Birth Rate Debate: Why Is No One Having Kids? - #1099

Summary

Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson

Episode #1099: Birth Rate Debate – Why Is No One Having Kids?

Release Date: May 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

This thought-provoking roundtable examines the global decline in birth rates and its sweeping societal consequences. Host Chris Williamson is joined by leading demographic thinkers (B, C, D) for a deep dive into why fewer people are having children, the economic and cultural fallout, the clash with modern identity and feminism, the realities of “pronatalism,” and what—if anything—can or should be done about it. Drawing on data, lived experience, historical parallels, and irreverent humor, the guests dissect the roots of falling fertility and debate whether any interventions might work in a world so fundamentally changed by modernity.

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Key Discussion Points and Timestamps

1. Meet the Panel & Why They Care

• [00:00-05:20]
  • None of the panelists intended to study fertility: “None of us grew up as kids and we're like, I hope someday that I study low fertility... there were other things we loved in the world, and we gradually woke up to the fact that if no one's having kids, the other things we love don't last.” (B)
  • Pronatalists are often motivated by long-term concerns for humanity’s future (e.g. existential risk): “We care about humanity in 100, in 1,000 years. We're at the precip of a tipping point.” (C)

2. The State of Demographic Decline

• [05:20-07:03]
  • Fertility is falling worldwide: projected 1.6 births/woman by 2100, only six countries above replacement.
  • US at a record low (1.6, 2024); UK childlessness at age 30 is now the majority (58%).
  • Exponential decline: “If you have a fertility rate of 1.0... the total future births of all future generations is equal to the total of the current generation. Because you keep halving and halving...” (D)

3. What Happens to a Shrinking Society?

• [08:13-12:40]
  • Economic & Social Decay: Reference to Detroit: “A city built for 2 million people with only 700,000 living in it... there was decay everywhere. Except... a family having a picnic... For me that was the image of the future.” (D)
  • Geopolitics & Security: Low fertility creates uneven, compounding effects: “You get a lot of countries that realize one, this is their last chance to make a go at it before they don't have a fieldable army anymore... the 21st century fertility decline... will be the resumption of zero sum interstate conflict.” (B)
  • Broken Welfare States: “Most developed countries' governments are set up like a Ponzi scheme... It's not going to exist much longer if demographic collapse keeps playing out without serious intervention.” (C)
  • “The needs of the old are cannibalizing the futures of the young... Municipalities just disband.” (B) [16:03]

4. Urbanization, Migration & Population Triage

• [16:21-17:40]
  • “Magnet cities” like Tokyo, Sofia, London will persist—rural areas emptied out.
  • “Population triage... the places that will survive are more expensive—and have lower birth rates.” (B

5. Why Low Fertility Hurts the Economy

• [17:40-21:11]
  • Innovation and growth need both a supply of people and demand for novelty: “Innovation is nonrivalrous... As fertility falls, we will simply not have as much innovation. Robin Hanson... argues that we're basically facing the end of innovation.” (B) [19:59]
  • Debt burden will rise sharply as the population pyramid inverts, further squeezing the young and throttling public investment.

6. Why Is This Conversation Taboo?—Pronatalism & Feminism

• [26:25-34:24]
  • The fertility debate triggers intense reactions, accused of misogyny or fascism.
  • “There is a tension between sustainable fertility rates and the gender egalitarianism that I think most of us cherish... Is it intrinsic tension? Can we find a way through?... Right now feminism is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. But we don’t know that it has to be.” (B) [26:25]
  • Stark political divides: Conservatives’ fertility went from 1.44 (1980) to 1.67, liberals from 1.44 to 0.87 ([30:46]).

Notable Quotes:

• “If feminists stop having kids, there will be no feminists left.” (C [30:29])
• “You believe in ideology, that's self-defeating... You have been psyoped... they're leaving you behind...” (A [34:24])

7. Shifting Social Norms, Work, and the Role of AI

• [35:42-38:46]
  • Women are reporting less interest in “girl boss” paths, more in “tradwife”; AI may soon eliminate many “lanyard class” (soft skill) jobs, disproportionately impacting women.
  • Potential reversion to family businesses, integrated home/work life—“not barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.”

8. Economic Reality vs Cultural Perception

• [38:46-51:24]
  • Is cost of living the real reason? Panel disagrees: “For every example, you can find counterexamples around the world... it's easy for societies to become programmed and assume 'life is expensive here'... but ask those same people if they have a partner, often the answer is no.” (D) [39:32]
  • “There's no difference between cost and culture. The demand curve is shaped by culture... If all people want is to have kids, you can donate to a sperm bank... but people want a family, a partner, a house, a package of goods defined by cultural norms.” (B) [43:55]
  • Laws and norms make low-cost childraising next to impossible in mainstream society; CPS will legally enforce “unsustainable” Western standards.

9. Delaying Family Formation—Misperceptions & Real Risks

• [52:47-60:41]
  • Most young people greatly underestimate the timing pressure: “The window is much, much shorter and the likelihood of childlessness at age 35 is declining.” (D) [52:55]
  • Age at marriage is chief predictor of hitting fertility goals; marrying before 27 leads to nearly zero gap between desired and realized number of kids. ([58:44])
  • Modern career paths have shifted men's “peak” income to age 47, making mate selection riskier for women, which ironically drives further delays.
• "You have less time to hit your desired family size. ... if you MARRY before age 27, on average, you have basically no gap between your desired family size, early life and your final family size." (B) [58:44]

10. Happiness, Fulfillment, and Regret

• [61:50-67:48]
  • Are parents happier? Intentional fertility increases happiness; not wanting kids and not having them = fine, but unwanted childlessness = misery: “Parents are happier... Having kids you want to have increases happiness in the most robust models we know of. ...Happier people have more kids.” (B) [61:50]
  • “A life that's hedonistic and single and childless can be perfectly fun. And we should design around that... For all the people who choose not to create new humans, to not own the future ...AI can be this literal deus ex machina... these people are going to die in their little pleasure pods... and they're going to be happy.” (C) [67:29]
  • Meaning vs happiness: “It's not about suffering or happiness. Because ultimately, what truly makes human lives worthwhile is not the quotient of their suffering or the number of their utils. It is meaningfulness.” (B) [69:54]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the inexorability of demographic collapse:
  “Look, there are going to be fewer people for a while. It is, it is inevitable that the population is going to decline, that a lot of people are going to die, governments are going to fall apart. We want to prepare people, we want to raise awareness, but there's no stopping that. Maybe AI can help, but there's no stopping that.” (C, [81:17])
• On selection pressures:
  “I'm okay with only the most big go getters, most ambitious people who are going to push through no matter what, being the ones to inherit the future. It is unfair, right? It's deeply unfair. But the world is relatively less unfair today than it ever was before.” (C, [78:44])
• On the value of “motherhood as career”:
  “My wife is a business manager for a complicated business called Our Family that has a lot of complicated financials... She is building civilization every day in our house. And it blows my fucking mind that there are all these childless people who are like, well, I don’t want to give up my identity and become a mom. You get to transform from a cog in civilization to building it, to being the person who defines what the future is. How is that not a promotion if you can land it?” (B [113:19])

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Solutions & Policy Interventions Discussed

1. Cash Incentives & Policy [166:36, 167:14]

• Panel explores child bonuses, marriage bonuses, ending “marriage penalties” in taxes/welfare, free tuition for mothers, pension credits for caregiving, and better support for work-family balance.
• Caution on effectiveness: “Throwing money at the problem didn’t solve it at all. Community ultimately did.” (C, [184:50])
• Sometimes “status” or nonmaterial incentives (e.g. cultural celebration, “motherhood medals,” role models) work better or are critical complements.

2. Cultural & Regulatory Change [170:59, 172:48]

• Remove legal and regulatory barriers (childcare, housing, occupational flexibility).
• Normalize and facilitate earlier family formation; rethink inflexible educational and career tracks.
• Offer status and public validation for parenting.

3. Information Campaigns [201:07]

• Biggest impact may come from information “shocks”: clear messaging that fertility declines more rapidly and earlier than most realize.
• “If you don’t have a kid by age 30, your odds of ever having a kid are only 48%.” (B [201:31])
• “The number of people who, when they get to their late 40s, will regret not having had more kids is about 10 times as many as the number who regret having had too many.” (B [214:59])

4. Social Contagion & Community [191:33]

• Family formation is contagious via social networks; policy must leverage and not inhibit networks that facilitate pairing and parenting.

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Underlying Themes and Tone

• Fiercely data-driven yet laced with dark humor and resignation about the irreversible population trends.
• Strong divergence on optimism: some say “we can fix this” (policy, tech, cash), others “the collapse is inevitable, focus on adaptation and legacy.”
• Empathetic to both the appeal of childfree lives and the deep pain of those who find themselves regretting childlessness.
• The show resists both right- and left-coded “blame” narratives; both culture and structure shape the outcome.

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Conclusion: Where Does This Leave Us?

The episode closes with the sense that demographic decline is a “wicked problem”—rooted as much in culture and meaning as in economics and policy—that will force societies either to adapt politically or collapse and regroup around the fragments that value and sustain family formation. The guests each argue for more honest, widespread information and compassion—seeking to minimize future regret—while warning that neither funding alone nor nagging nor moral panic will likely “save” the modern fertility rate. The very nature of modern freedom, identity, and prosperity may have made family formation “high status but unattainable” for millions. In the end, it's a question less of “should” than “can”—and for whom.

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Quick Reference: Key Stats & Shocks

• In many developed countries, your chance of ever becoming a mother if you haven’t by 30 is about 50% ([201:31])
• US: 40% of 15-year-old girls today will not become mothers if current trends persist ([93:14])
• Conservatives' fertility now nearly double liberals’, per recent surveys ([30:46])
• Parental regret: 90% of people with family size regret wish they’d had more kids, not fewer ([214:59])
• Most impactful policies are those enabling earlier family formation, not just more flexible incentives later ([195:23], [182:22])

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Final Memorable Quotes

• “Motherhood is an aspirational, costly good... what we really mean [by ‘status’] is we want people to see it as an accessible, attainable, and aspirational good.” (B, [190:37])
• “Children burn away your selfishness... we're all so in our heads, and it's torture. ...Fill the void with meaning.” (C, [222:57])
• “How's that working out for you?” (A, [223:16])

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Hosts/Guests:
A – Chris Williamson (Host)
B, C, D – Panel of pronatalist / demographic experts, rounds of friendly argument
E – Social media clip (anonymous)

For further reading: See the “Birth Gap” documentary (D), works by Leah Sargeant (feminism and fertility), and the latest research at Pronatalism Initiative (B), XY World Y (D).

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Discussion continues online!

Transcript

[A]

Why should anyone listen to anything that you guys have to say?

[B]

I mean, you've brought in an interesting group, right? I mean whenever people don't want to read something and they just want to watch something to understand falling fertility, inevitably I'm like, well there's this movie you can watch online about how fertility is falling. Why, what's going on? And I reference your work and I pass them basically to you. I mean I'm a demographer. At some point today during this conversation, I will probably try to draw a graph in the air with my, my hands. You can like lunge and slap my hand down when I do it. But so I mean for me there's that. And then of course the Collinses are like practically the people who've made this an issue. For a lot of people we're the

[C]

punchable face of pronatalism.

[B]

So I guess I'm kind of introing like multiple people here. And then you're like, it's so true, it's so true.

[A]

I don't want to punch you, but it's. Yeah, yeah. Simone, have you got, is this just a passing interest, A passion for you? What is this?

[C]

We are, we're hard, effective altruists. We care about the long term future of humanity. And you can actually see this among many people who are famous pronatalists like Elon Musk, right. Like his interests track with what appear to be existential threats to humanity. He's concerned about the environment. He works on Tesla, right. He sees these things. Now he's trying to get humans to space. So people who are very interested in long term human flourishing are naturally likely to care about demographic collapse because it is one of those things that is a civilizational level threat. I mean when, when Steven mentioned for example that this does affect everyone. Yeah, Boomers who are like, eh, like not my problem. They're still in just a few years going to be receiving only like under 80% of their expected Social Security payments which are being paid for by Gen Z, who's not expecting anything. So everyone is affected by this. And yeah, this is something where basically even if you don't care about the long term future, you're affected. But because we do care about it, we care about humanity in 100, in 1,000 years. We're, we're at the precip of a tipping point that could either take things in a very cool direction or a very bad direction. So we care about it from that perspective.

[A]

And you've been working on this for two decades, flying around the world it's

[D]

just over one decade. It feels like two. I come from a very different perspective. I came out of the commercial world where I ran a data science company doing advanced data modeling for 20 years. And I could have and maybe should have continued in that line. But once I saw in January 2016 that the birth rate issue wasn't just limited, as I thought at that time, to Japan and Italy, that effectively it was spreading globally and had been spreading for 50 years and I didn't know about it. And for sure I was bringing up my kids at that time as teenagers, as they were for a world where birth rate decline was not going to be a factor for the entirety of their future. I got scared that why do we not know about this? And then going to research to find out, well, what's a common factor? Because we can't have independent factors alone explaining why this happened in Italy and Japan and Germany and Spain and Austria, et cetera, at effectively the same time. And I find that no one was looking at it from that way. So I really have devoted 10 years into what I would call reproductive dynamics. What are the patterns? So rather than looking at demography from the point of view of how do we explain changes or rather what levers can change things, is it linked to salaries, Is it linked to housing of prices? I come at it from a different point of view as what's the same? What are the underlying structures across societies and over time that are really locked in or mostly locked in? And so it's an interesting. I would describe it really as, yeah, reproductive dynamics or structural demography.

[B]

One thing that I think is worth noting is that for all three of us, your backstory, I know, you're all's backstory. None of us grew up as kids and we're like, I hope someday that I study low fertility. And also none of us are actually coming out of the tradition of academic demography. Okay. I started writing on low fertility and then went and got a PhD because it was a necessity of the job. Right. The reality is, on the question of low fertility, by and large, academic demography has to a considerable extent been missing in action that you kind of noticed this was a thing and then got into it from a very different background. You all were living in Korea, right? And kind of freaked out by no one having kids. For me, I was working on totally different regional economic development stuff. And then I kept bumping into fertility and being like, this is this weird, super powerful, slow moving force in the background of everything I'm writing about. Maybe I should Just write about that. And I think that that's the story for a lot of people who are concerned about falling fertility is that none of us just woke up and said, I'm deeply concerned about falling fertility. There were other things we loved in the world, and we gradually woke up to the fact that if no one's having kids, the other things we love don't last.

[A]

Global fertility is projected to keep falling, reaching around 1.8 by 2050 and 1.6 by 2100. By 2100, only six countries are expected to still be at or above replacement level. The US recorded its lowest ever fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman in 2024. Around 710,000 fewer children were born in the US last year, compared to the nation's peak in 2007. Since 2007, the general fertility rate has declined by 23%. And in the UK, being childless at age 30 is now the norm, rising from 48% to 58%.

[D]

Yeah, and I think those numbers really don't even do a justice to the reality of what that means for a society. People often still think, many still do, that there are too many people on the planet and having fewer people is a good thing. But when you look at the dynamics of this. I like to talk in the periods of time in which births will half and then half again and half again and half again. A curious one I was looking at the other day is if you have a fertility rate of 1.0, that's very low, but it's above what we're seeing right now in Korea and Taiwan, Hong Kong, et cetera. If you take 1.0, and if that doesn't change, the total births in a given generation is equal to the total future births of all future generations, because you keep halving and halving and halving and halving, and you add up all those halves of halves of halves, and you get no more than the total of the current generation. Now, that's 1.0.

[B]

That's a fun homework math problem. You're like Intro to Demography students.

[D]

Let me give you another one, Can I. I've only two of these and I haven't shared these before, but if you take a fertility rate of 2.0, almost replacement level and 1.0, and I were to ask you, what's the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0? Well, there's actually two answers to this question. If you're talking about, well, today's generation, you know, the number of average children people have, of course, is 1.5. But if you're looking at the future, the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0 is 1.92. Because at 2.0 bursts are going to half every 800 years. You get down to about 1.92 and they're going to half every 400 years. You've halved the length of time for births to half already. When you get down to that 1 point, 5 point, 1.6 point, like the US and Europe. And frankly, I think we're all on the path to South Korea. Maybe we'll get to that at some point in the conversation. But where we are right now, births are halving in the industrialized world every 50 to 60 years.

[A]

What happens if the population declines? I think a lot of the time people ask the question, why should I care? They maybe got some defenses. We were worried about climate change or overpopulation or this or that or the other. Trying to get women out. We'll get into that. But what happens to the world? Forget individuals, forget happiness and connection and stuff like that. What just happens to. What's the impact of having fewer people next generation than now?

[D]

I think there's so many answers to that. I mean economics and the social side. I spent seven years in Detroit, Michigan, around the time of its bankruptcy in 2013. And there was a city built for 2 million people with only 700,000 living in it. Very different reasons. But you have the same issue of a society, a city in this case built for a certain number of people. And you look over a period of decades what it's like for a city, a community to be hollowed out. I remember as filming for the documentary, driving around and you see some clips of this, but there was one moment driving down this street of what would have been very fancy houses in then a very scary area not far from the center of Detroit. And there's just decay everywhere. Except towards the end of this one way street. There was a family having a picnic on the garden outside with young kids running around. And for me that was just the image of this is the future.

[B]

That's a book chapter opening, right? Yeah, yeah, right.

[D]

You know, you've got this joyous moment for a young family surrounded by decay. And do you know what? I bet you now that family isn't living there. I bet you that, well, Detroit has kind of re energized itself. It's come back, but that's not going to happen while fertility is low.

[B]

So I'd say I hope we come back to the question of what will Happen in terms of people's individual experiences, happiness, because personally, that's what I care about most. But there is one area of this that I think is dramatically underappreciated in terms of the effects of falling fertility. Fertility doesn't fall evenly everywhere. And as we just heard, it is the case that small differences in fertility, once you're below replacement, small differences in fertility, quote, unquote, small differences can create radically compounding differences in military age recruitable populations. The result is in the 20th century, we worried about how large groups of young men would impact internal stability of countries. Too many young men, they start a civil war, you get communist revolutions. And the US built a whole foreign policy apparatus around managing communist revolutions and civil wars in other countries. The 21st century we already know is not like that. Civil wars are not the problem. Interstate conflict is okay. We're seeing an explosion in conflicts between states. Why? Well, one very plausible reason is that when fertility decline becomes very rapid and becomes very differential, you get a lot of countries that realize one, this is their last chance to make a go at it before they don't have a fieldable army anymore. And two, that the guy beside them declined way before them, that they're a generation farther down the path. And so a lot of countries in the next few decades are going to be at a place where they realize that they will literally never ever have a better time to strike ever again. That being the case, the 21st century fertility decline, I mean, you can think about this north and South Korea. North Korea's fertility rate is something like two times that of South Korea. China has low fertility, but still has, has this big age bump that Taiwan does not have. Taiwan's already smaller. Now you can say, well, automated weapons will fill the gap and all these things. And that is happening in Ukraine. I mean, Ukraine's trying, but Ukraine's also showing how hard it is. Even with the full support of lots of industrialized technological societies helping them innovate and develop, it's still taking a brutal, ghastly cost for their entire society just to barely cling to their turf. So I would say that that one of the real realities of low fertility will be the resumption of zero sum interstate conflict. And we know that because stable population societies or even declining population societies have existed many times in the past. Most of human history was a situation where there was no long run population growth and it wasn't peaceful. The idea that as countries decline, they'll get so freaked out about war that they stop fighting is nonsense. Instead, they will realize now's our moment.

[C]

But it's even more local than that because, I mean, basically we, our government, and most developed countries, governments are set up like a Ponzi scheme. And you're not, you're bought into it. Like, this is a problem because you're bought into a Ponzi scheme. And even if you're trying not to, like, let's assume that you're like, well, I know I'm not going to get my Social Security. Well, I know I'm not going to get Medicare or Medicaid. If anything's hard for me, it still matters because hospitals are going to start shutting down when the government stops reimbursing them. Your 401k. Yeah. If you're bonded to the stock market, if you have a 401k, if you have a state based pension fund. Also keep in mind that as cities start to spend more and more of their budgets just paying for pension funds, where's the money to pay for their existing police forces, for their fire departments? Who's going to come to your house when it's burning down? A lot of these things that we've come to depend upon that we're like,

[D]

well, obviously I'm going to get this.

[C]

These are relatively new inventions. United States is a socialist utopia and people don't even realize it. You were like, oh, you know, China is social. No, they're not. We're way more socialist than China, people. Well, you have to pay for school in China. All the, all the health coverage that you get in China. Yeah, it's not, you don't get like, if you're poor in the United States, if you're at or near the poverty line, especially if you're a parent, you typically have childcare paid for. You typically have health care totally paid for for your kid. You have food assistance for your kid. That doesn't exist in China, that exists here. And it's not going to exist much longer if demographic labs keeps playing out without serious intervention.

[A]

Why? What?

[B]

We already see this in a lot of towns. I mean, I'm from Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky has massive population decline over the last few decades. And whole communities, municipalities that just disband and they say, okay, we're just done as a municipality. There's not enough taxpayers. What really does is you get to point, they'll abandon the school, they'll abandon the roads, the town disbands when there's not enough taxpayers to pay for the salaries of the bureaucrats. Okay. And at that point they're like, well, we'll disband and I'm like, I think most people would have preferred if you fired yourselves and kept the school a little longer. But I mean, you can buy towns in Kentucky, school, fire station, everything. Now they're grown over with weeds and vines and all that. But it's a great place to start communes, right? But ultimately you can see this all over the country. I mean, Chicago, where, Illinois, where teacher pensions, there's like a microcosm what's going on. Teacher pensions are driving this massive constant run up in educational spending even as actual money spent on on instruction is not rising. And surprise, surprise, people are like, well, all this education money is not getting better outcome for kids. Yeah, because the education money is just pension money. We just file pension funding as education funding. And I'm like, no, pension funding is welfare. Okay, there's a classification issue here. But so like, ultimately, localities are already have this having the states localities, they're having this problem where the needs of the old are cannibalizing the futures of the young. And just, I mean, to put a point on it now you see more and more older property owners then saying, well, we shouldn't have to pay property taxes once we've paid off our mortgage because we don't have kids in the school system. I'm like, first of all, you went to that school system, you can pay it back. Second of all, you did have kids in it and your property taxes didn't pay their full cost. And third of all, we discovered during COVID when you shut the schools down, the youths burn your city down. So pay your protection racket.

[A]

I remember we had a conversation, I said, what happens if you have a country's population decline? What does that look like? Is it just that towns are half the size? That's not the case. It's that small towns that are less desirable to be in just disappear entirely and become abandoned. New York will be the last bastion of wherever the population decline goes to.

[B]

Is Tokyo suffering?

[D]

Right? I mean, you look at Japan right now and you look at the forecast for population movement within Japan, and the rural areas are absolutely dying. But the growth within Tokyo is continuing and will continue for a generation more. I call these magnet towns or magnet cities. Young people will gravitate to where there are jobs, where there are supermarkets. And the older people will be left sadly in these rural dying communities.

[B]

And you'll call it population triage, right? People look and they realize this town has no future, so they move to the places that will survive, which are more expensive, which are more expensive.

[C]

And which have lower birth rates and

[D]

lower birth rates and shredders. And then they move again and again and again.

[B]

And so you get, it's actually. And you can see this everywhere. It's not just Japan. I mean, in Bulgaria, Sophia is doing fine. I mean in England, London does okay around the world. Once you see it, you can't not see it that low fertility societies often have thriving primate cities. Because what's happening is all the people who can get out. There's this incredible filtering effect that everybody who has the ability to look ahead at the future, everybody who's kind of a long term planner, an investor, a builder, looks and goes, I don't want to be here when the stuff hits the fan and they move to the big city.

[A]

Why is it the case that declining fertility impacts the economy negatively? Like what's the reason for that? Because you said 401ks, we don't have the money to be able to put into the system. People might not naturally just understand why that's the case.

