quite dangerous for our schemes. Quite contrary to the kind of spirit of chauvinistic adventure I think that I believe is necessary to propel people to the far reaches of the solar system.

[Callum]

There's an easy answer this, Tom. You know, you get on the spaceship and then you just pull the blinds

[Louise Perry]

down, Just don't look back. The post lunar depression as well. In all seriousness, this is my big reason for not wanting. If someone offered me, you know, we get these polls, I think you guys did another one last week, like, would you go to the Moon? And loads of those of these annoying bovine respondents are like, no, because there's nothing to do there. No, because it would be boring. My general reason for not wanting to go to the moon is because I think it would cause, like, it would cause me psychological collapse. I just don't think I'm psychologically robust enough to deal exactly with the overview effect. And even among astronauts who are selected for their mental robustness, there's really high rates of post lunar depression and indeed of divorce and all sorts of like personal crises having been to space, because I think it really does just our monkey brains are not. I mean, my monkey brain can barely stand flying. Like, I look down, I'm like, that is way too high. I'm just, I'm not into this. Presumably Mars would have the same effect. Like it would drive people insane. I mean, like in the same way that going to Australia clearly drove some people insane, but more so because it's

[Tom]

even strange, I wonder whether like normies would actually be, you know, I consider myself a bit of a normie and in my career I've spent, you know, look whole, like hours of days talking to people who think the world is going to end. And then it would be pretty terrifying for me in the moments and then I would still be leaving the interview thinking like, oh, what's for supper? And I think like, if this stuff doesn't pass all the way down your brainstem, and if you're a normie, it doesn't, then maybe you will be fine.

[Callum]

There's a good essay by, I think it's Venkatesh Rao where he talks about how much technology is designed to be kind of skeuomorphic the idea being that skeuomorphic design, which is that new technology inherits the look from the old.

[Tom]

Yeah, so the floppy disk.

[Callum]

Exactly. The saved image is. Exactly, exactly. And how things like trains, the speed of acceleration is designed so that you're basically never experiencing forces that different to what someone riding a horse might have ever felt. And that actually the terrifying thing about space is that there's no way you can get over. You can make this like anywhere near.

[Tom]

Yeah, that's faster than a horse.

[Callum]

Yeah, exactly. There's no way you can make this anywhere near like, similar to, to what someone might sort of normally experience. I wonder though, whether, you know, I mean, there's sort of efforts to kind of terraform, like looking at how you would terraform Mars or, you know, ways of getting up into orbit. I don't know if you could do it without taking serious G force, but it's a sort of interesting question whether it could be, it could be made into something more like flying Louise, which, which actually, you know, you maybe are the exception in disliking,

[Louise Perry]

make it boring and, and like irritating. Like just being on Ryanair.

[Callum]

Yeah, you have to take your shoes off before you get on the rocket. Half, for God's sake.

[Tom]

In, in the longer term, I think if, if we do end up settling Mars, then something's going to have to change the planet or human biology. And I think actually at that point it might be easier for human biology to change. Maybe this is not a pleasant thought to a kind of biological essentialist here.

[Louise Perry]

Well, I mean, you presumably would see people selected in some fashion, like just through normal process of evolution, not even tinkering. Like there'd be some people who would go and some people who wouldn't and there'd be people who flourished and had children and people who didn't. And you see pretty rapid changes to the Mars population as a consequence. I mean, I don't know if you're envisaging like people with psychological robustness capable of living on Mars or people who can like breathe completely different gases.

[Tom]

I think that would take longer. But I think that, yeah, we could

[Callum]

start, start training you here. We, I could sort of wrap a paper bag around and you know, we could sort of let you, let you do that for five minutes and then every day we could make it a bit longer and see how, see how you evolve.

[Tom]

Preparing me for, for Mars.

[Louise Perry]

This is the market when we don't accept that on the podcast.

[Tom]

Yeah, some people pay a lot of money for that.

[Callum]

Keep your clothes on. While we did it on on the sort of. I mean, I think I'd like to ask more about, about Earth in general because again, we've sort of touched, touched on these questions of these are different attitudes, but kind of implicit in what we're saying is this is the idea basically of escape, that Mars is a release valve and that in a sort of Spenglerian, Goethean way, the nations of Earth will simply proceed through their sort of late Middle Ages and into their senile years, final years.

