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- [00:01]
Chris Williamson
Bonnie Blue might be pregnant.
- [00:02]
Louise Perry
Good news, very bad news. I mean, I would bet money that she is not pregnant. I would bet money also that Lily Phillips is not pregnant. What are the chances that the two of them are pregnant at exactly the same time? Come on.
- [00:18]
Chris Williamson
I also see that's a lot of sperm.
- [00:21]
Louise Perry
Yes. I did see someone on Twitter saying that actually the most reliable contraception in the world, like the Marina coil, has a one in a thousand payout.
- [00:31]
Chris Williamson
So 157 actually breaks it.
- [00:34]
Louise Perry
Yeah. So I guess it's plausible, but I really hope it's not true. I mean. Yeah, I think it would be very likely that social services would get involved. In all seriousness.
- [00:48]
Chris Williamson
Wow, that's interesting. And I totally didn't think about that. Why would they get involved?
- [00:53]
Louise Perry
Because it's very common for children to be taken away from mums if they are in prostitution. And the thing is that I think what social services are normally worried about is children being exposed to punters, like if they're coming into the home, which isn't happening with Bonnie Blue or Lily Phillips. But it's like they. I mean, they do like work from home in the sense of doing tamming from home. And like, it's. I think it would be very, very difficult to protect children completely.
- [01:23]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it's perilously similar. And, you know, the word sex worker was reclaimed by OnlyFans and online models and stuff like that. And it kind of. Sex worker, I guess 20 years ago would have been girls that were out on the curb at sort of the dark hours of the night and guys driving past. And now it covers a whole range of sins, many of which are digital and totally parasocial and totally solo. But something tells me, actually. Yeah. That social services might. If you want to expand the definition of sex worker to include this sort of a stuff, then perhaps the social services have got something to say about that.
- [02:02]
Louise Perry
Yeah, I mean, I think they'd at least have to think about it, you know, like, I mean, I. Yeah, I really hope it's not true because imagine the psychological toll on a child who knew that they'd been brought into the world in those circumstances. Right. And I mean, Lily Phillips is single. Lily Phillips doesn't have a boyfriend. So if she's Bonnie Blue. Yeah, I think she does.
- [02:25]
Chris Williamson
I mean, I guess if you've had a sample of a thousand guys, you've got to be one good one in there. Or maybe not.
- [02:33]
Louise Perry
Haven't they been selected for being like the one.
- [02:35]
Chris Williamson
It was guy. It was guy number 854. And I saw him across the room and I thought, you're. For me.
- [02:41]
Louise Perry
I mean though, this is a thing as well. Like they're just the. The torture that that child would be put through in school because everyone would end up knowing. And imagine your conception being on. On film. I mean, just everything about it is appalling.
- [02:55]
Chris Williamson
What do you make of. You know, it's kind of. It feels like we're in kind of a bit of a post onlyfans era, or we were until Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue sort of re. Injected some attention into it. I was. I wasn't really seeing people talk about it in the same way. It kind of become normalized. I think a lot of the market inflation, the bubble that had occurred around Covid had maybe started to decline a little bit. And this wasn't. No, it was a thing. Some people do it, some people don't. But you know, there was a big talking point for a long time which was, well, you do this as a younger woman and then you try and either find a partner and then if and when you find a partner, you then have a child and there's this archaeological evidence that vestigially follows you around potentially and follows your kids around for the rest of time. What did you make of that? What did you make of sort of the concern around that for young women who want to make a little bit of money but then have their whole life ahead of them that they have to carry it forward with?
- [03:52]
Louise Perry
I mean, the expression that I've used before is that onlyfans is to the marriage marker as a criminal record is to the jobs market like it is forever. And it does make it more difficult to. This is actually something. Have you watched a Lily Phillips documentary?
- [04:06]
Chris Williamson
I struggled a little bit, but yeah, I got through it.
- [04:10]
Louise Perry
I thought it was actually really good and really interesting and well done. And this is one of the things she talks about, like, how am I gonna. She doesn't have a boyfriend, she doesn't really have any friends, right. How is she going to find a husband? I think she says at one point, like, oh, maybe I'll find a husband who wants to. I can't remember the expression she uses. But basically, who has a cock fetish, right? Which. Which doesn't sound like a very good basis for marriage. I mean, it's this really serious problem. And I always think with these women, like really good looking onlyfans women, why don't. If they want to have like easy money, why don't they just find rich husbands? That seems like a much more there's like a much better lot. It's calculating and materialistic, fine. But it's a much more long term strategy rather than blowing up your reputation by earning not even that much money on OnlyFans. I mean, the thing is that most women on OnlyFans earn a pittance. It's the massive hitters, like the power users. Yeah. Who end up. And the Pareto distribution is wild. Like, it's worse than podcasts. Right.
- [05:16]
Chris Williamson
It's probably worse than book publishing.
- [05:18]
Louise Perry
Probably. Yeah. And so much worse because you don't trash your reputation by putting out a podcast or a book.
- [05:25]
Chris Williamson
Depends how shit the book is.
- [05:26]
Louise Perry
True. Whereas with OnlyFans, like, you carry the same reputational risk, but you earn a tiny fraction of the money that the really successful ones do. And I mean, there are so many horrible stories as well about women having like photos sent to their families or to their employers or just. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a crazy thing to do. And yet nonetheless, I have heard that something like 1 or 2% of young American women are on OnlyFans. It's massive.
- [05:55]
Chris Williamson
What's the. What have you sort of come to think about the Bonnie Blue Lily Phillips contribution to the conversation around sex and women at the moment?
- [06:10]
Louise Perry
So I think from having watched the Lily Phillips documentary, I've heard from journalists who've interviewed her that she's really, really nice actually. And it does come across, I think that genuinely she is very sweet. And one of the things that I concluded from watching the documentary with her is that she's actually really quite vulnerable. She says things like, she says really poignant things like, oh, I'm only good for one thing, me.
- [06:34]
Chris Williamson
And I remember that.
- [06:35]
Louise Perry
Yeah. And talks about not having any friends and feeling like she does this sort of diffident thing where she says, oh, I don't care about being judged. But it's obvious that she actually massively does care about being judged because she keeps talking about it, you know, And I strongly concluded from that that actually she is doing this more as a kind of self harm than anything else. Bonnie Blue I'm not so sure about. Like, she might be one of those unicorn women. I've like, I've always, I've always said there probably are some women, the world is big enough. There are some women who actually really like having sex like a man and really like really mean it. Bonnie Blue might be one of them.
- [07:13]
Chris Williamson
I suppose, you know, in the way that you have a distribution of different mental makeups within any society, your genes are gonna Roll the dice on a few mutations and a couple of tinkerings here and there. Maybe you'll have a guy that can grow his hair into a ponytail and raid Lindisfarne and come back and not have any ptsd. You know, that's one type. Wouldn't do to have a society filled with all of them. Would probably be quite chaotic. In the same way, perhaps there is a role for one of the local women to not really care too much about getting attached when they have sex with a lot of men. And that's not me saying that Bonnie Blue is the berserker of the.
- [08:00]
Louise Perry
She might be. She says that she is. Like, it's possible that she is. I don't know. I can't see into her mind. I do think that. I think Lily Phillips almost certainly isn't like that. Um, and I. I just have always had a problem with the idea that just because a woman says she wants to do something, or indeed a man says he wants to do something, that means that he's definitely doing the thing that's in his best interest and everyone just needs to step back and be like, oh, yeah, great, go for it, mate.
- [08:27]
Chris Williamson
Isn't it interesting because there is this desire for agency that everybody has. It's kind of tied into a meritocracy that you can design your own destiny, that your life should not be lived by default. Who are you to tell me what I can do? Remembering that Lily Phillips is British. We don't exactly have a flourishing culture of freedom at the moment in Britain. We're not, you know, I mean, I'm in Texas, like the home of come and take it as a tagline. The UK is please feel free to come and take it. So, yeah, it's just. That's interesting to me that this sort of emancipation, liberation, freedom thing that everybody sort of bows down to at some point, you go, well, maybe we do need a kind of sort of like, paternalistic oversight position that we go on here. Maybe there's certain types of disposition. This isn't me saying that we need to step in and, like, you know, have a fucking intervention with Lily Phillips. She's an adult and she can do what she wants.
- [09:26]
Louise Perry
I think a family should do that.
- [09:28]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [09:30]
Louise Perry
Whether it's like society does. So, look, I think increasingly that agency is more like a personality trait than it is like an essential quality of human beings. I think that it's on a bell curve. I think it's probably actually a combination of different personality traits. It's probably a combination of, like, Industriousness, disagreeability, disagreeableness. Probably there's some intelligence in there as well. I think there's, like, multiple things going on, but I think there's. Some people are naturally more agentic than other people are. Elon Musk, I think, is an amazing example of the most agentic person you can imagine. He's just like, I'm gonna go to Mars. He just decides, you know, age 30, I'm gonna go to Mars. I'm gonna die on Mars. And he's just making it happen. Right. And he's just, like, done everything in his power to make it happen. Similarly, he's like, I'm gonna have, you know, gazillions of kids, et cetera. He's just. He's one of these people who bends the world around his will, not the other way around. Right, right. And most people aren't like that. Most people take. Take life as it comes much more and are much more passive and just basically go along with what other people are doing and kind of follow life scripts and hope for the best. And, like, things don't always work out for them, but they get on with it. Like, that's the normal way that people behave. And I honestly think that's probably for the best. I don't think we want the entire world to be Elon Musk's. I think it would be too.