[C]

I mean, when you have growing fertility, you have growing population, growing demand, you have more people paying into a system. Also, we didn't set up things like our social services in a way where you actually pay money to Social Security and it stays there. No, we first created Social Security and we paid people out immediately. And we're like, we'll just keep funding it as we go along. What could possibly go wrong? So when you stop that again, because it's a Ponzi scheme, just like the basic design is you have to pay people in and then you pay someone out, and then whoever's last holding the bill is going to have to.

[A]

So you need to feed more young people in the bottom in order to be able to pay for the old people at the top. Because we've got an aging population. This inversion means that there are fewer and fewer young people with more and more old people. And that is going to be the problem.

[B]

So the point here, so, but, so I mean, that's 100% true. But when I think about the real economic crime of low fertility, you know, I benefit so much from the existence of Albert Einstein, okay? He invented things that everyone in the world benefits from. Ideas, concepts, or we could say Elon Musk, okay. Or any of these high productivity geniuses who have done things that have revolutionized the world. Innovation is non rivalrous. Everybody benefits. The odds you get a genius are just a function of population times education, times some latent genetic difference, but times capital density. Okay? So if a super genius is born In a country with no education and no capital density, they don't live up to their potential. So basically, as fertility is falling, particularly in industrialized societies that have deep capital markets, education, where a genius could rise to their potential, everyone loses. A bigger population, particularly in those countries, yields innovators for the entire world. The fundamental engine of economic growth is not population structure, it's just ideas. It's productivity, it's division of labor, it's innovation. And that stuff slows down even on the consumption side when a new. What are we drinking here?

[A]

New tonic.

[B]

New tonic, a productivity drink. And this is a relatively new product. It's only been around for a couple of years. Couple years, okay. I would bet if you did a marketing survey on your consumers, most of them aren't 65. They're probably relatively young, partly because your market is young, but also because the market for every new product skews young. Demand for innovation skews young. Older people are fine with what they have. So it is not just that a higher fertility population makes more innovators, it's that a higher fertility population wants more innovation, demands more innovation, can absorb more innovation. As fertility falls, we will simply not have as much innovation. I know. Robin Hanson, an economist who writes on this, argues that we're basically facing the end of innovation, that we're going to see essentially the end of human progress, or at least a dramatic foreshortening in pace. Maybe AI revolutionizes that, but when I think about the economic costs, yeah, there's the wasted consumption of reallocating young people's savings towards old people's consumption. That's a real burden on the economy. But you need those innovators and you need people who buy their products.

[D]

I think there's several ways to try and, to me, crystallize this. National debts. We've all got them. National debts are there to be paid off somehow, or their interest to be paid off. If you have fewer people in future, those debts don't just disappear. You're going to have your national debts, as they stand now, paid off by fewer and fewer and fewer people. So it's not just pensions. A lot of this skews to the problems that we're going to have when people get older. But the tax system is there to support the entirety of how societies operate. And national debts are a very real, tangible thing. I think that everybody should be focused on now. You're right, we're going to lose human capital, talent. I'm less concerned about that because I think the problems are, you know, if You're a young person today thinking of setting up a business, any business, whether it be a cafe or a spaceship company. And you're looking at a business plan and you're looking for investors. And if your cafe or your drinks company is dependent on a certain number of people and growth and you're actually looking at, let's take a cafe in a town with falling birth rates, the investor's going to be much less likely to say, I want to invest in that. I'll keep my money in my pocket. I think you're going to have a massive move away from entrepreneurialism, the investment in time and funding to create innovation. And then we haven't even touched on capital markets, the whole entire bond market, which most people are unaware of. We don't go around thinking about what the bond market's going to do today. But the bond markets are what drives economies. And when governments issue bonds, they issue bonds for new projects to support their national debts, et cetera. There's a cost to that. And those bonds can be today 20 years out, even 50 years out, and those bonds get traded. So you can go today and you can buy probably a 20 year bond that's got 15 years remaining on the city of wherever in Kentucky or the country of Japan. The cost of those bonds, the interest of those bonds is effectively going to be negatively impacted massively in the decades ahead. And what does that mean? It's going to be harder and harder and harder for governments to raise more money, which means again, less investment. And this goes back to my passion for this project. We haven't even. Even if you were to think there's too many people on the planet and if you were to think you don't want kids, this is going to impact you. It's going to impact societies in ways that we aren't yet talking about.

[A]

We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement, feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body. Which is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid nutrients, liver and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test about 20 markers and function runs over 160. And this isn't just numbers dumped into your inbox every result is reviewed by clinicians, abnormal markers get flagged and you get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps so you can actually do something about what you learn. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Normally this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics with function, it is $365 a year. That's $1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now you can get $25 off bringing it down to 340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional $25 by going to the link in the description below. By heading to functionhealth.com ModernWisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout, that's functionhealth.com ModernWisdom ModernWisdom a checkout. This sounds like quite a left leaning idea that we're worried about the welfare of people. We're worried about especially helping people who are more disadvantaged, that it's really important to ensure that there is enough in the pot to be able to support the people who really need it, including the old and the poor and the people that are injured, et cetera, et cetera. If you ever want a nationalized health service, you're going to need to have money to be able to fund that as opposed to just relying on the wages that people can put in so that they can pay their insurance so that everybody else can get it redistributed like that. Why is it the case that having this conversation is so unpopular on the Internet and immediately gets thrown the right wing conservative misogyny, the fascism. Why do those arguments get thrown around so quickly?

[B]

I think people understand correctly that there can be, there certainly can be. And often, in fact, there is a tension between sustainable fertility rates and the gender egalitarianism that I think most of us cherish, right? That like I'm not like a radical left feminist, but like I do want my wife to be able to vote and own property and have the right to like the police. Hear her out if I'm beating her or something. Like I'm you know, like little e egalitarian in that sense. And a lot of people fear very sincerely they say, well I do worry about low fertility, but I would never say so publicly because I stand with women and the pronatalists want to force women to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. And I'm sympathetic to that. And unfortunately, some varieties of pronatalism have tended to play into that. The reality is, and there's genuine tension. I mean, it is true that a lot of the most sexist countries in the world have the highest birth rates. It is true that within society, people with more traditional gender attitudes have higher birth rates. These are all true things. There's real tension between certain gender models and high fertility. Now, does it have to be intrinsic tension? Can we find a way through it to the other side? I hope so. And I think that's what you all have talked about as well, is that you want your progressive fins to be having kids so that their values can survive in the future too. And so I think there's a lot of people who feel, rightly or wrongly, feel trapped between two things they want. They don't love the idea of a low fertility future, but they also feel like they don't have an option other than to like, well, if a low fertility future is the only way to protect the fact that I'm a woman and I basically want to have rights, then screw fertility.

[A]

Who cares?

[B]

Or trust that it'll get solved somehow. Just don't think about it. And I think on some level, pronatalists have not always done a great job. And I probably count myself in this to some extent, of trying to communicate that, yes, right now, feminism, broadly construed, is pretty strongly negatively correlated with fertility. It is on almost any metric. But we don't know that it has to be. We don't know that there's not a future version of feminism that's pronatal. We don't know that such an ideology couldn't be invented. The problem is most of the people who self identify as feminists won't even try. So they won't even try to come up with a version of the ideology that's pronatal. So. And there are people who are like, Leah Sargent has a great book on this, where she's trying to. But. So I would say I agree with what a lot of you're saying, but I'm a little more sympathetic to people who feel between a rock and a hard place.

[A]

Well, I think the other point here is that it's obvious what you need to give up now, and it's not obvious what the costs will be in future. And for the most part, you're not going to pay them. Right. And if you're not intending on having kids, or if fewer people around you are intending on having kids, then you're not even attached to people who might be having to pay them. So it's having to give up something that you want in order for something that you're being told that future people need. But we're not good in a society at doing that at the moment. At the old staving off the.

[B]

Do you really value gender egalitarianism? And then you have daughters and then you learn that the future is going to be one where all the crazy far right people had all the babies and they're going to outvote you. And now your daughters live out a handmaid's tale. Okay, as silly as that sounds to my rational brain, I personally know people who really think that's what's going to happen, that any kid they have is just going to be like governed by zealots. And so they're like, well, I don't want that for my kid. I'm not going to have.

[C]

Yeah, but if feminists stop having kids, I know there will be no feminists left.

[B]

This is what I'm like, be the change you wish what we did to prevent forest violence.

[A]

This is the gap, the mean change. The mean children by ideology. Conservatives at 1.67, which has actually gone up since the 1980s.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And liberals from 1.29, which was nearly the same, 1.44 to 1.29, 1980, conservative to liberal, to now 1.67 to 0.87.

[D]

So yeah, it seems to be the case from well put together surveys that let's say 90% ish of people at some point in life either have or want kids. That's not all right wingers. 90% is pretty much everybody. I think the issue here is that the left have found it more challenging because of the frictions with some of their traditional beliefs to come up with a narrative here that enables them to come up with some form of voice. And I think people on the right, and I will say also I'm not pronatalist. That surprises a lot of people. I'm a researcher. I call myself pan natalist. And a pan natalist is someone who supports people to have the kids they want to have, but also respects people who choose not to.

[C]

Oh, we do too. It's great.

[D]

Okay, I think that's pannatalism.

[B]

We call that pronatalism.

[C]

But no, we only want people who like kids to have kids.

[D]

I think pronatalism to me is interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as people who would encourage others to have kids. And I would encourage people to think about it. I don't know if that's a newest.

[C]

That is a fetish on the left. That is all these women being like, oh, Mr. Trump, don't send me to the Mar a Lago breeding pens. Why are they wearing those Handmaid's Tale costumes? Because it is. It's hot. When you look at what women read in romance novels. Don't breed me, sir. This is. It's not real. No one is asking progressive women to have kids. When you look at, like, far right conservative men who are marrying women, they're marrying women from Latin America, they're marrying women from Eastern Europe. They are not wearing. Marrying progressive white women. There's that return to land colony in the Ozarks. It's for whites only. And they have to keep saying to the men, sorry, like, you have to actually marry a white woman if you want to come here. And they can't get any men who are far right conservative white nationalists who have married white women because they're not there. I'm just saying this is fake, this whole, like, prenatalism. Well, we want you to have kids. No, don't have kids. If you want kids, have them. But otherwise you can just not inherit the future. All right? Because they've screwed it. They've screwed it. This is a toxic culture. We have to wash our hands of it. We have to take to the stars and leave them behind. That's it.

[B]

So I think so. I would. What you call pannatalism? Yeah. That's how I would describe pronatalism. Okay. I don't think pronatalism means forcing people to have unwanted children. I think it means pronatalism. Pro, meaning in favor of natal. Meaning births. It means you're in favor of births. In practice, I would say you're a pronatalist if you support actually doing things that helps people actually have more kids.

[A]

I think the problem with that, Simone, is that there's. It's all well and good kind of victim blaming people and saying you believe in ideology, that's self defeating because of your belief in it. You have been psyoped or gaslit into not wanting something or having a life that doesn't permit you to have this thing, despite the fact that 90% of women have or want kids. So it seems to me that I understand if you've been in the trenches, as you and your husband have for a long time, that you go, all right, I'm fucking done. I can't. The project to try and change hearts and minds. I've Kind of lost faith in that. I get it. I understand why you might be exhausted at doing that, but that is condemning a huge swath of women who are left of center.

[B]

And men.

[A]

And men, yeah, of course. Because for each, you know, the two to tango, like. Like you are condemning those people to kind of be at the mercy of an ideology that you think is bad. And I don't know, I would like to think that we can try and sort of stir the pot to bring some of the silt up and go, hey, maybe what you believe is good in many ways for the world, but also, perhaps it's got some side effects that even the people that are espousing it aren't gonna embody. Like, these people are endorsing beliefs that they don't embody, and they're leaving you behind, and it would be important to get you on site. One of the things I worry about, if you say, like, hey, if you're on the left and you don't think that kids are good, go fuck yourself, because my kids are going to inherit the earth. Like, I get it. But that's not actually what would be true if you were to continue to try and do the hearts and minds change thing. And again, for every step that you take forward, there's 10 people saying you're trying to take rights away, force, handmaids, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I get why that would be exhausting. But I think trying to work out how to bring people into this, because if you really care about birth rates overall, you should be trying to get as big of a bucket as possible to scoop everybody up.

[C]

Market forces are going to bring them in. You can already see this. The rates of women who are. Who are, like, supportive of the concept of a girl boss have gone way down. A lot of more women are interested in becoming a tradwife. We're seeing because of AI, this bottoming out of email jobs, bureaucratic jobs that were disproportionately staffed by women. And I think women are.

[A]

That's really uncomfortable. People don't realize this is like cutting edge normie realization.

[C]

It's happening. It's tipping.

[A]

The first jobs. It's called the lanyard class. The lanyard class are the first ones that are going to lose their jobs to AI. And unfortunately, this is the exact sort of job that women who have got soft, skillsy, HR marketing stuff, that they've worked hard, they've done the career thing, they've done the. The socioeconomic thing, they've done the education thing and now five guys and a lot of code has come into play.

[B]

I think it might be the opposite though. I mean, Claude can replace your hard skills. Claude can't replace the human touch. Right. And I mean, I say this as a man, I say this as an avid Claude user. Like I am hiring people now. We're staffing up at ifs. We don't need to think about their hard skills as much. Right, Because Claude will do it or Claude will train them. But their soft skills really matter because if I'm going to put them on camera, if I'm going to put them in front of a journalist, if I'm going to do like that stuff matters. So we don't know exactly what's going to happen with AI. And there's some things AI will replace soft skills on. I mean, apparently AI is like replacing a lot of people's girlfriends and boyfriends.

[C]

Maybe also like art and maybe also writing and, and you know, therapy. Just like all the soft skills that even if you ask an AI now,

[B]

it'll be disruptive in a lot of industries. But I think there's a reason that programmers in particular are freaked out because

[C]

it definitely replaces, it's not programmers, it's women. And their sentiment is already shifting. And what's going to happen is women are just going to be driven by simple economics. There is less opportunity for me in the job market. Maybe I will start treating homemaking as a career. They're going to jump off the sinking ship that is our current economy and start moving back into family oriented businesses. And that's not bad. I mean, history for the past 2000 plus years has been families working together. And this isn't women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This is women. You know, the husband's out there like, you know, butchering pigs and women are, you know, in the front selling the meat. Right. These are businesses that families work on together. And I think we're going to see a return to that. And I think it's really cool. And I think women are already leaning in that direction. And this isn't about saying women, screw you, I don't care about you, we're leaving you behind. They're going to come to this on our own. But I think this is not about me trying to proactively go out and change their minds. It is about me being like, it's okay for you to do this, it's okay for you to love like this and just letting market forces play out. I was one of those women who were like, I'm never going to have kids. I'm going to live on forever, I'm not going to get married. The most progressive you could possibly imagine. And when I discovered like, oh, I'm allowed to have different feelings, I'm allowed to want this and there are ways that I can do it that allow me to still be very intellectually engaged and high achieving, but also have a whole lot of this whole other thing unlocked in my life, it's super doable. It's a tactical thing.

[A]

So I asked Grok to scrub the most common reasons given on X to explain why birth rates are declining. Economic pressures and affordability was by far the most cited. People repeatedly argue that raising children has become financially impractical due to high costs of housing, childcare, inflation, stagnant wages and the need for dual incomes. Single salary no longer supports a family, making kids a luxury many can't afford. Variants include asset price inflation favoring the wealthy, goody job prospects for young people and wealth inequality like billionaires driving up the costs. Around 25 to 30% of people in the UK cite money as a reason for not having children. And lower income individuals are twice as likely to intend to remain childless. So economic pressures and affordability. Is it the cost of housing? Is it the cost of living that's stopping people from having kids?

[D]

For every one of those examples, true as it may appear, wherever you're living at, you can find counterexamples around the world. I mean housing for one for sure. I understand housing is a major challenge. It's a challenge for my grown up kids to now you look at Tokyo with birth rates as lower, lower than most places in the world. You've had mortgage rates of less than 1% for over 30 years. You have a society that doesn't necessarily crave more space. I have never met any Japanese. I've been to Japan nine years now. I've never met any young Japanese person who said that the barrier to them having kids is housing or income. They say no, it's gender imbalance, it's life work imbalance. So I think it's easy for societies to become programmed and assume that oh yes, life is expensive here, or there's some other imbalance or there's too much youth unemployment in say Italy. That that must be the reason that that's my reason. But what I've noted in these surveys often is that you ask those same people, the 20 whatever percent who blame finances, do they have a partner? And the answer is, well, no. So would the answer to the question be different if they did have a partner. And really, how much more expensive is it for two people living independently to live together and have a small infant?

[A]

But why is it the case then that so many people on the Internet and so many people when we talk about this problem? It's obvious. It's obvious it's impossible to afford a child and raise a child in this economy. Why is that response given if you're saying that it's not the case?

[B]

Costs do matter. And I think there's two ways to help. Think about this. The first is, let's say you have bad eyesight, okay? And the reason you have bad eyesight, you know, ophthalmological traits are overwhelmingly genetic, right? The reason you have bad eyesight is because your parents have bad eyesight. What we would say is you have bad eyesight because of your genesis. There's a lot of people who would say, okay, so if jeans are causing bad eyesight, you have to fix it by changing your genes. I would say, no, you could get Lasik or wear glasses, okay? Costs are not the root underlying cause of low fertility. It's not like in societies where costs are a bit better that they just have no fertility decline, because fertility decline is happening all over for cultural reasons and technological reasons, all kinds of things. But they are locally a cost. They are locally a factor everywhere. And we see that there's ludicrous amounts of evidence that costs matter. A lot of times people say, well, if costs are such a factor, why do higher income people have lower fertility? They don't. That's a statistical error caused by looking at women's income instead of householder husband's income. Fertility is positively correlated with income and has been forever. Even in non human primates and non primate mammals, social status predicts higher fertility everywhere. So costs do matter. The eyesight analogy is a nice way of understanding causes and responses. Causes and how you fix a problem are just not always the same thing. Second way to understand cost is what I call the blueberry problem. Okay? When I was growing up, if I said, hey, Mom, I want some fruit, she would go into the cabinet and she would pull out these plastic cylinders that inside them had some kind of chunks of, I don't know, maybe it was peach or pear or some kind of fruit in a liquid, like a sugary liquid. I don't even really know what this stuff. It was probably plastic rolling off a thing, but it was like 15 cents for a little cup of fruit. You can still buy them at the store. They're still there. I see them. I Don't buy them for my kids. My kids get fresh blueberries, they'll knock back like $10 of blueberries in like five minutes. Why do I do that? Because social norms changed, okay? Because the social norm now is if you're the parent of the park and you're not giving your kids real berries, I mean, what are you? And also, it's not just social pressure. I like the idea of my kids eating fresh blueberries or fresh blackberries, whatever.

[A]

It's a curse of knowledge in that way.

[B]

Yeah, okay, but when you think about it, is that cost or culture? Well, they're the same damn thing. There's no difference between cost and culture. The demand curve is shaped by culture. And also culture itself shapes the demand curve. If you ask, what's the price of a prostitute? It's going to matter what people.

[A]

Jared knows it's going to come up.

[B]

It's going to matter what people think. The appropriateness of using a prostitute is okay? Any price contains in it both material supply and demand factors and culturally normative judgments. So when we think about the cost of kids, people say, well, it's not that having kids got more expensive, it's that your social norm of raising kids changed. But look, if all people want is to have kids, you can donate to a sperm bank, your genes will get out there. But people don't want to have kids. People want to have a family, a partner who loves them. Children that they get to share their life projects with a house of a certain type. They want to have a package of goods that go together and that package is defined by prevailing cultural norms. And it is the case that the prevailing cultural norm of what a middle class family wants to have is really fricking expensive. And you see it on Twitter.

[A]

Comparatively, yeah.

[B]

And you see it on Twitter. Just yesterday there was this thing about people shaved this farmhouse with a kid running in a field. And they're like, this used to be affordable. And I'm like, that farmhouse was definitely a planter aristocrats house. This was not affordable. The other factor going on here is because fertility has always been status correlated for men. Every generation of kids is basically the children of the top 80% of men. Which means everybody's expectations intrinsically ratchet upwards because the bottom 10 or 20% of men filter out of every generation.

[A]

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[C]

but you've touched on the core wicked problem of falling fertility. I mean this began not in the 70s, like a lot of people tend to think, if they're looking at this as outsiders, but in like with the industrial revolution. And that is when we fundamentally changed the way that we lived. We shifted from living in family units with cottage industry businesses to working in cities to working in factories. And suddenly everything about the family that used to come from within the family, you know, your food, your clothing, everything was made more or less within your family or community to suddenly being bought piecemeal. Everything was atomized. And that is a fundamentally unsustainable lifestyle. And it makes kids very difficult to have. And now kids are being raised like they're aristocratic millionaires. I mean even the children of noble families in the past would be raised in a way that would have CPS called on those families today because the kids are off running in like the garden, they're down in the kitchen, like almost getting burned in the fire or something, right? Like the parents were like, go away, leave me alone. And like come presented to me dressed up by your sometimes present governess at the end of the day. And that, God forbid. No, we have to chauffeur them everywhere. We have to buy them fresh blueberries, you know, like this. And, and to a certain extent too, this is, this has been legalized. You know, you, you can't even legally raise your children, children sustainably anymore. So it makes sense. Basically there is no affordable way to have children, especially a lot of children and opt into mainstream society. You have to be a weirdo, Mennonite, Amish person. You have to be often some cult. You have to live off the grid in some way. You have to be in some high fertility Catholic community where everyone kind of takes care of each other's kids and keeps quiet with CPS and stuff like that. That is a really tough thing is you can't now really opt into a high fertility lifestyle.

[A]

You're talking about a non typical volume of kids there.

[C]

Well, yeah, but I mean like, you know, keep in mind most people aren't having any kids at all. If you're gonna have any kids, the

[A]

outliers for not having kids is coming from people not becoming mothers, not from people not going from twos to sevens. Right. It's non mothers as opposed to family size overall. Once you have one, you're likely to get to, to a relatively similar number.

[C]

Yeah, but they're not going to sustain the rest of the population. Like you know, if just a few people are going to have none, you have to have a bunch of people having none.

[A]

I understand this is how you look at it from a population wide perspective. Right. We need to compensate. So hey you guys, you can go over here, start your commune, do the thing and the kids can run around in the dirt. The reason I'm trying to get it back to, people say that the reason they don't have kids is because it's too expensive. That what it seems like is the current culture has made people think that they need a very high level of income.

[C]

It's not just, it's belief. Like I said, like they feel it in their gut. Yeah, no, no, but like literally CPS will be called on you if you're like, hey, son or daughter, can you walk home from school today? Literally. Like when our son was in public school, he couldn't walk from the school bus to our house. We had to be out there, there. There's no such thing as a latchkey kids anymore.

[A]

Right, so. But surely there's still a problem here, which is dual income households. It is hard to support a family on a single parent's income. Yeah, that didn't used to be the case. So it's not just material changes in terms of lifestyle inflation. And I, I've watched too much Instagram and now I think that I've got to have the, the newest stroller and the best car seat and all of these things. Like, it's not just that there's material changes that have occurred too.

[B]

So a great example is actually in building on what was just. And CPS is coming up a lot here, so don't call it on me. But a lot of times I like housing for this because housing is interesting. Unlike the price of blueberries, housing might also shape marriage in really interesting ways and coupling in interesting ways. But a lot of people, when you talk about housing, they say, well, back in the day, people used to put five kids in one bedroom. Why not do that? And the answer is because it's illegal. Because now in most states there are occupancy rates rules that say no more than X number of people per room. Sometimes they'll even be things like boys and girls are legally prohibited from sharing a sleeping space. And it's kind of one of those like wink and a nod laws where like, as long as you're white and educated and you don't make trouble, it's not a real law. But as soon as somebody calls CPS on you, now the law applies. Or if you get CPS called for something else entirely. There's some jurisdictions where it is legal for CPS to deem that your children be. Need to be removed for no other reason, that they are sharing a bedroom with the wrong sex or that there's too many of them in a room. So when we say like, oh, social norms changed and people want more space for their kids, it's also a crime to not give kids.