[Tom]

For you.

[Callum]

A lot of your work is about there was a mistake made. Can we potentially change course and, you know, the war of the sexes. Everyone loses if someone wins. Do you see, do you see a. A way to. Like, what is your, what is your sort of view now? Like, how do we, how do we get on with each other? Because Tom and I. Tom and I first started doing this podcast after he interviewed me about an article he wrote about how men were getting more right wing and women were getting more left wing, and this meant that no one was dating. How did, where. How do you feel about that?

[Louise Perry]

So the book that I'm slowly but surely writing at the moment is on how birth rate collapse is going to change the world. And I started off being interested in why birth rate collapse was happening, and then I sort of realized that's in some ways the least interesting question. I mean, it's a difficult one to answer, as we've already trailed. I think it's got something to do with living in conditions of very low mortality, reduces people's desire to have children. And I have various bits of evidence for this. But I think the point is that what's happening is remarkably profound and widespread, and it's happening everywhere, and it's happening really quickly. And we should probably expect the drop in the size of the population in the coming century to be as steep as the rise was in the last century, which is obviously going to be very dramatic. And there are countries like South Korea where they're going to have like four great grandchildren for every hundred South Koreans alive today. And that kind of thing, like, incredible levels of, like, so much more than the Black Death kind of loss of population size. I mean, the good news is that it's not going to be like the Black Death, because the Black Death was horrible, whereas what we're having here is people just like, vaguely drifting into not having children in a passive kind of way, which is not, not all that apocalyptic, but it will have very profound effects on societies. And the way that I increasingly am thinking of it is as a bottleneck like a really, really profound evolutionary bottleneck that we're just at the beginning of. And things like, you know, political polarization between the sexes, which I agree is very, is a very strong effect that you see in the data all over the world. The people who make it to the other side of this bottleneck are the people who can get on with each other. In some senses, the bottleneck solves the problem. Like, I'm not, it's not designed that way. I'm not, I, I'm not endorsing it or condemning it. I'm just saying that this is kind of what is happening. Like, the people who can have children in the present conditions are the people who are going to inherit the Earth, or at least their children and grandchildren are going to inherit the Earth and are going to change it a lot. Like the people right now who are having children are different from the people who aren't in various interesting ways and also in ways that we can't really know. And yeah, like that. It's, it's this incredible crucible of the future that we're living through right now and we don't even see it. I do worry to, you know, as I've said, I love space. I am actually increasingly a techno optimist and the main reason I worry about the birth rate drop is the extent to which I think that it imperils further innovation. Because I, I just am not sure that a world in which you're seeing plummeting population size is a world that can also send adventurous young men off to Mars and invest loads of money in NASA. And, you know, it seems like those things probably are at odds. I hope they're not, but I think they probably are.

[Tom]

But

[Louise Perry]

I don't know, like, modernity has been a hell of a hell of a ride. It has this amazing effects on people for good and ill. But yeah, I mean, I'm rooting for modernity and I think that modernity probably will survive in some fashion. Like the people who can. Maybe it retreats in some way. Maybe you have a kind of Byzantium where you have some of this. I don't know, I'm very preoccupied with these questions and I don't have clear answers to them and no one can. These are really difficult, difficult questions.

[Callum]

So you think, you think actually the, a lot of this stuff is quite locked in that there isn't necessarily a meme that could change people's minds and get them to, you know, kiss a bit more.

[Louise Perry]

Maybe if, if Evie magazine can make us think the Conservatism is sexy.