- [10:55]
Chris Williamson
Well, Michael Mallett had an interesting take on this where he said, a lot of the time, people get criticized for looking up to role models too much, sort of mimetically following the desires of others. But it's his position that for maybe most people, this is a Michael Malecism, not me saying it. Maybe for most people, they're too stupid to be able to design from first principles what they want to do with their life. So actually outsourcing your thinking and your life direction to someone who's cleverer than you is not a bad idea.
- [11:24]
Louise Perry
Yeah, it's not even just cleverness is important. It's not even just that. It's also wisdom. It's just like what guardrails do is that they understand human beings better than human beings generally understand themselves. And there will sometimes be some people who break the guardrails and it's for the best, you know, but in most cases, you should basically do what most other people do because of reason.
- [11:57]
Chris Williamson
My pushback against that would be, you know, 50%, the average American is obese, divorced, and with less than 1k in the bank. So doing what everybody else does sounds like a safe option, but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you probably definitely don't want. So in this we have a. We have a difficulty, right? Yes. There are lots of ways that you can try and do it yourself and fuck it up, like building your own car or something. It's like, hey, look, people that are good at car building have tried this before, but this would be like if the car manufacturer market had more than a 50% fatality rate or like more than a 50% like, you know, serious incident crash rate. And you saying, I've actually got two quite difficult choices in front of me. I can sort of roll the dice on my own. So I guess you need to make. But the people that need to make the judgment of am I smart enough to be able to try and roll this on my own and build. Build my own car? Are precisely the people that can't do that and that actually need to follow it because they're maybe divorced, obese, and less than 1k in the bank is better for them than had they have tried to do it from design, not from default.
- [13:01]
Louise Perry
So I think the reason that the average American is divorced, obese and has less than 1. It's like a tongue tie. I can't do it anyway is because we live in, we. Our society is set up in a maladaptive way for human nature. Right. Like, the reason that people are obese is because there is a abundance of cheap calories available and no real need to do exercise. And this is kind of like, kind of a great saying, right? Like we don't have to worry about famine in the way that our ancestors did, but it clearly is terrible for people's waistlines. Similarly, the reason that divorce is so prevalent is because of all the stuff that I've written and spoken about for so many years. You know, we don't encourage people to make good relationships decisions and the institution of marriage was actually really good and throwing out the window was a mistake. And so basically I think that if we should be making. So I think one of the. One of the most. A lot of people who are in positions of authority in all sorts of ways, whether that be in media or politics or whatever, tend to be really, really agentic people. They tend to be intelligent. Yeah. But they also tend to be very good at basically bending life to. To their will. Right. And those people often find it very difficult to empathize with people who aren't like that, particularly because we just not really something that we talk about. Right. It's not like a. I mean, I've basically kind of made up the word agentic. It's not. It's not really something that people are familiar with as a concept. That means that they can find it really hard to, you know, for instance, I'll just say, oh, just. Just eat less and move more. You know, why. Why are people struggling with their weight? Like, this is ridiculous. I'm fine because I have exceptionally good sel and I'm really conscientious and I just design my life such that I'm not tempted by empty calories. But. And they. It doesn't occur to them that most people aren't like that and aren't really capable of being that willful. And therefore. And these are exactly the same people who will like, just dismiss Ozempic or something and say, oh, we don't need any of this stuff because people can just eat less and move more.
- [15:07]
Chris Williamson
I'm fascinated. It's a very unpopular position still now. Very unpopular position to be anything that isn't anti Ozempic online at least. Maybe I've made my own bed a little bit. You know, the audience agency is one of the most important things in my life. And intentionality and, you know, designing your life in the way that you want it to be. So perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost in that regard. But, yeah, Ozempic and this sort of bolstering this naturalistic fallacy sense that you should be using the willpower, that you should make it more difficult for yourself, you know, There's a new class of psychiatric medication coming out. Wellbutrin is one of them, which is an SNRI rather than ssri. People use it. People that suffer with seasonal affective disorder can use it, and they can quite easily go on and go off within the space of sort of three to four months. And there's another new class as well. I can't remember the name of it, but all of those are kind of getting perilously close to just free happiness. So it's like, hey, are you a little bit more neurotic than you would like? Are you too high in your autism? Does negative affect affect your life a little bit more than you would like? Well, maybe just like this is the Ozempic equivalent for your brain. And I understand that we have this long, illustrious history of SSRIs are one point on the Chapman scale out of 56 of depression. That dancing with somebody for one hour a week has three times the effectiveness of this with none of the side effects and all the rest of this stuff. But you have to assume that as medicine and science and our understanding of the human system becomes better, that we are going to be able to design better drugs that impact people in a more effective way with fewer side effects. You go, okay, well if that's happening, at some point we're going to reach health restriction escape velocity and we're going to be able to just design shit that is negligible on side effects and does make your life better in the same way as you might be able to. You know, before the germ theory of disease, people just wouldn't, oh, it's tiny invisible things. You mean it's not the. What was it called? Not efflusa. What was it that they thought it was carried through? Why they had those big long noses?
- [17:16]
Louise Perry
Not aroma. I know exactly what word you mean.
- [17:20]
Chris Williamson
Miasma.
- [17:21]
Louise Perry
Miasma.
- [17:21]
Chris Williamson
Miasma. You mean it's not. It's got nothing to do with it. You mean that my lavender in the end of this long beak isn't protecting me in this way? You know, when we just move forward, we move forward and we get ever more sort of finely tuned. But yeah, I think every.
- [17:35]
Louise Perry
So I, I'm also, I think Ozempic is great and I think that everything has trade offs. There probably are some trade offs down the track with Ozempic. I don't think they're going to be as catastrophic as the anti Ozempic people hope they will be. Right. Like you do. It's really easy to find people on the Internet who are like, it's going to make you blind, it's going to cause you cancer or whatever just because they sort of feel like fat people should be punished for not getting thin the right way. I think that the best comparison in terms of that social response in the history of medicine that I've come across is actually anesthesia. When anesthesia first became available.
- [18:12]
Chris Williamson
Take your amputation like a real man.
- [18:14]
Louise Perry
Yeah. Well, there were people who thought that pain was essential to the healing process, for instance, who thought that if you don't have terrible pain during surgery or you know, of anything, I mean, like some degree of painkilling has been available forever. People used to chew willow bark because willow actually contains the same chemical as aspirin. Right. So people have always been killing pain to some extent. But when proper anesthesia became available in the 19th century, yeah, there were loads of people moralizing about it and saying, this is going to cause all sorts of problems down the track. This, you know, that has remained interestingly, you know, the only area where you're not supposed to Use proper painkillers. Childbirth, yeah, that always comes back to.
- [18:54]
Chris Williamson
Making babies with you.
- [18:56]
Louise Perry
That remains a very moralistic area of medicine because there are epidural. Right, epidurals or indeed having C sections or you know, whatever. Medicalization of child. And like, look, I'm essentialist on this. I think that the natural childbirth movement have some sensible things to say on how women can sometimes feel like over medicalizing childbirth is frightening and can cause more problems than it solves and whatever. Like I get it, but I don't agree with the idea that childbirth has to be painful. And actually I don't really understand why. This is the only type of serious medical experience that has to be painful. And I feel like often when you find people having these very deeply held but quite amorphous objections to some area of medical science, like a zempic, it's normally got more to do with social stuff than it has to do with the medical objections.
- [19:53]
Chris Williamson
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- [21:20]
Louise Perry
Is so you mean people get that naturally?
- [21:23]
Chris Williamson
Yes.
- [21:24]
Louise Perry
Yeah, yeah. I think that is one of the things that happens.
- [21:26]
Chris Williamson
Right. So Daniel does his live bit and he's talking about, I think, second child maybe was a complicated birth. And he's in the room. Animation. Dr. Animation says something not too dissimilar as well, about her first child, complicated childbirth. Father who, you know, has been able to wrangle the world around himself, at least some amount of agency, he's managed to get this woman pregnant that's not totally unagentic. And he's sat in the corner, literally, with his dick in his hands, unable to help, unable to do anything. Like the most spare prick in the entire room. As an army, like a Formula One style squadron of people in latex gloves move around the love of his life, carrying the next love of his life. And then something happens and he doesn't know what's going on and he can't help again. He's just completely trapped, completely helpless. And then a thing comes out and everybody gets wheeled out of the room. In basically no time at all, everyone's wheeled out of the room. Mum goes to one room, child goes to another room or maybe the same room, I don't know. And nobody turns to look at dad. Nobody turns to say, are you okay? This is what's going on. Here's an update. Because you're not a priority, but psychologically, the scars that come through from that, you know, the PTSD that men have post childbirth isn't something I think, that should be overlooked. And then his wife, apparently during this. I don't know whether this is true or he's exaggerating for comic effect. She's screaming at him like, you did this to me. I can't believe. You know, the classic sort of comedy sketch. Anna. Then maybe 12 hours later, everything's okay, baby's okay, mom's okay. And dad and baby and mom are reunited. Anna, she says, like later that day, she turns to him and she says, it wasn't so bad, was it? We should have another one. And Daniel's there, shell shocked, you know, like the old Battle of the Somme style. Shell shocked still, you know, his adrenals are never going to recover. And he's like. And then he learned about this thing. He's like, oh, women get this fucking amnesia drug for free.