[A]

Is this what most young people are thinking about though? Or are they not lucky in it?

[C]

They're looking at like the cost of daycare, which is insane. They're looking at really basic things. And again, you can't opt into modern life life and also do this sustainably.

[B]

I'll say the CPS stuff is very prevalent for people who don't share our skin color.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

In the US it's quite a concern.

[D]

So all of these things are going through young people's minds is in the context of misinformation that it's easy to start a family at age 35, 40, no problem, I've got time. Time. And if, if you're in that context where you believe you have time, you can easily see where you're going to think well, if I just get that little bit farther in my career or maybe I'll meet a more attractive girl next week, next month, next year, I got time. Or a more stable, more successful man. And this to me is. And I've started a nonprofit, I hope you don't mind me saying, called XY World Y. And we're setting up volunteers around the world to simply go and talk to younger people about the reality of the timing of when people realistically can start families and the stat.

[A]

Can you explain what this graph is, please?

[D]

Sure. So.

[B]

Oh, that's one of ours.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

Well, yeah. And I have my own way of driving, but I saw that it's the same thing. So the way I like to state it is for each individual country, at what moment in time does a woman have a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother? And that means you look at the people who've already become a mother. And in the US this is, is around he's 27. So if you look at American women who've become mothers at 27 and then look at all other women currently childless at 27, how many would be expected to become mothers at current prevailing fertility rates? And in the US that's 50. 50 at age 27, that shocks a lot of people. And back to your point that I do sense a shift you were saying about the idea of things are starting to change and maybe prioritize, and maybe we will see people deciding to prioritize becoming a mom again over purely career. But one of the things I think is so important that will help this is people understanding, not just women, that the window is actually much, much shorter and the likelihood of childlessness at age 35 is decline.

[B]

It's not like you're good all through your 20s and then it falls. It's just.

[D]

Yeah, well, to be honest with you, I think this plays into an explanation of the political differences that we've seen. I don't know. But I imagine that conservatives, Republicans in the US are having kids at a younger age.

[B]

They are, yes.

[D]

And if that's true, it makes sense that more are going to become parents and that the liberals, the left, given again that the vast majority of people do want kids. I think what's happening there is that more and more leaving it to a point time where they still think there's time to have children.

[A]

What are some of the other realities around the timing stuff?

[B]

So, you know, this will really shock you, Chris, to hear this. I know you're not very familiar with this topic, but there are some Problems in dating right now between men and women.

[A]

Why'd you look at me and say problems of dating?

[B]

I just. I know that you haven't really written about any or talked about masculinity or anything like that. I know that's unfamiliar terrain to you, but. So, yeah, I mean, people are marrying late. They are not just marrying late, they're coupling late. The rate of people who have no partner of any kind not having any sex or anything like that is declining. Or the rate that are not is rising. And I think there's a lot of different ways of thinking about this one is, okay, people think they have all the time in the world. Fertility knowledge is really low. There's a lot of great work on surveying fertility knowledge, figuring out what people really think. It turns out people's knowledge about fertility is not much better than storks. And so people postpone because they think they have all the time in the world, or they think IVF means there's no clock at all anymore. People postpone because they think they need to have a ton of money saved up. I'll admit I actually had my first kid before I learned that people save up money before having kids. I was like, after I had my first kid, somebody was like, oh, you all must have been saving a lot. And I was like, I mean, we paid down our student debt. But wait, what? And they're like, yeah, I mean, you know, you need, like, USDA says there'll be, like $250,000 of spending over the course of a kid's life, so you probably want to have, like, a big chunk of that saved. I was like, oh, no, we didn't do that.

[A]

Hold the pen and fucking. Yeah, we just had a baby fertilize this thing.

[B]

But then the other. The dynamic under all of this is, is it used to be, when I say used to, I mean, as recently as the 1950s, but certainly back in the 1700s or something, that a guy who was 20, 22, 25 was at his peak income, his peak earnings ability, basically, that guy, you know exactly what his social status is going to be for the rest of his life.

[C]

Partly because he also started working at, like, age 11.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So he's way into.

[A]

Been a fucking chimney suite for two decades.

[B]

No, but this thing also, he's going to inherit the family's farm, so you already know what his real assets are going to be. Now, determining a man's trajectory is harder at reproductive ages because his peak is later. Peak income now for most men is at, like, 47. Okay.

[A]

And you think that people are pricing that in there?

[B]

Absolutely are men and women. Women, because the ability to bet on a man's future is a higher volatility bet now. And so men are just not as safe a bet.

[A]

Have you seen this new data? I only got sent this today. There's some new data showing that women who wait longer to couple with a man do get a man of higher mate value. But they trade that at the risk of never having kids at all.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So it's this sort of game of chicken, higher or lower where you just keep on going and going. Exactly. Okay, I'll pull the pin now.

[B]

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

[A]

So there are incentives here in order to prioritize what you want.

[B]

Men have the same incentive. Yes, because men know that if I

[A]

wait, I can maximize. Yeah, we just go to 47.

[B]

And so you get this situation where, where it's not like 23 year old girls are fending off thousands of suitors. Right. That's not happening. In terms of marriage at least it

[A]

depends how you look at 23.

[B]

But in terms of marriage. Yeah, I should stipulate that because again, men have incentives to wait when they can most clearly demonstrate their own mate value. And so it's not even a question of, of like, oh, are young people richer or poorer than in the past. They're richer, incomes have gone up, but they're not as rich as they will be. So as peak income shifts as the extent to which your early life income predicts your peak, you become a more uncertain marriage bet and people have every incentive to kick the can.

[A]

What are some of the realities of trying to do it later?

[B]

I mean, you have less time to hit your desired family size. In fact, one of the best predictors of having fewer kids than you said you wanted, we had these longitudinal surveys where we asked people, how many kids do you want to have when they're like 18 and 22 and 25, we follow up for decades. So then we can see who hit their goals, who didn't. And one of the best predictors of hitting your goal is the age at which you marry. And if you MARRY before age 27, on average, you have basically no gap between your desired family size, early life and your final family size. Marry before 27, you're 4, 26 maybe. And you're pretty much going to have your desired family size. Marry later than that. And your odds fall and fall and fall and fall and fall. Because the reality is now if your desired family size is one, you might do it, but if it's three, it's going to be harder because the reality is you're trading off time. But it's not just number of kids get married at 35, maybe you have the number of kids you want, but by the time they want to play soccer, your knees hurt. By the time their grandkid comes along, your ability to remember your grandchild's name is not as good good as you might have hoped. Walking your grand Being there for your grandchild's wedding, not going to happen later doesn't just mean you have fewer kids, it means you spend less of your quality years with your kids, with your grandkids. That is just I said earlier I hope we get to the happiness problem. Yeah, all these social effects of falling fertility are bad. But to me, the reason I care about this, the reason ultimately I've chosen to devote my life to this at the Pronatalism Initiative, is because there's just a lot of people who are going to die miserable because they don't have the families they want. And as a Christian, I'm called to love my neighbor. I don't have an option in it. And I think that this is one of the most severe problems in our society that so many people are foregoing. One of the great intrinsic goods in life, one of the most meaningful parts of their life, the great project that they will build as much or more than any company is going to be the company of their family before we continue.

[A]

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[B]

Parents are happier. You get happier when you get happier.

[C]

No, not true. Especially women take a happiness hit. Women, clothes and diapers.

[B]

They do not their happiness. No. Intentional fertility causes a rise in happiness. The problem is we mix unintentional and intentional fertility in the data. It's very difficult to separate because you don't have preferences. I guarantee you in longitudinal data, happiness rises short term. In the long run, it's a little more ambiguous because happiness scales reset over time. Happiness rises with engagement. That is, it rises before marriage, basically. But then marriage locks it in. If you don't get married, the happiness of a cohabiting union rapidly returns to baseline. The happiness of a married union tends to remain above baseline as long as you remain married, which people don't always. But widowage and divorce tend to return you to your premarital happiness level. There's three different longitudinal surveys. I can demonstrate all this in having kids that you want to have, which is a big stipulation. Unwanted kids, unintended kids is a different dynamic. But having kids you want to have increases happiness in the most robust models we know of. Unintended fertility is a different beast. And it is true that in almost every service survey, unless you add like a million controls where you're basically controlling away the effect of having kids, people with kids are happier. And one reason is because happier people

[C]

have more kids, especially when there's like abundant childcare in that country.

[B]

But yeah, more Social Security women do

[C]

in places where there's less social support, which is like the modern developed country, like in the United States, where you're not really getting a lot of help, especially if you're a middle class or above woman. Women especially do take a short term hit, per the research that I've seen, and then it goes up over the long run. But I think this focus on hedonistic happiness is overwrought. And again, it's cultural. You have to look for meaning beyond that. And I mean, we also have to look at really pragmatic.

[B]

Yeah, I agree with that. For what it's worth, I would say meaningfulness is more important.

[C]

We can talk about broken dating markets, but like, what are we. We can't fix it. I mean, what my, my husband and I literally have an index of other parents with kids close to Our age, we're going to intermarry our children. My new way of skeezing on people is like, I want our children to intermarry. Like we're. We parents used to be very involved in matchmaking their children. And so we have to talk about what are we actually going to do because we, we can't fix the swipe based dating model. That's gone. It's done. What we're trying to do now is just manually matchmake again. Maybe bring back the London sea.

[B]

Oh, matchmaking is coming back.

[C]

It is totally coming back. Arranged marriages, people are like, I mean, zoomers are like, sign me. Where do I sign up for the arranged marriage group you guys have? Like, it is a real.

[B]

Mine is called church.

[C]

Church is a big thing. Honestly, like Catholic colleges, religious colleges are like the new, hottest place to find a spouse. I mean, we need to look at what practically to do because we can talk about this big problem. The whole thing is like, so what? I guess I'm going to like die alone and. And without any sort of support or I'm never going to marry. There are many things that people can do now. And that's what's important too is this is a wicked problem. It's very scary. But, like, with every endemic and existential problem, there are manageable things that you can do. Like if you're worried about, you know, changing sea levels, like, maybe we should look at like managing a mass migration and getting people off coastlines and shifting the home insurance market and shifting regulation, expecting it to. We need to look at how we, on a micro and macro level are going to manage falling and declining fertility rates and our own personal lives based on the expectation of that. And I think too much of the discussion around demographic collapse is like, is this a real problem? Like, how bad is it? Let's all like ruminate on that. When really it's like, okay, well what are we going to do? And some of the solutions are very radical. Like literally arranged marriages sounds kind of crazy, but this is what we've come to. And I think very similar to Covid. People are like, oh, this will like blow over in a couple months and like the world shuts down. This is another Covid. You think this can't possibly get super bad. It's not going to be so crazy. It's going to be profoundly more crazy than Covid. This is cities crumbling. This is pension funds falling apart. This is people dying en masse. Millions and millions of people. We need to realize that, but then also just actually plan for that, no more performative perinatalism, actual perinatalism.

[B]

Comment on the dying en masse. I just want to mention because I don't know if all listeners will get this, this. In industrialized countries, our social support systems are probably good enough probably that for the most part, most old people will kind of get through. It's places like Thailand where fertility is below 1 and the money is not there to support a big Social Security system for old people. That's. And where the health system is not as strong or like India or increasingly African countries, countries, those are the places where the death toll will become apocalyptic.

[D]

Well, I agree. Places like Thailand are in for an extraordinary level of old age, loneliness and challenges. India, my gosh, my worry about India population right now is its aging population two, three decades from now. No one's thinking about that. That's a humanitarian crisis. It's a ticking time bomb. But in terms of happiness, I think one of the things we have to isolate out here is the temperature percent of people who don't want children. Now, in making the Birth Gap documentary, I interviewed five, six women, 40s, 50s, who had never wanted a child ever. And they're completely happy. Yep.

[B]

That's why I emphasize wanted children. Right.

[D]

So when you average happiness across women and don't separate those out, you're kind of missing something. Now those people who don't want women or they don't want children, I believe it's almost binary. Now you change from not wanting, unconditional.

[C]

Everyone has a price. But a, a, a life that's hedonistic and single and childless can be perfectly fun. And we should design around that. I mean like our, it's incredibly fun.

[D]

I, I think though that the, the people who never, ever, ever have a design desire, there is something that means that they will be happy whether they have kids or not.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

That does not manifest itself. And those people who are just despawning

[C]

it, they're going to be super happy. Like we're, we're big pronatalists. All of our time now is in developing. We're doing like we're building an AI platform. It's called RFAB AI. We're trying to replace humans, replace employees, replace husbands and wives. Like you can see this all happening with other people who are in AI as well, who are also pronatalists. They're investing in all this repro tech. They're having a lot of kids themselves, themselves. Meanwhile, they're also replacing humans. For all the people who choose to not create new humans, to not own the future. And those, I think AI can be this literal deus ex machina that's coming in and going to correct for a lot of this, A lot of the loneliness, a lot of the lack of happiness. These people are going to die in their little pleasure pods with their fake families or their fake realities, and they're going to be happy. And I want them to be happy. And we're literally trying to build things to make them happy.

[A]

Are you, you do you want them to be happy? There's an oath.

[C]

It's gross when people aren't happy. It's very, like, disruptive. Their cries are annoying. So I do. I want them. I believe in, for example, euthanasia. I love this. I love. I love euthanasia.

[D]

Oh, I think it's terrible.

[C]

It's. Oh, it's beautiful. It's the smartest thing Canada ever did. No, that's going to be the solution to healthcare in the future.

[D]

No, but I think it creates a society where I already see it. I've heard it from young people in Japan who are looking at older people saying, why are they still here?

[C]

No, really, we need maid in Japan. We need maiden.

[B]

We need euthanasia. I think it's worth noting just a second ago I was saying, well, kids might make happiness. And you said, well, we shouldn't prioritize happiness so much. But when it comes to euthanasia, well, people shouldn't be unhappy. But I would say no, suffering people, their unhappiness is not a problem. Meaningfulness is ultimately, ultimately the greatest value. And I think we can argue, is suffering meaningful or not? But earlier you said suffering, the avoidance of negative utilitarianism, the avoidance of suffering is a kind of bankrupt view. And I would agree, I would just strongly agree and say, whatever the broader wisdom of euthanasia, and I think that's a whole debate which we can do at home.

[A]

I want to see that book be written, the Wisdom of Euthanasia.

[B]

But whatever it is, I would just say that it's not about suffering or happiness. Because ultimately, what truly makes human lives worthwhile is not the quotient of their suffering or the number of their utils. It is meaningfulness. And it is the things that they build of benefit for others.

[C]

Well, then let the ones who lack meaning get out of the way. All right? And this is not like I will die by my own hand. If I'm lucky enough to live long enough. When I'm no longer useful, I will end my school.

[B]

It's probably not the metric, but look, it's not.

[A]

So one of the problems that I see with that, again, is that there are certain people who have not, through really any fault of their own, had. 90% of women want to have kids. Right around about 4 in 5 childless women who breach the top of their reproductive threshold say that didn't have kids, say that they wanted to. 10% can't. 10% don't want to. 80% did. It seems to me that we kind of have a duty to try and help people live the better lives that they can. It's the same reason that we tell people that smoking's bad for them. It's the same reason that they tell people that they should moderate their alcohol. It's the same reason that we tell people they should get seven to eight hours of sleep a night. And that to someone that's in a health desert or someone that's in the equivalent of an information desert. This is the same for 80% of women who reach menopause, can't have kids and didn't have kids. 80% of them. Is this still correct, this data?

[D]

Yes. So to me, even if we were to solve this phenomenon, phenomenon through, let's say, people having larger families, those who do have families, and we still have this contingent, large contingent of people who dreamed of having families and end up childless for life, that's still a major crisis to me that we still need to address.

[C]

They don't want it bad enough. Look, there are.

[D]

No, I don't agree. No, no, no, no.

[C]

I'm super infertile. I have five kids. How does that work? We made it work. We slept on a mattress on a floor for a year.

[D]

But you had someone to do that.

[C]

That way you can do it by yourself. And we've met so many people who have.

[D]

No, no, no, no.

[B]

Well, but hold on. You can do it by yourself, but let's go back to this. People don't just want kids. They want a specific kind of family. They might want it very, very badly. So in. What you all have is beautiful for you all, but it's not what everyone is going to want, then they can

[C]

go out and get it.

[B]

But my point is, some people's version of family, they absolutely cannot be something you can just take.

[D]

So let me put my vitality curve on the table. So I heard you with Richard Reeves giving a really good.

[A]

I managed to molest your great idea and get it a little bit right.

[D]

Yeah, you did. So if you look at the age of motherhood and almost certainly fatherhood, if we had the Data, if you look at the age of motherhood, it falls into a bell curve shape. What does that mean? It means that, that if you take a society, and most societies today have a peak age of motherhood of around 30, South Korea, 33 US, a little younger. There's a curve, and that curve is almost perfectly smooth if you want to throw R squareds at it. And then we're not getting too scientific here, but it's like 98% R squared matched to a perfect bell curve. Now, that curve has stretched over the decades. It used to be the peak was really high when everybody was having kids around the Same time, early 20s. As the timeline has stretched out, the curve has got flatter and flatter, and it's fallen by a faster rate than it's stretched. So you can look at this coldly, because I'm not talking to people to ask them do they want to have five kids even though they don't have a partner. I'm just looking at data saying, do you know what. What you can actually predict what the fertility rate in any country is going to be, any cohesive society, by simply knowing the average age and the width of that curve with very high accuracy. It means that, in effect, there is a constraint, there's a limit here into the number of people in society who can ever become parents. And that's quite a chilling thing, even for me, when I first saw this data. I don't need to know the name of the country, country the year. I don't need to know what the house prices are, the level of unemployment, et cetera. You can simply predict what the rates of motherhood are going to be in any society from age alone.

[A]

Well, the vitality curve is essentially, everybody's at a dance party and the music is playing and people who want to leave the dance party used to want to all leave at the same time. Which means that if you want to leave and I want to leave, we can leave together.

[B]

They called last call and they were walked out.

[A]

Yeah. However, this new vitality curve, which is flatter so there's more variety, the likelihood of you being ready and the person that you meet being ready at the same time is less and also. Right. Shifted, so it's later, means it is harder for you to find someone compared to where it would have been in the past. So I don't think it's fair to say that they don't want it hard enough, given that right now I'm going to guess the vitality curve is also kind of a measure of difficulty. Difficulty it's kind of like a measure of family formation. Difficulty, mating difficulty, mating crisis issues, changing dynamics between men and women, men's mate value, men might want to have a family. I'm being outstripped by some changing demographics socioeconomically here. Like, yes, they could David Goggins it and get up at 4:30am and triple their net worth and try and do that thing. But it doesn't deny the fact that the difficulty of doing that has become significantly greater. And that just causes casualties as you go along. So again, I worry about saying they don't want it badly enough because all it results in is sort of people being left behind.

[B]

I think we can also just look at the honesty of people's suffering in another way. And that is, again, I've mentioned longitudinal surveys before. We can just look people who hit their desired family size. That is the number they said when they were young. And then they get older. Older. Are they happier or in a. Yeah, okay, happiness, blah. Yeah, it's not a great measure, but unfortunately, in this case, I'm actually not talking about happiness. It's the CESD scale. It's a scale for depression, basically. So how depressed are they? Are people who hit their desired family size from earlier in life, are they more depressed, less depressed in general? There's some exceptions, but in general, the people who are the least depressed are the people who are hit the number they said when they were a late teenager or young adult. If you overshoot or undershoot, you're just more likely to be clinically depressed. And moreover, in ivf, we can see that when people go, everybody who goes in for IVF wants kids. Almost nobody's like, oh, crap, I fell into an IVF clinic.

[A]

I was bored, and I decided to get a haircut and freeze my egg.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So that's not what happens if you're getting ivf, you want kids, but some people succeed and some people don't. And it's not totally random, but it's kind of random. And some people succeed faster. See what happens to people who succeed versus people who don't. And what we know is from Nordic data, where there's no privacy so researchers can see all your medical data, which is super fun. We know that if your IVF fails or if it takes just longer than expected, you're almost twice as likely to be prescribed antipsychotics or antipsychotics.

[A]

No way.

[B]

Yeah. So I think we can just say that a significant source of suffering. Suffering of misery, of depressive symptoms in midlife, in late midlife in this case, particularly for women, because that's who we have data for. But I suspect it's true for men as well, is failure to hit fertility goals, either overshooting or undershooting. Overshooting actually has a more severe negative effect. Like having a kid you don't want can be fairly negative, but undershooting is so much more common in terms of having fewer than you want. And so, so I think that tells us that when people say they want something, they're not bullshitting us because when they don't get what they want, they're like sad and miserable and need anti.

[A]

They haven't manifested their own depression to say, I'm going to prove them right.

[B]

Yeah, screw you researcher, I'm going to

[A]

get depressed on your behalf.

[B]

There's consequences. Now, I do agree that if people wanted it harder, they might have tried harder sometimes. So I'm not going to say everyone who says they want two kids is statistically identical to each other. They're not. There's obviously some people who want two kids and they want it hard. And there are survey questions. I've pioneered some survey questions to try and get at the intensity of numeric preferences, but it's hard to measure. So I'll grant not all numeric preferences are created equally. But the reality is they do matter and they are a reflection of late psychological.

[A]

What do you think? I'm aware you've got your long termism ea hat on in a big regard. Uh, does that, does any of that land with you?

[C]

Look, when we're all getting on spaceships and heading out somewhere else, like to Mars. I don't know if I want to be sharing a spaceship with the person who couldn't get their act together and plan early. Right? Like we used to lose a lot of humans to infant mortality. That was tragic. I think it's a lot less sad that maybe, you know, someone couldn't get their act together. Maybe they just didn't have what it takes. You know, they're not humanity's best and brightest or whatever they they were. They were, they were too much a victim to culture and then they're just not gonna inherit the future result. Like I, I, I'm okay with only the most big go getters, most ambitious people who are going to push through no matter what, being the ones to inherit the future. It is unfair, right? It's deeply unfair. But the world is relatively less unfair today than it ever was before.

[B]

That's like how I learned to love fertility decline.

[A]

That selection pressure is incredibly Novel. And I don't know if it's actually what you want everybody to be selected for in the future. In any case, do we want everyone to be like hyper autist agency maxes?

[C]

I don't know.

[D]

I. I don't.

[A]

Yeah, I'm sure. But I don't think that that is necessarily what you want an entire civilization to be filled with. We've got novel selection pressures.

[B]

ASD spectrum symptomaticity and genes related for are associated with much lower fertility.

[A]

All right,

[B]

for now, I'm using the

[A]

colloquial version of autism, not the real version. It's like the autism I have, not the autism that like, not the autism I have. Look, I'm just. My point here is that the novel selection pressures thing, like people aren't hard charging and driving enough, like executive function was essentially only required fucking 100 years ago.

[C]

Yeah, but we're in a new world now. We can't go back. So if you're gonna be one shotted by modernity, you're not gonna be here anymore.

[A]

What if the future version of modernity. Because there would never have been a period of selection pressure that would have changed as rapidly toward the direction of. You very well may have been killed.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

2004.

[C]

I would have died like at least five times.

[B]

I died in childhood. Yeah. All my kids did.

[C]

Scarlet fever, 100%. And then childbirth again. And then childbirth. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[A]

You were killed multiple times.

[C]

So many times.

[D]

Okay.

[A]

You're five times dead.

[C]

Ancestrally, for real. No, this is true. And this is actually one of the first things that got us into.

[B]

Kids would have still died in like 1970.