[Callum]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, to some extent, yes. This, this is locked in, like, at this point because of the geometric effect of birth rate decline. Like our, our generation's children at this point would have to have so many more. Like, we'd have to see astonishing rise in birth rates really quickly to even go back to the population size that we're at now. So, yes, to some extent, for the next, say, 50 years, this is already locked in and we don't yet see any sign of it. So the interesting question for me, I realize we're getting a bit far away from space, but the interesting question for me is do we see if I'm right about it being caused by modernity or more specifically caused by low mortality? Are we going to see a cycle where we see humanity de. Industrialize and regress back to conditions of, I guess, post modernity and high mortality, and then we revert to our previous ways of life, which are Malthusian, and then the whole thing starts over again? So we have a kind of Spanglerian cycle. Maybe that was one option. Another option is that we have almost like a J curve, that the people right now, whether they be like the Elon Musks or the Amish or whoever, like the people right now who are still having lots of children despite everything working against them socially, if their children are also very highly inclined towards being fertile, then we could see a J curve and an enormous population explosion. And if that's true, then we've got to send them to Mars, because what else are we going to do with all of Elon's, like, great grandchildren? I mean, maybe that's why he's doing it.

[Callum]

We might struggle to put the Amish on a rocket.

[Louise Perry]

Well, yeah, I know. That's why I tend to think that, like, the Amish probably won't inherit the Earth because at the moment the Amish are basically piggybacking off of the low infectious disease rate in the United States in general. Like, left to their own devices, their infant mortality rate would return to the species norm, which is like a third to a half. So I'm not sure if the Amish are it, but certainly for the time being, they're very, they're very fertile.

[Tom]

Bit of an implicit call to action to our listeners, I suppose.

[Louise Perry]

Well, yeah. I mean, do you, do you care about making it to the other side of the bottleneck? Like, a lot of people don't. A lot of people are like, why would I? I'm not going to be here. I'm going to be dead. Like who cares? I don't, doesn't matter to me if my genes survive into the future or my culture survives into the future. I don't care. And again, for me it's much like one's attitude towards space travel. Like do you think that this is important and interesting and impressive and what's your emotional response? And for a lot of people, apparently they neither care about space nor care about their own genetic line coming to an abrupt halt.

[Callum]

Well, because they just don't care. And those people, as you say, it means you have to take an economic penalty at the moment, right?

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, basically. And it hits your status and it's

[Callum]

tiring and you are, you are, you're voting with your feet. Is there a. And this is, I don't know, neither of us have children. So maybe this isn't a sort of

[Tom]

self aggrandizing, speaking as two batch child, as bachelors.

[Callum]

This isn't as, as maybe it would be if we did have children. But is there, do you have some sense of who the traits of these people are

[Louise Perry]

more conservative and more religious, more xenophobic?

[Tom]

He's got three out of three.

[Louise Perry]

So interestingly, there used to be more, at least within western countries there used to be more of a relationship between education and like high, like more intelligent, high, highly educated people have fewer children. I think that's less true now actually. But the religion factor is really quite strong and the partisan gap is really quite strong. So those are two things that we can be fairly confident are going to shape the future. There's one of the reasons I'm just, I just think wokeness is such a, like it's very destructive at the moment but like it's not going to last because the people who embrace that ideology most enthusiastically are socially sterile.

[Tom]

So the population of kind of wokeness could halve in a generation.

[Callum]

Yeah, but surely if you have this geometric, you have this geometric decline, assuming that there is still transmittance of these values in some way, surely you're then stuck in a sort of permanent inverted pyramid where even if, because the population is declining at each stage, you always have this senior cohort who dictates the direction that you never get, you know, you never get out of the boomer thumb. It's, it's, then it's Jenna.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, democracy can't, can't survive this.

[Callum]

Really. You think you're. And how does, how does it, how does it fall apart?

[Louise Perry]

Do you, do you think, I mean maybe in the way that it's already falling apart, that you just like endlessly expand the franchise until it's completely meaningless. Like with labor expanding labor simultaneously expanding the vote to 16 year olds and then also the uni party becoming like ever stronger. I mean it's just, it already feels to me as if democracy is a bit of a sham. So maybe that just continues that it becomes less and less meaningful and you see more and more power actually held within the hands of say a small group of oligarchs and other institutions maybe like including, hey, you know, like private space travel kind of companies and tech companies. I mean it's already the case that like in some sense Mark Zuckerberg has more power over my life than loads of British politicians. So maybe, maybe that's how things is. It doesn't happen dramatically, but maybe that's how things shift gradually politically, because it just isn't, it obviously isn't sustainable to have more and more money, money funneled towards pensions and the interests of the gerontocracy. Like at some point that fails, at

[Tom]

some point the state can't pay for its outgoings. Yeah. And then you'll have someone stepping, saying, yeah, give me all the power and I will resume the handouts and there will no longer be a democracy.

