Based Camp - How To Save Dating & Relationships - With Louise Perry

00:00:00.000 The other thing that I'd add, this might not apply as much in the workplace, but definitely in terms of politics, I would say that frustrated maternal impulse is a very politically potent and potentially dangerous force.

00:00:12.640 Yeah. And I think that, like, say, I don't know, attitudes towards refugees in the UK.

00:00:21.600 This might not be as acute in the US, I don't know.

00:00:23.740 But I, any number of political causes, this is just one example, I think that the reason you see disproportionate numbers of young women who don't have children drawn to these kind of high, like, highly charged empathetic situations where you are, like, trying to save groups of people, right, who may well be adult men.

00:00:48.140 But I honestly think that a big part of that is, it's like with getting the dogs, you know, it's this tug towards mothering something.

00:00:57.440 That is a good hot take.

00:00:59.900 Would you like to know more?

00:01:01.960 Hello, this is Malcolm Collins here.

00:01:04.420 Today was, of course, my lovely wife, Simone Collins and Louise Perry, our special guest today.

00:01:10.120 You may know her from the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast, or you may know her from her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

00:01:16.560 And if you do not know her, we recently did a tour in the UK talking with a lot of rising political, well, conservative political stars, because, of course, that's who talks to us.

00:01:26.560 And she was repeatedly named as the number one conservative thought leader in the intellectual side in the UK right now.

00:01:34.580 And so we are thrilled to have her on our podcast.

00:01:37.720 The question I wanted to focus on was in this episode, is how can we make dating work?

00:01:46.020 Because I think if we look at the world today, everyone who is being honest is saying gender dynamics do not seem to be working right now.

00:01:54.960 So what do you advise when you're advising young girls or young boys about how to go out there?

00:02:00.840 Because let's be honest, they are in a dramatically worse situation than we were.

00:02:05.080 How do you advise them to go out there and find partners?

00:02:07.500 And how might you build a new systems that could help them?

00:02:12.900 It's really difficult.

00:02:13.800 And I say this as someone who's, I've been with my husband for 10 years and I have that feeling of being the sort of last chopper out of Saigon, right?

00:02:23.060 Because it was pre-dating apps that we met.

00:02:27.360 And we just met through, it's through friends, the sort of good old fashioned, well, not quite good old fashioned, right?

00:02:33.780 Like good old fashioned is actually an arranged marriage.

00:02:35.460 But there was this sort of brief window, right?

00:02:39.420 Post-doctoral revolution pre-dating apps where you generally met people through actual existing social connections.

00:02:44.900 And I would always advise where possible to meet people through actual existing social connections.

00:02:49.580 Because apart from anything else, it means you have some kind of vetting process available.

00:02:53.600 The problem with a dating app is it's just a stranger from the internet.

00:02:57.720 And people will admit, people who, like friends of mine, male and female, who've used dating apps,

00:03:02.440 will admit that they behave worse with people they've met on dating apps in terms of ghosting or whatever.

00:03:07.380 Interesting.

00:03:07.780 Because they know there are no social consequences. 0.81

00:03:10.060 Because they know that no one is going to then spread a rumor that they're like a shitty person who ghosts people.

00:03:16.360 This is, you know, particularly if you're in a big city like London, there are just so many millions of people that they disappear into the night.

00:03:21.240 It's like, it almost doesn't feel real, I think, when you use a dating app.

00:03:25.820 So, yeah, real social connections is better.

00:03:28.720 It is difficult, though.

00:03:29.400 I'm sure you've seen these graphs about how people meet over time.

00:03:32.940 And it went from being like an enormous number of people met at church, for instance.

00:03:38.380 And then you see all of that stuff, or at work, and then you see all of that stuff declining and the apps taking their place.

00:03:47.600 And, hey, sometimes people do have flourishing marriages that started on the internet.

00:03:52.920 It's not, you know, it's not nothing.

00:03:54.340 One of the things that we've tried to do with the podcast is we had a matchmaking event in London a few months ago.

00:04:02.100 Yeah, and we're going to do another one.

00:04:03.120 We're planning on doing another one on Valentine's Day, in fact.

00:04:06.900 I mean, I'll tell you, they are not a good way of making money.

00:04:10.340 Because you have, you can completely see why the people who created the apps are, you know, multimillionaires plus, right?

00:04:18.060 Because it's that the internet is like endlessly reproducible, whereas in real life events are not endlessly reproducible.

00:04:24.280 And actually, a lot of work and effort into having, I mean, I think it was 60 people who came to the first one.

00:04:29.220 And having all these 60 people in a room is actually very, like, logistically demanding.

00:04:33.740 We thought, no, we're going to do it because the podcast, if you're listening to my podcast, that tells you something about your values.

00:04:42.920 Yeah, it's culturally selective.

00:04:44.260 They're somewhat aligned values.

00:04:46.020 Yeah, it's a very useful filter.

00:04:48.160 What was the structure of these events?

00:04:49.600 So we got people to email, well, to fill in an online form where they gave some basic stuff, the kind of demographic details, a photo and a few other things about, like, religiosity and stuff.

00:05:02.640 And then we mostly just, we mostly selected on the basis of having even numbers of men and women and having roughly the same age ranges.

00:05:11.560 Like, for instance, we had, like, too many young men apply, so we had to exclude some of the young men because a 35-year-old woman is not likely to be interested in a 20-year-old man, right?

00:05:22.020 So we did a little bit of tailoring like that.