[C]

Yeah. No, for real.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

No, no, mine too. It's so real. And I acknowledge that happen.

[B]

Like, I mean, we wouldn't have either. Like.

[C]

Yeah, well, and also like one of my kids would have died, like right when my water broke, like all these things. Right.

[B]

But my kids would have. None of my kids could have been born before 2003.

[A]

Yeah, all of you shouldn't be here.

[C]

No, exactly. Yeah. For exactly this reason is why we got into prenatalism, because we were less concerned with, like, look, there are going to be fewer people for a while. It is, it is inevitable that the population is going to decline, that a lot of people are going to die, governments are going to fall apart. We want to prepare people, we want to raise awareness, but there's no stopping that. Maybe AI can help, but there's no stopping that. What we were most concerned about, honestly, is it only like white conservative Christians and some Jews and some weird like space autists are going to inherit the future and then we're going to have this monoculture. And when the environment changes rapidly again, what if it like kills the space Mormons in the space autists?

[A]

Exactly what I'm saying.

[C]

And you only have space Jews left

[B]

and like, so you need space liberals.

[C]

Yeah, well I want space Koreans, I want space Emiratis, I want space Native Americans. And right now they're going to extinct, like quite literally. And so the first reason we got into this is we're like, well, can we at least have some kind of Noah's Ark? Right. Like enough people taking to the stars or surviving on earth somehow where we don't have this very dangerous monoculture and that I think it's possible because what we're looking at is logarithmic growth. You only need like 14 South Korean families to make it through. We probably already lost indigenous Americans.

[A]

Like what's left?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Basically South Korean fertility has risen from point from under 0.7 to just over 1 in the latest numbers. How the fuck did that happen?

[A]

Money.

[B]

They dropped massive marriage.

[C]

So it is money of money they spent on it is just going to accelerate their demographic collapse.

[B]

Marriage. The marriage rate began rising for the first time in decades immediately after.

[C]

They can't afford it. They can't afford it.

[B]

It's, it's. I mean all south. The money. South Korea.

[A]

That's what I say. Spend the money, make the money. Print.

[B]

South Korea replacement rate, fertility. If they put 12% of GDP into child benefits, I'll put down a mark.

[C]

I just hope they don't have to pay their pension.

[B]

It would only require them giving seven years of annual wages and a baby bonus.

[C]

Only bargain.

[A]

That's a bargain.

[B]

Right. That kid's going to work for like three years. Yeah, exactly right. They're going to have like a 40, 50 year career. I mean Koreans live forever. So like they're going to have a long career. All you gotta do is pay off, is pay seven years of their wages.

[A]

Right. Born into debt.

[B]

Also, Korea's government is already like half the size of the US with an extra 12% of GDP on top. They'd still have lower spending as a percent of GDP than we have right now.

[C]

Yeah, I wouldn't mind nuking the government apparatus here. That's.

[B]

I'm just saying it sounds like a lot of money. And it'd be like, wow, it's a baby bonus worth seven years of work. Yeah. So that every South Korean mom never has to work again.

[C]

It's still not going to work though.

[D]

This is a cultural problem in terms of half life, if you have enough

[B]

money, you can't change culture.

[C]

Everyone has a price. It's true. I just don't think we can pay that price.

[B]

No, I grant these are obscene amounts of money in terms of any kind of public finance. It is less money than we spend on old people benefits right now, but it's a lot. But we should be clear there is an amount of money. The number I quoted, by the way, is not made up. It's from a meta analysis that's in review right now on over 150 studies of cash incentives. It's not fake. But the point is, yes, the amount of money is very large, but there is an amount of money that just

[A]

solves a quick aside. Most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem, it's also what's missing from it. Which is why for the last five years I've started every single morning with a cold glass of Element in water. Element is an electrolyte drink with a science backed ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial intake ingredients. Just the stuff that your body actually needs to function. This plays a critical role in reducing your muscle cramps and your fatigue. It optimizes your brain health, it regulates your appetite, and it helps curb cravings. I keep talking about it because I genuinely feel a difference when I use it versus when I don't. And best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So if you're on the fence, you can buy it and try it for as long as you like. And if you don't like it for any reason, they just give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US right now. You can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com modernwisdom that's drinklmnt.com Modern Wisdom so

[D]

going back to this age structure in terms of being able to predict birth rates without knowing the country, without knowing anything, even whether whether you're offering IVF or not. What shakes out of it is that about 90% of the dynamics of birth rates are age related and about 10% is money. And everything else on its own. So unless you channel that money or childcare policy or whatever else it is into having children younger, it's probably not going to work. And with South Korea now, the average age women are starting families is age 33. So they've got a problem. Not only at that point in time are you way behind the curve. We're seeing a huge increase in the incidence of one child families increase.

[A]

Starting family mean getting with a partner.

[D]

Well, for most people, that's a. That's a key element. That's a key.

[A]

Is that what, starting a family?

[D]

No, no, it means having a child's child. First child.

[A]

Okay. Wow. So you're getting in a relationship at 28, getting married at 31, having.

[D]

That's the average.

[B]

I love, I love that you're like, modern timeline. There was, of course, you dated for three years.

[A]

Is that unrealistic?

[B]

I mean, I think that's probably what a lot of people do, but it just is always shocking to me that that's like, normal.

[A]

So I'm Zuma brained. Sorry.

[C]

What do you think is appropriate?

[A]

What do I think is appropriate?

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I would say maybe dating for 18 months, two years, get engaged one year.

[B]

That's totally reasonable.

[A]

Okay, sorry, I was trying to be a bit more. All right, I'm fucking twisting the numbers a little bit.

[B]

18 months plus engagement. But again, engagements are too long.

[A]

Cohabitation effect. We got to be careful.

[D]

We're talking around the idea of age being important. I think we're all agree. It seems to be that age is a big factor here.

[B]

Don't start early, don't get done well,

[C]

and stop infantilizing society. I mean, we should have kids working in their teens. We should de. Emphasize people getting university educations, and we should shift high school back to doing what universities used to do.

[D]

I'd like to see.

[C]

We should graduate high school, ready to work, ready to go.

[B]

Somebody had a tweet where they're like, you shouldn't encourage women who are 23 to have kids. They're barely adults yet.

[C]

And I was like, bring back teen pregnancies.

[B]

They've been adults for half a decade. I would not go that far, but I know you would, and I respect that about you.

[C]

I'm ready. I'm ready.

[A]

Is there a relationship between female education and fertility rates? A causal relationship?

[C]

Not causal, no. It's correlated. It's messy.

[A]

Because what I've done with the. I've tried to do it, although it took an hour. The first big reason that people give it's too expensive. Typically comes from the left. This reason, which is women are getting educated, bro. Slow life strategy come careerism, workism, et cetera. Although this one's specifically around female education. Like that's usually what comes from the right.

[C]

Yeah, but when Iran started curtailing female access to higher education, their birth rate continued to diplomat.

[A]

So I'm asking what's the relationship?

[B]

There are a couple of studies that use credibly causal variation. So they're looking at places where mandatory school enrollment was raised by a year or two. Primary school education does have a causal effect. When you go from like oh, you had six years of education to eight, that does reduce fertility. Tertiary education, college education doesn't appear to.

[A]

Which is usually what people are pointing

[B]

the finger at now usually we aren't like those women should have stopped, stopped at fifth grade like that. But that does matter. Like just getting people basically literate and agential in the world does matter.

[C]

If anything, it helps now because it's how women are finding their partners.

[B]

Yeah, but tertiary education doesn't seem to have. To my knowledge, there's not a credible study showing that expansion of tertiary education reduces.

[A]

Okay, so the most used reason for people left of center. Center is wrong.

[B]

Is there's a grain of truth, but it's more complicated.

[A]

And the most used reason for people right of center as long as you believe that kids up to the age of 16 should be educated is also largely wrong.

[B]

Yeah. This entire conversation, it's mostly the declining marriage issue. Right. And this is.

[A]

Okay, so is it, is it, is it just a coupling problem?

[B]

Not just, but largely mostly a coupling.

[C]

It's a cultural problem. It's. It's either you value this kind of lifestyle or you don't. But if you buy into mainstream society, you're, you're going to fail. Like you have to go off the grid sort of memetically to a certain extent. And some people, like a lot of people are getting into that. And what I'm so excited about with AI disrupting a lot is it's going to jar people awake or force a reckoning that could get a lot of like more people just interested in doing this, you know, like nothing makes sense anymore. I'm going to find a partner and have a family. Because that does make sense. It's good.

[B]

I will say the supply of trad wife propaganda was dramatically increased by high quality image generation models.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Because there aren't actually enough like trad

[A]

wives, sundress, baking cake, like real tradwives

[C]

are terminally offline like the tradwives that you see now are not actually trad wives.

[A]

They're in the fucking grass. They're too busy touching grass. They need to come back and get on Instagram.

[C]

Yeah. So we don't see that.

[B]

But AI propaganda is filling the gap. So I see. So marriage and mating is a big part of it. And you can see this in all your work on, like, declining motherhood, that first births are the locus of most

[A]

fertility decline in the industrial Total maternal rate.

[B]

Yes. Or what nerd demographers would call the first parity progression rate.

[A]

Can you explain what that is? First parity progression, total maternal rate.

[B]

Oh, it's your concept. You want to walk through the math.

[D]

Yeah, it's very simple. If you take the numbers that we traditionally use, we've used them here. Total Fertility rate is the average number of children that a woman would have in her lifetime in a given country if birth rates remain the same. So pick an easy number. Let's say that's 2.0, much higher than most nations today. The ones that we're talking about. Well, it may be that underneath that you may have some countries where almost 100% of women are having children and they're having an average of two each. Or maybe only half of women are having children, but they're having four inches.

[B]

Like the Soviet system where almost all women had kids, but they had like, exactly two.

[D]

Right. But you don't know what's in behind that, because it could be that or it could be only half of women are having children and they're having four kids. You still get two. The total maternal rate is looking at the incidence of motherhood, basically, how many women. And effectively therefore fathers too, how many men are becoming fathers or women becoming mothers?

[B]

And a lot of the decline we've seen around the world is at that first parity. That is the odds at which somebody with two kids chooses to have a third have really not declined very much in industrialized countries in the last 20 years.

[A]

The total, the TMR is like 2.6 to 2.4 in America.

[D]

Right. The CPM. Children per mother.

[A]

Yeah, sorry, children per mother is.

[D]

It's around 2.6. In fact, it's slightly increasing since the age.

[A]

Meanwhile, the total number of women not becoming mothers has just fucking gone through the roof. What is it now?

[D]

Well, it's 57.5% the last one. It's so effectively we're getting to a state in the United States that's not

[B]

the share of women who. That's not the shareholders Won't become mothers. Cohort.

[C]

That won't.

[B]

Yes, it's like a synthetic cohort.

[A]

It's a moving average fucking synthetic cohort. Nerd.

[D]

Guilty.

[B]

Guilty.

[D]

Look, maybe a way to think about it is if you're 15 years old today in the US and you live the next 25 years throughout your fertility window, just like fertility patterns right now in the US pretty much 6 out of 10 will become mothers and 4 out of 10 will not.

[A]

No way. 40% of 15 year olds today won't become mothers.

[D]

If it's.

[A]

That's the most fucking insane stat that

[B]

I've heard, It's pretty nuts.

[A]

40% of 15 year olds will not become mothers.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

And the reason they won't is because, well, I mean, non marital pregnancy is declining. That is part of it. But the biggest one is people just aren't getting married and they're not cohabiting either. They're just living.

[D]

They're waiting. They're waiting until they've gotten. Till they're 35, 40 IVF. That's where it goes wrong.

[A]

This is when we're talking about what's to do with education, it's to do with employment.

[B]

Those things can matter. Okay, so let's. On the whole, you don't want it enough points. So there's a grain of truth to this. Okay. One reason people might not get married is because a lot of people decide they want to get married because they feel ready to have kids. Okay. So if people are never feeling ready to have kids, the pressure to marry declines. But if you make kids super attainable, people might get married more. I'll be honest, I'm very much a promoter of the idea that it's really about marriage. And I've sometimes been criticized for ignoring this backdoor method through which kids reshape kids, walk back in time and shape the marriages that form around them. Them. But that is a real effect. And so same as the eyesight thing, it might be that declining marriage or bad dating markets or whatever is the cause of low fertility. It also might be that fixing dating markets is really, really, really hard.

[C]

Well, there's a lot of anti marriage propaganda.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

Particularly for women are given the impression that they're going to take a significant hit to their lifestyle if they marry. That the women are happier after they divorce.

[B]

Well, and men are told that once you make then the exciting times of your life are over and now you're done building the exciting things.

[C]

Oh, but there are way more men. When you look at the priorities of young men, Marriage is up there, kids are up there, women are like, no thanks.

[A]

I don't know. Why do you think that's the case? Why do you think that we've got this sex difference now in desire for marriage and desire for kids?

[B]

I mean, I would say personally, not being a zoomer woman, that it seems a lot of it is related to emergent norms of what we call low, like small F feminism. And what I mean by that specifically is the convergence of things like MeToo giving a lot of women the impression that men are fundamentally unsafe. Just yesterday I saw someone saying men do 95% of intimate partner violence. That's not true. Men do about 57 to 60% of intimate partner violence. Maybe not even that much, if you trust the raw CDC data. So you get this idea that men are a deep danger to women. Yes, men do most of the crime in the world, but specifically on intimate partner violence, it's actually way more equal than you would think. Or you get things like women being told that when you get married, it's like your individuality is done. I mean, on some level, yes, that's true, it is.

[C]

No, it's our modern culture that basically has shifted our values in favor of individualism. And he didn't.

[B]

And men get told the same thing about the individuality.

[C]

It's true. But I think women have a lot more to lose. So it's sort of men feel like they become complete when they have their wife and their kids, whereas women, what you're being sold is you're going to lose yourself once you have kids and your husband, you no longer exist as an identity. And in a world where everything's about you, you, you, that's terrifying. Also, women are raised to want to always be 20, to always try to look 20. When you see, you know, older female actresses now, they still look, or they're trying to look like they're 20. Like there's no, there's no model for like a matronly middle aged woman who has a lot of kids, who's kind of cool, like maybe milk.

[A]

That sort of thing can't be flexed on Instagram. So I think the way that, I

[B]

mean, it can be, right, but it's.

[A]

The current market dynamics aren't exactly rewarding that, right? People aren't showing the diaper changes at three in the morning other than to say, look at how horrible this is. And I think that this is, it's an important thing to kind of give compassion to women about which is the things that you are rewarded for and are Most visible have changed rapidly over the last 30 years. And what is now being valued more than ever is youth, fertility, freedom, status, the opportunity to do what you want, independence. And that is not just something that you have always kind of wanted a bit of in the right doses, but it's the sort of thing that your entire world is going to feed back to. And if most of your communication and most of your integration is mediated through the Internet, mediated through social media, which is where most of this is, because you're in an atomized non religious, non pan generational house, this is the only way that you can get some sense of semblance of belonging and recognition from the people around you. So you're obviously going to play into that game and it's tough because you go what you have been psyoped and gaslit into believing. And that's not to say that every woman wants to have kids, et cetera, et cetera. Fucking caveats and throat clearing of the way. Like for the women who do, there is this market that they're existing within which doesn't allow you. Okay, put the glasses on. I can tell this is going to get good. There is a market you're existing within which penalizes lots of the things that come along as a byproduct of becoming a mother.

[C]

Well, and there's no market for hag maxing. No one's going to make money by selling hag maxing. You know, you can't sexy enough. It's not one who's going to make money from it. Like if you invest like sundress companies. No, not even that, because they invest, you know, your busty youth, right. The milkmaid dress is all about perky breasts. If you've got saggy pancakes, you're not wearing a milkmaid dress. Okay. Like it's just, there's no one's going to make money from a woman stepping back and investing in her family and supporting things from behind the scenes this year.

[B]

So like last year for the Pronatalism Initiative, most of our work was focused on housing. We thought housing was super important and we think it is. And we still have some more on that this year. Most of our work is going to be on, on non material drivers of fertility culture. So looking at culture, because we all know culture matters, but what is it about culture specifically? There's one norm that comes up a lot in surveys I do and I didn't take it seriously for a long time, but I'm gradually coming around to you didn't have tinfoil for Me to put a tinfoil hat on. So I'm going with the funny glasses. And it is that we've underrated the extent to which travel has fundamentally rewired particularly young women's sense of identity.

[C]

That's a great point.

[B]

What I mean by that is globalization, cheaper airline tickets, Instagram, all this stuff has actually changed the world. Vacation is different, leisure is different, specifically. And there's also, we can point to a technology shock, basically. Deregulation of airlines, improved airline technology for better fuel usage. We can say, isn't it weird that the share of Americans with a passport has tripled in a generation and a half? Isn't it weird that everybody vacations in all these countries? Like the end of the Cold War, War, deregulation, all this stuff. And in surveys, one of the things that shows up repeatedly over and over is when you ask people, okay, you say you want to have kids, but you're like, not, what is it? And one of the most commonly volunteered responses when we don't give it as an option is, I want to keep traveling. And once you have kids, you can't travel. And I'm like, here's a picture of me with my kids at a mountaintop in Georgia. Here's me and my kids in Vietnam. And yes, granted, I'm a high earning man with a flexible job who, who can give my children an elite aristocratic upbringing.

[A]

And it's a bit more of a nightmare than doing it on your own.

[B]

It is, Honestly, I love it. And I tried to bring my kid here. We were just talking about this before. I was gonna bring my kid here, but she wanted to stay at home and go to the racetrack with mama and put on fancy dresses and watch the thoroughbreds work out. So I love traveling with my kids. I had a speaking gig in Hong Kong a few months ago. I brought two of my kids with me. We had so much fun. It is more logistical challenges and it's way more expensive. It's much more expensive and it changes the type of trip, but I genuinely love it. And I see so many people who really believe. And again, cost stuff stipulated, it's expensive, but I see so many people who really believe that, like, once you have kids, travel's not fun anymore. When it's super fun, you see the world through a kid's eyes. You go to a place and there's a green taxi, and you're like, yeah, it's a green taxi. And they're like, it's a green taxi. And again, like, I see this time and time again. That travel particularly, there's a sex difference on it. Women increasingly see this as how you find who you are. You go and sample all these cultures and this tells you who you really are, what kind of culture.

[A]

It's like an eat prey love generation, dude, that book.

[B]

And you build this like cosmopolitan, multicultural identity. Whereas men are like, is there a cliff I can jump off? Can I like shoot a rocket launcher in this lightly regulated African country? Like, get like what?

[C]

Like.

[B]

And they do things that are fun, but it's a whole different thing what men are looking for in travel to the extent they do it at all. And young men controlling of income, travel way less than young women. And in particular, as women age, travel becomes more and more associated with childlessness. Middle aged, childless women travel a lot. And so travel culture starts to cater to them. You get this whole thing where again, I have these on, because I will admit the empirical basis for this argument is not fully fleshed out. 2026 is the year where I have a research budget to flesh it out a bit more. But I really think as we think about culture, a specific cultural norm we should be thinking about is the extent to which for young women, international travel has become a fountainhead of identity that they see as hostile to people who are anti natalist.

[C]

Though we've literally had close family members say, well, but if you have more children, how will you be able to travel? And we're like, okay, so which of our future children are. Are you gonna just say that too? Like, we're literally gonna have another kid and be like, hey, why don't you tell them that you thought they shouldn't have existed?

[B]

Vacation.

[C]

We could have gone on a cruise. We could have gone to Thailand. Like, it, it's, it is, it is so antinatalist. And I, I get that there are great experiences. Our kids lose their minds when they just see an airport shuttle with polka dots on it, like, oh my God, like Valhalla. But it's not actually that rewarding. If you go on a trip now, you see a lot of people who look hot and tired and dehydrated going and taking the picture and going to the hotel.

[B]

I was hot and tired and dehydrated in Vietnam.

[C]

I mean, like, it's not, it's really not as rewarding as you, as you think it is. And people are literally making trade offs between bringing a whole new life with the entire range of their experiences and a whole new generation into the world versus one international trip a year.

[B]

The wizard I want to endorse that and I agree. But I will say there's swimming upstream and then there's, you know, trying to just divert the river. River a bit. Swimming upstream. All in favor of it. Fight the travel bug. Okay. I'm not going to because I actually really like traveling. So I'm child of my generation. But I think that's a place where you can say, okay, a gigantic baby bonus that costs 10% of GDP might be expensive, but allowing people with children to skip all the lines at the airport literally costs nothing. Or requiring airlines to seat you together, no matter your family. Fair class. Provided you buy all the same fair class.

[A]

You have one business class seat. Fuck you, everybody.

[B]

I've got crying children or like bassinets in business class. A lot of airlines literally don't have

[C]

them or don't allow business class or don't allow them.

[B]

Yeah. So like there are choices we could make that might with the issues of business class or like there's a lot of things you could do to make. And actually Secretary Duffy has done stuff on this like trying to get more playgrounds inside of airport terminals. Unfortunately, the US is so litigious that we suck at airport.

[A]

So you're trying to make child, child travel more child friendly.

[C]

It's a false God. Don't do it.

[B]

Endorse the attempt of the Collinses to just fight back. Fuck that. Let's make an alternative culture. Endorse also for those of us too weak to do that, I think we should.

[A]

Speaking of someone that did 100,000 miles around the world in 72 flights last year, I'm in that one thing that was interesting on the sort of loss of identity point that we were talking about. There was this New Statesman article that came out last week and one of the quotes in it said it's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. This is a group of girls that they're interviewing. It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. We have to get rid of our career. I'm not fully against kids. I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I want to still be me. And I will probably lose that. That final sentence. I'm not fully against kids. I just don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me. And I will probably lose that. I think think that that like yeah, travel and Instagram and all the rest of it. This hits really close to the center of what it is that women viscerally feel. It's real right? That like, holy fuck. I spent a long time getting myself into education and employment and really, really pushing the limit. And like the world recognizes me and maybe I've got followers on Instagram and my Instagram's going up and maybe I've got my own business to a degree or whatever it is I'm doing. I don't want to become just a mother. I want to still be me. And I will probably lose that. Why is that a new or novel identity shift challenge that women are facing?

[C]

I'll tell you what, like the one thing that convinced me to have kids, second date with my, my future husband. He's like, I want to have a lot of kids. And I'm like, I'm never going to have kids and I'm never going to get married. And he's like, well, what would have to change, you know, to, to change your mind? I'm like, I don't want to give him my career and identity. Exactly that issue. And he's like, well, what if you, what if you didn't? What if by default in our relationship, if anyone had to step back, it would be me and you would never have to do anything you don't want to. And I'm like, well, I'd have infinite kids then. And I think a lot of women are the same way and they're not presented with that opportunity. I think another issue here is that

[B]

now women are really hate the crap you all get in the media. When Malcolm is like paradigmatically the thing that a lot of like feminists would say they want is like a man who will be like, I would like to have kids. I'm willing to take the hit for it. Like that's something I have always admired about him and about your oldest.

[A]

So Malcolm, Malcolm's a stay at home dad.

[C]

Well, he's right now with like all the kids, right?

[A]

Stay at home army fucking platoon commander while.

[B]

Sorry I interrupted you, but I just wanted to do some male.

[A]

No, no, but the fact that he does that. But you guys get kind of castigated as the conservative trad con despite the

[C]

fact that he's like the troll. No one's going to pay attention to us if we give the nuanced perspective. Because no one likes nuance in the end. You got to catch them with the candy.

[A]

But identity don't want to become just a little bit.