[Louise Perry]

And maybe young people end up fleeing to tax havens as well.

[Tom]

Yeah. Alas.

[Callum]

What the then. Oh, what the. Actually, some places, some places become kind of youth attracting and you get an ever greater.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, well, probably not Dubai given current events, but Samo Berger had this interesting idea that you might see say Hong Kong. So an example of a place which is in some senses hostile to the west and is therefore not very inclined to extradite its tax exiles becoming you know, like 90% European or something. Because people of young productive people who don't want to, I mean we probably will see a period of incredibly left wing economic policy where this is all assuming that AI isn't very consequential. Right. So like we don't know that's the big variable. But you could have a period of. Dying gerontocracies, flailing gerontocracies trying to capture as much wealth from the remaining young productive people as they can. And those people being really desperate to leave and maybe they end up in somewhere like Hong Kong. I don't know. It has been Dubai until now. But it seems unlikely that they're just gonna sit, that they're just gonna sit there and allow themselves to have all of their wealth and labor extracted from them. Or they go to Mars. Maybe Mars is the tax haven.

[Callum]

I don't Know, well, on that question, do you think you would have to then go as a couple, do you think that that is then the condition? Because that's a sort of interesting idea, right, that if you're in this extreme environment, almost as part of your bottleneck, you know, the most direct way of filtering is, are you married? Have you. Have you already been able to demonstrate this ability to get on with like, Noah's Ark? Yeah, exactly.

[Louise Perry]

The animals went in two by two.

[Callum]

Yeah, yeah. Because that's the only way you could do it. That's the only way that you could possibly maintain it. Or put another way, actually, do you. If given the numbers of transports are so low, do you actually have to have a sort of enforced polyamory to avoid inbreeding?

[Louise Perry]

People do have a bit of a tendency to revert to polyamory, at least in a mild form, when they have the repressive boot of monogamy removed from them. But then at the same time, I mean, it depends on what kind of time frame we're talking about. Like when I'm talking about tax, the tax. The tax haven model, that's like 20, 30 years from now, maybe. Whereas when we're talking about the super religious, conservative people coming out the other side of the bottleneck, that's more like a century from now. So I'm talking like slightly different time frames. And we should. It may be that the society, the two societies that get formed by those two events are different from one another.

[Callum]

Mars as well. Right. Mars is the third society.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Tom]

What is the course of events that you would like to see, particularly for this country, say, 50 years from now? Like, what would you want to see in that period?

[Louise Perry]

Oh, I mean, I obviously want to see Britain return to her glorious pomp. Right. You know, obviously I do. I have this. The Anglo. The British diaspora is still one of the, like, largest ethnic groups in the world. It's like 250 million people or something like this. So because of 19th century expansionism, and I am hugely optimistic for the British diaspora, America is still a superpower. You know, Donald Trump is still fond of Scotland because that's where his mum is from. You know, like, there is still actually enormous amount of political power within the British. The hands of the British diaspora. We've just been hit over the head by communism with Anglo characteristics, as I like to think of it. But I'm not sure how optimistic I am about person that makes sense. I don't know.

[Callum]

You think?

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I would.

[Callum]

The coal mine of the, of the diaspora.

[Louise Perry]

Well, or Just there might just be, there might just have been too many bad decisions made and too much bad luck for it to be, for us to ever return to that, to anything like our days of glory.

[Callum]

What would the things on the national level, but actually also on the personal level, like what, what are the decisions that one should make then in this, in this locked in world massive space

[Tom]

program, complete ban on joint.

[Louise Perry]

What should listeners do?

[Callum]

There's two levels to it, right? There's what you want on the national level, but there's also what you want as the individual level.

