Do Smartphones Brainwash Women into Hating Babies？
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss the decline in married fertility since the peak in 2009, and the counterfactual scenario of what fertility might have been had people gotten married earlier, and formed families at the same rate as formerly, and why the decline isn't primarily due to a breakup in marriage rates.
Transcript
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hello simone i am excited to be here with you today today we are going to be going over a lot
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of fertility statistics a lot of graphs and we are going to be asking a question that has been
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posed in a few different ways we're going to be looking at a number of different articles and
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research pieces today one is the question of is fertility collapse primarily due to a breakup in
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marriage rates downstream of cell phone use or is and then a second argument i heard actually
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very interesting for me what is it adam ruins everything that got adam conover he has like a
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podcast now and he had a competent like progressive pronatalist on who is arguing that it was cell
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phones that were leading to all of this this is not something i've heard before i mean certainly
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cell phones have been blamed for the lack of children's literacy the mental health crisis but
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marriage rates well no she argued it was making kids that wasn't happening to the phone so we're
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going to go over these two related arguments okay okay sure and i'm going to start by reading a
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piece from the financial times and then going occasionally into other pieces that it's citing
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but from a marked fall in the number of couples had u.s rates of marriage and cohabitation remain
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constant over the past decade america's total fertility rate would be higher today than it was
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then and here i am putting a graph on screen that is total fertility rate varied widely by marital
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status and what it looks at is what your total fertility rate would be if you had been having
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kids this whole time so some numbers look really high like the married and spouse present looks like
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it's been hovering around 4.5 for the the past decade right and so the question is okay why does that look
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like it's hovering around 4.5 why does separated look like it's hovering around 2.5 why does married
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spouse absent look like it's hovering around three like these seem weirdly high right okay
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so here's why while women are married they tend to have very high birth rates note the chart above
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does not show that married women will have four or five kids it means that the average birth rate
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for married women ages 15 to 50 sums up to four or five kids you started at 15 there that seems a
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little like you're massaging the data okay i don't think many women are getting married at 15
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a sweetheart tiny tiny tiny um but that's a 35 year span when the average woman will actually only
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spend 12 and 20 of those years married yeah so okay what is shown here which i find compelling
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is that for period married the number of kids people are having is not declining over time
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so if you can get people married earlier you are going to have more kids yet we've said that before
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i do not think that that is the core of the problem but we'll talk about that in just a second
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as you can see above there's been a decline in married fertility since the peak in 2009 but married
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fertility rates today aren't actually much lower than married fertility rates in the mid-2000s
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for diversees and widowers age-adjusted birth rates are actually higher now than they were before
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the recession never married women again have about pre-recession levels of fertility too
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by fixing age-specific marital status 2001 to 2008 levels we can model a counterfactual scenario
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of what fertility might have been had people gotten married and formed families at the same rate as
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formerly and what you see here is that yes the fertility rate would have fallen net negative
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uh but not by a ton you're looking at like by a negative like 0.2 here or something like that
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okay but we'll get to why i'm not super compelled by this essentially all of the decline in fertility
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since 2001 can be explained by changes in the marital composition of the population married to single
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and divorced women are all about as likely controlling for the age and marital status to
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have kids as they were in 2001 but today a smaller portion of women are married during those peak
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fertility years relationships are not just becoming less common but increasingly fragile in egalitarian
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finland it is now more common for couples who move in together to split up than to have a child
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a sharp reversal in the historic trend and this is from a paper here partnership dynamics
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an entry into parenthood comparison of finished birth cohorts 1969 to 2000 any thoughts before i go
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further i'll keep going i want to hear more when pictured as a rise in happily childless dinks dual
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income no kid couples with plenty of disposable income the social trends accompanying falling birth
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rates seem benign but the rise of singledom and relationship dissolution is a less rosy story
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especially considering the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest of course
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many people are happily single the freedom to choose how to spend one's life and with who or
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without is to be celebrated i don't believe that by the way people aren't happily single everyone hates
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their life when they're single i don't know i loved being single but i didn't know you existed so
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there's that okay okay quality of your life when you were single versus quality today
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much better now more stressful though yeah but the point being is is you would hate your life when
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contrasted with today if you knew this was a possibility yeah totally but the wider data on
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loneliness and dating frustration suggests not as all as well so we're going to put some graphs on
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screen here here you can see the share of children born outside of wedlock by mother's class and this is
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in the united states 64 of your poor 36 of your working class 13 of your middle or upper class
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um millennial family pass by class do you have a kid before marriage or do you have marriage before
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a kid if you're poor 61 chance you have a kid before marriage only 16 chance you have a marriage before
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a kid wow okay if you're working class it's 44 chance you have a kid before marriage 34 chance you
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have a marriage before a kid kids are forcing marriages in our society if your middle or upper class is
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actually only a 19% chance you have a kid before marriage and a 51% chance you have a marriage
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before a kid. Wild, right? And when you look at these disparities. Why an almost worldwide decline