[C]

But women in the past used to complete their identity to fully become themselves by being a mother. You know, people would, you know, all the arts, like the Virgin Mary with, you know, that's like pronatalist propaganda. Like all the most beautiful women always have a baby in their arms, right? Like this. This was so endemic in sort of the culture that women grew up around that they were willing to die in childbirth because that happened a lot. You know, they would know someone who died in childbirth, who lost babies. You know, this was clearly something that was very dangerous. Women were willing to endure that anyway. And it just happens to be now that we live in a corner culture where all that we're presented with is a loss. And we've grown up with mothers who've done that. I mean, the reason why I, I really felt this way is I saw how it hurt my mother to basically sort of fall back and become this caretaker. And then I. I think she kind of gave up on getting cancer treatment because she didn't really have an identity left anymore. She just decided to stop treatment because there was no one for her to care for anymore. She was done caring for me. She was done caring for her parents who died. Like what. What left was there because she lost her identity in that wash. And I didn't want that for myself. And I think a lot of women feel the same way. We need to fix that in society. And I do think.

[A]

Does that mean, therefore, that somebody needs to leave, lose their identity now in the modern world?

[C]

We need to shift to a new way of living, but we will. We're about to enter such a period of massive disruption with demographic collapse, with AI, with all these other things that are going to happen. I feel like it's going to shake out for the best. Best. But people need to be aware of the dynamics at play. I mean, I'm glad you're having this conversation with people.

[B]

Can I just. Sorry. We've talked a lot. You and you. You are getting into.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, for me, at the risk of repeating myself about the importance of age, we're going through a lot of shifts right now, so maybe now is a good time to look at the progression of education, career development, because the way societies are set up right now. And you're absolutely right, I mean, women absolutely do and should want to establish themselves in some way on the career path. Of course they should, because they just spent n years studying, going all the way back to elementary school, all those exams, right the way through college or training or whatever it is. Of course, career development is a natural thing. So as societies, what we have done is effectively formalize a system. System that is antenatal. And unless we start having conversations with all respect, truly. I mean, the travel question is, as a dad who divorced dad traveling with three kids around the world and can I tell you a little story? I was flying between LA and London with three children under the age of seven on my own.

[B]

We who are about to die salute you.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

And my daughter, she was two at the time. I mean, she was so sweet. She started playing peekaboo, but not saying a word, just looking at the man behind her. And it was a little annoying, I'm sure. And I tried to stop her, but at one point the flight attendant came and said to me, would you please tell your daughter stop looking at that man? And I said, well. And the flight attendant was saying this in a way that she wasn't comfortable. The man had complained. And my response was, who's gonna pay his pension?

[B]

Correct.

[C]

Nice.

[B]

Correct.

[C]

Nice.

[D]

And the flight down. What do you mean?

[B]

A baby crying on the plane is the sound of a healthy society, right?

[A]

As the one person sat at the table who doesn't have children here I feel like I'm having to pay a car cost that everybody else gets to benefit from. My sleep is being damaged. What about my sleep? It's hard.

[B]

You got plenty of sleep. You don't have a kid waking and

[A]

you up at 3:00am oh, okay.

[B]

That's true.

[A]

I'll get back into business classes if I can.

[B]

The part where it says just a mom. This is a. I hate this so much. So my wife is a stay at home mom. Mom. She wasn't. The first several years of our marriage, she actually earned more than me. And then we were kind of equal and then we had kids and she stepped back and honestly, we didn't really discuss it at first. It just kind of happened, which is what happens for a lot of couples. Since we've discussed it and she's like, oh, no, no, no, this is what I wanted. This is great. You go and earn money and I get to raise my kids the way I always dreamed of. This is perfect. But once our kid's grown, maybe, maybe she'll go back and restart her career. But it infuriates me when people are like, oh, you're just a mom. And it's like, hold on. My wife is a business manager for a complicated business called Our Family that has a lot of complicated financials. And I mean, I'm not the one handling all of that because I'm a nerd who says things like parity progression ratio in wide audience podcasts. Clearly I'm not the guy who going to sit down and solve day to day life problems. Not me. My wife manages that. Because a complicated high income family needs a business manager. My wife is an educator. We homeschool our kids and she organizes personally three different homeschool co ops that she thrives at and they give her a chance to plan curriculum, to oversee other people, to manage things, to lead projects. She is a huge contributor at our church community where she's functionally a center of social life for a lot of people. My wife is living, living. She is a girl boss in a sense. She's a mom boss. Okay, yes. She doesn't get paid for it by an outside employer and she doesn't, unfortunately she doesn't get the recognition she deserves because what she's doing is a complicated skills intensive career of raising people who are going to be incredible adults. And look, there's a lot of stuff that's genetically baked in. My kids are smart because they have my wife's genes and some of mine. My kids are decent and pleasant people to be around because they have my wife's genes and they're unpleasant because they have some of mine. But their acculturation, the specific manners they use, a lot of their culturally specific morals and values, I would love to say a lot of that is me and some of it is me. The fact that I enjoy archery and hatchets and swords as me. But their actual day to day functional operative practices and values are because of my wife. She is building civilization every day in our house. And it blows my fucking mind that there are all these childless people who are like, well I don't want to give up my identity and become a mom. You get to transform from a cog in civilization to building it, to being the person who defines what the future is. How is that not a promotion if you can land it? And we just, we don't get that. But it infuriates me that my wife's career is treated as a demotion. When she like we upgraded her to a what I see as a higher status career.

[A]

There was a conversation I had with a friend who had two kids while she was still working very high powered job at Google. And then one kid after Covid where she decided she was gonna be a stay at home mom. She kind of missed a good bit of the, done the daycare thing previously. This time I'm gonna be a stay at home mom.

[B]

She's old an, an awesome one.

[A]

She's a fucking. She's a sick, she's a sick mum. And she went to a local mum meetup Thing I love parenting, you think? And one of the mums said to her, this is a while after she moved into this new place. One of the mums turned to her and she said, you know what? I wish I'd known you a few years ago when you were still working, you know, when you had a lot going on.

[C]

Oh.

[A]

And she rang me after, after this and was like fucking distraught that basically these other mums who were also working mums saw her as less than they saw her. And what she said to me, this was a real kicker. She's like, do you know what it is? And she's mum, right? Mum Mode left the big paying job at this company behind. I'm so jealous of people that had kids during COVID you know, because they didn't feel like they were missing out on than anything. So even her as somebody who's made.

[B]

I'd say having kids during COVID was

[A]

kind of, I mean it was fucking sensitive. Maybe not necessarily for the reason that it didn't feel like you were missing out on what was going on, but like this is the point that to me having a population that's not this shape, an upside down fucking Giza pyramid shape, seems like the sort of thing that would be good if you cared about social redistribution and you cared about looking after people that were in worse situations than they would like to be in because you've got enough money to be able to pay for them in the same way way as pedestalizing mothers who decide that they're going to raise the next generation of humans seems like the sort of thing that should be a pro feminist policy. And seeing only independent women who are careerism working their way through things which they are free to do and they should do if they want to do. But them being the only women that are seen as ones worthy of respect, respect, that seems to be the most misogynistic thing that I can think of. Oh, the thing that you naturally can do with your body, the thing that you were literally built to do is of less status than something which is more coded as that of a man. And what men typically have done throughout history, like is that. Am I fucking insane here or is that not the most like misogynistic viewpoint that you could think of?

[C]

It's not. It's a systemic problem. It's not misogynistic per se. It's. This doesn't. How can you measure this in terms of genetic gdp? How can you measure this in terms of output? What we've lost, it's a silent death of this huge amount of utility that just wasn't sufficiently measured. But keep in mind, like even.

[A]

And this is the joy of building a family.

[C]

Well, but I mean, in the 40s and 50s and even 60s, there were home economics classes. Women were taught about managing household finances and about cooking and about family care and nutrition and all these things. It was treated like a career. No, it's like, I really want to bring it back in auto shop. I would love that.

[B]

Some schools still have, but they're like electives.

[C]

Yeah, well, I've never seen a school that, that does that. But I mean, we, we used to as a society do that. And to a certain extent it just isn't. It isn't captured, it's not measurable, and

[A]

therefore it's not flexible.

[C]

Right. We can't see it. So it must not be valuable. And it's not just this parenting and all this community support. It's all the philanthropy and community support and elder care and all these invisible services that women who are like, in your wife's position, she's not just raising, raising your kids, she's also contributing to the. I'm sure she's also contributing significantly to

[B]

her community society on her back.

[C]

But no one's measuring it. Like, if no one hears it, did it happen?

[A]

And is this why it's low status?

[C]

Yes. I mean, right now, status is sort of measured by like, did you take a picture of it? Like, is it online? Like, is it measured in gdp? Is it making money? This is how we decide in our society now, if something's valuable and all these intangibles, you know, as the world becomes increasingly online, people are being rewarded for what is.

[B]

Also, you think about elder care. There's an older woman in our church who's in cognitive decline and knows it and needed help and didn't know who to ask. She got talking to my wife at church. Me and my wife were over there a couple nights ago setting up a Roomba for her that can clean her house for her. My wife is helping arrange her pickups for church. My grandpa, who's in his upper 90s and is in memory care, My wife is over there one or two times a week with the kids to sing to him and read the Bible with him. A lot of the labor of caring for. It's like, oh, we need these women to be in the workforce to generate tax revenue, to care for, to do old age pensions. You might want some of those women who are not doing 40 hours a week at work because they might be

[C]

doing some Elder care and the inefficiency. Right. Instead of doing that, the state's like, oh, well, let's pay all these other services to provide elder care. Except 90% of it goes to fraud.

[A]

Apparently, a friend made a good point the other day. If you took two women who both ran a bespoke daycare service and looked after each other's kids for the same amount of money, the net result would be the same as if they looked after their own kids full time.

[C]

Except they'd be respectable.

[A]

In the former case, the women would be seen as girl bosses, and in the latter case, they'd be seen as unambitious.

[B]

Yes. Also, as long as you incorporate them as a business that's actually currently legal and you could get a tax credit for it. But if you watch your own kid, it's not. The IRS would come after you if they found out it was purely one to one. But if you had, like, 12 parents and you all took the turns, you could, that'd be perfectly legal. And so I'm not gonna lie, I've brought this up at my church. Like, we could come up with, like, childcare, laundry, daycare. That's really just like a. Yeah, like a child. It's just a mom.

[A]

Are there enough Somali people around to run this?

[C]

No, no, no.

[B]

But, like, for the. Even just, like, for the child care tax credit, like, then we could all pay into this the same amount, all claim the same amount out, and we all get a tax credit.

[C]

Look, if they're doing it, we should do it, too.

[D]

Too. I think, you know, with huge respect to your wife. Huge. And also to you for raising five kids so far. But most people don't want those lies. Most people want a smaller family.

[C]

They don't know. They don't want those lies.

[D]

And most women do want careers and do want dual identities.

[B]

And my wife had one and probably will again.

[D]

Right. So we need to engineer societies in a way that enables that, and we're just not right now.

[C]

That's how society mostly was, though. There was never this world in which women were always not working. Women have always worked. Your wife is still working now. She worked before. And this is very natural. And I think we've. I think there was this. I think a lot of it has to do with this golden age of media. Like, when TV first came online, we had this very short period of the nuclear family where women were a leisure class. And because we all anchored to that, because that's when TV first came online, we had these, like, foundational shows. Everyone was like this is what tradition is when really no, it's never been like, like that. What we saw was this weird aberration and it's always been that women have worked and also raised kids and it's very dynamic and kludgy. But we don't, we're not very creative. We have to see a model for it. And there's no model left.

[D]

There's no model left. That's absolutely right. But what we've done is put career paths, which involves education and training in place that mean that the jump off point where you can now consider realistically both being a mom and working in some form is really impossible for most people to get their mind around. And okay, we talked about finance and I want to go back to that, but there's a lot of financial vulnerability to young people and with divorce rates as high as they are is one example for sure. A young woman is probably going to want to think things through if things don't work out. So if I'm right that the age is the key determinant of the level of childlessness, the TMR in the country, we need to be thinking of ways for mass re engineering of societies to make careers and education and pathways to parenthood simultaneous at a younger age. But there's no, there's no conversation around that.

[C]

Yeah, there should be though, because the coolest thing about perinatalism is this is the lowest stress cause in the entire world. Because everyone on a family level can make this possible. You can matchmake your kids, you can help them start their careers in high school earlier. Like everyone on a micro level has the capability of creating an intergenerationally durable culture where they're all about high fertility and starting families early. You can do this on your own personal level and other people can do it. It can mimetically spread.

[D]

Let's say we're successful collectively in that people should become more aware, aware of the risks of delayed parenthood, that the likelihood of becoming a mom in the US I think at age 35 or older is around 15%. Once people start to understand that, and if we imagine that, okay, not just the US this is becoming more of a global problem en masse, that younger people do want to start to have families again at a younger age. There's nothing in this conversation that I think we've really approached yet that actually in the approach that.

[B]

Absolutely.

[D]

And that's where conversations, including ours, I think needs to go.

[A]

Yeah, Simone does have a solution for this, which is fuck him. That's Your solution currently.

[B]

But as with travel, Simone's like, ah, screw it. Travel norms are bad.

[C]

It's overrated.

[A]

But there is a bell curve also at the table too. And Simone happens to be toward the tail.

[B]

But for those of us, you know, for people who are not, are going to have a hard time saying, ah, fuck the norm, I'm gonna just do my own thing. Which I think that's a great thing to do. But if that's not you, I do think talking about compatibility of career trajectory and family trajectory is really important. And I think during COVID we all woke up and realized a big one, remote work. And there's growing evidence that remote work unlocks a lot of fertility and so great. But it's unlikely that remote work is literally the only technology out there to do this. Yes, one of the big ones. I actually have an article that's gonna come out about this, I think tomorrow is that just being able to take a break for like four years in a career. The problem is when women exit the career force, they take a huge hit and re entry is often almost impossible. Right. It's so hard to re enter.

[A]

Is the same thing true for men? I'm going to guess not to the same extent.

[B]

Well, men never probably. They just don't exit. For those that do exit, I'm not sure. But re entry is so hard. That is the place where we can make a huge difference. Because the reality is it's not just that a lot of women exit the workforce when they have kids. Most women do not want a demanding career when they have a one year old. Some do, but most don't. And in surveys we see this. When you've got small kids at home, most people are like, I might work a few hours to keep my toe in the market, but if you're told, look, you got four years where you don't have to have a workplace job. If you want to work a little, you can. But basically we expect you to just like pour into your kids. I, I think 80% of women, if they knew they could return at a comparable place as they left, would. The problem is we don't have that. And maternity leave doesn't solve it.

[D]

And from what we're saying, mothers of young families are highly skilled at organization, dispute management, time management, et cetera.

[B]

Hostage negotiation.

[D]

There you go. And if I were an employer today, today I would be, you know, here's what I'd love to see. Employers get to that. In annual reports at hiring fairs, employers state the number of their staff that become Parents?

[B]

Yes. Like the, like the. You say how many board members are minorities and how many of your new

[D]

hires are your environmental footprint? You have to do that legally right now.

[B]

The total fertility rate of your employees.

[D]

And then you see where college young people gravitate towards. Those who don't want kids may well go to the employer who has highest salary and everything else, but very low rates of motherhood.

[B]

When I was at a conference with, there was a Chinese businessman, actually a couple of them, who run large companies. And I was listening in translation. So this might not be entirely. I might have the exact details wrong, but basically they were like, we've started doing this. We're tracking the fertility of all of our employees. When they have a baby, they get a huge bonus. If they're a woman, they get a certain amount of. They get way more than the maternity leave that China provides because we feel like if they have kids first. One of them said, well, better people have kids and I want the best people. And I was like, okay.

[A]

Are you sure that wasn't Simone?

[B]

No, but it was funny. These Chinese, these were unusual. Okay. These were self selected by Chinese businessmen worried about low fertility. Okay. But like, they were being very blunt about, like. Oh, yeah, we've started, like hiring interviews for like our junior, like, executive fellowship things. We ask about their family plans and we hire the ones who want more kids.

[D]

Well, what about.

[A]

What. What about free college tuition for mothers?

[B]

Okay, so this is an interesting one because you could say when people have kids, they tend to drop out of college. We want to encourage women's educational attainment by providing free tuition for mother moms. So it's interesting because you're saying we want to encourage education when obliquely. What you're actually doing is you're encouraging fertility for students. And I think it's a fantastic idea. School is a great time to have a kid. Your schedule is easy. I mean, I had three kids during my PhD.

[C]

Smart.

[B]

Sorry. Arguably, I had four kids during my PhD. My first was while I was applying. It's a great time. First of all, you have a lot of young peers who can watch your kids. Second of all, most universities have on site childcare that you might be able to get into and is often discounted for students. Third, you're pretty young. Fourth, your schedule's like, flexible in different ways. If you are married during graduate school, that is your time. Crank them out.

[A]

But that also means that free college tuition for mothers would allow somebody who's 35 to go and get an education.

[B]

Yes. Oh, so you Mean, going back, you could.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You could have like a V. A VA or like a GI Bill for moms.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. I think it's not a terrible GI Bill.

[C]

I like it.

[B]

Yeah. GI Bill.

[D]

Yeah. I interviewed a young German woman medical student about fertility making birth gap. And I didn't realize, but she already was a mother at age 21. So I was interviewing her as a medical student thinking it was going to be asking her about her future fertility plans. And no, she's already a mom. And by the way, she was traveling and so that was never a problem to her. But her data point for starting a family young was she looked at all the other doctors and so many were childless. And she talked to some of them and said, well, there's just never been a moment in time. Life just sped up and sped up and sped up. So she decided, well, let's do. And she ended up cohabiting with a group of other young people who all the kids and you know, so there is something for it. It's not for everybody, clearly, but you know, these pathways to, to make education, training, careers, career development, parenting, something that are entirely compatible is. I'll go further. I don't think nations are going to survive this.

[C]

No.

[D]

Unless the age of parenting becomes much younger. And so this isn't a marginal idea. It's something that goes to the core.

[A]

The point that you mentioned there, which I think is really important, is the sort of felt sense that women have, especially now, of that loss of identity and the fear and the uncertainty. Uncertainty. Cost of living is higher for a lot of people, especially at the lifestyle that they think that they're supposed to have. Which is what it is. Right. Regardless of whether or not you would just inflation or impose. Correct.

[B]

You don't choose your social.

[D]

No.

[A]

So you're. You're suffering in this thing. Regardless of whether it's true on a spreadsheet. When you come for inflation and all the rest of it, that's what it feels like. And one of the re. One of the things I've been thinking about, I got in a lot of trouble at the start of this year for talking about birth rates decline. It's interesting when it kind of breaks out into the real Internet. Right. Not the people that are maybe a bit more familiar with this and I hadn't done the appropriate land acknowledgement, throat clearing that I do usually. And that means that if you don't and it hits kind of like the normie net, you get in a lot of trouble. It made me reflect on things I'M like, okay, if I'm interested in this topic and I don't want to have to take a ton of slings and arrows when I do it, how do I do it without having to do this sort of unnecessary landing in Australia thing each time before I start talking about it? I think one of the problems that I encountered with was the cost of having kids to a woman is so high, like, physically incredibly high. They're the ones that risk it. They're the ones that their mate value changes way more than the father. Give a dad a kid and get him to walk around a park like his mate value's probably gone up.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

As opposed to a woman who. Your beauty, your sense of self worth, all of this stuff that society is imposing on you and is now trying to extract and monetize for from you

[B]

say nothing of health complications and the

[A]

physical, the cost, the pain, the uncertainty, the fear, all of these things. And I think what happens is, if you're a guy who is talking about that in anything that approximates flippancy or dismissiveness, you come across as being very callous if you talk about this topic without the appropriate level of sensitivity. And it's all well and good, me steaming in and going, well, look, we know that it's like, hey, hey, hey. I don't think that you're fully appreciating the gravity, the felt gravity of the situation when we're talking about lost identity for women in their careers, which are now a more important part. It's the thing that's imposed, self reinforced from all of the people on the Internet. This is your primary source of self worth. Your work, your career, your education, your independence, your freedom. And then there's real legitimate reasons to worry about it, too. You say, well, what if I get left? What if we get divorced? I don't want to be a financial president to my husband. I mean, a relationship that I can't. How many marriages stayed together 75 years ago because the woman had literally nowhere else to go? All of these things together have created a situation where this conversation's really fucking hard and the conversation's always about women. The conversation always lays this at the feet of women and goes, because as I asked you this question over WhatsApp, I was like, why do we. Why is it like, total children per mother? Why is it the. Why is it mother, mother, woman?

[B]

Because men lie about their fertility.

[D]

Never.

[B]

They don't know how many kids they have. Sweden actually tracks this data pretty aggressively. And the total number of children born by administrative Data matching to fathers is about 8% less than to mothers. Sorry, it's about 6%. In the U.S. it's about 11%. About 11% actually. I think in the newest data it's 10%. But about 1 in 10 kids have no, no medically acknowledged paternity.

[A]

Well also like the ONS just collects data about mothers.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

There is no data about fathers.

[B]

No, the ONS has father data, but it's missing for I want to say 7% of births. But it is there.

[D]

But in terms of the regular fertility data around the world we focus on mothers because it's easy at a hospital to get a birth record and ask some questions to the mother. Age, birth order is nice to have. I think we find it uncomfortable, or we did in the past to ask you as the mother, by the way, who's the father here? Or it might be in some. And we've stayed away. I think that's changing. I know there are initiatives around the world to collect more timely, meaningful fatherhood data. But one interesting thing, back to this

[B]

curve where they're phasing it all out.

[D]

Okay. This time timing curve in countries where we do have data on the timing of fatherhood really is just a slight delay of the same curve of mothers. A little, little flatter, little stress, a little flatter.

[B]

Especially at the high end.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

So again, the idea that men think that they can wait, they're in the same races, I've called it that women

[C]

are for now listen, I mean this is going to be centered on women for a while and then we get in vitro gametogenesis and we get artificial women wombs. And that tech is in development today.

[B]

It is.

[D]

So it's not going to work though. If you look at fertility treatments which

[C]

have been in place for a small population, but once this scales, it scales. So you know, I'm looking, I'm, I'm far future. Right. So I see this as a, is a viable solution. There's another really important part of this though is with there's this, this big sort of psyop with women in pregnancy that it's like this horrible thing that destroys your body, which clearly isn't necessarily true. But it's one of those sort of self fulfilling prophecies. I think when women buy into this and come to believe it, they're way more likely to have actual and very real perceived worse pregnancies and worse complications and worse recoveries because they expect it and they live it like spoonies. You know, these people who sort of believe they're deeply sick online actually experience those symptoms. Spoonies, they, they, it's like Munchausens. It's like new, new Munchausens. And there's like whole social networks where like they post the pills they take and they sort of buy into it and feed into it and they're feeling real sickness, but it's not real. And I think a lot of this does happen with pregnancy and there's just, there's the amount of women who think that this is going to destroy your body and it's going to be painful and horrible when you expect that it's going to happen. And so I appreciate that it needs to be acknowledged and that this does fall to women and that pregnancy isn't easy. But I mean also people run marathons, people climb mountains, people. Honestly, the travel that you do is so I volunteer vomited more times acquiring businesses and traveling around the world than I ever did in any of my five pregnancies.

[B]

There's actually a cure for morning sickness that's in trials because we identified the specific protein combination that causes severe morning sickness. A couple of years that's going to be gone. I will say all of my wife and I's pregnancies have been high risk and my wife is missing a considerable part of the vision in one of her eyes eyes because of a unique pregnancy complication. So I'm very aware of the incredible. I mean pregnancy is not just like a minor medical thing, right? It's not. And yes, there's also definitely psychosomatic post pregnancy syndromes that is this really going on? But I think think that that makes it just one. It's so much better than it used to be. It blows my mind that the term is tokophobia, which means fear of giving birth, fear of pregnancy. It blows my mind that we are living in such a tokophobic age when we are finally in a period where when you correctly measure the causal effect of pregnancy on women's mortality, we're at an age where it's not detectable. That is, women who experience pregnancy do not have detectably higher mortality rates than age and race matched women who are not pregnant.

[A]

But think about what the rest of life is like. Think about how sterilized everything else has become that this is now the scariest thing you're ever going to do in your life.