[Louise Perry]

I mean what I want at the national level is to, is for Britain to do everything it can to attract back talented members of the British diaspora, like aggressively. That seems to me like of all the things that you could do, that's probably the most important thing that you could do. And there's, there's, there's heaps of them and that obviously include, you know, that means doing lots of different things that we're not currently doing. That means doing precisely the opposite of a lot of things that we're currently doing. But yeah, but that would be that, that's the meta goal in terms of the personal point. I mean the book that I'm writing was originally titled the Case for having Kids. It will probably have a different title now. But I like actually genuinely for listeners, in all seriousness, the best decision that you can make now with assuming that you're about our age, the best decision you can make now with the next decade of your life is to have several children, if only because, just purely for selfish reasons, because there is going to be no pension waiting for you, there is going to be no National Health Service waiting for you. None of this stuff is currently sustainable. Your best hope for living a comfortable life as an older person is to be supported by your children. So just purely selfish. It's mad to be childless. Completely mad. And to think that the state is going to be waiting to pick up the people pieces for you. It just won't be. And also I obviously, I just obviously think, I wonder if you two do as well actually. So you love space. Do you also feel instinctively like a desire for personal legacy as well? Do you feel horror at the idea of your genetic line being extinguished? Is it the same impulse?

[Tom]

It doesn't feel like the same. I have loved space since I was, you know, four or five years old and I think it's only later in life that I've felt it would actually be a kind of failure in some ways not to leave any genetic imprint on the planet. So I'm, I, so I'm not sure if it comes from exactly the same place that it feels. There's some overlap in those parts of

[Callum]

psychology, Tom, you have to remember Louise had an effective altruist phase.

[Tom]

I've already confessed to Louise.

[Louise Perry]

We've discussed this.

[Callum]

Yes. Which, yeah, I, I think and I mean, I, so I trained as a, as a biochemist, so have always been sort of slightly more in the, the wetter end of the sciences rather than the, you know, the clean Apollonian pillars of, of space. I, I, I, I grew up, I'm the oldest of four. So I think kind of for me, the idea of having children, it was just, it was that and then sort of going abroad in your sort of early 30s. So I grew up in, I grew up in Germany and so parents moved around and the whole sort of family moved with them. So I think that for me that was just, that is just the model of what one does. I did tell my mother yesterday that I was sort of looking to, looking to be married before and having children before 30. And she was like, there's no way you're, you're responsible enough. So, you know. Well, although, you know, she's probably not the most important woman I have to convince.

[Tom]

No, it's on the agenda. I think we both want five plus children.

[Callum]

Yeah, I'm definitely four. I'm definitely four. But we'll need to.

[Louise Perry]

Some of this is memetic.

[Callum]

Well, I think in our circles I'm seeing a lot of people having children, actually, which is quite interesting.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Callum]

In that it definitely, as you say. Well, I mean, there's the whole lines about, you know, seeing children is one of the best. I think this might even come from your, your, your book. Seeing children is one of the best ways of, you know, creating more children.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. And I mean, probably that's how, that, probably that's the actual mechanism for how the child mortality rates feed into fertility. Because what you see as the demographic transition proceeds across societies is that there is a lag where child mortality drops, but birth rates remain very high. And then there's a period of population exponential population growth. And then at some point the birth rates come down as well. And then they go below. And then like, here we are and the mechanism as to how people. Because no one's actually looking at data and thinking like, like, what are the chances that my child will survive to adulthood? Should I, how many should I have? No one's reasoning in that way. People seem to just respond to the cues around them. Like, so how many kids are other people having and how dangerous, how generally insecure do I feel, etc. And there's like very interesting research actually from an anthropologist I read who went and interviewed people in Nigeria who were in the midst of this exact process where like mortality was falling but birth rates were still high and asked people, do you think that mortality has gone up, down or stayed the same recently? And people had no idea. They were completely oblivious to what was happening in their midst. So the way that, that feedback actually happens is through people imitating each other and through quite subtle social signals. And it can take some time, which does mean like that. And that tallies therefore with the fact that if your sister has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the 12 months following, etc. And indeed if none of your friends have children, you're less likely to have children yourself. It is memetic and people to some extent learn it from TV as well.

[Callum]

Jesse's office is fully sort of women because it's. She sort of. She works in lingerie in the L'Or

[Tom]

House

[Callum]

and they're all having children, which I'm, I'm quite, I think is a positive. Is a positive sign.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. I mean the other reason to be pronatal is just that babies are lovely icon again, although not to.