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and why now? The fact is that this is happening almost everywhere all at once. Points to more
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broad changes acting across borders than country-specific factors. The proliferation of
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smartphones and social media has been one such exogenous shock. True. Geographic differences
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in the rise of singledom broadly track mobile internet usage particularly among women whose
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calculus in weighing up potential partners is changing. Both of those things are true but maybe
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not as strong as you think. Surveys of childless women tell us that the top reason is not career
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lifestyle or financially related. It is that they just haven't found the right partner. This was the
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second most common reason given in a representative UK study of 42-year-old childless women right behind
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not wanting children. Focus on career was way down the list. US studies echo this. Fertility rates
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within marriages have stayed fairly steady since 1990. And I'll put a graph on screen here or a chart
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on screen here. The most important reason for remaining childless. This was a 1970 British cohort
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study. So a very old cohort study first of all. Yeah. And if you look at men versus women actually for
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men trying to find a good partner it was the harder problem than it was for women. This was 28% of men
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not wanting children. 23% of men not finding the right person. For women it was 31% not wanting
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children. 19% not finding the right person. So women are the bottleneck in not wanting children. Not
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not finding the right person. This is a little bit of pocket sand here. Okay. Mobile phones and
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attitudes towards women's participation in politics. Evidence from Africa. So in this study they are
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showing that women adopt more liberal views of a woman's role in a relationship and with kids
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when they get access to mobile phones. And this is where I will bring up the secondary argument I
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heard that I found pretty compelling from that Adam Conover show. Which is to say okay well so
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and I actually think this argument is way stronger than this argument in the financial times. Because
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the financial times is like well it's women becoming more liberal and not getting married. But the
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problem is is that we know in societies where women are still getting married which we'll get to in a
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bit you know whether it's Iran or India or anything like that we're still seeing precipitously dropping
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fertility rates. Right. So it's not marriage. It's just not. It's just not. We don't. We should see a
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huge difference in the societies where marriage is still happening and where it's not still happening
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and we don't see that huge difference. So whatever it is is everywhere. It's in rural Guatemala. It's in
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Iran. It's in India. It's in China. It's in the U.S. What is everywhere? Mobile phones. So what this
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other person argued she goes well what you don't understand is how much boredom people used to have.
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She's like you know when I was growing up yeah we had phones and I had like snake on that phone. I had
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snake on my phone. I'm very good. I remember fondly. Yes. Yes. And when you're deciding do I want to go
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over to a friend's house or play snake you usually want to go over to a friend's house even if they
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don't have like something specific plan you're like almost anything is better than snake snake is only
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better than like sitting alone in a car or something like that right now you're dealing with a completely
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different phenomenon. Do I want to go to a friend's house or enter like a fully immersive 3d world right
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or do I want to chat with an AI or do I want to like that's lot lot harder especially and and within
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cell phones you've got these whole you know keep in mind you didn't have things like reddit back then
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you didn't have things like social media as we understand it today where there is constant feedback
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constant dopamine loops and the idea being that the main reason people had kids historically was just
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that they were born. That's the main reason they dated. That's the main reason they hung out with
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friends. That's the main reason they did all of the things that made society work. Yeah because what
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we're also seeing is rates of like the number of friends that people have are much lower now than
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they were before as well and that does correlate with smartphone adoption. So there's there's ancillary
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evidence that suggests this is true. People are just not they don't need other humans to amuse them
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anymore. And in some countries they're like banning cell phones in schools and stuff like that which
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was a lot of this it's like I'm sorry that's not gonna work because then they're gonna have access
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to cell phones outside of school. Do you plan on them finding their partner in high school like you
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don't seem to so why are you acting like that's the solution right? Yeah. So one even if this is a
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problem I'm not particularly compelled by it and then two this doesn't explain the secondary issue
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which for me is much bigger which is that fertility rates are going up for every single age cohort except
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for under 24. Yeah. Or going up or staying around steady. It's under 24 that is that is dropped and
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then under you know 20 where you've had the precipitous drop. And so what we need to find is
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ways to motivate fertility at these these higher ages more than you had historically dramatically more
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than you had historically. And so you can't explain new technology which you might say is actually the
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drop in fertility rates is a good thing and we need to increase fertility rates in older
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generations through increasing the desire like you need to have a more a desire to have lots of kids
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than even your ancestors did. And also none of this really to me like the boredom thing that doesn't
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explain 50 percent of people saying they don't want kids if you're talking about like Gen Z you know
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like that doesn't explain that when historically as we went over in a recent episode only five percent of
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people said that. So and and 20 percent had no kids historically by the way that was what we learned in
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that episode. I don't know if it's necessarily boredom or if it's also that we've lost an ability
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to be comfortable dealing with humans at all because of phones. People are far less comfortable now
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interacting in person let alone picking up a phone to make a call you know that that's like seen as kind
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of like a palsy move you know. I think it's palsy. Who dares to give me a call and that I think adds the
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friction significantly to bringing another human into the world and being aware of the fact.