- [23:31]
Louise Perry
Yeah.
- [23:31]
Chris Williamson
But dad doesn't. So you've got this Jekyll and Hyde, bipolar fucking wife in front of you. And the first time I ever learned about it. And I thought, how have I got 36 years old? Never learned about this. Crazy.
- [23:46]
Louise Perry
I think it happens with the early newborn days as well. Like there is a tendency to just forget how terrible it was.
- [23:53]
Chris Williamson
And then the sleep deprivation helps you forget. The sleep deprivation.
- [23:57]
Louise Perry
Yeah. And then the. And then you like six or 12 months later you're like, I should have another baby. I'm already. I had the most horrendous pregnancy and my son is almost six months and I'm already like drinking to go again. Yeah, I'm like, I should have another baby. I think. I mean it wasn't like that.
- [24:15]
Chris Williamson
The human species done by design. Done by design just to. Just to sort of. I think there's maybe a little line that we can draw back to the Lily Phillips thing. You'd mentioned about this kind of. I'm only good for one thing, me. When she's trying to make a cup of tea or she burns some toast or something like that. I do see and I remember this from being in nightlife, especially around girls that worked in strip clubs. And then I had admireme VIP Chelsea Ferguson, she's the owner of an OnlyFans competitor that's in the UK. And I brought her on the podcast. I think she was episode maybe 150, something like that. I wanted to know what it was like to do this. And there is this. I want to call it something else, but I can't think of it. There is kind of like this Stockholm syndrome thing where girls that begin to do some form of sexual capitalism go native in a weird way and they start to maybe derogate their own capacities or what they could do outside of this. And you know, it's like, it's the guy that goes to a life of crime and believes that he can never, he can never stop. You know, no job would ever have me or, you know, a straight life just wouldn't be for me. I'm just built to be in and out of jail. Or the addict that just believes that he's never supposed to get off drugs, that he's sort of not worthy of this thing. And that made me sad in watching the Lily Phillips thing. It reminded me of some of the vibes that I felt when I used to work in nightlife. And it was three in the morning and we'd go to the only place that was open, that was the strip club and you know, these girls would be in there with some bachelor dude on his stag dude cheating on his wife for the final time before of cheating on his fiance for the final time before he can and seeing the worst of Men in their, you know, warped, drunken, late night desires. And yeah, it's. That bit was probably the least comfortable bit. It wasn't the end of the sex thing. Seeing her cry was uncomfortable and that was pretty undialled. But the fact that you've sort of internalized this story that you've told yourself, which is a combination of self deprecation and a coping mechanism to be able to justify why this is the thing that you can continue to do even though it's evident that it's not your thing. Like if Bonnie Blue is the LeBron James of fucking guys and not catching feelings, you're like LeBron James, five foot six cousin.
- [26:42]
Louise Perry
Yeah. I interviewed Andrea Hines recently who is, used to be in sex industry. Really interesting.
- [26:53]
Chris Williamson
Is that the lady that you looped me in with?
- [26:55]
Louise Perry
Different lady. Also very interesting. The specific thing that Andrea talks about is how being in the sex industry like to be more explicit. Like being in prostitution. Right. Not just camming or whatever is a bit like being in an abusive relationship, except you're in an abusive relationship with like hundreds of men. So it's not, it's clearly different. But in terms of the psychological effect, it's very similar. And she talks about the sort of this, the psychological cycles you end up in which are very similar to domestic violence. Like you say that feeling of I'm not, I can't do anything else, I'm not good enough for anything else. But equally you do also have the highs where you're like, wow, I'm earning so much money or you know, I've got out of whatever bad situation, situation I was in which led me to try prostitution. Like there are ups and downs but the, the risk is that you, yeah, you end up in this kind of rut. And one of the things that she's talked about and I've heard other women talk about as well is how actually you can earn really quite a lot of money. I mean, prostitution definitely pays more per hour than almost anything else and definitely more than like the realistic other jobs that many of these women could have. But often the money sort of disappears because often one, you're going to want to spend money to feel better because you feel really dreadful and you feel worse as time goes by. And so you want to. And so you might spend money on drugs, you know, that's one obvious. Alcohol. But also you might spend money on like expensive stuff you don't need or holidays.
- [28:28]
Chris Williamson
Clothing.
- [28:28]
Louise Perry
Exactly. Because you want to feel like it's worth it. And just putting it in a savings account doesn't make you feel like that. There's also a feeling, which a lot of women speak about, that the money is sort of dirty, particularly if it's cash, because you know what it's for, like, you know why you've got it and it has. There's almost that compulsion to like, just get rid of it. Which is why, I mean, Lily Phillips is clearly making loads of money. Bonnie Blue is making loads of money. I don't necessarily think though, that means they're set up for life because one HMRC is going to take half of it, assuming that they're paying their taxes, which I'm sure they are. Yeah. Two, think how much money you actually need to earn in like a two or three year period in order to spend your whole life. Yeah. Like that's actually massive, massive sums. And I'd be really surprised if they're being.
- [29:13]
Chris Williamson
You're talking about nine figures to be able to not have to do it again. And you've got to. It's gonna have to be a lot more men than a thousand to be able to get there.
- [29:20]
Louise Perry
Yeah. I mean, we've only heard of them for the last few months. They haven't been earning that much money for that long. I think people who say, oh, whatever, like this is amazing for them because they just get to do this for a little bit and then they set up for life. I think that's probably not the case, actually, and it will cause lots of problems down the track, not least in terms of relationships.
- [29:40]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. I remember my first ever job. I was a room service boy at a Tall Trees hotel in Yarm, which had a nightclub attached to it. So I would go and deliver the drug dealers their breakfast on a morning, literally move huge big pillows of pills aside and weed and all the rest of the stuff and pop it down and they would give me £1 50 in change. And I remember that I really hated this job, but I just didn't. I wanted to be proud of the fact that I had a job. And this is when the Internet was just about coming online and you'd be able to get through some weird browser hack for a Nokia phone. You'd be able to get MSN messenger or you'd be able to get MySpace or something like that on your phone. And in order to be able to connect to the Internet, I actually worked this out. I didn't like the job so much that I was distracting myself by buying Internet packages so that I could go on MSN and talk to my friends who were all out having fun But I realized that I was being paid £4 50 an hour. But to connect to the Internet it was £9 an hour. So I was netting a loss of £4 50 an hour to go to work in order to sedate myself from having to be at a job that I didn't like. And that is the same sense I get from your sex worker lady friend.
- [30:54]
Louise Perry
Yeah. Also generally people, as we've talked about, only fans isn't a very good life decision. Right. Generally people, women who are going to take the long term risk of going on onlyfans, are not going to be that good at managing their money, like to be blunt, because managing your money actually requires you to be very forward thinking and you know, to, to like win the marshmallow test repeatedly throughout the day. Right. And that's probably not like this. The, the, the idea that you get from the onlyfans industry or from, you know, sex positive feminists that this is great for women because it's a source of easy cash. I just think that, I think it's just, it's missing what's really going on here, which is actually a lot of women setting their lives on fire for.
- [31:47]
Chris Williamson
Not that much benefit, at least in part. The observable metrics and hidden metrics are two things that people often make the wrong trades for. And this is another example of that. That an observable metric is how nice is the car that you're driving, how high are the heels that you're wearing, how big is the bank account, et cetera. But what you're trading that for is a sense of self worth and security and future and psychological pain and all of the other things. And even for yourself, you know, like I harp on about this hidden observable metrics trade all the time, but it's not even that easy to work out yourself because you go, well, where is my bank balance of sanity? This relationship is really, is really hurting me. But it gives me a sense of belonging or it gives me a sense of camaraderie or I've got someone who's really hot or I've got someone who's out of my league or whatever it might be. And you think, well, fine, like that's something that you can parade around in many ways, but how do you know? What does it mean that you're in psychological pain because they're mistreating you? Like what? Well, how much is that? Show me where that is. You can show other people go, dude, dude, your new girlfriend's hot. You can see that registers somewhere. But you having a sleepless night, that doesn't register. So it's an interesting trade that the girls are making here as well, which is observable metric of fame and attention and money and things that money can buy for stuff that even they actually aren't able to necessarily see about themselves.
- [33:22]
Louise Perry
Yeah.