00:05:24.180 And we'll do that for the future.

00:05:25.440 I mean, people have requested, you know, specific age range events and things like that.

00:05:29.160 So with sufficient demand, we can do that.

00:05:31.100 But, like, you can see why this isn't as popular as you'd hope because it is, like, it's labor intensive and it's quite small numbers that you're dealing with.

00:05:37.700 But it's also much, much higher quality because you're filtering on the basis of one, everyone there had to want to get married.

00:05:45.120 Like, that was one of the key things.

00:05:46.700 So no one was there just to hook up.

00:05:49.520 And everyone had, you could kind of have a basic assurance of shared values, which you can't really find anywhere else, except maybe in religious communities.

00:05:58.000 But then I hear from, I mean, I have a friend, for instance, who met his wife at, like, a young adult Catholic thing, you know.

00:06:06.660 You can, meeting through church is probably this, I would say, meeting through extended friend networks, meeting through church or whatever other religious organization.

00:06:19.060 Now, meeting through one of my podcast events is obviously at the top of the list because I want to be invited to the wedding.

00:06:23.700 But in terms of, like, the, you definitely want to be prioritizing real social connections.

00:06:30.920 But I do have enormous sympathy because, like, that does limit your pool a lot.

00:06:34.200 Yeah, so I want to pull on something you said because it's something we're doing for our kids.

00:06:37.680 And I'm wondering if you were, have you ever considered doing this for your kids, is arranged marriages.

00:06:43.580 We are looking at, specifically the way we're probably going to structure it is around the age of, like, 24, 25.

00:06:50.480 They get a partner assigned to them that we chose from a network of other family friends who are open to doing this.

00:06:56.660 And if you want to join, let us know.

00:06:58.100 And we basically say, look, this is the one chance you get.

00:07:01.160 Like, we're not going to find another partner for you.

00:07:03.260 If you turn this down, then you're on your own.

00:07:05.720 And it's funny.

00:07:06.720 I mentioned this to a lot of, like, millennials.

00:07:09.620 And they're horrified.

00:07:11.000 I mentioned this to Gen Z.

00:07:12.920 And they're like, oh, my God, I wish my parents would do that for me.

00:07:16.380 Please relieve me of my suffering.

00:07:17.860 Yeah.

00:07:18.560 Yeah.

00:07:19.020 Well, okay.

00:07:19.520 So I think that probably the ideal, well, if you look at different, how different cultures deal with this problem, which is a very, very difficult coordination problem.

00:07:27.200 Like, we must not understate how difficult this coordination problem is.

00:07:31.160 It's through, like, softer range marriages, right?

00:07:33.900 It's not the, you've never met this person and you're betrothed at the age of 12 or something like that, right?

00:07:39.380 That is unusual.

00:07:40.220 It's more likely, you hear about that or you read about that in history more often because aristocrats would be more likely to do that.

00:07:45.680 Right.

00:07:46.160 But normal people are normally not doing that.

00:07:47.820 It's more like you basically have a curated pool to choose from or you can choose and then we have to, we can veto.

00:07:56.500 Like, the family can veto.

00:07:57.980 Which I think, honestly, is actually a great way of doing it because, and in practice, you know, often does.

00:08:03.140 My husband and I often joke that sort of on paper we could have been in a raged marriage in the sense that we have very kind of similar families.

00:08:10.760 Like, there's just lots of ways in which we're very socially sympathetic, right, as a couple.

00:08:17.180 As it happens, we just got lucky.

00:08:19.020 But, you know, you can, I think that what does typically happen, honestly, in the best kind of matches is you meet the person yourself, but the families have to be on board for it to actually work.

00:08:30.880 And it soon becomes evident if the families are not on board and then maybe the relationship with us, you know.

00:08:38.200 But any kind of scenario where the families are completely not on board is just so likely to end in tears.

00:08:45.420 I mean, so that's a softer range of barriers and that probably is the ideal scenario.

00:08:49.540 I think in the context of this, it's interesting to sort of reflect on how sort of crazy the way our society right now is.

00:08:55.580 Like, we know we're supposed to find a spouse.

00:08:58.140 So, I think initially the idea was, well, you still get spouses, but then you get this younger age where, like, you sleep around a bit and you get to play at what it's like to be in a relationship, but you still basically get an arranged marriage.

00:09:14.280 Like, that is, the softer arranged marriages, I think, are what we still had in the U.S., you know, up until, like, the 40s.

00:09:19.100 And then it began to become like, okay, you actually test out a bunch of potential relationships and then you choose when you think you have found one that could be a marriage.

00:09:32.900 Now, what's interesting is people don't do that.

00:09:34.540 They're now like, no, I'm going to wait until I find the perfect one, right, which is a very different thing.

00:09:39.220 But that's not even what they really do.

00:09:40.780 They sort of now, what I've noticed, I think that this is actually the way things work in secular society, even if secular society won't say this, is you play musical chairs. 0.98

00:09:50.880 You date random people and you have sex with random people until one day you realize, holy shit, I need to, like, the music is turned off. 0.98

00:09:58.500 I'm on the chair I'm sitting on. 0.98

00:10:00.160 And that's actually how I think things are structured right now.

00:10:02.760 A friend of mine has, agrees with that, with that analogy.

00:10:07.180 She actually, funnily enough, she, this couple that we're friends with, they actually met when they were teenagers, so unusual.