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Well I agree. I think what we need is new exogenous ideological motivators for child for having kids.
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Absolutely yeah. And not modifying or banning technology that we cannot control in terms of
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how our kids are interacting with it. Absolutely yeah. And when I say they're like well I can control
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when they're young yeah but then you can't control when they're not young and now you've you've given
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them this horrible thing they have no immunity to. Yeah that that's a really important thing is this idea
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of raising kids screen free. I get the so an argument I hear a lot of people make is well at least I can
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give my kid inhibitory control and the ability to live without screens as long as they're in my
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household. And I do see benefits in that absolutely it's great. We're not giving them inhibitory control
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if you are removing the screens. You have done the exact opposite. Yeah I mean the thing is you have to
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learn how to have that control despite the presence of the screens unless you plan on isolating your kid
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for life because otherwise they will get access. Which the Amish do and some Hariti communities do
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functionally speaking but yeah it's not in one of those groups you know uh I guess convert
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if that's the way you want to play the game. I think it's a it's it's I want kids who can engage
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with technology uh because I think that technology is going to be key to them crushing their enemies
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and so I'm not I'm not keeping them away from this stuff you know. But to continue the fallen coupling
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is the deepest in extremely online Europe, East Asia, and Latin America followed by the Middle East
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and then Africa. Singledom remains rare in South Asia where women's web access is more limited.
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This is really interesting to me because I didn't know that web access for women was so limited in
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South Asia. And it is true that the places where you've seen the biggest fertility crashes have been
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like East Asia where phone use is so much more common than it is in Europe or the United States.
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And then in Latin America phone use is also super super common in terms of like recreation and stuff
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like that. And it's less common in Africa from what I've heard. So six in ten women internet users
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who took part in a study face some kind of restriction from their families when using the
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internet. This is in Pakistan. Women disconnected feminist case studies on gender digital divide
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amidst COVID-19. This is a paper. The majority of respondents of the survey said that they are only
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allowed to use the internet for attending online classes or talking to family via WhatsApp.
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More than a third of those surveys acknowledged higher restrictions on the use of internet for
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girls than boys, with 16% saying girls are not allowed to use it at all. 16% said girls are not allowed
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to use it at all. Gosh. But boys are fine. Yeah. Why the difference? Well, because they're not
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incepted with the feminist mind virus, which is the key thing that's causing a lot of the changes in the
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way women view one, the right to not have kids, I think. Yeah. But I mean, having phones is damaging for
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everyone. You know, the effects are universal. No, it's not. Not in the same way. The ideological
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spread to a guy, like you're not going to F up a guy's image of his attractiveness with a phone.
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You're not going to F up a guy's image of his market value in dating markets with a phone.
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I don't know. I mean, the existence of looks maxing implies to me that that's not true.