- [33:24]
Chris Williamson
Talk to me about the declining rates for marriage because this is a trend that's been going on for a while. I think we've got, whatever it is, 38% of Gen Z saying that they're not having sex. We've got sex, recession and all the rest of it. But I do get the sense that more worrying than that is like casual sex coming and going unless it, I don't know, precedes more meaningful relationships happening. I don't know what the sort of heritage is there, but the marriage thing I think seems to be a little bit more concerning. So have you had a look at this? Have you thought about what's going on here? Modern marriage trends.
- [34:01]
Louise Perry
Can I just repeat the take of a different modern wisdom guest, which is Lyman Stone, because I interviewed him the other day and he had a view on this, which I found so interesting and actually really like pulled together a lot of the things I've been confused about when looking at marriage rates and fertility and all this stuff that I'm writing about. He doesn't think that actually. He basically thinks the only thing that is wrong with fertility rates in the west is, I mean, he's looking at America, but this applies to Britain as well, is people getting married late. He thinks that's the only problem because actually once people are married, they tend to have kids. Like, you know, it's almost like you get married and you're like, well, what else are we going to do? Right? He says that actually the number of people who are married and are deliberately not having children, like the dinks, they're quite culturally prominent, but they're actually rare. There aren't very many people who do that. Most people get married and if they can, they will have some children. Right. But. But when people are getting married into like, I think the average age of first marriage now is over 30. Definitely. And the average age of marriage in general is quite old because people who get married multiple times account number of marriages. So they drag it up. But you know, in, during the baby boom, the average age of first marriage was so young, it was like 22 or something, really young. And even in the 80s, I got married when I was 25, which is basically a child bride in my peer group in the 80s. That was average. Right. So people are basically just skipping the whole of their 20s, during which they could have been having children because they're not actually coupling up until later or they're not coupling up at all. So Lyman's take, and I think it's actually a really interesting one, it's not to do. It's not. Well, sorry, people often say it's just to do with housing. It's just because housing is expensive, or it's just to do with the availability of contraception, or it's just to do with feminism telling women that, like, they're girl bosses and they don't need to have kids. Whatever. He says, no, it's actually just a coordination problem. It's actually just that people are not getting married sufficiently early so that they then have their whole of their reproductive lives ahead of them and can have, you know, 2.5 kids. But that is linked to the other stuff in the sense that he thinks, and I think this is really persuasive, that the reason people aren't getting married younger is because men in their 20s are not able to, for various reasons, signal their suitability as husbands in a way they used to. Because what women are looking for when they're looking for a husband is someone who they know is going to be reliable during moments of difficulty when they have children. Because when you're pregnant and when you're nursing and you've got young children, you simultaneously need more resources and also have less ability to get those resources for yourself. So you're in a real pickle. And like, the person or people who can provide that for you, like you, I mean, you need them, you need some. You need someone. And the obvious person is the father of your children. And that's, that's what monogamous marriage is basically like, legally obliging men to step up during those moments. And so women are looking for a man who will do that and who will, who, who is capable of providing those resources in that difficult moment. And they look for signals in men that, that they're up to that, you know, and wealth is one of them. But there are other ways of showing it as well, like going to an elite university. That's pretty good. Or running your own business or military service. That's an interesting example.
- [37:51]
Chris Williamson
Down to about 3%, I think, compared with 50% in the 1940s. Yeah, that.
- [37:56]
Louise Perry
I, I asked Lyman this and he was like, yeah, he, he thought it was true. Is it possible that part of the reason there was a post war baby boom, particularly in America is because so many men had had military service and had had this opportunity to demonstrate their suitability.
- [38:10]
Chris Williamson
As far as your husband, see how reliable I am. I just went to war, I can raise your child.
- [38:14]
Louise Perry
Exactly, yeah. Like we don't. It is harder now for young men to, to do that costly signal and to say like, it's harder to buy property depending on where you are, but it is generally harder to buy property when you're younger. The nature of everyone going to university actually is kind of, well, not everyone, but when lots of people go to university it actually devalues the signal and it also basically extends your adolescence in that you don't, you can't start your business, buy your property, do whatever until you've graduated. And this just like pushes further and further into your 20s. Yeah, military service, as you say, much less common. Basically the ways that men could demonstrate that they are up to being fathers and husbands have become scarcer. And it's no good if you start like if you gain those costly signals in your 50s. Right. Because at that point you're outside of the reproductive window. It has to be really in your 20s or maybe in your early 30s. And that is exactly, I think what we are missing right now. And maybe that's the key thing. Maybe that's why birth rates are falling off a cliff.
- [39:25]
Chris Williamson
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- [42:31]
Louise Perry
Yeah. And also young for all of These reasons you described about women being great highlighter girls. Basically, women earn more than men do in their 20s, and that's a catastrophe, actually. That's actually a catastrophe because it's precisely what women do not want in a partner. Someone who earns less them. So unless those women are then coupling with significantly older men, which most people don't actually do. I mean, I think that the average age gap between couples is only like two years. It's not that big. A lot of women are just gonna be like, why would I. Why would I saddle myself to some guy who I don't think can actually be relied upon? I'm just not gonna do that. And the overwhelmingly most common reason that women give when they. When asked, why don't you have children? Is not because I'm a girl boss or because I don't own my house or whatever. It's actually, I can't find the right man.
- [43:22]
Chris Williamson
Just haven't found the right partner. Yeah, yeah, that was the GSS survey. Just haven't found the right partner. Every time that I'm around, you know, my favorite place to do evolutionary psychology mating research is the Soho House pool here in Austin. So it's like, just replete with university educated 60 to 100 grand earning attractive girls. And, you know, there's all of these cabanas around the outside of this pool. And the music's at a level where everybody can hear, and no one's really got much going on. It's kind of a bit boring, but it's sort of interesting to talk. And I just sit and go, so, girl, like, who's single? And talk to me like, what is it that you're finding about the girls that you date? And invariably it's. They're not mature. They don't have their life together. And I'm like, okay, so what do you mean when you say that? Like, talk to me about what you mean. And sometimes they can come up with, you know, the. Emotionally, they can't really get on the same level as me. They don't seem to be prepared to commit, you know, like the classic kind of Lothario guys, especially if you're going a little bit more, quote, unquote, high value. But a lot of the time it's a bit more amorphous than that. It's kind of blobby. And I think to myself, I reckon you out own most of the guys that you're trying to date and say, okay, so who is it that you're dating at the moment? You're 26 Lydia, who is it that you're dating at the moment? Oh, well, my last boyfriend was 35 and the guy that I'm seeing at the moment's 38. I'm like, these are big, big age gaps. And yeah, that was really surprising to me.
- [44:43]
Louise Perry
It's one of the reasons why. Do you remember Princeton, Mom? No, this is this woman who wrote this was quite a few years ago now, who wrote in the Princeton student magazine or the alum, the alumni magazine, maybe advice to women at Princeton, which is, you will never be around so many eligible men ever in the rest of your life. The most important thing you can do at Princeton is find a husband, not get your degree. And this used to be like the old phrase the women used to use is, or everyone used to use as women would go to university to get their Mrs. Right. And actually there's quite a lot to be said for it if you do go to university. One of the advantages of just marrying your university boyfriend, which is what I did, is that you, neither of you have had any career success yet. Right. Like you've been selected for your suitability for that institution, but you can't do this like fine grained stressing about who earns more, whatever, because no one earns anything.
- [45:47]
Chris Williamson
Oh, I see, you're just picking someone at the start of the race as opposed to the end of it. Yeah.
- [45:52]
Louise Perry
And obviously you want to be making a pretty good bet, but I can see how you could get into a real problem if you're one of these Soho House girls women, sorry, I should say who, yeah. Has quite a lot of career success, absolutely does not want to date down. And we probably also get to that point where you're like, I've waited this long, I've got to find the perfect person.
- [46:10]
Chris Williamson
Look at how much effort I've put into myself. Look at how much sweat and blood and tears I've crafted. And you know, I think one of the things that might help this at least a little bit in terms of reducing the need for hypergamy because it does seem like high performing women desire more hypergamous mates than non high performing women. So this is as women earn and educate themselves more effectively further up the socioeconomic ladder, they don't reduce down their desire for a partner who's better than them proportionally. They want even more, even as they are, in absolute terms, more effective. So you go, oh my God, like, as you are a rarefied, if you stand atop your own dominance hierarchy, you're looking above and across one to like, like who Is it that's left? It's like, again, it's LeBron James. You know what I mean? It's like every. All roads back lead back to LeBron James.
- [46:58]
Louise Perry
But the comparison that I've heard as well, which I like, is with buying a lamp for your house. So if you have just bought a house and there's nothing in it and you need to buy a bunch of stuff, you need to buy a lamp. You can be like, oh, yeah, cool, I'll just get whatever lamp looks sort of nice. If, however, you have perfectly designed your house like it is, it is, every element of it has been really carefully thought through in terms of decor. And then you need a find a lamp that just like perfectly fits that house. It's going to be much harder to find a lamp because you're going to have much more picky criteria.
- [47:32]
Chris Williamson
But you also can't build the house around the lamp.