[B]

We live in a time where as best we can tell, there is no causal effect of pregnancy or, or birth on mortality of women. Maternal mortality is deaths linked to a maternal cause, but it's not always causal. In the sense that that might have been a woman who is higher risk of dying of other things anyway. Okay. And yet we live in this massively tokophobic age where we're so afraid of all the things that can happen and it's because everything else has gotten so good, right? Like nothing happens to you hardly. And, and so on the one hand, it's like, I want to recognize the risk women take on, that my wife has chosen to take on. And if she were here, she would say this, that I'm the one who's like, are you sure we, like we're debating if we're having a fifth, right? And I'm like, are you sure you want to do this again?

[A]

Like, yeah, I've got to beat the Collinses. We need to fucking beat those fuckers. That's the way that we're going to do it.

[B]

But yeah, we can't lose to them. But my wife is the one who's like, I mean, honestly, honestly, if we did suppose we got pregnant unintentionally, would you want to tell that child that you hemmed and hawed on whether we had them because you were worried that I might have a complication there's probably medicine for. And I'm like, wouldn't you put it that way? But on the other hand, what if you died? It's like, well, but the risk is quite low.

[C]

We're so time locked though. I mean, the thing is, even for a brother, an uncle or somehow apparent people are willing to donate organs. They're willing to possibly even die to save them. You know, if a boss is coming for them, are you going to.

[B]

But a prospective person.

[C]

I know it's very hard to think in the abstract of like this future human you've never met when like the marginal risk a woman takes on now if she could somehow meet that child, you know, or the parents. I mean, like, it just, well, it's just anchoring bias. Yeah.

[B]

Well, my favorite example is on, is on policy costs, right? The most expensive estimates suggest that the cost per life year after added of pronatal cash incentives is like you might have to pay as much as $25,000 to $30,000 in total policy cost per life year you add. So if a person's going to live 70 years, you add 70 life years for each marginal child. Whereas the best, most efficient government programs like Medicaid, Medicare are like 35 to $75,000 for each life year you save. So I'm like, so you're saying that adding life years through this Is too expensive. Expensive. But these other programs that it would be grossly immoral to cut are half as efficient.

[D]

I just want to chip in though. Death prevention has its own benefit from a personal perspective. I mean, there are risks. And I know I nearly lost my ex wife during childbirth. It was very close.

[B]

It's terrifying.

[D]

Oh, the worst night of my life and would have lost one of my children too. So the risks are real. And then you talk to people who go through. Through that and a lot of it. Well, I know a lot of it in my ex wife's case, it was related to the fact that the number of Caesareans should have. And people don't understand that these risks, you know, Caesarean becomes just the elective choice of norm. And I think a lot of people would be best doing some research on that before necessarily go down that route anyway. Doug, I don't want to get too personal, but there are risks. I would love to come back to something you just said because you did take a lot of stick in February. In fact, you blew the Internet up. Because I did searches for.

[B]

How did I miss this?

[C]

Yeah, I missed it too.

[B]

What interview got you in? Troublesome.

[A]

So I did. I was on Stephen Bartlett's podcast. So it was number eight in the world with number two in the world. Steven's got a very female audience. And we did two and a half hours on how to do a good New Year's resolution. And I did 10 minutes on mating dynamics and maybe three minutes or so on birth rates. And so you.

[B]

For four. So for two hours you hectored women about having babies is what I did

[A]

is essentially what happened. I got in. I, look, I got in an awful lot of trouble. And I mean, it's one of those times where Scott Galloway rang me and he spoke to me on the phone the same way that someone consoling a person that's recently bereaved. He's like, oh, no, hey, buddy, what are you. How's it going? And I was like, well, I thought he was fucking fine. What? And he's like, you haven't been on TikTok, have you? I'm like, no, I haven't been on TikTok. Should I go? And he's like, do not go on TikTok. So that. That happened at the beginning of the year. That's definitely the biggest furore that I've been in and around this topic.

[D]

If you look at searches on Google for the world, child word childlessness, right at this time, it.

[A]

I impacted the Google search trail when

[B]

you Mean child free. Right. Because only a bigot with the say childless.

[C]

Exactly.

[D]

Well, that's a whole other thing I don't want to give. I just hate that term. But you said something then that you're now thinking how to kind of not draw in that anger. Is that something you, if you activate

[A]

sort of the immune response, you don't change minds. People dig their heels in and again, like Simone's like fucking we're on a spaceship thing aside, like first off, it's just not that enjoyable of a situation to get in. I understand there are some people that there is no amount of sanitizing that I can do to talking about, about this topic. But there is and I have, maybe I have a bright eyed, bushy tailed hopefulness that I shouldn't and that's going to be eroded by just spending more time with you and Malcolm. But I, I'm like, okay. I really think that the conversations that I've had with you and with you and with your other half have moved the needle and helped people to become aware about what? Delaying family formation, the challenges of coupling, what this really means. What sort of a limit have you got? How much planning do you need to do in future? All of this stuff, like, I really think it's made the world a, a better place. Even if it's taught people some things that they really don't want to hear. And it's kind of antithetical to the world that they think that they want to live in and some do want to live in, but they're the loudest people on the Internet, et cetera. Like, I don't want to have to take flack for doing something that I think is really good. If that's the cost, then so be it. But I'm like, I reckon I can be more effective. Yeah, I think I can be more effective with the way that I talk about this stuff. I also probably hadn't fully priced in this like callousness response system that women have when it feels like a man, especially one that presents like me as being flippant about what they're going through or about the fears that they have in this new world. Right. Because we're often happy to give men or I try and push to give men. Hey, they've lost a lot of their roles. They don't really understand what they're supposed to do. How are they supposed to add value in this way? They're falling behind. The school system and the work system don't seem to be designed in the same sort of way. For someone that can't be a highlighter girl, they're rambunctious. They get fucking put on meds because they've got adhd, which is just them being forced to sit in a classroom, et cetera, et cetera, etc, And I'm like, I want people to understand that in the modern world there are mismatches with how these creatures, the boys and the men previously would have been able to operate. The same thing is happening to women. And I'm like, right, okay. I just don't fully understand all of that being said. Many of the criticisms that were levied at me, we've gone through today. It's stuff to do with one of the ones I want to get onto, which is housework and childcare. There's a kind of a very obvious playbook that happened, but most of them were, this guy wants to strip women's rights away. He's disregarding how hard and challenging it is for women, and he's making an assumption that women who don't want to have kids want to have kids. Now the third one is really interesting because a lot of those points were being made by women who still could to have kids, which means that you don't need to put your money where your mouth is. You have no skin in this game. You can say, I'm not going to have kids right up until the point that you can't. And then you can rug poll everybody else where you got your. I'm promoting what is currently kind of the trendy thing in feminism thing. And then I'm going to pivot last minute. There's a lot of very well known women that have extolled the virtues of no strings attached, casual sex where you don't need to have kids or do family formation to then do a kind of surprise announcement that he got down a morning in a rose garden. Wasn't it so beautiful? Also, when it comes to the housework and the cost of living thing, you go, hang on a second. You're single, you're single. And you're saying that the reason that people aren't having kids is because of the cost of, because of the cost of living, but you're not in the situation where you could have, have kids, so what the fuck are we talking about? So I'm like, right, okay, I understand that these are some of the sort of like early onset trigger points around this conversation. So I want to approach them appropriately, gently, and say, hey, coupling seems to be the big issue as far as I can see. Yes, age related stuff. It's people are not in relationships. So you talking about how hard it is to have kids, the cost of childcare and where we're going to get the money from and the living crisis and the housing and all the rest of it, it's like that is a wonderful hypothetical. But until you're in a relationship, until really you're married, for most people this is kind of just mental arithmetic that doesn't actually have a result at the end.

[B]

Unless the mental arithmetic is demoralizing you from pursuing a serious relationship, it has real world effects.

[C]

It's self defeating. Cope.

[B]

Yeah, but if it's one of these things where you're like, well, having kids is never going to be attainable anyway, so why bother with the serious religion?

[A]

I don't think that's what people are saying. I think for some reason that might be what it down to effectively. That might be what? How Reality. Anyway, you said I got in trouble, where were you going?

[D]

Oh, well, I was just going to respond to that one point first that I think for a lot of younger people, the idea of why bother dating seriously is absolutely true. When you meet someone at age 18, 21, the person you start dating now,

[B]

you're not going to marry him.

[D]

No, you can't imagine that they are. So why are you going to take that seriously? So why is it worth.

[B]

One of the great misfortunes of the modern world is to find a person that would be good for you to marry when you're 17. Because what are you going to do? Actually marry them?

[A]

Bro, one of my, one of my really good friends just got engaged.

[B]

It'd be great if you did, but like, it's not normal.

[A]

One of my, one of my really good friends just got engaged and his fiance's workmates were fully aghast and apparently the first thing that all of them said to her was, how old are you? Oh God, she's 28. That was their response, like, no grudge, like, what are you doing? You're highly educated, you've worked your entire life to how could you? And I'm like, hey, I'm saying this as a 38 year old guy, I need to. I should have put this fucking disclaimer up top. I understand, 38, unmarried without kids, that can be the fucking header of this podcast. I get it, okay.

[D]

Where I was going to go with

[A]

that was working hard on it.

[D]

I think all of us, I imagine, have taken arrows for this. Well, you certainly have. I certainly have.

[A]

Yeah. But did anybody else impact Google Trends data? No, that's what?

[D]

I've never seen that. No, that's a different level. But I think back to this 10% who not only don't want kids, but I would suggest, don't understand why anybody would want kids are always going to be voices trolling anyone having this conversation.

[C]

They're not. They're not. They're not. Because I. This is so. This is so interesting. I feel like most of the people who are involved in the I'm childless, I'm child free. Sorry debate are feeling some cognitive dissonance. Because when I was in my child free era, which was like, basically up until I met Malcolm, my husband, I was like, yeah, I'm not going to have kids. I'm not going to do. I was like, that's great. I was celebrated for it. No one ever questioned that. And I was not involved in the debate. I felt super secure in my choice. No one questioned it. I think that a lot of it comes down to people really feeling ambivalent about it. And that's because we live in a society where, like, if you are kind of interested in it, you still feel punished for that. And I think this comes from a place of interest.

[D]

So what would you have done back in those years if you'd come across Chris's podcasts on this topic? Would you have been ambivalent or would have you.

[C]

I was busy watching my, like, cottagecore content. You know, just like. Oh, like fantasy stuff and books and manga.

[D]

One of the. Yeah, I will take.

[A]

I mean, that's.

[B]

That.

[C]

That is how it is. I. We gotta talk about child care or. Sorry, house. House, housework. Because this is. This is something that really bothers me. And it's something that will build so much false resentment among women. And here's the thing. Women do disproportionately a lot more housework and cleaning and everything. It's not because their husbands are forcing them to. It's because their personal standards are higher. Women are like, well, you know, if we didn't exist, who would organize all the parties for the men? And who would put the doilies on their tables and who would wash their sheets every week? And the men are like, wait, I thought you just washed sheets like once a year. You know, like, women just. They want these high standards.

[A]

What's the thing that guys supposedly do? Feigned incompetence. Is that what it's called?

[C]

A weaponized. Weaponized incompetence is not. It's lower standards. And women feel like they have to. I am always all around the house. I'm cleaning up and I'm grumbling and my husband is literally like, to this

[A]

stay at home dad, is it gonna make you sick?

[B]

No.

[C]

Then leave it there. Like that's just how it is.

[A]

What about that? So for a lot of the, a lot of the comments that I got, and there was one lady who I think had written an entire book basically on parody at home, parody on housewives.

[C]

Oh, she's the one who made that deck of cards.

[A]

I'm not sure.

[C]

The divorce deck. It's so stupid. Men don't care as much. Fair play, fair play. Oh God. This is, it's a deck of cards that ruins marriages because it builds all this false resentment.

[B]

It's supposed to be a conversation game where you, you distribute cards that represent family tasks. And they, functionally speaking, what it's supposed to do is it's supposed to give wives a way of obliquely communicating to their husbands how shitty their husbands are,

[C]

more efficiently resenting their husbands, building resentment where it doesn't have to be.

[A]

There's people who believe uno for housework.

[B]

There's people who believe that it really helps couples. I'm not one of those people. But it's. Yes, I also, my wife and I have also referred to it as the divorce deck.

[A]

Maybe, maybe it's just, maybe it's just because I'm British, but I tend to try and give people at least like a little bit of room. I tend to give them the best interpretation of their work that I can. A lot of women say that men aren't prepared to assist enough around the house. They're not prepared to help enough with child.

[C]

They're really bad at it.

[A]

If men contributed to more, women would feel more confident in starting a family.

[B]

Men are contributing more than they ever

[C]

have and they're super happy to the

[B]

share of domestic work being done, which means chores, childcare, all in being done by men has risen every decade for the last 90 years. Okay, it is at all time highs. American dads do something like four times as large a share of domestic work as the most involved pre agricultural society dads that we know.

[C]

Even when you look at it at like 1950s mothers. Now basically the average American dad spends as much time on childcare as a 1950s stay at home mom.

[B]

So part of that is a change in classification of what people mean when they say childcare. But it is true, there's been a huge change. Men are doing way more than they ever have. We're still doing less than our wives on average. That's true.

[C]

But they prefer doing that stuff more and they have higher standards, which is why they, they go into it.

[B]

And the way we know it's a preference difference is because if you look at single men and women of the same age, in the same race, and you look who live alone and you look at their time spent on housework, those matched controls, those women already do 200% more housework.

[A]

No fucking way.

[C]

So like, well, look at Asmod Gold's house. I mean, come on, like the standard cleaned it up.

[A]

Leave him alone.

[C]

Well, yeah, and it's fine occasionally, right?

[B]

But like, this is the point is like, yes, there are preference differences and you do sometimes get the odd couple where actually the man is more cleaning intensive. But like, what you often get actually is a man who values tidiness but doesn't want to do himself because his mom was very tidy. And that's a real problem some couples have is you get Mismatch on Mom vs. Wife, in which case he probably just needs to deal with it and accept that his wife isn't his best mommy. But it blows my mind when people are like, if men did more housework, fertility would be higher. And I'm like, we are living through the largest increase in male housework humanity has ever experienced and fertility is collapsing. Has it occurred to you that having a baby involves both people's choices? And often men are the ones who kind of are open to having more kids because they don't bear as much of the costs. If you shift more of the cost onto the men, the person in the couple, couple who's more ready to start the conversation and say, have we considered this? We'll not start the conversation. Like, societally, it's not clear that men sharing more of the burden increases fertility. What might is women having more broader support in society? Whether it's from government provided benefits or community organization provided benefits, or just individual choice to do like, like various kinds of help with friends and family and stuff like that, basically alloparenting, that does help. But when the total bill of work in a couple has not changed and you're just shuffling around who does it, that's not boosting fertility because couples make choices together.

[A]

But also these conversations were often done by people who weren't in relationships. Again, yeah, it's all hypothetical. I understand that the housework might be something that you've seen online. I think when you actually ask in emotional containment. You heard of that? So it's the task that man, that men end up taking where there is some kind of emotional perturbment that's gone on either in the wife's life or around the home or with something that's happening close to the home. And the containment of that, when you factor that in, you almost basically zero out the work around that house. I don't know whether that's.

[B]

I'm fascinated how you quantified that.

[D]

Whoever's the voice on this topic is gonna take arrows. I mean, there's no avoiding that. And I just wanna say, I mean, I think it's three years since we first did a podcast and at that time no one was talking about fertility. It was in the.

[B]

Except for weirdo pronated.

[D]

Right, right. It was almost an unspeakable topic in the mainstream media. Except once you year when the fertility rate came out and that would be it. I went through both US Congress and UK Parliament records of speeches. Fertility or low birth rates was not mentioned once in any of those Congress parliaments. If you look now. And it changed very quickly. And it changed very quickly since you started talking about this. Truly politicians started talking about talking about it. I know some of those directly map back to what you were saying and the podcast that you are. So I guess I'm saying I'm hoping Elon effect.

[C]

Yeah, but Elon wants to be talking

[D]

about this back to 2015. I saw him on CNN. So even in his early days talking about this, the media weren't prepared. So I think you've done a huge favor to society to at least allow people to talk about childlessness. I mean, that was completely unspeakable. And so when I saw the Internet explode with the word childlessness taking off in a way it never has in February, well, I mapped it to you and I'm pretty sure it was you. But that's a good thing because even those people who say that they don't want children, at least they're thinking about it and at least they're able to talk to their friends about it, even

[A]

if it's not an unspeakable conversation.

[C]

It was good. But as a woman, there are many times when my husband. Husband will say the sensible thing and I'll get super mad about it and I'll be like, no, you're wrong. And then I will. I will, you know, I will spike the Google trends of our household. And then I go and I sit and think about it and I let it sit. And I ultimately see the reason in his argument. I think that sometimes when people have a very strong negative reaction to something, it's just the first reaction and they need time to sit and think with it. And sometimes it's. It's good to get a strong emotional reaction. When people are offended by something, it's only because something is credibly threatening their worldview, which means that basically they think there's some weight to that point you're making. They wouldn't be offended by what you said if they didn't think that what you said might have a kernel of truth, that maybe they're wrong. And it's terrifying to be wrong. It's terrifying to think maybe all the decisions I've made up to this point, to be childless, to focus on my career first, maybe that's wrong, that that would make me mad, that that would make me scared. And so the fact that you got all that anger, that is an incredibly good sign. You want to see people offended because they're starting to think.

[D]

I agree. And you know where this manifests itself. One of the most difficult things I've become aware of is the attacks on women from other women about whether they want their kids or not. People who choose a life without children. I refuse to used to call it the CF word, as I call it. I mean, child and free should not be put together. It's childlessness. People who choose childlessness, attacking other women who do want children, saying, but why would you want to do that? You can travel where you want, you can get up anytime you want. And seeing woman on woman attacking each other, that's the most sad thing in all of this. But again, you're right. At least people are.

[A]

So he's saying, if I identify as a woman, I might be able to.

[D]

Cool.

[B]

I love what people are trying to do. They like, they don't want to say childless. They don't want to say child free. As you see this with demographers. So they say null, aparus.

[C]

What?

[B]

Which is the tech. It's the technical term. But I'm like, I feel like calling a woman null is actually way worse than less.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Is this not a good thing? Because the climate's fucked and fewer humans would be.

[C]

Look, we are not the first species, by a long shot, to cause global climate change. This is just a normal thing that you can plan for and plan around. This is very different, which is from climate change.

[B]

I'm curious. Sorry, what other stuff?

[C]

When biological life first came onto the continents.

[B]

Oh, yeah, Fair. Yeah. I mean, just the advent of life.

[C]

Yeah. No, like when you. When you study historical geology, you're like, oh, God, like this. Look, climate change is normal. We just have to plan around it. Similar to demographic collapse. You can't change it with climate change. We can't stop climate change. Like, everyone was like, oh, well, if we meet these emissions like limits, then we'll be okay. And then Covid came, we met them. It wasn't enough because you can't stop it. Similar with demographic lapse. You can't stop it. You have to plan for it.

[A]

So that's an interesting difference, I think, between your corner of the table and ours that the.

[B]

I want to stop it.

[C]

Yeah, it's not going to happen.

[B]

You might be right. But I believe we're like five inches

[C]

from the iceberg on the Titanic. It's going to sink. Are you going to get on a lifeboat or not?

[B]

I think I can keep that boat floating.

[C]

Sure you can.

[A]

Blind man band here, baby. I got it.

[B]

Get that boat through the Suez Canal. Okay? Three, couple of guys. We can do it. Okay. So on climate change, I think like I'm a climate change cautious optimist. We have, we have the technology. Okay. Or we can rebuild it. No, like solar panel, like we're about to get. There's a different type of solar panel that is about to come. Like the first commercial version of it is about to come online. That's like 40% more efficient than the other ones. Nuclear power is coming back. We're getting small nuclear reactors.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Like this is, this is happening. We are getting. Kentucky has one of the like reopened nuclear sites in the US Which I'm super excited about. We're reopening the Paducah plant. I think we're going to beat it. I think though that a lot of climate declinists or kind of climate population decline is honestly just don't understand the math because they are, they are Ehrlich brained on the IPAT equation, which is impact equals population times affluence times technology. Okay. And so they see that as a causal relationship. If population goes up, impact, impact goes up. Impact on the climate, that is, if affluence goes up, impact goes up. But this is not, this is an accounting diagram, not a causal one. The reality is we can look at countries that implemented population control programs in the 60s, 70s and 80s, because the UN has been collecting data on this for decades. And we can say what happened to their carbon emissions. And the answer is the harder a country cracked down on population growth, the faster their climate emissions rose. Now, there's a variety of reasons that cracking down on population growth tended to be associated with really aggressive industrialization strategies. But it turns out population just Isn't the driver. It's actually all technology. The entire equation really just boils down to t technology. If the technology is right, you solve the problem, which means all you really care about, literally the entire question for climate change, and not just climate change, climate change, habitat production, species production is technology. Now sometimes that's literal technology, sometimes it's governance technology. Okay, so like the quality of government policy, particularly for like wildlife protection, that's the whole ball game. Population growth doesn't predict habitat destruction and wildlife destruction after you add any kind of control for governance quality, which is to say all you want is good technology or good governance. So how do you, you get that? Well, I mentioned earlier in this conversation, we know that larger populations innovate more. We know this, this is not ambiguous. It is a solved economic question. Therefore, if you know that your future depends on tech maxing and you know that more people gets you more tech, then the green future is a high population growth future. That's the only equilibrium. It solves that.

[A]

I think a lot of people, people are hopeful, people who don't care that much about birth rates but are still kind of like white pilled on. The fact that we're going to get through it is, well, it's going to be fine because we've got AI and AI is going to answer all of the problems. I'm struggling to sort of comport those two worldviews because what that does mean is that an awful lot of wealth will be concentrated in the hands of like eight people who all own those particular AI companies. And that doesn't seem to be typically the worldview that people who are not bothered about birth rate decline are interested in. It seems to be people who would typically not want to have eight people with 50% of the world's wealth, but also people who don't care that much about. But AI is going to solve the problem, but the solving of the problem results in another thing that they also don't like. So I think, yeah, the rubber's going to meet the road here at some point, some point soon.

[D]

I think there is a lot of natural dissonance, cognitive dissonance among societies who have been educated rightly, that population totals are increasing and increasing and increasing. We've not been told at all, despite knowing it for many decades, that it's leveling off. So I get the reality that people need a moment to stand back and say, wait a minute, I've been told all my life, life that there's a population explosion and now it looks like that's over if there ever was one. What does that mean for everything else including the environment? But the topic of the environment is different ways you can come at it. But imagine that the crisis had not been population growth, it had been a meteor due to hit Earth. And imagine that we managed to successfully divert this. So maybe a near miss. The meteor is not going to hit us anymore. It's gone. Would we be still sitting here talking about a meteor hitting Earth? No, that was then. And for me, when you look at the population growth challenge of the past, total births on the planet peaked around 2013. I think 145 million in one year. It's way down already. That's total births, including Africa, sub Saharan Africa. We're already past the point of a risk of populations going up further. So it is what it is. And the challenge we have now is how do we come out of this? Because I mean you can see here, none of us have come out today to say here is the singular solution.

[B]

Well I did give a cost estimate. We could just buy a lot of

[D]

it example of how we could travel in some way and cost estimates. But yeah, the reason I believe this is a bigger trip topic for humanity to grapple with is the simple fact that there are potential solutions to every other crisis that I know we might not like some of those, but at least we can talk about solutions.

[A]

So what are the solutions? Yours aside of fuck it, spaceship, we can't go.

[C]

No, no, we don't have the money for that.

[B]

We do. We do. Okay, if the US added its be about 5, 6% of GDP a year max for the US to buy our way out of our current fertility situation back to 2.1. If we added that amount of spending and taxation we would still be spending tax.

[C]

Oh, because that's going to happen.