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Looks maxing is a minute community. When you contrast it with the women who think that their
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value on the marriage marketplace is their value on the sexual marketplace. It's like not even,
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this is the majority of women versus 0.01% of guys. I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, no. What do you
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mean you don't know? Do you argue that the number of looks maxers is higher than 0.01% of the US
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women though are far more likely to end up obsessing about their appearance because that
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tends to be a major factor influencing their desire. Okay. So you're saying that it is way
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more damaging to women than men. Well, yeah, but I'm also not so sure that
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we're moving. No, no, no, no, no. You back up your, your position here. What, but also,
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I mean, what you still, I'm not just talking about the development of body dysmorphia. I mean,
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you're also screwing up inhibitory control. You're also distracting people. Like why that
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doesn't matter. I don't think that matters at all to having kids. So are you saying it's a cult? I
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mean, I mean, but also look at the cultural ideals that are presented to young men online. They're
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basically, you know, forced infantilization for most of their lives. Men are encouraged to live
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like teenagers for as long as they possibly can. There's very little celebration of parenthood and
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early marriage. That's true. I think that there are some online communities for men that do push
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that, but the number of men that gravitate towards them is the vast minority. I think that this is
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the difference here. You were talking about the vast majority of women versus the vast minority of
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men. If you look at the women who end up making inaccurate judgments about their value on marriage
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markets due to interacting with online dating pools, I would say the number is probably 95%
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to 80% of women. If you look at the number of men who develop an obsession with their looks versus
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the number of women who develop an obsession with their looks based on online. Online women,
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I'd say over 50% of women. Men, I'd say less than 3% of men. You're just not talking about the same
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numbers. So you're just trying to blame body dysmorphia on why women aren't having kids?
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It's one of the things I'm saying, for example, red pillism, for example, is much less damaging to
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having lots of kids than feminism is. A guy who enters a, even an inaccurate representation
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of a historic male-female relationship as depicted by the red pill community is likely to have kids.
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It's my intuition that the bigger problem is the normalization of a culture that puts hedonism over
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all else and doesn't reward having families or living in alignment with values that aren't just
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hedonistic or highly progressive values. And I think that that affects men just as much as women.
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I disagree really strongly here. It doesn't, I mean, like it obviously does. I'm trying to walk you
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through this. So I'm trying to get you to like, think of numbers in your head. Okay. What percent of
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men who engage with the internet do you think are engaged with like toxic, like red pill communities?
00:18:57.780
Probably not that many, but I'm not sure. Like I have no, I have no research on this.
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The number is, is, is maybe between five to 25% low. Okay. However, you also know how many women
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who engage with the internet engage with toxic progressive communities. You can just look at the
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Yeah, I think, well, and it's not, not to run counter to my own argument, but the fact that
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spoonies are almost entirely comprised of young women, this is to say people who believe that they
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have chronic illnesses and sometimes really do, but often don't. And that can be really damaging to
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their lives. And what about Stoics, right? How many female Stoics have you heard of on in online
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communities? Yeah. Yeah. Fair. I mean, that, that is true. So the internet is more damaging
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to women than it is to men. I've not heard this thesis before, but I'm going to have to think
00:20:07.680
about it, Malcolm. I'm going to have to think about it. All right. So key findings from the research
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indicate that around 40% of the women surveys use the internet every day. So a lot of them are still
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using it every day. And even in these countries with usage becoming higher as family income rises.
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So again, family income, this probably shows why you have the negative correlation here,
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a whopping 80% of the respondents who are unable to use the internet are from South Rizikistan,
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one of the newly merged districts of the Khyber-Pakitakoa something province. Anyway, you may,
00:20:40.640
what, what sort of birth rate does this lead to? Well, Pakistan's birth rate is falling,
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you know, as recently as the 1990s, it was over six per woman and now it's 3.41, but it's still
00:20:50.820
quite high when compared to something like India, which is below replacement rate now, or Bangladesh,
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which is below replacement rate. This is not to overstate the role of social media,
00:21:00.960
other cultural differences between countries and regions mediate both the spread of liberal ideas
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and people's ability to act on them. Cast and honor systems encourage high rates of marriage,
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irrespective of media access and female education, income and employment differ markedly between
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regions. So remember, we're talking about India has a unusually low fertility rate for its income level.
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So let's look at India in marriage rates. Okay. In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 households,
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93% of married Indians said that they came from an arranged marriage. Just 3% had a love marriage and
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another 2% described theirs as a love come arranged marriage, which usually indicates that the
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relationship was set up by the families and then the couple agreed to get married. There has been
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only a slight change over time. 94% of octogenarians had an arranged marriage and the figure remains at
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over 90% for young couples in their twenties. Did you know that? That's really interesting to me.
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That is really interesting. Manisha Mondal always thought that she would have a love marriage.