00:10:12.020 Yeah, and now they're in their, they're married in their mid-30s, but with, with, with a baby.

00:10:17.760 But the, her line, which always makes me laugh, is like, not only is it like playing musical chairs and therefore, you know, losing options with every, every round, but also that those options are selected for badness, right?

00:10:29.700 Like, there's a reason those chairs are still there and it's not some kind of dysfunction.

00:10:34.840 So I, the worst possible advice that you hear so often and is so horrendous is that you should hold off on choosing a spouse until a certain age point.

00:10:45.560 You should, you should not, you should not choose a spouse, for instance, until you're in your thirties and there's something suspect about any relationship that starts before then.

00:10:54.300 Like, the university boyfriend must be dumped, for instance, you should, you should dump the university boyfriend, you should, you should try a few other musical chairs and then you can actually start seriously thinking about searching down your thirties.

00:11:04.780 And even aside from the biological clock problem, which is a very serious one, like, no, anyone who's, anyone who's in the same boat as you in their thirties and, and, and for some reason unmarried, unless they've been like widowed, there might be a good reason why they're not married.

00:11:20.220 Like there might be some kind of whatever, like aversion to commitment, like a whole host of, a whole host of reasons why people would have selected themselves into that category.

00:11:30.080 Yeah.

00:11:30.380 So one thing I would advise, so this is for our younger listeners, cause it's advice I would give my kids is the one place I think secular society does give good advice on this is you probably shouldn't marry someone you're dating in high school or middle school.

00:11:42.700 Um, and the reason I say high school, you know, cause this is where this is most likely to happen is because these are the first times you're feeling these emotions and you don't understand that, you know, this is just a random person who you happen to have met and you are unlikely to, because you just haven't been exposed to that many people in high school to really have found that optimized person.

00:12:01.100 I think college is when you really should, like you should aim 70% to find who you're going to marry in the years.

00:12:08.060 If you don't go to college in the years, you would have been in college.

00:12:10.760 Like I think that.

00:12:11.800 Yeah.

00:12:11.980 Don't get your BA, get your MRS.

00:12:13.660 Right.

00:12:14.020 That was a joke among older generations.

00:12:15.980 I mean, yeah.

00:12:18.160 Yeah.

00:12:18.600 Yeah.

00:12:18.760 Yeah.

00:12:18.860 I mean, you couldn't, do you remember Princeton mom?

00:12:21.640 No.

00:12:22.180 She was this woman who was, this was a few years ago now, who, whose children, one child maybe was at Princeton and she had been to Princeton herself.

00:12:30.380 And she wrote a sort of letter to young, to female students in the college magazine.

00:12:35.620 Oh, I remember.

00:12:37.000 And it was so controversial, but she was completely right.

00:12:39.820 She said, you know, listen, listen, ladies, like you are never going to be surrounded by this many eligible young men ever again in your life who are, who are single, who are selected for their intellect, conscientious, all these good things.

00:12:53.320 And like, you have nothing to like, come on, like university students are so idle.

00:12:56.560 You have basically nothing to do.

00:12:57.880 You, you should, you should be trying to find a spouse. 0.89

00:13:00.820 That should be your goal.

00:13:01.820 And it was incredibly controversial.

00:13:03.860 And the good ones do get snatched up.

00:13:06.040 And I think that's the thing, you know, there's these, the, in a way we're always sort of like, we get annoyed by progressive culture, but we're always like, it always ends up punishing the progressives the most.

00:13:15.220 You know, the ones who are susceptible to these ideas, they're the ones who aren't lapping up guys.

00:13:20.860 The, the young, aggressive, conservative women are the ones leaving the college with all the most emotionally stable, caring guys. 1.00

00:13:27.800 And that's why when women are like, oh, there's no good men anymore. 1.00

00:13:31.420 It's like, yeah, because you missed them.

00:13:33.100 You had your chance.

00:13:34.380 Yeah.

00:13:34.840 I, I, I make fun of progressives, right?

00:13:37.180 Because obviously it's, it's fun to do so.

00:13:39.320 But I'm saying this as someone who, who used to be a progressive, right?

00:13:42.420 And I, I basically just got lucky in, in getting, in finding my spouse when I did.

00:13:46.420 It wasn't through like, especially good judgment.

00:13:49.100 It was just pure luck.

00:13:49.940 And actually, you know, like for all that we, for all that we make fun of them rightly, and I'm not talking about the really crazy blue head kind of end of the spectrum.

00:13:57.180 I'm just talking about sort of normal, middle class progressive, you know, they're actually great people generally, right?

00:14:04.240 They're generally like hardworking, conscientious, like talented, intelligent, economically productive, all this kind of stuff.

00:14:12.200 Like I, I actually really, really desperately want the best for these people.

00:14:15.620 And the culture, the progressive culture, actually, as you say, it hurts progressives most.

00:14:20.660 It actually channels people towards making decisions which are really bad for them long term.

00:14:24.140 And, and mean that they don't reproduce themselves as well.

00:14:27.360 Yeah.

00:14:27.720 I heard recently about one governor.

00:14:30.260 I don't, I haven't looked this up properly, so it may not be true.

00:14:32.840 But the governor of Utah actually hosting a lot of events in the governor's mansion.

00:14:36.840 But not necessarily just for matchmaking.

00:14:38.740 Like he's hosted events where he's just having like everyone who's into fly fishing, you know, come over for a party at the governor's mansion.