- [47:35]
Louise Perry
Indeed. Right. That is kind of what it's like when you're looking for a spouse later in life. You've already kind of set up your life. You know where you're living, you know what your career is, you have really strong preferences. You've probably kind of structured your daily schedule around exactly what you like and whatever. Like all of your life is designed around you, and then you have to find someone who fits into that. Whereas if you get married young, you kind of just develop it together and you end up your. Your, your lives as a joint thing are formed around each other. And obviously that does sometimes go wrong. But I think that is part of the reason why there's this age. Basically, if you get married somewhere in the medium kind of age range, between like 20 and 35, maybe something like that, like not too young, not too old, you're less likely to get divorced. And I think it probably has something to do with that. It's that sweet spot in terms of you're not so young that you make really stupid decisions, but also you form your life around your partner, not the other way around.
- [48:37]
Chris Williamson
That's so interesting. Why do you think it is that anytime anybody wants to bring up declining birth rates and marriage, that it's seen as a right wing or fascist talking point?
- [48:54]
Louise Perry
Well, I could say that they shouldn't think that because basically all societies are interested in the fertility of their people. And there are loads of examples of definitely not fascist at all countries having pronatal policies. Like South Korea would be an example. France has had all sorts of pronatal policies for years. Whatever. Um, I think that would be slightly Dodging the question though, because I think what people mean there is like, why does it matter if countries die out? Like, why do you care so much? Is kind of the question that's been invited there.
- [49:35]
Chris Williamson
Push back against nationalism in a way.
- [49:37]
Louise Perry
Yeah, I think so. And to push back against any kind of in group preference, which is. Yeah, I mean, that's like a fundamental difference between right and left. Like, do you think. You know the concentric circles, heat map thing? I'm sure you've seen that shared online.
- [49:54]
Chris Williamson
It's such a. I've seen it shared online and I've never actually understood what it was. So it's one of those memes that just went. Kept going over my head and I pretend I sort of grinned in the corner and was like, yeah, yeah, sure, heat map.
- [50:06]
Louise Perry
Sometimes it gets misrepresented as people on the left literally care more about plants and trees than they do about their own families. Which I don't think is true and doesn't sort of pass the sniff test, does it? But what it does describe is that people on the right tend to be quite happy and confident in just saying, like, yeah, I care most about my family and then. And then about my extended family and then my community and then my country and then whatever, fine, like, I don't. I'm not embarrassed to say that that's my preference. Whereas people on the left tend not to do that and to say, no, actually I have like universalist aspirations. I should care just as much about a child on the other side of the world as a child in my own neighbourhood. And this can lead to some quite perverse preferences. I think that in practice people actually normally don't really behave like that. I don't think that anyone really does care as much about people on the other side of the world as people close to them. But it is a sort of problem within leftist thought that you're sort of not allowed to care more about people close to you. Universalism is the ideal.
- [51:18]
Chris Williamson
Even if that doesn't appear in practice, it appears in rhetoric. And that's what you're able to espouse online.
- [51:24]
Louise Perry
Yeah. I think also what often happens in practice is actually this is me being a bit cynical, but I think sometimes commitment to the far out group, as Scott Alexander has called it, can be a stick with which to beat the near out group. Right. So if, say you're an American Democrat and actually the people that you feel the most animosity towards are American Republicans. Right, they are near out group. They're the people who you actually are most preoccupied with in terms of the people that you dislike. Whereas your far out group might be, I don't know, people who live in China who actually you don't really think about very much. And sometimes expressing China is really a bad example. Haiti, okay. Sometimes expressing a really, really like fierce loyalty with the people of Haiti might be a little bit insincere and might actually just be a stick with which to beat the rednecks down the street that you don't like.
- [52:23]
Chris Williamson
The narcissism of small differences, the bigotry of small differences. It sounds a little bit like that.
- [52:27]
Louise Perry
Yeah, I think that might be part of it. I think there's also an element of like, these are just status competitions and people will use all sorts of tools in their status competitions because they're deeply important to us.
- [52:43]
Chris Williamson
There was a well done video about the sort of right wing support of population collapse or the right wing concern about population collapse I featured quite prominently. It was really well done, actually. I thought it was a really, really good video. This guy that put it, guy that put it together, I've watched some of his stuff before, he's done some really great videos and I think maybe I was part of the manosphere again. The manosphere fucking hate me. So I'm sure that they were very insulted to have me use like given their moniker in the chapters and the timestamps and all the rest of this stuff. But what I found was kind of interesting with that video was a lot of the quotes that at least I was taking as saying were these sort of very milquetoast, as far as I could say. Me saying things like, well, I'm not saying that climate change isn't something that we should be bothered about. In fact, I think there should be more attention paid to climate change properly than there is already. But climate change isn't going to cause an issue within the next hundred years. And I think that birth rate decline is. I'm like, I can't see within that sentence. I can't see what's supposed to be so fucking controversial unless you believe that. I don't actually believe the thing that I'm just playing lip service to the climate change discussion so that I can sneak my white supremacist pronatalist policy in underneath it, which is obviously not what I'm doing. You know, another question that I asked was, well, how do we know that it's not women's standards being too high and that men's standards aren't meeting what it is that women should Do I'm like, is that not like the entire sort of leftist discussion around like the sort of pro feminist, third wave feminist entire thing? So when it comes to even like I say, this video was really well done and I commented on it and said well done, not just because I was in it. Even this left leaning assessment of these issues in many ways seems to not really be able to fully square the circle. And it's like, well, you're trying to find some nefarious at least in me. I'm not to say that all pronatalists, like, I'm sure there's many pronatalists that are assholes and bigots and stuff, as there are people that are antinatalists. But at least with the sections that I was looking at, I was like, well, I know, at least I think I know the place that I'm coming from when it comes to this. And this isn't the Chris Williamson like fucking DEFCON 1 Iron Dome defense thing, but a bunch of it's the first conversation I've had about birth rate decline since I keep getting popped for random clips. This one was old, this was a really, really old one. And this is a Carl Benjamin take who says he was adamant. You have a duty to produce children so that someone you contribute to the pool of people to look after old people, given that you're going to be a person that's going to be old at some point in future. First time I ever heard it, I was like, fucking hell, Carl, that's a bit strong. And then after a little bit more thought, I was like, oh well, I can kind of see the logic. I understand where you're coming from. And I said something not too dissimilar. When we were talking about birth rate decline exclusively in the service of countries and economic future. I'm like, well look, who do you think is going to keep the GDP going when you get old? Because it's not going to be you. And this was somebody, I think on the right that was saying, oh yeah, this is the only reason that anybody should have kids so that you can continue to drive the gdp. I'm like, yeah, no, fucking obviously I'm not that retarded as to not think that it's the most meaningful, loving, caring thing that you can ever do for your genetic progeny and it's going to be the single most important part of your life when you look back from your deathbed. Like, I'm taking that as a given. And then on top of that, there are these other things that People don't talk about all that much. So it just seems that the entire discussion, no matter whether you're coming from the right or coming from the left, is largely just not that thoughtful. And a lot of the time people have either problems with or sort of problems for that they really struggle to articulate. And as far as I can see, no one has put together the definitive sort of thesis on birth rate decline. Why it's a problem, why it's happening, et cetera, et cetera. It's all being pulled together. There's a pronatalist conference happening here in Austin and when you've still got conferences going about stuff, it basically means that the science isn't settled about what the fuck's going on because people have still got so much shit to discuss. So yeah, that's a long rambling diatribe about how I don't think that people from either side of the fence fully understand what they're talking about when it comes to population collapse.
- [57:09]
Louise Perry
It's a really big and interesting topic. And yeah, I mean, you're right, the reason we have conferences is because actually there's a lot of contestation about what's going on. I'm trying to write a book about this and I keep having kids, which.
- [57:20]
Chris Williamson
Is like pushing darn kids getting in the way of my pronatalism book.
- [57:24]
Louise Perry
I'm walking the walks so effectively that I can't talk the talk. Look, I think that I find it tiresome obviously when people are really silly about this and have. I mean sometimes people can be like really, really like anti natalist to the extent of being like really anti children, like really hostile to mothers and families. I mean like there's a whole, there's a whole world of political objections to antenatalism that are basically disgusting. They don't worry me that much because you know what, they're not going to be selected for within the coming decades. Like I, I actually don't get that worried about kind of crazy progressivism, the sort of really outlandish blue haired sort of stuff, because honestly, I think it's kind of self limiting in the sense that the people who are most committed to that kind of politics, they don't have children, they don't want to have children, they don't like if you. And similarly, I mean a culture that thinks that you have no obligation to look after the elderly. Another thing I learned from Lyman Stone recently, the average American spends more time looking after pets and they do looking after elderly relatives, right? I mean the whole point of Pets is to, like, simulate that. That caring relationship with children.
- [58:42]
Chris Williamson
It's like not to replace it.
- [58:45]
Louise Perry
Sorry to sound anti pet, but, like, that's the point.
- [58:48]
Chris Williamson
This is a line in the sand that I'm prepared to absolutely stand on. If we get pushed back against the golden retriever population. That's an issue for me.