[B]

We would be spending and taxing less than almost any European country.

[C]

Still now the incentives aren't aligned.

[B]

Okay, I agree with you. Politically it's unlikely. But the question is what could we do that could be done if we all.

[A]

Where would that money go? Just clarity.

[B]

Baby bonus. You have a baby, you get a check.

[A]

How big does the check need to

[B]

BE in the US I want to say it's about 150,000 per baby.

[D]

And what if you don't already have a partner? So I don't have a baby, get

[A]

a check, find a partner, have a

[B]

baby, have a baby, get a check.

[A]

Right, okay, but you do need to find the.

[C]

It sounds like a rom com plot. I mean why are we not just

[B]

have a one Night stand and don't tell them you're not using protection.

[C]

You can just eliminate income taxes for families.

[A]

A real rack. Okay, so that is a real rack.

[B]

I actually agree. You could do things that are maybe a little bit less blunt.

[A]

That would only be to mothers as well. This would actually be a very sex.

[B]

So the interesting. So obviously the reason I quote it that way is because to get simplified condensed modeling estimates, we have to convert policies across all these studies into a common baseline. So the common baseline is a one time per child unrestricted baby bonus. But you could do it otherwise. Yeah, like France's quotient system where each additional child multiplies your tax brackets. Or you can think about instead. Actually, one of my favorite ways to do this, the Heritage foundation kind of teased this idea, but I think it's worth exploring more. They're like, okay, what if you do an investment for every child when they're born and then when they marry or have kids, they get the realized return on it. Suddenly you have these big payouts that the government only put a little money in. But after 30 years of investment, it

[C]

actually Trump accounts were kind of.

[B]

But it's not for kids. It's for like when you hit 18 or when you. It's so it's not a kid.

[A]

But I thought, I thought when I asked you earlier on, is cost of living the problem? You said no, no.

[C]

And they see that's the thing is money is not going to cause problems.

[B]

Cost of living didn't cause it. In the same way that, you know, bad genes might cause bad eyesight. But that doesn't mean you have to fix the genes to fix the.

[C]

But why are we going to throw money into a broken system?

[B]

Cause the decline, but it can fix it. No, Everybody has a price.

[C]

Yeah, well, the price. No, most people think the real price is like $300,000 or above. And you're saying 150. I think there's a lot of price.

[B]

I think there's a lot of people who do 150.

[C]

Will those people be contributing enough in their future tax income to make up for that?

[B]

Maybe, maybe not.

[C]

That's why income taxes also.

[A]

Would this incentivize people? Would this incentivize people who shouldn't become parents to become parents?

[C]

Because that's why income tax is a better solution if we're talking that type of thing.

[B]

I'm not saying that a gigantic single baby bonus is the optimal policy. I'm saying, could we do anything?

[A]

I am ready to Genghis Khan my way To a billion dollars.

[C]

There you go.

[B]

The at the extreme level, could we do something? Yes, we can, but we won't. But should we?

[C]

It's not going to happen.

[B]

You didn't stop to ask if you should like. Okay, I agree. 150k baby bonus. Probably not the optimal way to do this. It'd be better to start by just eliminating all the marriage penalties in the taxable.

[C]

That is big.

[A]

What's that?

[C]

So if you're middle class and you get married in the United States, you're taking a. Yeah, working working class. Well, but that is kind of the middle class now and you have a salary, you're going to take a tax penalty when you get married or a welfare penalty.

[B]

So there's a lot of people like there's a lot of single parents in, in the US who they have one kid maybe and now their kid is on welfare for their health care. They're getting housing benefits, they're getting food benefits.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And if they marry the baby daddy, they lose all of it.

[C]

We know a lot of people who are.

[B]

Well, because then you're now his income is included in your welfare because you're

[A]

only getting this, these benefits based on household income.

[C]

Yeah. The United States is a socialist utility utopia if you are a single woman living near the poverty line. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Right.

[D]

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

So but every country has this, particularly if two people have similar income. So talking about work, family balance, marriage penalties for middle and upper earners are highest when the two partners have similar incomes for people. For somebody like me who's a breadwinner with a zero earner wife, I get a huge bonus for being married. Like if I was not married to my wife, my taxes would be way higher. But I get a benefit from being married because my wife has no income. But if two people have similar incomes in their middle or operating income and they get married, they have huge penalties. It's even bigger for lower income people,

[C]

which is insane because these people would be raising the highest taxpayers in the future.

[B]

So in principle, solve marriage penalties is item one. Now that does cost money because you can do it in a revenue neutral way. But doing so creates a lot of losers from the policy change. So did you it in a way that gives you politically viable numbers of losers. You do spend money, but yes, that's your highest impact thing. And notably South Korea's increase in fertility in the last three years, which is like they've increased fertility by 0.2 or 0.3 kids in three years. That's nothing to sneeze at. And yes, it's still only at 1, but that's a lot better than 0.7. Partly. They did increase child benefits and child cash stuff. But the big change they did is they created an explicit marriage bonus and marriage rates rose for the first time in 25 years. Okay. Even though it's a bad luck year in East Asian culture right now. So I would just say, like, dealing with marriage. We already know marriage is a big factor. We know marriage. We have tons of studies showing marriage penalties reduce marriage rates. Solving marriage. Getting rid of marriage penalties is a basic first step. Dealing with housing supply, dealing with educational timing. That's something we've talked about. That's related to age in a powerful way. There's all these things we can do.

[A]

Yeah. Housing crisis is basically manufactured because zoning laws restrict people who want to build houses from building houses. If we were able to build houses wherever we wanted, they would no longer exist.

[B]

Or they only allowed them to build celibacy cells like, basically like studio apartments in.

[A]

She can never raise a family. No one wants to raise a family. And it's not conducive to a couple who may be living together in a studio apartment for going, we should really start our family here.

[C]

Well, they might not be allowed to. There are many apartments that you can apply to that are like, sorry, we're capped at this number of occupants. So if you have a family of six, there's so many. Like, getting an apartment that will take you in a city is incredibly hard.

[A]

Okay. Okay. So money is one of them in variety of different ways.

[D]

And I disagree with that, by the way.

[B]

Agree.

[D]

Yeah. I. I don't see enough evidence given the amount to spend. And Hungary, for example, did spend 6% of GDP, which is about the amount

[C]

that we spend on.

[B]

They claim to, but it's a lie. To be clear, they're not telling the truth about much. They're spending. Sure.

[D]

All right. If you look at the.

[B]

Sorry. They're counting the face value of the loans that they will underwrite. If people fully comply with the conditions. Many people will not fully comply with the conditions. And counting face value of loans you're

[D]

underwriting on the day, what percent is they spend? I'll take your number.

[B]

About 2 or 3%.

[D]

And South Korea.

[B]

South Korea is like 1%. South Korea is way below the OECD average. All the Asian countries are, which is one reason why they have low fertility.

[D]

Imagine that.

[B]

It's

[D]

an economic issue to be solved to some extent. You've got this thing called the Law of diminishing returns, which means the incentive prioritizes people who are in relationships. And we're thinking of kids anyway, it's like, well, we were thinking about it anyway, so why not now? So there's something called the Swedish roller coaster in demography, which goes back over to decades, which shows that when they brought out incentives to have kids, that indeed the birth rate went up and then afterwards it went down, and it often went down below where it was before. Because what happened, you had an acceleration of people who were going to have kids anyhow.

[B]

In the completed fertility, it rose 0.3 children above a plausible synthetic control. The policy created tempo effects that over time became cohort effects.

[D]

And what's Sweden's birth rate now, though?

[C]

Yeah, it's higher in Italy's, but it's not enough. It's really not enough.

[B]

I agree, it's not enough. Also, they're not spending that much. They're okay. Remember I said you could get there by spending an additional anywhere from 2 to 12% of GDP. Sweden's spending is like 3 total.

[C]

We're blindly discounting the other end of the equation, which is like demographic collapse is accelerated by two things, more government spending and fewer births. And if you just increase your government spending, you're going to need even more births to make up for that. It just doesn't make sense to me.

[B]

I don't know understand the link between government spending and demographic collapse.

[C]

If we run out of our funds as a government faster, we can't pay our pensions sooner, we run out of money.

[B]

It's not a problem for small budget constrained countries like a euro country. But it's not a problem for the US where you can just print it.

[C]

But eventually we're going to end up with hyperinflation. I know that right now we're the default currency of the world, but the faith is shaking more and more every year. It is.

[B]

I mean, it is, but with super powerful AI production activity, growth is going to be high enough to pay.

[C]

Well, I certainly hope so. I would love that. And we're certainly betting on that. But I think that in the end the solution isn't going to come from government, it's going to come from culture.

[B]

But I agree that trying to solve it purely through cash would be a fool's errand. I'm saying theoretically you could, I literally have discouraged the government from trying to solve it just that way. But I would say going to a public in a modern welfare state in the saying we're going to try and solve this, but we're not going to give you any extra cash. We will never succeed.

[C]

You could change the rules and the laws and the regulations at roughly.

[B]

I agree.

[C]

That's the way places and that would make such a huge difference.

[B]

Pension plans. Some countries give care credits. When you step out of work to watch your kids, you get a bonus to your pension calculation.

[C]

Again, it would be so much more efficient if we didn't launder our childcare and elder care through a ton of fraudulent businesses and instead can kept it. Also, the quality of care is much better for a child or for an elder person if they're being taken care of by a family member. Like the alignment's just better. And so you're losing tons of money, you're losing tons of quality. Like we can just tighten up the government a little bit without spending that like materially more money. It's just that right now to untangle that from a policy perspective, to get politicians to actually do it, we also just have to practically accept that it's not going to happen. So we have to look at what we can do to show individual people how to take matters and into their own hands. We're, we're, we're going to see a drop in fertility. We're going to see that a lot of people are going to disappear, cities are going to crumble, social services are going to fall apart. But in the end, like any given population whose perspective in the future I don't want to lose can just logarithmically grow into the future. As long as enough families. That's 14. Yeah, like it's fine, you know, like. So this is again very low stress. A couple people are going to get it from every culture. Hopefully again, we're losing indigenous Americans at the very least, maybe Janes too. But like a lot of people, there's going to be enough and they will be there. And so I really am more interested in them because functionally, anyone else who can't get their act together is not going to matter.

[D]

Well, are you saying though that we don't need to focus on policies to increase the likelihood of people becoming parents at a younger age? I mean, it can't only be about encouraging people to have fun.

[C]

I'm all for increasing those policies. I mean, even if you just care about government efficiency, those policies are favorable. And I'm also all for making this as pleasant of a transition as possible.

[D]

But it's one of the remarkable things to me, I don't think I'm overusing it, is that when you look at the stability of family size over decades. In the US it's actually gone up from around 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 children per mother if we focus on mothers. But underneath that, the number of one child families, 2, 3, 4, 5. In Japan, 6% of mothers were having four or more children in 1970, and it's the same today. You seem to have this really ingrained structure that throughout changes in political environment through crises, mothers just keep on having the same typical number of children as their mother's generation. And in the case of some nations, now their grandmother's generation. Now some societies have taken longer to get down to that lower level of two, maybe three. I can't see us as societies therefore easily going back to a situation where five becomes a norm.

[C]

Never mind when all the other types die off, which is going to happen.

[D]

I don't think it's about type. I mean, what type? What do you mean by type?

[C]

Cultural, inherited culture. So when all the low fertility cultures die and when also all the low fertility. Well, let's go into that genetic sets die off, what do you have left?

[D]

The reality is if we as our cultures continue on the path we're going on, we're going to keep halving every few decades and those cultures are going to be overtaken. Well, that's the point. That's my point.

[C]

They don't matter like in other cultures

[D]

or subcultures who don't fall, but they don't have drugs.

[C]

So when the government falls apart, who's going to defend their way of life? Right. You have to look at what technophilic populations have high fertility. So Israel, very interesting. I'm interested in going to space with them because they're going to be high fertility and they're maintaining a technophilic culture,

[B]

but they're having trouble. I mean, even amid this dramatic security crisis that Israel has right now. Now the Hasidim are one of the most militaristically voting populations and yet they're still not conscripting them, they're still not sharing the security burden. And so even Israel, I think there's a very open question about whether their model is even long run technophilic, so to speak.

[C]

That's for them to figure out. I think that there is. The real ones feel like their way of life is threatened by their technophobic nature. I think we have very good reason to believe that they will do what they need to do to survive.

[B]

I think the strongest case is probably actually the Lestadians. Right. Because they're high educational Attainment, fully integrated. They are political participants in Finland. They've had prime ministers. They're a fully integrated community that still maintains six kids. Five, six kids a woman. But they do have high attrition rates. I mean, they lose. Lose. I want to say 30 or 40% of their kids outside of the sect.

[C]

Well, that's another. Here's another thing, though.

[B]

I would go to space with them because I already commune with them.

[C]

They sound cool. No, like when. The coolest thing too, about pronatalism is that the cultures that are going to survive long term, they're technophilic, they are high fertility, but also they give the kids the best possible upbringing. This is something you win through love, through giving people such good life lives that they're like, I love this so much, I can't wait to give this to my kids. And that's so cool. In. In the past, we used to conquer countries and nations and continents, through war, through death, through killing. And now the entire world is your oyster. If you just love better, if you give better lives, if you help humans flourish. And that's just another one of those things that's so great about this movement. Like when I was raised, like in a very environmentalist mindset, and it was always like, step back, sacrifice this, you know, do this. And it just wasn't very fun. Fun prenatalism for those who practice it. It's fun. It's about optimism for the future, a love of humanity, a love of life. And that's super low stress.

[D]

But I imagine it's also about having children at a younger age.

[C]

Yeah, no, totally.

[D]

And I bet you in Israel it's not all of Israel, because I know birth rates are very divided between the different groupings there, but they do start earlier. But they're going to start earlier. So all maps every way you look at this. So back to incentives and solutions. For me, the biggest benchmark for any potential solution, whatever it is, is how can this in any way see people who want to have kids have them at a younger age. Because if it can't for me, move on, find something else.

[B]

Yeah, I'll just say again, not to harp on cash, but I think cash is misunderstood as a benefit.

[C]

Well, then put kids to work earlier and have them earn their own money.

[B]

But the effect on studies that look by parity. So we're looking not how did this policy increase the birth rate, but how did it increase first birth or second birth or third birth rates? Effects were biggest on first birth rates. That is say people going on to A third birth. If you already have two kids or you're going on to a third or fourth or a fifth, you have intrinsic motivations for fertility.

[C]

Economies of scale.

[B]

Right. Well, but also at that point, the person who's considering a fifth kid, like me or like you all were not too long ago, I guess they already have reasons to have kids. They don't really care about the money. They've already demonstrated they can afford the first. First four. And they like kids.

[A]

Well, the marginal cost as well. The complexity. The additional complexity of your.

[C]

No, not really. Like after four, it's just so much easier.

[A]

That's my point. Going from 4 to 5.

[B]

Economists have always said that money should matter more at higher parodies because the marginal kid is so cheap. But in reality, the empirical estimates show the opposite. That actually money is most influential on first person.

[A]

So you need to get them over the line because once you've got somebody to become a mother, the.

[C]

This is my point.

[B]

Money. For the people who are hesitant about a first kid, about marriage, money does sway them. For people considering a fourth kid, it doesn't.

[C]

I don't know. I don't know.

[B]

Because fourth kids come from values. First kids come from feeling secure enough to make the Choice when you're 25.

[C]

Katherine Ruth Pakalak did a lot of

[B]

research on that and she's studying highly values motivated people who already have four kids.

[C]

Yeah. Well educated. So college educated women who had five or more kids.

[B]

Great example. Money doesn't matter for.

[C]

No, no, no, no. What she found when she interviewed these women was for so many of them, and this is to your point, their experience with their first child was really the tipping point. None of them planned on having a lot of kids. And what happened that she noticed again and again was these women had such a great experience with their first kid. They were like, I can do more. And honestly, the hardest number of kids to have. I don't know what your experiences were, but for us it was just one. That was the hardest number to have

[A]

as an only child. That hits home.

[C]

Yeah, well, I mean, it's the biggest life change. It's like, it's hard.

[B]

You were really hard, man.

[C]

You must have been a handful. I mean, like, it's, it's tough. And I think that, you know, it, it. I don't think that money solves that. You know, you can pay for all these things. And we found, at least personally, that throwing money at the problem didn't solve it at all. That community ultimately did.

[A]

What about what? None of the interventions that I've heard.

[B]

I agree. I mean community's gonna out pound for dollar. Community is going, getting more pronatal, more alloparentally supportive. Communities is going to be a thousand times more more efficient than just throwing cash at. I would just say it's hard for those communities to form in a modern. Those communities are having a hard time forming in our society. Giving them a leg up by giving the community the ability to say, hey, look, I know you're nervous about having a kid, but dude, the government's literally going to give you $10,000. You probably can't afford.

[A]

Surely. Although it might be the most difficult thing to do, the most effective thing to do would be to change what is high and low of status. If you make it high status to become a mom again. If you make it high status to have a family again.

[C]

Oh, and I introduced this idea of having a medal for motherhood and what do they do? They call me a Nazi.

[A]

What was this? I didn't say this.

[C]

Stalinist, right? Well, no, and I think France did it first.

[B]

No, actually a lot of countries have done it. Yeah, the studies on. I mean I have no opposition to motherhood medals in principle. There's only like two studies on them and they both seem to find null effects.

[C]

But I think, yeah, I don't think that.

[A]

I mean real status, not a.

[B]

But here's my take. If you're a country that has a monarchy, there's a really easy way to do this. Let's say the royal family, every two year old born to citizens will be entered into a lottery for their third birthday. If they win the lottery, they get their birthday party with the royal family. Okay. And you choose 50 kids a year for each royal. If you've got a royal family, including all the random cousins, you've got maybe 30 royals, you could get a couple hundred. A couple thousand kids. Kids every year. That's a pretty good lottery.

[A]

Does it work?

[B]

We don't know because no one's tried it.

[A]

But that pastor in. Where was he? Georgia.

[C]

Georgia. Yeah.

[B]

Okay, I wrote the paper on this, right? And it worked.

[A]

Good paper.

[B]

When he, when he the leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church, when he started personally baptizing third or higher children, fertility rose directly in response.

[A]

People fucking speed ran pregnancy. Dude, I want to get baptized by

[B]

that guy sacked women that. Women that he was targeting. And the reason it worked is because he was beloved. He was a figure of national identity and he was offering to become a godparent, which in that theological tradition means he's literally your Family.

[A]

So like our discussion that we had about K pop stars, in order to be a K pop star, which is the most influential for all of Korea, you can't have kids and you have to be celibate for the entire time.

[B]

Korea did this to themselves.

[A]

Invert it. Say the only way you can become a K pop star is if you already have a child.

[B]

I have advised multiple governments that host lots of small countries that host a lot of concerts that have low fertility or that they're worried about fertility. Simple solution. It's illegal to publicly perform music unless you have children.

[C]

Well, I mean, but look at. So Japan, for example, like relatively has a pretty good birth rate. The amount of anime that is pronatal at this point is just off the chain. Like I think it doesn't not help. I think we should have more the problem.

[D]

Japan's birth rate is 1.25. It's sad that we're living in a time when that's considered, I know, positive.

[A]

They're holding onto it. So one of the things I'm in interested, interested in is how ostensibly pronatalist policies that incentivize mothers are interpreted when people put them out. Have you seen this?

[E]

So guys, if you now live in the UK and you don't have children, you now may be subject to the no kids tax or the child free tax of which may be implemented now under a reform UK government. You see, under this new policy, people who do not have children should pay more tax. You heard that right. Instead of actually helping those or giving benefits to those who have more children, let's penalize those who chose to not go down that financial and mental route.

[B]

It's the same thing.

[E]

Goodwin, a reform UK candidate actually proposed this as the negative child benefit tax. And the purpose is, quite literally in the name is to tax anyone without any offspring and to actually remove personal income tax to any woman with more than two children. He frames this to reinforce family values alongside reinforcing the nuclear family. Now already, don't you think it's very interesting how they surround this entire thing around women, not men and women. It's almost as if they know that this is going to be specifically and disproportionately targeting women with this tax. And so if you need any more of a reason to vote against this godforsaken party that's actively trying to poison this country and if you want to respect the autonomy of your own body and not feel pressured to do anything else with it, maybe, just maybe you should vote against this madness.

[A]

What do we?

[B]

I mean, there's no difference between a child benefit and a childlessness tax. However, messaging does matter. So it's, you know, there's a couple of studies that look at cash benefits in developing countries and they've studied if you rename the benefit you're giving, does it change how people use it? So if you tell people this is a benefit for having kids, does it change how they use? Or is this a benefit because you're poor? Does it change what they use it on versus if you tell them this is a benefit to pay for your child's education? What they found is, yes, Literally just renaming a child benefit substantively changes how people use it. So I do think things like renaming the child tax credit to parenting wage might be useful. That said, I do think there's a problem with status based approaches to fertility influencers. Talking about how great family is is probably a good thing, but not because it only operates through status. It also operates through perceptions of joy. Okay. Status can be very alienated. I would argue right now motherhood is already extremely high status. Okay. A lot of.

[D]

To who?

[B]

To many people. And what I mean by that is a lot of people aspire to motherhood and see it as something they'll never be able to achieve because it's so expensive and so hard. It is high status. It is an aspirational, costly good. When we say status status, is this like catch all term? What do we really mean? What we really mean is we want people to see it as an accessible

[A]

way to gain attainable and aspirational.

[C]

No, that's so true. Because also so many people have grown up never having held a baby. The number of only children that have grown up. And this is Another thing that Dr. Ruth Bucolick has pointed out, right? That like most people, it's just there's, there's no, they can't, they can't imagine what it's like. And so it's very hard to make it happen.

[A]

I had a. I had a conversation with my housemate last year and his sister gave birth and this was the first baby that he's held as an adult. And it's his kin.

[C]

Did it change him?

[A]

He's uncle. And he said he held this baby in his arms and he said, I understand why men go to war.

[B]

He experienced chemistry.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

And he was like, oh, I understand why men fight and die in wars.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

First baby I held was my now wife's first nephew. He was also the first baby I babysat and like all this stuff. Basically they Were like boyfriend conscripted childcare. Yes, it's absolutely a thing.

[A]

And there's actually like memetic sort of self reinforcing recursive stuff.

[B]

There's a lot of studies that show that fertility is a contagious behavior on both sides. When someone in your social circle adopts a long delay strategy for fertility, like they have an abortion or they adopt a long acting reversible contraception or sterilization, or they simply take a long time to have a tumor kid. It affects your odds of having a kid in a negative way.

[A]

Same thing happens with divorce.

[C]

Well, and a lot of things bad. Having certain careers, like it's all about, you know, what you see and how you, I mean things are contagious.

[A]

So you're saying if you are the boyfriend or girlfriend of a girlfriend or boyfriend and you want to have kids with them relatively soon, a good idea is to pick someone whose friends around them are moving towards marriage and family.

[B]

Yeah, babysitting your nieces and nephews is a great third date. Yeah, like honestly, like that's a fucking wild date. No, like seriously, like it's great. Oh my God. Getting kids involved earlier is a really solid filtering mechanism.

[A]

Apart from the fact that almost no one lives within 50 miles of their parents anymore.

[B]

No, actually 60% of people do.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It's just like highly educated people told oh, awkward.

[A]

I'm on the other side of the fucking Atlantic. Okay, so money, throw money at its one potential solution like is before we get onto and I am interested in the long termism solution for this. What do you propose? Because people always say what are we going to do about it? How do we do it? And you can equivocate all you want and talk about this. What would you put forward as some incentives, some policies that could work.

[D]

Yeah, for me. Forget incentives.

[A]

Intervention.

[D]

For me the core issue to address is parabola. If you don't have paraboling, you don't get couples, you don't get couples, you don't get children.

[A]

I knew I was right.

[D]

And everything I'm hearing, I don't completely disagree with any of it. But for me it's in the margins.