00:14:44.700 And everyone who's, you know, a married couple over, you know, 60 years old, like come.

00:14:49.720 And the goal, I think, was just to start connecting people more.

00:14:53.260 Because even in a place like Utah, which is insane, I mean, it's, you know, dominated by the LDS community. 1.00

00:14:59.980 There are tons of institutions where people are meeting, at least as long as they're Mormon, a lot of people.

00:15:04.220 But even there, he feels like there's a need for people to foster more connection, that it's even really hard to make friends anywhere.

00:15:09.980 I mean, this isn't just a dating problem.

00:15:11.820 This is a friendship problem.

00:15:12.960 Rates of friendship are down.

00:15:13.940 People report having fewer numbers of friends.

00:15:16.540 I'm wondering if you think this is something where the government is right to get involved or wrong to get involved.

00:15:21.560 Like if governments, and some governments in other nations have, started organizing matchmaking events for youth, matchmaking retreats for youth, would that be scary or dystopian to you?

00:15:31.240 Or would it be cool and encouraging?

00:15:34.340 Doesn't the government basically do that with higher education?

00:15:37.240 I mean, going back to the meeting in college.

00:15:39.220 Not really, because there's a lot of disincentivizing people.

00:15:42.160 Yeah, it could do so through higher education.

00:15:45.480 We've heard many people with regard to demographic collapse saying like, well, you know, a really awesome thing a government could do is for any government sponsored or supported university, you could give women entirely free tuition or room and board some kind of incentive that not every student gets.

00:16:01.540 So long as they promise to graduate, perhaps in a longer period, like they have more years to do it with a child.

00:16:08.140 And then they have a child while they're at university.

00:16:10.000 They meet their spouse at university.

00:16:11.920 And I mean, I think it really would create a big incentive.

00:16:13.960 So do you think something like that would be a good thing?

00:16:18.100 Or do you think it would be too on the coercive side?

00:16:21.380 Well, look, I sort of think that that ship has already sailed in terms of the amount that the government interferes in our lives in all sorts of ways, right?

00:16:28.300 I mean, the first thing on my list would be to stop, I mean, the UK government, although this is, of course, true elsewhere from doing like explicitly anti-natalist things.

00:16:37.000 I mean, like the way that our tax system works in this country is insane.

00:16:39.580 For instance, you stay at families with a stay at home parent, typically mother, pay a tax penalty, for instance, in this country. 0.92

00:16:48.480 Right.

00:16:48.740 There are all sorts of things which is like radically anti and right radically anti-traditional family.

00:16:53.540 So if we've already accepted, for instance, that the government is in the business of educating everyone, if the government is in the business of providing socialized health care and things like that, then you might as well pull levers to try and encourage people to make decisions which are in the interest of the country long term.

00:17:08.080 Because, of course, that's what we're talking about, right?

00:17:09.680 These are questions of national importance.

00:17:13.620 I like that idea of another idea I've heard is to give free tuition to mothers. 1.00

00:17:17.280 So because one of the things that would be useful is to is to I mean, women live longer than men, right? 0.91

00:17:23.900 And women also everyone lives a long time in Western societies. 0.98

00:17:27.600 Why is it that we have to we have to encourage women in, say, their mid 20s, the peak fertility period to be investing in their careers when they could just delay that section of their lives by five to 10 years and then work an extra five to 10 years at the end? 0.93

00:17:46.220 You know, if we if we could, the problem is that the current career, the current career plan is designed for a male life cycle. 0.95

00:17:54.380 It's not designed for the male life cycle.

00:17:56.560 Unless you start right at university.

00:17:58.500 Like if you get married freshman year, have a kid like you could have two kids before you graduate if you take four years to graduate.

00:18:04.920 And then you can and then if you stay at home with them as preschoolers, you're still entering the labor market in your mid to late 20s.

00:18:10.800 Yeah. And with a fresh degree, because the bigger problem, too, is that women get their degree. 1.00

00:18:15.860 They work a little bit and then they take this huge gap from working.

00:18:19.520 And then, you know, the degree is no longer fresh and their job isn't fresh.

00:18:22.660 Like if you can somehow get everything like you sort of finish most of your time off the market as a parent, both like right as your degree.

00:18:31.340 That's only two kids. You know, you don't take yourself off the market because you're a parent.

00:18:36.400 Or if you do, you have a real structure for that.

00:18:39.580 A really interesting and extreme pro natalist policy, a young college age girl we know proposed for Korea, you know, given how absolutely severe their case is right now, is to make it so that as a woman, you cannot graduate Korean college until after you have had your first kid.

00:18:59.340 And so you could start college before that, but you don't get your degree until you have a kid.

00:19:05.060 And given how important college degrees are within the Korean status hierarchy, this would immediately and dramatically affect the number of kids people were having.

00:19:15.140 Of course, it is a little coercive for my taste, but it would be effective.

00:19:19.660 But I think a really key problem that we keep having here, and this was shocking to me when we were in the UK, we're meeting with a lot of conservative, you know, leading intellectuals, policymakers, stuff like that.

00:19:29.780 But a lot of them young women. 0.73

00:19:31.600 And I repeatedly kept seeing them making the same mistake over and over again in regards to their relationships, which is they had found people they wanted to marry.

00:19:40.460 And they're like, yeah, but of course, we need to be dating for like three years before we can get married.

00:19:46.000 And I was like, what the are you talking about?

00:19:48.860 If you found someone who is good for you to marry, you need to aggressively vet them and marry them within like three months or six months.