- [58:55]
Louise Perry
No, look, I mean, that's a hot. Yeah, dogs are great, but the cats are great. Whatever. But they're like. They are like, the reason people are attracted to them is because they're mimicking human relationships. Right. And the fact that we're using them as. I mean, Malcolm Collins is much harsher on this. He says that having a dog as, like, your baby replacement is like using pornography. Like, it really is like social.
- [59:19]
Chris Williamson
Sorry, emotional pornography.
- [59:21]
Louise Perry
It's like socially acceptable pornography use, but it's simulating.
- [59:25]
Chris Williamson
That's funny.
- [59:25]
Louise Perry
I haven't heard that take before, but it does surprise. Yeah. So getting away from that. That is going to get clipped and it's going to get used to.
- [59:33]
Chris Williamson
It's going to get clipped by Mary Harrington. She's going to take an active offense for a Labrador.
- [59:38]
Louise Perry
But I don't worry too much about these, like, runaway progressivism because it is self limiting. Like, the people genetically and culturally who are currently being selected for are people who are basically capable of forming societies which are pronatal. Right. Like, one way or another, we're going to come out of this the other end with whether that be people who just have the genes for thinking babies are really, really adorable, or people who are just really good at forming, like, cohesive cultures that are really good at supporting young families. That's what's getting selected for. And it might be that getting there is painful. Like, the welfare state is definitely going to die. Democracy might die as well. There are all sorts of really, really difficult political challenges presented by this problem, but I'm not a doomer about it. I don't think that the human race is going to die out. I think what's happening is we're going through this almighty bottleneck.
- [60:28]
Chris Williamson
This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've worn Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it is the best. I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is pretty crazy. Whoop is super innocuous. You don't even remember that you've got it on. And yet it tracks everything 24 7. Via a little device on your wrist. It tracks your heart rate, your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, how much you're breathing throughout the night and now can even track your steps. But all of this into an app and spits out very simple to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal. I'm a massive, massive fan of them. And best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap. Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free. Try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, I'll just give you your money back. You can get the brand new Whoop 4.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com Modern Wisdom that's join.whoop.com ModernWisdom yeah, that's exactly what I had in mind. This is the first time I've heard anyone put words to it, but it makes complete sense. It's natal fatalism, right? That we are on this particular set of rollercoaster tracks. Just to call it out for the people that maybe aren't Behavioral genetics pilled your political ideology, the positions that you tend to take on lots of issues, is highly predisposed by your personality and your personality is highly predisposed by it's heritable, it's disposed by your parents. If you are part of a ideological group which is less likely to have children, that means that that group's genes, the. The ideology genes are less likely to be passed on, which means that that ideology gets less predisposed to over time and dies out. So you end up with over time you should do basically people who have kids have kids and those kids are more likely to be the kid having type of kids, which means that they continue. But if you've got this squeeze that we're going through at the moment, it may end up looking a lot like an hourglass where you have sort of wide lots of people liberated, everyone can do it. You get some technologies and some environmental changes which causes this to stop and then you select out and then come through on the other side when you have a critical mass of people who are the children of kid havers even in the new environment and then you get through that. But you're right, I mean the next 300 years probably, I don't know, has anyone Done far out, like real far out projections, like centuries away projections, to see when this sort of thing would rebound.
- [63:06]
Louise Perry
If anyone has, it's probably Malcolm and Simone Collins. I mean, they've definitely spoken about the risk actually of having a J curve in terms of population explosion, where the very, very fertile people are selected for so aggressively, which is, I think, what's happening right now that actually you see this massive explosion when they get to the next generation.
- [63:27]
Chris Williamson
Population boom, which was an issue, population bust, which is an issue, and then population double boom, which is a bigger issue.
- [63:34]
Louise Perry
Yeah. I mean, the big question there, though, I wrote an essay about this research for First Things is, is whether or not modernity can survive as such. Because if you look at the groups right now that are doing really well in terms of fertility, it's people Amish, it's ultra orthodox Jews, it's people who actually have not embraced modernity, really. I mean, they're living within modern societies and to some extent they get to piggyback off some of. For instance, the health infrastructure of modern societies. Like the Amish actually have very low infant mortality rate, even though they basically have 19th century technology, but they don't have 19th century infant mortality. And I think that must be because they live in America, which has low infant mortality. And so there isn't a lot of communicable diseases that they're vulnerable to. I don't know if they vaccinate, but, you know, they're not at risk of waves of smallpox and bubonic plague and stuff, because the rest of them protected by everything. A check on that. Exactly. However, are the Amish actually capable of maintaining that kind of medical infrastructure long term? Like if, if, if the entire country just. Just not, not because of their intelligence or whatever, but just because that's not what they're minded to do. If the entire country was composed of Amish people, would America still have great health infrastructure and would you still have really low child mortality? I don't know. So it might be that the thing that the two things that keep a lid on population explosion, one is mortality, the other is fertility. The magic combo is the group that can do both, right, that can be highly fertile and keep their children alive. Because we must not forget that in most times and places, the child mortality rate is almost 50%. And that's a great miracle of the modern world. And as a mum, that is the thing I do not want to let go of. Like, sometimes people will be very flippant about tech and say, oh, you know, smartphones are rubbish. Oh, you know, yes, there are all sorts of things about tech that we don't really like. You know what no one wants to get rid of, and that's C sections and antibiotics and all of this miraculous. I mean, I would be dead, my son would be dead if we hadn't had modern medical technology in my most recent. My most recent pregnancy. Like, this is serious stuff. And that's the thing of all the stuff that worries me about the fertility crash. It's not losing the welfare state, it's.
- [65:54]
Chris Williamson
Not the numbers, it's the technology that.
- [65:56]
Louise Perry
It's whether the people who come out of this bottleneck are capable of maintaining the type of medical tech which I really want to be maintained. That's my biggest worry about this.
- [66:07]
Chris Williamson
That's scary. And that's something that I hadn't considered. And you've now given me another thing to be worried about.
- [66:11]
Louise Perry
Sorry.
- [66:12]
Chris Williamson
Exactly. It's fine. I'll just add it to the list.
- [66:14]
Louise Perry
Although on the plus side, right, like, if there is a group at the moment, Israel is probably in the lead for this, right? If there is a group that can manage to be both fertile and high tech, they will dominate the world. They will have the world at their feet.
- [66:25]
Chris Williamson
My housemate, his sister recently had her first child and he drove to go and see her. And this kid's weeks old. And he said that he held this baby in his arms and sort of looked down and realized that it was his genetic progeny and felt this genetic relative felt this sort of surge of meaning go through him that he hadn't felt before. This is the first nephew or niece that he's ever held. First baby that's kind of his. In his vicinity of genes that he's ever held. And he said he's got a contrarian opinion that he doesn't want to have kids until he's 50. He's just going to like Lone Ranger, solopreneur it, make all of the money, have all of the life experiences, and then lock in at 50 and just go to town. I think a bunch of our friends died. I know. Classic men.
- [67:13]
Louise Perry
I was so envious.
- [67:14]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, classic men. However, he basically said he sort of felt this surge of genetic dynasty sort of go through him. And it got me thinking. We both had a long conversation about this, the sort of desire to be a parent being mimetic, not only in close friend groups that you see friends have kids, which makes you think about having kids, or you don't see friends having kids, which makes you less likely to have kids. Also, if family Sizes are reducing. I know that there's. It seems like the data's kind of mixed on this. Like if you have one kid, one child, it's likely that you're gonna have blah, blah, blah. But if you have fewer siblings to show you what it's like to have children, maybe that sort of mimetic desire to become a parent gets turned down. And you know, you have this kind of recursive loop of fewer mothers beget fewer role models, showing other non mother women what it's like to be a mother and extolling the virtues like the best advertising campaign ever. The thin end of the wedge is your friend that's just had a kid and is loving it. But if you don't have any friends that have had kids yet, then nobody wants to be the first mover unless you've got that Elon Musk of women that's gonna go and be agentic or Bonnie Blue. I suppose so, yeah. Mimetic design to be a parent. What do you reckon there?
- [68:30]
Louise Perry
I think it's a massive factor and that is really interesting about nieces and nephews. I hadn't really thought about it in that way because, yeah, it is. It's hard to overstate how magic it is. You don't. When you have a baby, you don't just have a baby, you have your baby, right. And like your baby is different from all other babies because your baby looks like you and is like it's. It's the most amazing thing to like. Like my eldest has my eyes. Exactly. And it's such a strange and amazing feeling to look at this person that you love more than anything and they have your eyes. Right. Like there's just nothing like it. And I can see how if you can get an echo of that through having nieces and nephews or cousins or whatever, which could be very motivating. Or indeed, your friends have children as well. I think there probably is a kind of vicious cycle and a virtual cycle where when you live in a low fertility culture, it becomes harder to have children because nothing is really set up for children. And the expectation is that you won't have them. Just things like, I'm taking my kids on a plane for the first time. And not just on a plane, but on a plane to Australia in like two weeks. And I am. One of the reasons I'm nervous is not because I actually think they'll be quite good, but the thing that makes me nervous is actually other people on the plane being unpleasant to us because they don't think Children belong there, and they're not used to seeing children in public spaces, let alone on airplanes. And, yeah, you just. There are so many. There are so many issues you encounter when you have children and very few other people do, where people are just not even necessarily hostile, but just clueless. And it just makes life more difficult in all sorts of ways. And I think the flip side, so I hear from people who live in very fertile societies, is it becomes super normal, and the infrastructure is there, and there's always kind of waiting pair of hands to hold your baby if you need them to. And, yeah, I think that there's definitely a sense in which what other people are doing makes a massive impact on what you do and what's easy for.