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I was used to fighting with my parents. I fought to attend college. That was a little far away from
00:22:10.220
home. I thought, okay, love marriage will be the next thing to fight about. Manisha, an office assistant
00:22:16.000
in Bahali, a small town in Eastern India told me, but in the first few days of college, a few boys
00:22:22.420
approached her to talk and older female students took her to the bathroom for a talking to. If she spoke to
00:22:28.220
the boys, they warned her reputation would be ruined to keep an eye out for her. Her older brother
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would drive past college a few times a day to make sure she was not talking to boys. College was
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important to Manisha and she'd rather incredibly oppressive and then work, then take a chance on
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love. So she cared more about work than she cared about marrying who she wanted to, which I thought was
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really interesting. Yeah. It does sound oppressive, but it appears to be working by her last year in
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college. Her wedding had been fixed with the son of her father's friend from the same community.
00:23:02.020
I see my parents. They have never had a fight, so I think it will work for me too, the 24-year-old
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said, showing her crossed fingers over the WhatsApp call. Marrying within your caste remains an essential
00:23:14.140
feature of marriage in India. In 2014, a survey of more than 70,000 people, fewer than 10% of urban
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Indians said anyone in their family, anyone in their family had married outside their caste and not many
00:23:26.240
more outside their jahiti or subcast. Interfaith marriages were even rarer. Just 5% of urban
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respondents said that anyone in their family had married outside their religion. Oh, wow.
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Did you know about that in India? I didn't. But India and Pakistan aren't famous for great quality of
00:23:47.500
life for women. So I just don't know how I feel about this. The solution to me is not, let's just roll
00:23:56.440
back human rights. Let's just roll back education. Let's just roll back human rights a smidge.
00:24:03.960
I don't accept it. I don't. And I think that carrots are more motivating in the end than sticks.
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I think that empowerment is better than disempowerment. And I think that there's plenty
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of history in the world in which women have had a lot of freedom, but have used it well because they
00:24:23.220
weren't exposed to a terrible culture. And I agree that smartphones are a vector for very unsustainable
00:24:30.560
and dangerous cultures. And I agree that those cultures have also hurt me, but they also hurt me
00:24:36.780
as a teen well before smartphones existed. I don't think just taking them away.
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You look at what motivates fertility in our family. Conviction, ideology, religion,
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none of it would be at all mitigated by cell phone or internet exposure.
00:24:58.060
Yeah. Also, you would not have gotten kids out of me if you were like, well, I only want to marry
00:25:04.480
a stay-at-home wife who doesn't go on the internet.
00:25:08.120
I would not have gotten kids out of you. Squeezing you for all the kids.
00:25:11.220
Well, like your whole, your, your selling point to me was, you don't have to give anything up if
00:25:20.460
Do you see that as an unrealistic selling point for most people?
00:25:23.000
I do see that that's an unrealistic selling point for most people, but.
00:25:27.620
Also, I'd point out here that, that you make it sound like totally magnanimous towards me,
00:25:32.980
but the actual term of the contract we came up with is not as unfair as it may sound. The rule
00:25:39.840
was, is that you would always be allowed to pursue your career. And if it came to it,
00:25:44.500
I would become a stay-at-home dad. Not that I would always support you no matter what. The rule was,
00:25:50.820
you were going to support us no matter what. Yeah.
00:25:52.920
I just gave you the privilege of supporting the family.
00:25:55.740
The option, optionality, giving women optionality, I think gives them empowerment. And I think most
00:26:04.600
of the choices among women to, so optionality plays a role in choosing to not have kids because
00:26:12.880
one of the biggest things we're seeing is just fewer unplanned teen births. Like that's what we're
00:26:16.920
seeing in South America. It's not that people's intentions have changed. It's just that there are
00:26:21.320
fewer mistake pregnancies and people are delaying fertility. But I think that the core answer to
00:26:26.360
all of this is mistake babies is where the kids have disappeared. Yeah. Like largely that is what
00:26:32.780
has happened. And what you're talking about here is not mistake babies, but you're talking about
00:26:37.740
basically forced babies by disempowering women and, and, and, and creating unwanted babies, which
00:26:43.060
again, like, I don't think that forcing people into anything is the solution and I'm vehemently
00:26:50.860
against it. Well, it doesn't seem, but I think there are countries that do this. Like Iran does
00:26:55.380
this and it doesn't lead to an increase in fertility rate. How does Iran force people to
00:27:00.160
have kids? Women in Iran do not have a lot of rights and the marriage rate is really high and
00:27:05.600
it doesn't lead to a high fertility rate. So the question is why, why? And the answer is because
00:27:10.240
you can't, it doesn't work like this. You, you, you can't just do that, especially if they have
00:27:13.720
access to the internet and stuff like that. And so I, I think that it is a, you might be able to
00:27:18.840
get around it if you're in a culture where widespread access to the internet isn't as
00:27:22.260
common, but I don't think that those cultures will end up being the cultures that end up
00:27:26.340
dominating the human species going forwards. So I'm not particularly concerned about them
00:27:30.740
or interested in emulating them myself. So the question is this, can you build up the
00:27:35.840
spiritual fortitude to interact with these types of technology? And I think that's doable
00:27:40.220
while still motivating like way higher kid rates than people had historically. And I think
00:27:44.220
that that needs new cultural systems, new way of relating to what kids mean to your culture.