00:19:56.260 And don't get a dog.

00:19:57.820 Yeah, that's another tip.

00:19:59.320 Don't get a dog.

00:20:00.460 Don't get a dog as a practice baby.

00:20:02.740 Because one, dogs are bad practice babies.

00:20:05.560 Two, it'll encourage you to delay having your first child.

00:20:08.340 And three, dogs are really annoying when you have a baby.

00:20:12.640 Well, I think they're worse than practice babies.

00:20:15.340 They are not meant to teach women how to have babies. 0.99

00:20:17.240 They're meant to masturbate the instinct that women feel to have a baby. 1.00

00:20:21.220 Yes, yeah. 0.99

00:20:21.800 They're a displacement tool.

00:20:23.240 Yeah.

00:20:24.120 Yeah.

00:20:25.320 The number of like, yeah, the number of yuppie couples in our sort of extended social network who are like, okay, so we meet at X and then we live together after Y and then we get a dog after Z.

00:20:36.280 And then it's like 10 years down the track that you have a baby.

00:20:39.620 Well, and I think the way to do this is to frame having a dog without having a child that's perverse.

00:20:45.280 And I do that. 0.80

00:20:46.240 I mean, I see that as like walking around with pornography in your hand.

00:20:49.780 It's like, it's the same thing. 0.97

00:20:52.220 You are using it to masturbate an instinct that evolves to get you to do what you were supposed to be doing, which is having a loving family.

00:21:00.680 And instead, you subvert that instinct and it may feel good in the moment when you're playing with the big, cute little puppy.

00:21:08.760 But in the long term, it's causing you and your spouse significant emotional distress likely.

00:21:15.080 Well, here's the thing that I'm kind of thinking about while I'm listening to this conversation, though.

00:21:18.500 I'm feeling like teen pregnancy is the most feminist option for an intergenerational durable culture. 1.00

00:21:26.980 Because hear me out, right?

00:21:27.800 Like if you weren't to start in college, but instead in high school, then you have the support of your parents for the first baby.

00:21:33.740 Which honestly, like in a modern society in which, you know, we're more atomized and everything, you know, we cannot expect as adults to have our parents move in with us, to, you know, always be living in the same place.

00:21:43.840 They may be a little older as well.

00:21:45.500 I'm going to push back for them.

00:21:47.420 Very strong on this, Simone.

00:21:48.500 You don't want to be a teen dad?

00:21:49.600 No, I don't think that women can appropriately find good long-term partners in their teen year. 1.00

00:21:55.500 Because you do not know where the guy is going to turn out in terms of competence. 0.99

00:22:00.380 I think a guy who like has his shit together in college is somebody who's going to have their shit together. 0.99

00:22:05.640 Oh, okay. 1.00

00:22:06.060 So yeah, we're talking statutory rape teen marriage. 0.78

00:22:08.640 That's what we're looking for.

00:22:09.880 Where you have, you know, a very good, you know, successful college grad, male college grad.

00:22:13.860 You have, you know, a 16-year-old girl.

00:22:16.480 Okay, yeah.

00:22:17.320 I suppose I am okay with teen marriage if they're dating college guys.

00:22:21.500 And that sounds so wrong.

00:22:23.020 But it would be so, like, because then, you know, the girl could have three or four or even five children from high school through the end of college.

00:22:29.920 Get a great education, have an amazing family support network, have all the flexibility to both learn, develop really good skills, and have help with children at the same time.

00:22:39.260 And then by the time she really needs to, like, lean into her career and, like, just kill it in the workforce, she's good.

00:22:45.580 And then also when she's old, she doesn't, you know.

00:22:47.660 We got to be clear, this is mostly meant jocularly as a joke in our society right now because while you could conceivably create a society that worked around the system she's talking about, that is not the society that we actually live in. 0.99

00:23:02.880 And anyone who attempted this would be very likely to end up a single mother, which is why it would be really stupid. 0.99

00:23:08.580 I mean, this also comes down to my general advice of not trying to find a partner in high school because I know a lot of guys who seemed like they had their lives together in high school but actually didn't have their lives together. 0.97

00:23:20.440 And a lot of guys who didn't look like they had their lives together in high school who actually did.

00:23:24.340 I mean, it's actually, like, the nerdy, like, rocket hobbyist kid who is the kid who made a lot of money and the jock captain of the football team who's more likely to fall off.

00:23:33.840 But by the time you get to, I'd say, like, junior year of college, you can broadly tell who's going to have their life together as an adult and who can't.

00:23:42.140 And that's why that's a good age to begin to, and not begin to, to begin to finalize who you're going to marry.

00:23:49.200 Not to start practice dating.

00:23:52.540 High school is for practice dating.

00:23:54.480 College is not practice anymore.

00:23:55.920 Another concern I have about starting a parental career first, like, if I'm thinking about this from the perspective of a mother, is I wouldn't want one of my children, or both, like, male or female, to, like, start as a parent and be really into it and then be like, no, I don't want to do anything else.

00:24:11.980 Because I want our children to also grow up and have impact on larger society.

00:24:16.860 And I feel like they have a moral obligation to do that if they have the skill and connections and ability to do it.

00:24:21.680 Like, they should be making society better.

00:24:23.620 Also, we live a long time, right?

00:24:25.060 Like, you know, there is a, I suppose one way you can do it is if you have so many kids.