[Callum]

There was a. Again actually this goes back, this goes back, Louise, to the dating event. There was a woman who I met there who I think was the youngest there. She was 21. And I'm not sure if you knew, if you know, you will have known this, but she, it was a slightly tragic case where she, she had just dropped out of Cambridge out of a sort of Cambridge physics degree because she'd read so much evolutionary psychology that was saying that, you know, men tend to prefer less well educated women or sort of, you know, or the worst. And it was one of the most, it was one of the most extraordinary conversations I think I've ever had. And it has stuck with me ever since that she was sort of able to say, I know that I probably haven't done the right thing, but this idea has sort of buried itself so deeply in. This is her. It had buried itself so deeply in her mind that she, she couldn't get past this. And it's a sort of interesting example of memes are blunt weapons and.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, right.

[Callum]

And people are. You never get quite what you want. And unfortunately, you know, with a bell curve there will be people at every, on every side that every, each end that get kind of Affected. It was.

[Tom]

It's.

[Callum]

But it's. It has stuck with me. It stuck with me ever since. And I. I don't really have a reason for telling. I just. It's this astonishing story.

[Louise Perry]

I wish you'd asked me because I would have said, if you want to find a husband, Cambridge is the perfect place to get your Mrs. Like, just think of it in those terms would have been my take. But, yeah, I mean, yeah, memes can be really powerful. Things like ideology is another way of expressing. Ideology can be a really powerful thing. Much as I'd like to be a kind of crude historic materialist, like, it is clearly the case that people will upend their lives in all sorts of ways when they encounter certain ideas which are really powerful, one of which is communism is a very, very powerful ideology.

[Callum]

Are you less. Are you less convinced by the, like, the whole idea of the pill that you talked about in your first book then now, does that have less sort of weight on your thinking?

[Louise Perry]

Well, I think the pill has had a very transformative effect in terms of relationship dynamics. I think it probably isn't, actually. I was kind of hoping when I embarked on this book project that this would be the flip side of the pill. It would be that the pill has also caused the contraception has also caused the birth rate decline. But actually, I don't think it has. Weirdly, you'd think it would. It would really make sense if it. If it would because you rough, like the dates roughly track that the pill comes around in the 60s and then you see rich countries dropping below replacement in the 70s. And yet. No, I mean, weirdly, actually people. People pre pill. But birth rates have been dropping in rich countries since the 19th century. So long before the pill came along, people were managing to reduce the size of their families already and they, of course, were doing it through, like, strategic abstinence rather than through contraception. But yeah, and. And strangely, like countries that. Like countries like Japan. Japan famously has very low birth rates. It also has a very trad model of marriage in many ways and weirdly low uptake of hormonal contraception and very little, very little birth, very few births outside of marriage. Like, there are all sorts of ways in which Japan is like the trad dream, and yet evidently it doesn't make them fertile. So, yeah, I had to go searching for another explanation aside from contraception.

[Tom]

Yeah, well, we. Yeah, I mean, Louise is late. We. We feel we should let you go. But what a terrible note to go out on it.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, no, I'm sorry. And we Drifted. We, we drifted out of orbit when we were, we'd started off.

[Tom]

Mighty Phallus is rocketing out and, and seeking the galaxy. That's what would bring up the.

[Callum]

Yes, exactly.

[Louise Perry]

Can I, can we end on a nice note? Something that I have really, really enjoyed about all the, all the Artemis stuff, which I've followed with great delight, is how unapologetically Christian so much of the. Particularly from. Is it Victor Glover, the Fair. I, I, I. This was also true on other, on other moon missions with me reading, reading out, reading out passages from Genesis and so on. But I love that they haven't shied away from it if they've ramped it up to, to my knowledge, there has never been an atheist on the moon.

[Tom]

Really? Huh. I suppose, being varying levels of religious expressiveness, it wasn't Buzz Aldrin.

[Callum]

He was an elder. He was a Presbyterian elder or something. So he gave communion in the command module or something.

[Louise Perry]

Amazing. Yeah. And all the Reddit atheists are absolutely seething about this.

[Tom]

This week I'm gonna make another confession which will appall you, which is that I'm an atheist as well. But I don't mind.

[Louise Perry]

I think go to the moon, Tom.

[Tom]

I think it's.

[Callum]

Yes, you'll be banned. You'll be banned from the moon.