00:27:50.520
There's a lot of the reasons why people don't have kids are based on false premises. You know,
00:27:55.900
the idea that you should have your career and everything 100% in place before you have kids,
00:28:02.020
which now is increasingly impossible. Who's ever going to be financially or career stable
00:28:08.800
You can't wait to have kids until you're, you're stable.
00:28:11.440
Yeah. There's a bunch of false and, you know, also this false perception that it's not a good
00:28:15.520
idea to have a kid while you're going through college or graduate school. That's one of the
00:28:20.300
Yeah. I was, I was talking to one of our followers about this and they were like, well, you know,
00:28:24.100
my partner's autistic. And so we need like a full-time nanny to have kids and start having
00:28:28.700
kids. I'm like, no, you don't. It doesn't, my partner's autistic. Okay. Like you'll figure it out.
00:28:33.740
It's more, it is more stressful to have a full-time nanny if you're autistic, because guess what? Now
00:28:40.400
your life is entirely about managing this party. Yes. Which by the way, is incentivized to exploit
00:28:46.400
you, to disappoint you, to only think about themselves and not about you or the baby. So
00:28:50.800
good luck with that. Being an autistic parent, I think is a lot easier if you're good at masking,
00:28:55.640
because you will do what doesn't feel natural, but is best for your baby. When a neurotypical
00:29:03.080
parent would not, I act cheerful and playful around our kids as much as I can. And certainly
00:29:10.740
I don't feel it a lot of the time, but I do. I go downstairs and just, you understand it. She,
00:29:15.580
she creates the perfect environment for my kids. She, she goes, I go downstairs and she is making a
00:29:21.380
homemade pizza and playing Italian music, like, like fun, like whatever music. The kids are all
00:29:26.880
helping. It is this perfect scenic family movement moment. And I'm like, Simone, like, how are you this
00:29:31.800
perfect? And she goes, well, I thought this is what like a perfect family moment would look like.
00:29:35.140
So I decided to do this. Cause like, I don't know, like I'm autistic. Right. So I was, I figured this
00:29:39.340
is what you need to do. Right. Yeah. So normal neurotypical parents do what they feel like doing and react
00:29:43.700
to their children the way that they feel. And a good masking autistic parent reacts the way a perfect,
00:29:49.820
loving, playful, yes. And parent will. And so I would argue that. And, and I would say also many,
00:29:57.820
many, many, when who are autistic are also really, really good at masking. So they're among the very
00:30:02.260
best parents you could possibly have. No, you don't need a nanny. Cause like, that is the one thing
00:30:06.040
that autistic people really aren't that great at even being able to deal with, with training,
00:30:10.220
which is just other people being assholes and taking advantage of them, which is a constant thing,
00:30:15.000
right? Like with all of our old, like childcare options before we found our amazing solution we have
00:30:19.580
now. You were basically like, Simone, you can't talk to them because I would talk to them and
00:30:24.160
suddenly like all of the terms would be subverted. Suddenly they would drop out on us. Suddenly
00:30:28.380
like their rates would triple. And they sense weakness whenever they talk to Simone. Simone is
00:30:34.220
not dealing with contractors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not good. Because she's like, I don't want to be
00:30:39.500
mean. And I'm like, you need to be mean. Like you need to show that you have boundaries.