00:24:32.180 You know, if you have an incredibly long, I don't know if you know the TV chef Gordon Ramsay, British celebrity, right?

00:24:38.880 His wife just had her sixth child, age 49.

00:24:41.820 And she had her first child when she was 24.

00:24:47.580 So she's had this incredibly long reproductive career. 1.00

00:24:50.400 I know.

00:24:51.540 Amazing, right?

00:24:52.280 So it's a really interesting fact, actually, how many celebrities who didn't go to university, who come from working class families, end up having loads of kids.

00:25:00.220 I'm sure you know that there's in the quadrant of, like, you know, X axis is education and Y axis is income.

00:25:06.880 It's the high education, low income people who have the fewest kids.

00:25:09.800 And it's the high income, low education people who have the most.

00:25:12.600 And you see there's, like, premiership footballers who have loads of kids.

00:25:15.800 Anyway, it's a lovely sight.

00:25:18.440 So, you know, so one scenario, I guess, is that you have so many kids over such a long, you know, not necessarily tight packed, you know, three or four year age gaps, which is the standard for hunter gatherers, right?

00:25:27.720 So that's quite a healthy, like, physiologically, that's quite a healthy age gap.

00:25:31.500 You have lots of kids with moderate age gaps.

00:25:35.740 And then by the time your youngest is growing up, you have grandchildren.

00:25:39.860 So then you do basically spend your entire life just looking at children.

00:25:43.260 Like, that is one scenario.

00:25:44.920 But many women are going to have two or three in our ideals. 1.00

00:25:48.620 And that's completely, that's great.

00:25:50.600 And that doesn't actually take up that much of your life, therefore.

00:25:53.520 So to have, to say, you know, for this, you don't want this scenario, I think, where women, women are excluded from the workforce between the age of, say, 40 and 60.

00:26:05.120 One reason for no good reason.

00:26:07.020 Yeah.

00:26:07.240 No, that's 100% correct.

00:26:09.780 We, we're so obsessed with having, like, four or five, six, because when you look at societal trends and the number of people who choose not to have any children at all, or even just one, like, you know, we have to make up for it somewhere.

00:26:22.620 Plus, there's one really interesting bit of research that people did at one point looking at, I think people, Malcolm, was it in Norway or was it Sweden?

00:26:30.920 But looking at it intergenerationally.

00:26:32.700 I saw that as well, yeah.

00:26:33.780 Yeah.

00:26:34.140 So, like, you know, having just two kids is very, your odds of having a great-grandchild are so low.

00:26:40.020 So we think about it from that perspective, too.

00:26:42.180 So another thing to note, because, you know, this is something that keeps getting said on this podcast, which is make sure women can work and participate in the workforce. 0.99

00:26:49.600 And I think a lot of people, they may hear this and they might say that's anti-conservative, that's anti-traditional.

00:26:54.360 There was a great, the most recent Nobel Prize winner, I want to say in economics, actually did a piece on this.

00:26:59.580 And I'm going to put the graph on the screen here, which shows that actually, no, women used to participate in the workforce at around the rate they do today. 0.74

00:27:07.840 There was just a historical period where it went down for, frankly, in a historical context, a fairly short period, which was really at its height in, like, the 1950s.

00:27:19.860 But if you go earlier than, like, the 1920s, and then especially if you go into the early 1800s, female participation in the workforce was almost as high as male participation. 0.93

00:27:27.400 But it was often from home.

00:27:28.620 And that's the key thing.

00:27:29.480 Yeah.

00:27:29.680 Yeah, so it's more about having sex-specific jobs, which most societies do end up basically, I mean, we do, frankly.

00:27:37.620 We do, yeah.

00:27:38.120 Yeah, it's just not explicit.

00:27:39.720 But having the type of job which is easily combinable with having children is the way of threading that needle.

00:27:49.760 The problem is that the influx of women post-second wave, the influx of middle-class women into traditionally male-dominated jobs has not produced, you know, like the plight of the female doctor, for instance.

00:28:01.380 I saw a friend yesterday who's a doctor who has a baby, and it's basically impossible for her at this stage to combine motherhood with being a doctor.

00:28:12.040 Oh, absolutely.

00:28:13.120 There are points later on where you could, but she had a baby, you know, like too young, right, late 20s, not very young, but within, like, basically the way that NHS medical training works is it depends on abortion.

00:28:26.240 It depends on, like, you, and contraception, it depends on women delaying having children until they're at least in their 30s, because if you have a child any earlier than that, it will be almost impossible for you to progress in your career. 1.00

00:28:38.820 You just have to take an enormous break or drop out entirely, which a lot of women do. 1.00

00:28:42.540 So, like, that's an example of a career which is now majority female in terms of medical student graduates that is completely incompatible with childbearing. 1.00

00:28:49.660 So you end up with all these accomplished women shredding their fertility for the sake of a medical career. 1.00

00:28:55.680 Or their careers, which is just as bad.

00:28:58.280 I mean, depending on what you care about.

00:29:00.400 Like, it's terrible that women are, with this kind of potential, are just saying, well, I guess society's not going to get my help, you know, as a medical professional. 0.98

00:29:06.980 But NHS really needs really good doctors.

00:29:09.880 And I think what's so fun about this, too, is that this is super tractable.

00:29:13.500 Like, if the right number of, you know, people high in the NHS, in the way its operations run, were to decide we're going to fix this, this is, you know, a policy change we're going to make.