[B]

And we've been how do you get more pair bonding?

[C]

That's the question.

[D]

That is the question. So for me everything comes from incentivize

[B]

the baby, you get the bond.

[D]

Well, there is one real advantage that societies appear to hold, which is that the vast majority of people do want to become parents one day and that people today simply do not know that if you wait to 30. Apparently it seems universally the likelihood based on outcomes is less than 50, 50%. And I know for a fact that once young people are told that, especially women, something goes, what do you mean it's only a 50% chance? I thought 35 was fine.

[B]

There's a couple of randomized controlled trials on this showing this.

[D]

But also, Lemon, if you look at outcome results, I've got a website coming up that's got the average age of the likelihood of childlessness by country. And it's shocking, shocking even to me. And I've been sitting with this data for a long time. If we do not open up pathways, no matter how much financial incentives we offer to enable young people, particularly women, to still continue the careers they want to have and the education. So to be specific, we've got to reinvent education. That's where it starts. I think lifelong learning is a great thing. I'm a lifelong learner myself. I go back to college, I have done throughout my 40s and 50s, and it's to take courses that I want to study.

[A]

Not everybody's a learner. Not everybody's super keen about the idea of long term education and people can't wait to get out of it.

[D]

That's fine. But why compress three, four plus years of young people's lives into studying things that they will probably never use? And for what purpose?

[A]

What else do you do? What think do you do instead?

[D]

Well, earn money, get out, become a model.

[A]

At what, 13?

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Well, I think everybody. Society should be engineering.

[B]

Labor laws are ruining this country.

[D]

Right?

[C]

The children yearn for the mind.

[B]

I will say there actually is a study showing that child labor laws in US history do reduce fertility.

[D]

I think we can take two years of education.

[B]

That's not an endorsement, by the way.

[C]

Two years?

[D]

Yeah. A year out of high school, 10 years.

[B]

I will say there is a study. So Quebec is the great test case for this because Quebec actually finishes education a year earlier through a unique program where high school is three years and then there's a two year community college thing for people who want to do that. And then it's a three year university. So if you finish university, it's at the same time as other people. But everyone who goes to university does SAGEP for two years before. And a lot of people are done at sagep. And so the total show like go on university is lower. And there's been some suggestion and the result is Quebecois, on average finish education a year earlier. Now, earlier I said I'm not aware of a study that says that tertiary education shapes fertility in a big way. And that's true. Quebec is an interesting case because what they do is they have really high tertiary educational attainment. Lots of people get it. They also have some of the highest fertility in Canada. But the way they do it is they do compress the length of the tertiary education. So lots of people, people get these Sage EP degrees and they essentially got a technical degree 18 months faster than people in Ontario would get the same degree. So attainment Quebecois people on some level are better educated by some measures. It's a little complicated and yet have higher fertility. But it's because they hit similar milestones six to 18 months earlier. And it seems to be in. And I know there's some studies exploring this, nobody's conclusively demonstrated, but does seem to be that compressing the educational timeline. Same credential, shorter time might be part of why Quebec has higher fertility than the rest of Canada. There's some other good variation to explore with this in Canada because they've changed educational timelines several times and I'd love for somebody to do a study on it more extensively. But. So I think that that goes to your point that yes. Like any way to compress would be a good idea.

[D]

Yeah. And I think young people would be in favor, like, hey, less, less schooling, that's good. Earning money sooner, that's good. Employers able to hire more people and train them, that's good. But I would add in this lifelong learning aspect, which is it's like you get 2/3 way through studying something and you get some recognition for that. That's important.

[C]

Well, the best learning is on the job. That's how you learn best.

[D]

It's applied and you learn what you like and what you don't like and you may well shift. So for that last third of your education, split it over summer school over three, four years, have employers and then government support people going back once they've fine tuned their education into something that they truly want.

[A]

This doesn't fundamentally change the reward paradigm of the longer that I wait, the higher my sexual market value, the better partner I can get.

[B]

Doesn't change that.

[A]

Which is ultimately like, that's like starting the race sooner. Yes, but the finish line doesn't exist. There is no finish line. No, there is when you're going to give up. No, you choose when you're going to exit.

[D]

If you think the finish line is at 40 and you find out actually it's probably at 30, 32.

[B]

So the information shock, that is, I'll Say I actually. So for a variety of reasons, education on fertility information is probably an effective and cheap strategy for some marginal changes and maybe big ones. It remains to be seen. But you're right that the educational timeline doesn't change the age earnings gradient. But I want to point out on some level cash does. Right, because if I told you you get a $150,000 nest egg for having a baby at 23, okay, maybe the man won't have great earnings, but you'll be okay.

[A]

Now what are some just talking on that if it's information and shock is a strategy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What are some of the pieces of information that you've found shock people the most?

[B]

I mean for, I mean just age gradient of decline is one. Another one. And this one I find blows up men's minds.

[A]

Hold on there. So like I give you a bunch of different billboards around the world free. I can put them anywhere that you want. What are the three or five things that everybody around the table is going to put on the billboard?

[B]

My wife has told me that I'm bad at understanding how normal people people think. And so I'm not a great judge there because I would just be like a graph and there would be a line going down that is showing women's odds of conceiving in a given month of active sex by age. And then on the other hand would be a line going up and it's the number of mutations in a man's sperm by age. And the point of it would be

[A]

like you have less time.

[B]

It's a freak on because she doesn't have time to conceive and he doesn't have time to conceive the kids that he's dreaming, dreaming of having. So people talk about this as a woman's problem. It's true. A man can conceive children for a very long time, but it is male age that's most predictive of most pathogenic de novo genetic mutations. Basically like bad stuff in your genes. Now, women's age also matters for stuff like down syndrome. So that's what I would want to communicate somehow. I'd work with a marketing company to figure out the best work.

[A]

Copyrighting means a little bit of work.

[B]

Just a graph that's an X.

[A]

What would you put on?

[D]

Well, it's a refined version of what probably we're saying here, but it's a very simple one that in every country, I love the idea of billboards because it's simple. The probability of becoming a mother at age 30 is X or the probability falls to 50% by what age? And just that alone, I mean I've said it here.

[B]

If you don't have a kid by age 30, your odds of ever having a kid are only 48%. Yeah, well actually waste your life.

[D]

They don't care.

[C]

They don't care.

[D]

No, they do care. They care. Oh my gosh, they do care.

[B]

When you give. When you sit two classes of students in different rooms and you give one of them fertility education seminar and the other one, just like a general informational movie, it creates a large effect. And there's only one study that's done like a two year follow up on like it was like married couples who did it. And they found this. The group that got an educated, that got the education had twice as high Oxford married couple.

[C]

They were already married already.

[A]

This bling's been fixed.

[C]

Letters from high school classes that have been presented, pronatalist and antinatalist debates. They have zero interest in kids.

[B]

It needs more research. But all of the randomized controlled trials that have been done mostly on college students, or this one on married couples, suggests the values do change in response to information. And the only one with behavioral follow up, which is this married couple one, the behaviors also change.

[C]

Married couples marrying is the first step to having kids. That's.

[B]

It could be that the values change in the college students would not translate into behavior. That could be. But right now the evidence we have is consistent with the behavioral effect. I would love to see a bigger study on this. It blows my mind.

[C]

Yeah, I'd like to see it too. I would change my mind with knowing information for sure.

[B]

I agree it's not a slam dunk yet, but it's worth studying.

[C]

Yeah, sure.

[D]

Well, let's share why I'm so confident that people will respond to this, this message, particularly women. I made the berthcut documentary and we were in editing during COVID for like two years. And during that, whenever it was allowed in Japan, I would have these home parties and I'd screen it to people. Japanese international people, men, women, mainly 30s, 40s, some 20s. I even invited a group of feminists I was say who came or I wanted to hear those voices too. I got all parts of the spectrum. But I noticed two things. After watching the early copies of the documentary, I couldn't get people to talk about anything else. And these were events where I was tired of making this birthmark. Let's talk about the weather.

[B]

Could you give your spiel again?

[D]

Yeah, but they actually didn't even need me. They were talking to each other.

[C]

Sure.

[D]

About how it is that they can meet their dreams of having kids or if they don't want kids or whatever else.

[C]

Here's where that goes wrong, though. You are speaking to the Japanese people who go to parties. What about the hikogomori? Okay. What about the vegetarian men? They didn't show up. You don't hear from them because they're in their apartments, not leaving for months on end.

[D]

Yeah, but I think that's downstream. I think we've created environments where particularly young men give up on the possibility of ever marrying young women, too.

[C]

What about the four B's?

[B]

Men?

[D]

Sure.

[B]

But all you're saying is that the effect size in the population will be smaller than he's describing, not that it will be zero. Because if it's effective for a subgroup, that's still something.

[C]

That's good. Power to the people. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I mean, you're doing really good, important work. And I love. I mean, you have probably caused so many families to have children.

[D]

I get photographs of babies sent to me quite a lot.

[C]

I love that I've got to be

[A]

careful with the Epstein emails.

[B]

So. But on information like, I think fertility information is a big one, but I think we should. It's worth talking about reprotech a little bit because a lot of people have good and bad. A lot of people have bad information in different ways about reprotech. One is they overestimate the effectiveness of IVF often. But the interesting one to me is. So my wife and I, we had a lot of miscarriages and we did genetic testing to figure out what's going on. Do we have some kind of incompatibility or condition? Nothing was identified conclusively. My wife had blood tests. We didn't find anything specific. There were some maybe indicators of something called antiphospholipid syndrome, but it wasn't a slam dunk. But finally our ob, who was a university research ob, was just like, look, next time you're pregnant, we're going to start you on the drug for this condition, like prophylactically. It's called Enoxaparin. It's a huge pain in the butt injection that my wife has to do every day of the pregnancy. He was like, just prophylactically, we're going to try this, see what happens. We've had zero miscarriages in three kids since we had the first kid before it, in between some miscarriages and she barely survived infancy. That drug is still not standard of care in any country in the world. Even though it's been around for 30 years. Even though recurrent miscarriage. If all we did using clinically demonstrated effectiveness was get every person using that drug after their first miscarriage or even after their second, we would have in the US somewhere between 2 and $15 extra babies every year.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And miscarriage prevention is like very obviously just a good thing.

[A]

So traumatic.

[B]

And yet we're very. Yes, traumatic. And yet we are so hesitant about experimenting on pregnant women, about being like risk taking with pregnant women.

[A]

Does that make sense? It seems like it would be a good idea to be.

[B]

Okay, it is. But like, at the end of the day, when you're dealing with somebody who's had recurrent miscarriage or recurrent infertility, they usually want to. They usually want to try everything.

[C]

If it's opt in and informed consent, throw everything.

[A]

Throw everything.

[B]

Exactly. But doctors won't do it.

[A]

Why is it that we haven't spoken about the impact of hormonal birth control and reliable contraception? Is that not the line in the sentence?

[C]

It's just not that correlated. It's just so down, really. Yeah.

[A]

Because this is usually from the guys that are more manosphere red pilly. This is the first thing that they throw out. Women's reproductive independence placement rate Fertility in

[B]

the US not even controlling for mortality, just below replacement fertility in the US is first directly observed in the 1920s. And if every single married woman in America today conceived at the rate of Amish women of the same age and marital status, fertility in the US would still be less than three children per woman. Okay. Because there's just not enough reproductive age. Women who are married. Okay? The difference between us and the Amish is mostly about marriage, not birth control. Okay, so like birth control. It's not. It's not. That has no effect. It does have some, some effect, but people use birth. Birth control was invented when it was. Because that's when people wanted it. Okay. The technology to invent it existed decades earlier. It was not actually that like breakthrough at like a chemical level. It's just that that's when the demand for it was there. So. But my point about the miscarriage thing was not. Not to sob story about my own family, very happy about my family, but because we didn't know. Okay? We didn't know. No one told us how common miscarriage could be. No one was telling us there are options for miscarriage. There's options for these things. And so much repro tech research goes into ivf. And for people who want ivf, that's a great benefit. But there are so many conditions that make it hard for people to conceive or to have healthy children or that

[C]

prevent them from even trying. Yes. Like, I was told that if you have A section, you can't have more than three and then you have to stop.

[B]

But you can.

[C]

The world record is 11. Like my surgeon who did my last one, her record is eight. Like, and. But everyone I talked to is like, well, I know you can't have more than three C sections.

[A]

Is this not the same sort of justification that's put forward by people who go, well, my cousin, she had her first kid when she was 43 and she had a second when she was 46.

[B]

No, no, what she said is there are risks to subsequent births after C section, but for many women they are manageable with modern surgery and support therapy.

[C]

The risks are trivial. What I'm trying to say is the risks are much lower than this. There is a huge belief that it is impossible to have more than three

[B]

kids or that the risk is gigantically

[C]

high when that if you do, it

[B]

can be for some women, but for many people, risk of a VBAC is not totally random. It is somewhat predictable. And risk of repeated C section, sorry, vaginal birth after C section. So doing a vaginal birth. But even in the risk of repeated C sections, it's not like a doctor looks at a woman with prior C sections like, well, gosh, we have no way of figuring out if you could have another one.

[C]

There are things so many ways.

[B]

The problem is doctors are very risk averse, so they often won't even tell you what they think your risk is. But the point is, Even things like GLP1s, like Ozim, when people go on GLP1s, they're suddenly more likely to have kids. Now, one reason is because GLP1s interfere with absorption of hormonal contraception. The other one is they lose weight. So you're hot, you're hot, but also when you lose weight, you also tend to have just a healthier balance of

[C]

hormones in your body. Yeah. If you're underweight or super overweight, you're less likely to get pregnant.

[D]

Yeah, I get. All of this is interesting. Clearly it's interesting, but it's in the margins and all of these things can.

[B]

Enough margins is a big thing.

[D]

I don't think unless we find a way to fundamentally open up society for people to pair bond at a younger age, any of this will have a long term.

[C]

Well, look, the societies that do that, and there are micro Societies that are doing that, they will inherit the future. Like, I don't see what the big problem is. It's happening, it's going to happen, it's done, problem solved.

[D]

Well, that sounds kind of anti natalist to me. If you're saying it's done, it's not

[C]

because the pronatalist cultures are going to win.

[A]

It's pronatalist just over a longer time.

[C]

Yeah, look, I'm not gonna force people who don't wanna have kids to have kids. And also if they are, if they're not gonna get their acts together and do it, and if they really don't care that much, then I don't want them to have kids.

[B]

Look, I do.

[A]

So I understand where you're coming from here, which is like, look, guys, no one. And this is your whole thing, right? I want women to be able to have the number of children they want. And much of the conversation between me

[B]

too, for the record. Yeah, of course.

[A]

But a lot of the conversation is that the number of children that you think you want isn't the number of children you think you want, at least at the age that you're at at the moment. Because maybe you've got culture, maybe you've got other things in the way, maybe

[B]

you've got things to revise the number up as they age.

[A]

Yeah, I fucking bet they do. Which is the opposite of the way that it works. So I understand why that would be the case. Right. Every single person around this table is not saying at all to anyone, you need to become a breeder. Because there will be breeders in the future and they will be the ones that inherit the earth. I think what we're trying to do is here to go, hey, and this is where it comes back to the information thing. I, I like the idea of an information shock. I do think it's, you know, you

[C]

are the information shock. Keep going.

[A]

Brilliant. Look, I used to work in nightlife, right? And that was 18 to 22 year olds, a thousand of them in a nightclub. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, everybody was sleeping with everybody and nobody was really thinking about this thing, this sort of stuff. But it wasn't as if there was an antinatalist approach there. That was just like the fledgling nascent first beginning of the moving of like that kind of free sex sort of thing that was happening in the modern era. You go, okay, at some point people are going to have to face biological reality until we can ivg, you know, like pluripotent stem cell our way through a fucking herocyte Check of all of the different embryos that. That we've got, people are going to end up, like, with the future that they lay for themselves. And I think that educating people so that as few people as possible regret it. I think that's kind of one of the outcomes that we should all be focusing for as few people as possible getting toward the middle end of their life and going, I fucked it on the family thing. I messed up on the family thing. That's what regret Ministry minimization.

[B]

Right? That's why I can't. Because I think there's gonna be a ton of people who regret it.

[A]

That was my point. That was my point earlier on, that there are people who are in the middle. They're not gonna be changed. Right. Chelsea Handler has her. I went on Raya and slept with this guy in Paris and ate a croissant and drank white wine, and it seems to be having a great time, and that's great for her. There are some people who look at that lifestyle and think, well, that's the thing that I want. Not knowing that they might get there and regret it. And it's really difficult to walk this tightrope without sounding like you're trying to pull people back from something that's obviously rewarded and obviously very fun in the moment and what everybody else seems to want. And I've outsourced my thinking to the group and isn't that cool? Without going like, without sounding like a fuddy duddy that's coming in and sort of like clamping down on top of everybody's fun and what they want in life. It's like, who are you to tell me what I want? I know what I want. You go, I think that what you. You think more is, I can have what I want. And in future, I can also get this other thing that I have, this get out of jail free card. I have an ejector seat button. And if the goal. If all of our goals is, hey, as few people as possible regretting the decisions that they made around family formation, I think that's like, that's a pretty fucking good outcome. But how we get there is still,

[C]

until I know, raise awareness, let people think about it.

[B]

That's why information is so important, right? There's probably going to be people who will listen to this and be like, what? Ability to conceive declines linearly for women from age 20. Men's mutations in their sperm start rising at age 18. What blew my mind. Okay, hubby, wifey, time to do this.

[A]

Can you try and Put your best mark marketing hat on for me. What are the biggest headline stats that you think would change the most people's minds?

[B]

The number of people who, when they get to their late 40s, will regret not having had more kids is about 10 times as many as the number who regret having had too many. There are some who regret having had too many. About 90% of the people who have any regret about their family size regret that they didn't have more. More that's going to be you if you don't get on it. And then in terms of marriage, people worry a lot about their odds. They're finding a spouse and I'm sympathetic to that. It is hard, But. But a bird in the hand really is often better than two in the bush. That is to say, waiting until you think you're at peak mate value may mean that the marriage you have is never the one you dreamed of. Ultimately, arbitrage is the name of the game. Finding somebody who sees the value in you that nobody else does and finding someone that you see the value in them that other people don't. And I'll be honest, my wife definitely saw that in me from a nerdy, weird, not quite showered college freshman. She pretty much stuck a marker on my back and was like one to watch. We'll keep that one in the Same

[A]

Bitcoin at 5 cent.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And likewise, I mean, pretty early on I was like, okay, she's a little on the extra road in its side, but we can work with that. And I just think so many people, they have the paradox of choice. They see all these things, but more importantly, they invest deeply in these relationships with somebody who's always looking for two in the bush. And you'd be better off having the hard conversations on the first date and proposing when you're 90% certain.

[A]

What does that look like? Hard conversations on the first date. What should people ask on a first date? Number of children?

[B]

Views of divorce? What religion children will be raised in

[C]

if they are born?

[B]

Go babysit your niece and nephew's kid. What do you think about spanking kids? Not sexually. I mean sexually too, if that's your thing. But these are hard conversations and I think they're great first date conversations because you shouldn't waste your time.

[C]

Agreed. The sooner you get to know, the better.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Also,

[B]

my advice on marriage was a bit less pithy because I think in some ways it's a more complicated conversation. Conversation. But you are very likely to regret having too few kids. The number one predictor of too few kids is late marriage. And marriage makes people happier. They get happier after they're engaged, okay? People are like, well, it's not after they're married. That shows it's not an effective marriage. It's selection, God damn it. It's after engagement. Okay? We know this. We can see in the data when they get engaged. So when you realize that you're going to be with that person for as long as you can both stand it, it's not that the wedding ceremony makes you happy. It's that the wedding ceremony is a lock in. It's like you wait to get the good interest rate and then you lock it in. And yes, you could wait forever, but ultimately the people who got a 2.9% interest rate during COVID Covid, maybe they're a little worse off than the people who got a 2.7% interest rate, but they're both way better off than I was in my 7.9% rate, okay? Which I realize that just sounds like I dunked on my wife right there in the metaphor, but I'm not. I got a great interest rate wife, but you could hold out for a while, but at some point you just have to say, this is a great house, but buy it, whatever the interest rate may be.

[A]

Stephen, give me a couple of information shocks.

[D]

There's data, and data is important, but it's the personal stories upon personal story upon personal story of people. But women want to talk about this more. But it's men and women who age 30 something are on that cusp and they realize that they're probably not going to have kids. And I think it's true to say that people probably approach me when they're feeling because they feel they can because of the documentary, et cetera. Even if it was just a minute percentage of people who get to 32, 35, having been sure that they were going to become parents because everything was mapped out. They even had the partner. And then there's that breakup and then they're back, starting again. Easter E2 to try and find someone and really realizing the math means maybe waiting a year to find the right person to start date, two years to be sure. And it's that luncheon I had with A Japanese woman, 34, having gone through exactly that saying, I don't want the flowers, I don't care about the honeymoon, I don't care about fancy dates or dinners. I just want a family. And you go back to the 20 something year olds you're talking to and the realization when you tell them that the chance of becoming a mother beyond age 30, or in the case of Japan, it's 25 or the US 27, the likelihood of ever becoming a mother in today's society is less than 50%. And you map those two things together and you really realize that this isn't a marginal. Economists talk about children as normal goods. I don't know if you've heard that a normal good is like a TV because the more affluent you are, the bigger TV, the more TVs you can have. No children is not anything normative that can be described in the sense of any other product. It's something deeply emotional, deeply passionate that most people want, want. And seeing that transition from an aspirational 20 year old still believing we have time and understanding from data that that might not happen to the reality of that 34 year old going through that transition, that's the story I want everybody to know about more than anything and then make the right decision for them.

[A]

Simone, what else haven't we we said

[C]

I think people should. We haven't talked about how people should be questioning if things are not working for them, then what should they be doing? Like a lot of people are, are pursuing all these things that made them happy when they were kids. Like they're still playing video games, they're still traveling the world, but they're experiencing severe diminishing marginal returns. Like they're just not getting the same high from that they used to and they're not realizing that they're in a different phase of life and that's just not going to make them happy. Or a lot of people think who are also very euphorically child free and against pronatalism, are very critical of capitalism and yet they're like, well I'm just going to buy more into the dank lifestyle and then a capitalistic lifestyle, but that might not be making them happy. So I think people need to information shock themselves too. Like is seeing a therapist helping me with my anxiety and depression? Or is maybe there's something fundamentally wrong about the way I'm living my life? Am I chasing a false God and just severely questioning their own lifestyle and their own way of life if it's not actually making them happy and contented?

[A]

That's really interesting to think. How many people are super unhappy? How many people have got depression or anxiety? What percentage of young girls have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness and depression?

[C]

I had that. I could barely leave my own house. I have the potential to be an extremely dysfunctional, neurotic person. And there's something about, like, kids just gave me something bigger to care about. They filled build the void and they burn away your selfishness. They get you out of your head. We're all so in our heads, and it's torture. I don't want to be stuck with my own thoughts.

[A]

Yeah, I'm an asshole.

[C]

You need to fill the void with meaning.

[A]

One of my really good friends, very smart friends, got this line. Bill Perkins. When somebody proposes a life strategy that he can see is maybe not getting them the results that he wants, he always asks the same question. He says, and how's that working out for you?

[C]

Everyone should ask themselves that.

[A]

And how's that working out for you? So, guys, you're all awesome. I appreciate you all individually, and having you together as a group has been really fun. This is one of the first roundtables that I've done. I'm sure we're in tons of fucking mad. I'm going to put these on. We're in mad trouble in the comments. TikTok's gone crazy. But I think you're all trying to make the world a better place. So thank you all for being here. Appreciate you.

[D]

Thank you.

[B]

Thanks for having us.

[A]

Take a lot. All right, thanks. Goodbye, everybody.

[B]

Yo.

[A]

Longest one in the new studio. Wow. Go.