00:30:44.760
Yeah. Yeah. And you don't, you, you enter like. Yeah. Like they'll call me trying to work. And
00:30:50.840
this, this, again, this isn't with our current childcare arrangement, which is amazing. But
00:30:54.140
like babysitters would call me and be like, Oh, so-and-so has a dirty diaper. And I'd be like,
00:30:58.260
Oh, well, of course I'll come down and change it. And then, you know, of course I'm like super
00:31:00.920
interrupted. It's a, if you give a mouse cookie situation where like, then I'm down for an hour
00:31:04.660
and here I am paying this person an hour. And they demand that you talk to them and they,
00:31:09.320
you know, and you're like, Oh, I'm talking to them because it makes them like us more. And I'm like,
00:31:12.900
no, they think that by talking to you, they are getting you to like them more so they can get
00:31:18.940
more out of you. It's not the other way around you. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, that among other
00:31:25.860
things likes it in this like list of things that people misunderstand about parenthood and just
00:31:33.100
changing the culture around it can make a huge, huge, huge difference. And it's going to have to
00:31:38.700
happen on a community by community basis. But in the end, it's those high fertility communities
00:31:42.880
that are going to inherit the earth. So it doesn't matter that only a small number of cultures are
00:31:47.740
going to pass through all this. The ones that figure it out will. And I just don't think the
00:31:52.440
ones that systematically disempower women are, are, are going to make it. These women
00:31:58.400
there'll be like a permanent dysgenic spiral. Yeah. It's, it's not, it's not good. It's not good.
00:32:05.680
Also they're, they're not having that many kids anymore.
00:32:07.840
Yeah. It's not even that effective a strategy anymore. So it's like, well, why, why take all
00:32:12.540
the costs? Yeah. The, like going forward one, I mean, because child mortality is way down,
00:32:17.580
women don't ultimately have to have that many kids to really grow the population because we're not
00:32:24.000
losing half of them to tragic ends prematurely. However, sacrifices between fertility issues and
00:32:33.160
delayed childbearing people are going to have to be highly motivated. If they want to have kids,
00:32:39.320
they are going to have to really, really, really, really try and either invest in a ton of like just
00:32:45.460
holistic health solutions and live healthy lives, which is hard to do these days or undergo fertility
00:32:52.140
treatment and IVF to have the number of kids they want to have. And that's a culture thing.
00:32:57.900
That's not a female disempowerment thing, but I do agree. And we're going to have to talk about this
00:33:02.680
with our own family that, yeah, maybe you're right that phones are hurting women, young women,
00:33:10.680
especially more than they hurt men, which is. Well, I think that you protect them not by not
00:33:16.380
having them access phones, but by having a strong memetic structures that can protect them from the
00:33:22.500
types of memes. It's the memes on the phones that are hurting them. Yeah. It's not the phones.
00:33:26.560
Yeah. The phones are amazing technology. The phones are amazing. The way that we use our phones with
00:33:34.140
kids. I would never not want our kids to be around phones because our kids know. I'm not that worried
00:33:37.800
about our daughters. Last night Octavian was like, oh, how do you make a paper boat? And I'm like,
00:33:42.180
I don't know. Let's look it up. And then you can learn. That's so cool. I mean, my mom used to look
00:33:47.040
things up in dictionaries with me and I love that she did that, but now we can do that with literally
00:33:50.560
learning how to do almost anything. You know, how, how to deliver a baby calf, how to assemble
00:33:55.960
all sorts of things. This is so cool. Well, I love you to death, Simone. Any final thoughts? I guess
00:34:00.520
not. Sorry. So it's the accident babies. That's the problem. We need not more accident babies,
00:34:08.020
but we need to find a way to offset the accident babies that don't exist anymore. And the cultures
00:34:12.320
that relied on accident babies to replace themselves like Catholics. I'm going to say like, but it's,
00:34:16.920
we need to make, we need to make childbearing an aesthetic desirable thing. We need to make
00:34:25.060
childbearing aspirational. We need to make it people's special interests. This has to be how
00:34:29.980
people are competing, what people aspire to, what people enjoy, what their hobbies are.
00:34:34.320
And when I speak at conventions and people come to me and like at the Pernadals convention last year,
00:34:37.740
somebody was like, well, I mean, surely you want to ban condoms. Surely you want to ban porn.
00:34:42.140
And I'm like, no, those are the babies we're glad don't exist. The babies that somebody had
00:34:47.660
because they couldn't figure out how to use a condom or they couldn't get access to a condom
00:34:51.120
or the babies who exist because a guy didn't have access to porn. And so it was like, well,
00:34:56.040
I want to get off today. So I got someone to use my girlfriend. Those are the babies that,
00:35:02.180
that are, that are the accident babies. Yeah. How can you be pronatalist? And even if it's just
00:35:07.060
pronatalist in terms of like, Oh, I love kids. How can you love kids and want people who resent kids
00:35:15.080
to be raising them? Now we need to change our culture and show people that actually they are
00:35:19.660
ready to have kids. Yeah. But that is a very different thing than literally forcing it upon
00:35:26.120
people because face it, many people just never do get ready.