00:29:23.600 Or, you know, we're going to accommodate childcare in this way or whatever.

00:29:27.620 Like, they can fix this problem.

00:29:29.160 And this is a really similar thing with female lawyers, mothers, lawyers who are mothers in the United States. 1.00

00:29:33.700 There are, I think there's a certain number of minimum hours that mothers, that lawyers, sorry, have to work in order to qualify and, like, maintain all their licensing.

00:29:42.240 So, effectively, female lawyers in many states can't work part-time and also maintain their ability to practice law. 1.00

00:29:51.420 And this is stuff I never even heard about before we started talking with people about pernatalism.

00:29:55.300 So, there are so many really dumb things that we do to even just penalize parenthood when, you know, already there's enough. 0.61

00:30:02.300 Well, you can look at this and see how solvable a lot of pernatalist issues are and why we need to be working on this front at the policy level.

00:30:11.900 You know, when you say, how can you, with the skills of a doctor, make money and contribute to society while being a mother?

00:30:18.660 Well, I mean, historically, you could probably do that in the old model of doctor, which is to be a home care doctor, you know, to travel house to house to do.

00:30:25.300 And it would probably be much cheaper to operate than our existing systems.

00:30:29.160 But you have some big bureaucracy like the NHS and they're not going to be able to do that.

00:30:32.780 You look at medical regulation in the U.S. and people are going to push back on that.

00:30:36.180 You look at the lawyer thing that you were talking about.

00:30:38.300 If you actually let them operate within a sane structure.

00:30:41.560 Now, and this is one of the policies that I am most pro as a pronatalist policy for sane family structures.

00:30:48.980 I have not seen any politician push yet is one where if a company is going to demand that an individual works from the office, that they have to prove that they are getting incrementally more productivity from that demand.

00:31:03.380 I do not think that blanketly companies should be allowed to demand that people work from the office.

00:31:07.940 I think that it's a demand that can only be made with evidence, similar to like if I was bringing over an immigrant. 1.00

00:31:12.720 And this is going to freak out a lot of these, I'd say, fragile CEOs.

00:31:16.340 But as people who are CEOs, who have worked with people working at home and in the office, whenever you see, and we've written about this in our book on governance and running companies, and we've lectured about this, like Stanford and stuff like this.

00:31:28.220 Every time I see a CEO of a large company saying, oh, it's just not working.

00:31:32.220 We have to bring people back to the office.

00:31:33.940 I've never once seen them provide evidence.

00:31:36.240 Whenever somebody says, oh, we're going to let people work from home or we're going to extend our work from home program, that's always accompanied by evidence.

00:31:43.880 Why is that?

00:31:44.720 Why is it that no one seems to be able to show actual evidence?

00:31:48.060 Well, and there are a couple of reasons why, right?

00:31:50.220 I mean, like a lot of people implement the back to the office policies because they want to lay people off.

00:31:54.900 And that's a really easy way to do it.

00:31:56.920 That's what we think Elon was doing.

00:31:58.360 The other really bad reason that exists out there, though, which we've seen, we can totally vouch for this, is a form of office theater where basically a lot of people, like Malcolm says, have really delicate egos.

00:32:09.000 And they need their peons around them scurrying through the offices to make them feel important.

00:32:14.300 And it's just this like traditional vision of like, it's not real.

00:32:18.080 I want to elaborate on something you said there because I don't know if our audience would immediately understand what you meant.

00:32:22.600 When she says they want to lay them off, in a lot of developed countries right now, if you just lay somebody off randomly as a company, you have to pay some sort of financial penalty for that.

00:32:31.580 But if you told them to come to an office and then you said, oh, look, they couldn't make it to the office after you had them like move all over the country because they could work wherever they want.

00:32:39.880 Well, then you don't need to pay that penalty.

00:32:42.140 And so it can be used as sort of a trap, which, of course, legally, I don't think is something we should be allowing because you shouldn't be able to demand people come back to the office.

00:32:49.740 And if that was the case, then people couldn't pull these shenanigans.

00:32:52.040 No, we also, I mean, we're very much in that you should be able to fire someone at will kind of mindset.

00:32:57.740 I mean, also, even if that costs, so we agree that remote working is pro notal, right?

00:33:02.740 But like, yes, even if there are costs to say productivity for remote workers, or like the example, example that my friend gave yesterday, is that one of the challenges of her stage of medical training is that she gets a lot of she gets she gets given a rota, which changes week to week.

00:33:19.080 And she has no choice about that.

00:33:21.260 So she's told, you know, you'll be doing, you'll be doing an early shift this week.

00:33:25.580 And then next week, like, it's basically completely impossible to arrange formal childcare around that kind of rota.

00:33:32.140 Either you have, so basically, you either just drop out entirely, or you have a partner whose job is incredibly flexible.

00:33:39.240 Or you have, say, a grandparent who can provide, who's around the corner and can provide full time, including overnight childcare.

00:33:46.580 Like, this is very, very demanding expectation.

00:33:48.880 Like, another example of the NHS being stupidly antenatal is another doctor friend.

00:33:53.380 And I know lots of doctors, because I used to go, like, I was, I'm a medical school dropout.

00:33:56.780 Yeah, there, but for the grace of God, when she had a baby at medical school, as a single mother unplanned, but, you know, peak, peak fertility, and she wanted to be given a job out of, out of university near her mother, so that her mother could help with overnight childcare.

00:34:13.080 Smart.

00:34:14.100 Right.