- [70:39]
Chris Williamson
You to do, given that you're now a mother of two. What have you learned about optimal parenting and the perils of the pressure of trying to be an optimal parent and how resilient children are and stuff like that?
- [70:52]
Louise Perry
Optimal parenting? I think so. Going back, actually, interestingly, to, like, the doomerism about, say, environmentalists who don't want to have kids because they're massive doomers, I've been thinking recently about the role of neuroticism in parenting because, you know, you'll know that women are more neurotic than men, like, quite a lot. And that difference only comes on at puberty. And it seems likely that the reason women are more neurotic than men is mostly to do with the fact that women are mothers who are primarily responsible for little children. And actually, Jordan Peterson likes to talk about this painting. I can't remember the name of the painter, which is of the Virgin mother holding the infant Christ.
- [71:42]
Chris Williamson
Michelangelo's Pieta. It's a sculpture, is it?
- [71:45]
Louise Perry
With the snake on the floor?
- [71:47]
Chris Williamson
Oh, interesting. Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe not.
- [71:50]
Louise Perry
I think this is a painting rather than sculpture, but I can't remember the artist. She's holding the infant Christ because there's a snake on the floor, and she's, like, got her foot on the snake, and it's basically protecting her infant from the snake. And he always holds this up as, like, the archetypal image of the protected mother. And it can confirm. You get super neurotic when you're. You know, a friend of mine warned me before I had my first. You will behave in ways as a new mother that would have you diagnosed as OCD in any other circumstance. But in this instance, it's actually fine and it's normal and you'll get over it. But the neuroticism is adaptive. It's not very pleasant, but it is adaptive because neurotic mothers historically were the ones who, you know, spotted the snake on the ground or took whatever protective measures necessary in order to protect their children. I now wonder if neuroticism might be doing the opposite. I wonder if actually neuroticism might be discouraging people from having children either. Like the super neurotic people who are so worried about climate apocalypse that they don't have children at all. But also even, I mean, I notice in myself I'm quite a neurotic person and I just worry about things. One of the differences between me and mums I know who have lots of kids close together is that they are generally much more chill and much more willing to just kind of let their kids get on with it and not be constantly following them around and not be just not worrying too much, just kind of being. Not being helicopter parents, just being chill. And I recognize in myself that I find that really difficult to do. And I would really struggle to have, say three under three, because you just have to, like, in reality, if you've got three kids under three and you don't have loads of nannies or whatever, you just have to let the kids get on with it and just. And not fuss too much and certainly not be too worried about your house being too tidy. And you know, like, actually the sort of personality that I wonder if is now being selected for in terms of people who are willing to have kids are people who are actually quite chill and quite, ah, we'll just do it.
- [73:52]
Chris Williamson
Who don't, you know.
- [73:53]
Louise Perry
Exactly.
- [73:53]
Chris Williamson
Who cares about the state of the economy? Who cares about the carbon parts per million?
- [73:57]
Louise Perry
Exactly. Who don't get themselves all like so wrapped up that they're too, that they're too worried to just go ahead and do it. And then when they do have children, they're like, oh, we'll have another one, we'll make it work, whatever, run it back. Yeah, exactly. I wonder if neuroticism is now being selected against.
- [74:13]
Chris Williamson
Wow, that's interesting.
- [74:15]
Louise Perry
Yeah, it's just my hypothesis and like my impression from looking around at people.
- [74:19]
Chris Williamson
I would be fascinated to see whether the children of neurotic parents have higher or lower infant mortality.
- [74:27]
Louise Perry
They probably have higher. But I mean, I like every crazy neurotic mother, I read every news story that crosses my eye about something terrible happening to a child. And I gotta say, like the vast majority of cases we read about some terrible accident that's happened to a child. I'm like, I would never let that Happen like the negligence, lack of supervision. Yeah. I mean often it's just people being just silly. And I, and I read that and I'm like, I would literally never do that. This is not, that's crazy. But then I think the chance of your child dying is still really, really low. Right. Even, even properly quite negligent parents, the chance of their child dying in some kind of accident is still really low. It's probably still the case therefore that neuroticism has been selected against because actually you're moving from like 1 in a 10 million chance to 1 in a million chance kind of thing. And so it's probably actually fine like if you live in a really safe environment like we do with vaccines and all this good stuff, whereas being like, eh, let's just have another baby, that makes a pretty big impact on how much genetic material you leave behind when you're gone.
- [75:41]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. How much gender neutrality can there be in parenting now that you've got a full two split tests to be able to compare? What have you learned about gender neutrality?
- [75:54]
Louise Perry
I think that male children are really different for female children. I mean, I don't have a girl, I've got two boys, Right. So I don't have a girl yet. I have definitely learned that. I can completely see why little boys are diagnosed more with ADHD than little girls are because actually the normal way that little boys behave is much further towards the ADHD type of behavior than the normal way that little girls behave. I'm amazed when friends bring around their little girls like two year old girls who just sit at the table like quietly coloring. My son does not do that. Other son, other little boys I know do not do that. They are much, much more rambunctious and actually is really difficult sometimes fitting the character of little boys around the demands of modern life. I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that ADHD diagnoses go up at the same time that we're expecting little boys to sit quietly on the mat all day in school and be, you know, it's just. This is not what they. This is not what they.
- [77:04]
Chris Williamson
Well, it's, it's so fascinating. Right. I don't know. I certainly know that ADHD diagnoses are increasing, but I don't know whether the DSM criteria with which ADHD is diagnosed has remained stable across time or whether there is just, well, this new, more peaceful, more brains, less brawn style world. It's kind of just inconvenient for these boys to be the way that they are. And you know, you have, you could argue perhaps that apart from being a huge step change, anything that's within sort of the 95th to the 5th percentile of any trait is like just, that's just normal. Like all of that is normal. Even out to pretty close to the tails. That's just, that's just pretty normal. But as soon as it begins to get inconvenient, it's kind of simpler to just register that as a thing, some sort of pathology, something that needs treating, something that needs therapy or medication. And yeah, I can just see how you go, well, look at the gold standard. They're just, they sit there, they color in, they clean up after themselves, you know, the dolls. And then I look over the far side and there's a hole in the door. Where's that come from? You're not Even, you weigh 10 kilos. How do you put a hole in the door? And yes.
- [78:29]
Louise Perry
Yeah, I mean basically we kind of cut. I don't know what portion of boys are diagnosed with adhd. It's pretty high though. I think it's like, I don't know, it's non trivial. It's like 20%, something like that. I've read what we have basically done is we just cut off the like most rambunctious 20% of the male bell curve and just give them drugs. And I don't think it's very good for the boys. I think it'd be much better if we had an education system that was better suited to boys normal behavior. But it's kind of difficult. I mean a lot of what's being done at school is crowd control, which is why I used to think maybe I should homeschool the children. And now I actually don't think I have the personality.
- [79:13]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [79:14]
Louise Perry
For multiple reasons. Because it's incredibly hard work actually. Like, because the problem is it's a coordination problem. If we all lived like people used to live for most of human history, where you live around your extended kin and you live in a walkable environment and you're constantly hanging out with other people who have children and you know, that would be one thing, but the reality of living in a low fertility society where everyone sends their kids to school is who are the kids going to hang out with during the day? And I know that there are homeschooling co ops, but in reality it can be quite hard to actually coordinate with other parents.
- [79:53]
Chris Williamson
Get over to Texas, there's communes everywhere. These people, you'll teach them to whittle a flute out of a stick they'll learn to do archery by age four. I mean, they can't count, but holy shit, they can skin an elk in five minutes flat.
- [80:06]
Louise Perry
Yeah. So, yeah, the really high agency thing to do would be like, I'm just going to move to Texas and I'm going to find my. I'm going to find my people and I'm going to, you know, educate children exactly how I want them to be educated. All right, maybe we'll end up doing that, but it. You can't really. I always. I think of this as being as unilateral trad life. When you're like, I'm just gonna go and live in the woods and I'm going to homeschool my children. I'm going, you know, and it's like, yeah. Except that it's actually very difficult to do that on your own. Trad life involves other people. You know, that's proper.
- [80:43]
Chris Williamson
Proper trad life is pan. Generational housing. It's. You've got a friend who is a teacher and you help out a little bit some days and you take the class another day. That's proper trad life.
- [80:52]
Louise Perry
And you have a dozen cousins around you who all have kids of the same age. Right? That's actual trad life. And you've always. And you. And you can't read and you all live in the same place, as opposed.