00:35:30.120
It is interesting to me that so many religions rely on our basic, most perverted, most animalistic
00:35:37.940
biology to motivate reproduction. And that those, those groups are the ones that are dealing with
00:35:44.280
fertility collapse the most because it turns out that this system just doesn't work in the modern
00:35:48.080
era and that you need to find ways to get people to value kids for the sake of the kids, which,
00:35:53.340
which does work. You know, for example, if you look at the Catholic communities, for example,
00:35:56.540
they're doing really well in terms of the fertility is because they want to have kids. It's not because
00:36:00.640
they accidentally got pregnant or didn't understand contraception or they, you know,
00:36:05.120
it's because they're like, I am all about having like as many kids as possible.
00:36:08.420
Yeah. And I think, well, the thing is, and what I think Catherine Poceluk has it right, that
00:36:12.160
high fertility couples start out wanting a lot of kids for a setting and ideological reasons.
00:36:16.860
And that gets them through the first three. It's like loosening the jar because it is really hard
00:36:21.740
to push through your first kids. It is difficult when you're doing everything for the first time and
00:36:25.780
they're not there to entertain each other. And you haven't yet shifted to commercial operations
00:36:29.840
of everything. So nothing's really sustainable. That's the hardest part. So you need that exogenous
00:36:34.280
motivator. And then beyond that, the kids sell themselves. Like it's, it just, it's hard. It's
00:36:39.340
hard to quit after that point, as long as you have the physical, are you addicted to pregnancy?
00:36:43.840
I'm not addicted to pregnancy, but I am definitely addicted to having more kids and wanting more kids
00:36:50.180
in this world. They're just such amazing people and they love each other.
00:36:53.500
Purpleing child addiction. I know. I actually find it very interesting that progressives,
00:36:58.380
they always frame what we're doing. It's like a breeding fetish. They're like,
00:37:02.280
Yeah. Well, which one is ironic because none of our children have been produced via sex.
00:37:07.060
Right. But the idea of like, oh, they're trying to force their breeding fetish on society.
00:37:10.940
And it's like, what a perverse understanding of why people do things. Right.
00:37:15.020
Yeah. Like literally the only version of sex that is not an exercise of some kind of kink is
00:37:23.360
procreative sex. Yeah. Everything else is some kind of kink or like hedonic thing. The only version
00:37:30.600
of sex that is like actually. Well, that's what it evolves for, right? Like that's, that's why you
00:37:33.840
feel these things. Yeah. Duh. But you know. Anyway, love you to Esteban. Have a good day.
00:37:41.640
Gochujang chicken. I was actually wondering if you could do fiery chicken with gochujang,
00:37:48.300
I don't know what you're talking about. Like the same chicken you had last night. That kind of
00:37:54.980
chicken. The chicken I had last night used gochujang and a sweet sauce. It didn't. No.
00:38:01.120
It was just gochujang and what? No, there was no gochujang sauce in that chicken at all. That was
00:38:05.740
not gochujang chicken. What was that? That was Szechuan chicken. Really? It was very sweet for what I
00:38:14.180
thought. When I gave you gochujang chicken, I was like, wow, like, don't you think it's too
00:38:19.040
sweet? And you're like, it's not sweet at all. I'd be lighter. It's just right now. I'm not
00:38:23.800
really in the mood for sweet food. I'm more. Would you just like mapu dofu instead? I just,
00:38:27.540
I need to use that chicken. Yes. Let's do mapu dofu. Off I go then. I love you. You're amazing.
00:38:35.800
Everybody has been dunking on phones again. Like we're back to it. I thought that with the
00:38:40.740
threat to TikTok ban, that people would start defending phone use. And now
00:38:44.940
no, suddenly phones are still bad. I haven't noticed this. I have noticed it offline. Not,
00:38:54.380
not necessarily online. Let me do the reminders. Hey, guess what? We are going to be in Austin at
00:39:00.000
the natal conference this March. We would love to see you there. So whether or not you live in Austin,
00:39:04.740
this might be a great excuse to take a little trip. You can get 10% off your registration for natal
00:39:10.720
con. The, this is the second inaugural pro natalist conference, uh, by entering the code Collins at
00:39:16.780
checkout. So if you are going, we're really excited to see you there. And if you're not, sorry.