00:34:14.720 And it was like pulling teeth trying to get the NHS to give her this job, because they had it, they could understand if you had a spouse who was living somewhere, they could understand if you had a child in school, like, there were certain things where they were.

00:34:25.780 But not a childcare resource.

00:34:27.340 But not, but not a grandparent, that didn't count as a sort of, like, an important locus that you would need to be based around, right?

00:34:35.340 All of these kind of examples, it probably is the case that if, say, you had, let's say you have a parent-friendly rota, is what is like an option you can choose if you have a child of a certain age.

00:34:45.620 And let's say you had special provision that you could choose, you had more choice over where you allocated your first job, if you had a child, things like that.

00:34:53.120 Like, it would come with costs, you know, there would be, like, I think it's, I don't think that we should pretend like they wouldn't be downside for the employer from providing that kind of provision.

00:35:02.340 But what we're talking about here is, like, the survival of our civilization, right?

00:35:05.900 You can't be kind of too, like, the birth rates thing is so important, and people don't yet realize how important it is, that we should be accommodating those kinds of trade-offs very, very comfortably.

00:35:17.320 And the state should be demanding that employers just eat those trade-offs, because, like, we're talking, like, some decades down the line where everything starts to go to pieces if we don't.

00:35:31.720 Yeah. Well, and also, at least traditionally, there was this perception that male fathers were better hires, right?

00:35:41.200 Because they needed the stability, they would be loyal to the company, you could count on them because they had a family to support.

00:35:46.000 And I really resent this is not the same for female mothers who you accommodate, because when you get a mother working for you who's really talented and who you accommodate, she, one, is amazing talent, and it's really hard to retain talent these days.

00:36:01.900 And if you give her all the flexibility she needs to, you know, do her job, which she probably loves if she's really good at it, and take care of her kids, she'll stay with you, and she'll often go above and beyond.

00:36:13.020 And we see this with our, we have a company that we run, it's mostly female, there are lots of new mothers, there's a pregnant mother, aside from me, like, we're extremely accommodating, we're like, just whatever, take whatever time you want, work remotely, like, work with your kids, we really don't care. 0.99

00:36:29.820 And everyone who is a mother is so hard, they're like among our, yeah, everyone, actually, every one of our top players is a mother.

00:36:38.560 This is really interesting. In a previous episode, we had talked about, because we've read these cases of, like, women who hypothetically try to create all-women companies, and they always end up, like, with everyone tearing each other down and, like, fighting. 0.89

00:36:50.960 And, like, our company is almost all women, and everyone in there who's not a woman is a gay man, except for me.

00:36:55.080 Like, our company disproportionately hires gay people and women. And it has no drama at all anymore. And it's really, like, a healthy place to work. And I suspect the difference is, is that other company was hiring women who didn't have kids, and our company specifically often hires mothers.

00:37:13.740 Well, maybe this also comes down to the difference between the maiden and the mother and the matriarch. 1.00

00:37:19.120 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:19.900 The mother is in a very different cooperative sort of phase in life, whereas, like, maidens are far more likely to be competitive, to be, you know, trying to show something. 0.94

00:37:27.820 And maybe there's something about that, like, leaning into that, the different life phases that women have. 1.00

00:37:33.940 I think you're absolutely right, because a maid is competing for a mate, right? So there is a reason to undermine other women in sort of status hierarchies and in competition, whereas the mother has almost no reason to undermine other women, because what they would be optimizing for is cooperation and child-rearing, and the status just doesn't matter as much because they already have secured their mate. 0.95

00:37:54.780 Yeah, safety and cooperation and all that, and that leads to great employees.

00:37:58.080 The other thing that I'd add, this might not apply as much in the workplace, but definitely in terms of politics, I would say that frustrated maternal impulse is a very politically potent and potentially dangerous force.

00:38:11.520 Oh.

00:38:12.360 Yeah. And I think that, like, say, I don't know, attitudes towards refugees in the UK. This might not be as acute in the US, I don't know.

00:38:22.340 But I, I, or any number of political causes, this is just one example. I, I think that the reason you see disproportionate numbers of young women who don't have children, drawn to these kind of high, like, highly charged empathetic situations where you are, like, trying to save groups of people, right, who may well be adult men.

00:38:46.760 But I, I honestly think that a big part of that is, it's, it's, it's like with, it's like with getting the dogs, you know, it's this, it's this tug towards mothering something is really strong.

00:38:56.380 That is a good heart take.

00:38:58.320 Yeah, I, I like that take. I'm going to have a little blurb at the beginning of the video here.

00:39:03.660 Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. I, I really enjoyed it. If people want more conversations from us, one thing they can also check out is not just other, or other podcast episodes with you, but Simone has done an episode of your show.

00:39:16.040 So that's a good thing to check out, Made Mother Matriarch. And hopefully I'll do an episode of the near future. And yeah, it has been a joy to have you here. So please do go check out her podcast. And if you want more in it, there is one already out there with Simone. 0.91

00:39:29.700 Thank you so much for joining us. This was amazing.

00:39:32.300 It was such a pleasure. Thank you.

00:39:34.740 Awesome. Okay. And then are you working on another book? Like what's next? What can we, you know, when, when will we have you back on? Cause you have something new to promote.

00:39:42.660 So I'm, well, I'm writing the case for having kids. So that's my next book.

Based Camp - November 16, 2023

How To Save Dating & Relationships - With Louise Perry

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