- [80:59]
Chris Williamson
To this solopreneur trad life equivalent.
- [81:01]
Louise Perry
Yeah, yeah. It's like one of my friends, an Irish Catholic friend, she always likes to say that actual trad caths, right, they don't go to Latin mass several times a day, they go to mass twice a year, they can't read and they believe in fairies. Right. Similarly, actual trad life does not look like sort of Instagram trad life, Right.
- [81:22]
Chris Williamson
Because you know how floral prints and baking cakes.
- [81:26]
Louise Perry
Yeah. I mean, not just that, but it's the loneliness actually of it. I think that. I think unilateral trad life is actually a lot more like frontier life. I think that's part of what's being recreated. It's the Little House on the Prairie kind of lifestyle where you go out as the nuclear unit and you live in difficult conditions in the middle of nowhere. I think actually that's the sort of cultural memory that has been appealed to. And actually frontier life was very, very difficult, particularly for women, which is why there was this contagious mental illness called prairie madness. Have you ever heard of this? Where women living, you know, in the. In the. On the western frontier would literally go completely crazy. Through loneliness and stress. Like unilateral trad life is hardcore and most people are not suited to it. But the problem is that trying to recreate non unilateral trad life requires the involvement of other people.
- [82:18]
Chris Williamson
There's a coordination problem. God's eye view of this. Well, I have a bunch of friends who've tried to do bilateral trad life or whatever, the polylateral trad life, whatever the other word would be. And this is a funny story. So maybe how many? It's probably 10 couples, I would say something like that. And they had this plan. Some of them had kids, some of them were about to have kids. All of them quite wealthy. Many of them had had exits from companies, late 20s, early 30s, highly agentic, very white, very middle upper class. People from all over the country living in Austin, Texas. And they decided that they were going to do the commune thing, they were going to homeschool the kids, but that one of them was a teacher. The intention was at some point in the next five to 10 years, we buy 100 acres of land between us all and we do the polylateral trad life thing. They tried to do a couple of pet projects. I think one of them was to revamp a ranch out in bastrop, out toward bastrop, sort of out east from Austin. There was a couple of other projects they'd done to see how they would get. Like a test project, right. You know, it's like a job interview for everybody to interview each other to see how they would get on and, you know, whether the group would work like this. And I don't think it's happening. I don't think it worked. Just the coordination problem of trying. Because again, what, what people are doing there is they're larping as trad life people, which causes you to be as selective as the girl that's 27, earns 100 grand and has got 2 degrees as opposed to what actual trad life was, which was an imposition that was placed upon you that you just had to get. Make it fucking work. Like, you don't get to. You don't get to test run it and go. I don't actually really like the way that that homeschooler did the history stuff. Because I really want it to be done. It's like, no, you just get what you get. And yeah, I think, I wonder whether elective trad life with the expectations that the people who have the ability to do trad life have. I wonder whether that's just incompatible because you want the Five star service. You want the business class flights and you want the, you know, Uber Black xl. I don't think that that's realistic unless you sort of keep rolling the dice and really come up lucky.
- [84:46]
Louise Perry
I think it's a heart where you're not related to each other because to some extent when you're related to each other as you would be in an actual multi generational setup, you are, you're genetically invested in each other and also you can't really opt out. Like only in extreme circumstances can you just ditch your family. Like you sort of have to make those relationships work. Whereas the issue with these chosen connections, everyone knows you can kind of opt out and no one really has that much genetic investment in each other's lives, children, whatever. So interestingly I have a friend, Elizabeth Oldfield, who, she has written about doing this. It's not really, it's not a commune but she and her husband bought a house with another couple and Elizabeth and her husband have children, the other couple intend to have children and they, they're facing London property prices, you know, nightmare. And so they did economy of scale by buying this one house together and they share the kitchen but then they have other separate areas and whatever. I've been to the house loads of times and they've, they've done really well. I mean like it solves a lot of problems and when more children come along there'll be like childcare sharing and there's like, there's, there's a lot of sense to it but they also went into it really, really clear eyed about the problems and they do all sorts of stuff to try and smooth issues. Like they have a weekly house meeting where they talk about any issues people are having. They have like carefully mapped out exit plans if ever anyone wants to get out of the situation. Like it takes actually so much work to make these relationships function. And what really jumps out to me is that when you're not related to people it's much harder to make these things work than if you are related to people and you sort of have to. Which is not to say that you don't have issues with families, but yeah, I mean there's sort of a reason that people have historically grown these households and communities around actual genetic relationships.
- [86:52]
Chris Williamson
The only way that you can bear to put up with someone that you're in that close proximity to is if you're genetically related.
- [86:58]
Louise Perry
You know the real nightmare scenario actually in really traditional cultures. I'm really interested in some of the differences between patri local and matri Local societies, which is a very like nerdy anthropology thing. But patri local societies are where when a couple gets married they move to where the husband is from. Like they either they may be moved into his family's house or just to be nearby them. Matri local is the other, is the other flip side. So that's when you move to the.
- [87:27]
Chris Williamson
Mothers going to guess that the matri local is rarer.
- [87:30]
Louise Perry
Well, not necessarily so. Interestingly, English working class culture is traditionally matri local. And one of the consequences of that is that you'll be familiar with all these like old style comics who complain about mothers in law. Often the reason they complain about mothers in law is because they actually live with their mothers in law because it's a matrilocus society. And when you've just got married and you don't have enough money to set up your own house, you'll go and have to live with your, your, the, the woman's parents for a bit. And there's all sorts of stereotypes around cockney women in particular being very like brassy. I mean that's the, that's the, that's traditional term. Like being quite like strong willed, like mum, the mum being actually quite a dominant figure in the family. Like there's lots of ways actually in which English working class culture, British working class culture is actually empowers women quite a lot. Like women have quite a lot of power. Whereas patrilocal societies tend to be the opposite because you end up with the new bride moving into her husband's family and often getting dominated by them. Like being actually in a very weak position and having to be very subservient to them. And often patchy local cultures tend to have norms where women are more demure and more quiet and more willing to be bossed around by other people.
- [88:57]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, well you have, that's certainly one of the concerns I think in David Buss book Bad Men about how women become socially isolated from brothers and uncles and fathers and grandfathers who would have been able to step in if there was an abusive partner in the mix or if she was a financial prisoner in one way or another. So in many ways I can see actually why it would be more adaptive for it to be matrilocal because you know, the guy should be a little bit more robust at being able to deal with the slightly overbearing mother in law than the wife would be able to deal with a potentially abusive partner and a bunch of uncles and brothers who aren't her genetic part of a genetic lineage that are Turning a blind eye to it. So, yeah, I imagine that's a. Yeah.
- [89:43]
Louise Perry
I choose Matrilocal every time. But then maybe I would say that.
- [89:47]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, of course you would, Louise. You're great. I love every time that we get to speak, where should people go? They want to check out the things you write and things you say and whatever else you got going on.
- [89:56]
Louise Perry
So my podcast is called Made Mother Matriarch. It's on all podcast platforms, YouTube, et cetera. I mostly talk about sexual politics, although I increasingly. I've been thinking to myself, what are the things that I'm generally interested in? And I've decided that what I'm interested in is birth, sex, violence and death. So if you want to hear about any of those themes.
- [90:18]
Chris Williamson
Nice, great pick.
- [90:22]
Louise Perry
And my first book was the Case Against Sexual Revolution and I actually have a new edition of that book coming out which is a young adult edition. So it's been edited down to be shorter and simpler and less grim for a young adult. So it's intended for sort of 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds. Ish.
- [90:41]
Chris Williamson
So and that's called.
- [90:43]
Louise Perry
Also called. Oh no, that one's actually called A New Guide to sex in the 21st century. But it's the, it's the young adult edition of the Case against the Sexual Revolution. And it is basically the same book. It's just a.
- [90:52]
Chris Williamson
That would be. I can't wait to see what sort of a response you get for that one. Like whether it's this, you know, right wing mother trying to color the thoughts of our impressionable. Meanwhile Bonnie Blue and fucking Lily Phillips are just like, yes, Queen over the far side.
- [91:11]
Louise Perry
So far I've had like 95% positive responses actually to my book. I thought I was going to get cancelled and I didn't. Hopefully the same thing will happen, the Young Adult Edition. Although I think that some of the young adults themselves might be a bit. We did run. We did run it past and when we're doing the editing process, we got some teenagers to read it and give like anonymous feedback. And there was. There was more than one that was absolutely scandal by my like gender exclusive language and stuff. So some of them were.
- [91:41]
Chris Williamson
We didn't even get a chance to get around to being CIS English today. Maybe talk about that next time. Look, Louise, you're so great. Everyone should go and check out your stuff. Case Against Sexual Revolution's a seminal book. People refer to being Perry Pilled now like young women refer to being Perry pilled. So if nothing else, your legacy will live on as a meme in New York like college chicks. And until next time, I hope that you survive all of the children and the craziness.
- [92:08]
Louise Perry
Thank you Chris.
- [92:12]
Chris Williamson
If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.