[Tom]

Christian country, you know, you just got to respect it.

[Callum]

Yeah, well, it's. Well, we just need to make sure that the same applies to Mars.

[Louise Perry]

Louise isn't the bishop. My husband told me that the Bishop of Orlando. So the deal with a new. A new territory, when it's discovered, is that the bishop of the perspective of the place where the person who discovered it is from ends up being the bishop of that new place. Which means that the Bishop of Orlando is also the Bishop of the Moon.

[Callum]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom]

Oh. So the whole of Mars is up

[Callum]

for grant, which is why

[Tom]

we have someone in mind, the Reverend Mark Walker of Saint Barts. He's going to have the bishopric of Mars.

[Louise Perry]

Bishop of the Moon. Bishop of Mars. Yes. Amazing.

[Callum]

Yeah. But it will mean that we'll have to knock down, like, Spitalfields to convert it into a launch pad in order to make sure that it can take off from inside his parish.

[Tom]

Well, as William Blake wrote, the cut worm forgives the plough.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, it's interesting. I mean, given that it's the Bishop of Orlando, it is presumably where the spaceship takes off from, rather than where Neil Armstrong is from. Well, maybe it's because Neil Armstrong was living in Orlando.

[Callum]

I think it is where it takes off from.

[Tom]

We Urgently need papal clarification.

[Callum]

No, not papal. Clarify.

[Tom]

Catholics have been saying the same thing, so it might. Don't worry, I'm not a Papist. Maybe an atheist, but it would be worse if you're a papist. We'll ask Sarah Mulally her view on this.

[Callum]

Pull up the dame.

[Tom]

All right.

[Callum]

I fear. I fear in the moral maze. In the moral maze, she might have come. She might come down on the wrong. Wrong side.

[Tom]

But before we go, we should tell our listeners that Louise, if they don't already know, has a wonderful podcast. Maiden mother, mission specialist, as we might call it. You're gonna be broadcasting this as well, aren't you?

[Callum]

So.

[Tom]

So. So we're from the Anglo.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, I will.

[Tom]

And all the millennial women who are into trad lifestyles are warmly invited to come and listen to our podcast about, like, nuclear regulation and settling antibodies and not so.

[Callum]

Quite trat. Not. Not so traditional.

[Tom]

Sorry, I'm off message. All the hot girls listen to the Anglo Futurism Podcast.

[Callum]

I don't think you're 33, my man. You can't afford to be cheesy at this point.

[Louise Perry]

Tom, when you came on the show recently, I did have lots of comments in the replies, being like, I listen to both podcasts. This is so exciting. So actually, it was a more. It was a more fruitful brand collab than we might have expected.

[Tom]

That's great.

[Louise Perry]

There's actually crossover.

[Callum]

That's really good news.

[Tom]

And as I said, we should, like, get some of our listeners in the same room and see if any marriages result.

[Louise Perry]

Well, like how there used to be dating events in London called, like, fashion and finance, hot women who work in fashion, and rich men who work in finance. Yeah, okay.

[Callum]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Train nerds and tradition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Tom]

And of course, like, all the children have to have a middle name after one of the presenters of these two. These two podcasts.

[Callum]

So lots of code. Well, yeah, quite right. It's Callum with one L. Lots of.

[Tom]

To clarify.

[Callum]

Lots of.

[Louise Perry]

Lots of possibilities.

[Callum]

Right, well, on a happy note, yeah, Louise, we will. We will send you. We will lower you back down to earth in a little bassinet. Yeah, but, you know, sort of general. General babyish vibes or sort of, you know, pronatal vibes. You know. This stuff is stork.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Callum]

This stuff is mimetic. This stuff is mimetic. If the. If the basket is big enough and enough women see it as it descends,

[Tom]

it's a stork that's going through the sky, and it's like holding a bassinet

[Callum]

or something like that. All right, Lewis, it's been a total pleasure.

[Tom]

Thank you for coming on the show.

[Callum]

Likewise. And everyone's read your book as well.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Callum]

The Case against the Sexual Revolution as well. And with that, thank you. Thank you very much for. For coming on and. And goodbye to our listeners.

[Louise Perry]

Thank.