Based Camp - March 25, 2024


This One Graph Changed Everything I Thought I Knew About The Birth Rate Collapse

Topics
teenage pregnancies teen pregnancy trends
Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Simone Miss Manners Reagan Michael J.K. Robin Hanson Hamilton Malcolm Roberts Hooray Ronald Asso
Tract 0： Cultural Experimentation is the Key to Saving Our Species Feminists Won the Culture War but Lost At Life

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

184.27

Word count

5,036

Sentence count

417

Harmful content

Misogyny

25

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we look at a graph that sheds light on what is happening to fertility rates in the United States, and why it's particularly striking. It's based on a piece written by Reagan Artens Gray, who argues that women in their 20s and 30s are delaying having kids, and that the main culprits are women under 24 years old.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Simone, today we are going to have an episode that I think our audience is going to really like
00:00:04.920 because I saw a graph today that did more to explain falling fertility rates in the United
00:00:11.780 States than any other graph I've seen. I think this is actually the key graph in understanding
00:00:19.380 functionally what's going on with demographic collapse. And it touches on a trend we had seen
00:00:25.360 when we were talking about Latin American statistics, but I had never seen it so clearly
00:00:29.240 argued was in American statistics. Would you like to know more? Now, this graph was actually put
00:00:34.600 together by a Substack writer named Reagan Artens Gray. You can find it at Reagan's Substack is the
00:00:43.620 name of the Substack. And it's an article she put together, Can We Afford to Buy Marginal Babies? 1.00
00:00:49.340 And I want to go over the arguments made in this piece because they're actually pretty interesting
00:00:56.340 arguments and definitely worth engaging with. But I think that she comes up with a rational
00:01:01.880 argument in the piece. Like it's a good argument, right? Or the best I've heard in terms of a policy
00:01:05.960 solution. I just don't think it could ever get past with existing political climates. But what was
00:01:12.700 really interesting, and I don't mean, because she didn't seem to realize in the piece that no one had
00:01:17.460 put together this information before. At least two that we've seen.
00:01:22.800 Yeah, she put together like five different information sources. So this came from NHS
00:01:27.660 birth rates. This came from Osterman, Michael J.K. et al., births, final data from 2021,
00:01:35.060 Hamilton, well, anyway, just like a bunch of different studies. And then through synthesizing
00:01:39.460 all of these studies, you get this graph, which we are putting on the screen here,
00:01:42.880 and which Simone you are looking at right now, I assume.
00:01:46.400 Yes, sir.
00:01:48.200 Okay. So what was your read of what's happening in the graph? Because I remember it was wrong,
00:01:52.680 and I want to see how you got this wrong read.
00:01:54.860 Because it was wrong. What I saw from this was that we are seeing the same thing that we have
00:02:02.520 always been seeing, which is that women in their 20s have been delaying fertility more and more and 0.95
00:02:09.640 more. Oh, no, I see. Yeah, I see where I was misreading it. Because I thought in the past,
00:02:14.480 women in their 30s were making up for it. 1.00
00:02:17.440 No, no.
00:02:18.200 And they aren't.
00:02:18.780 What's fascinating about this graph is it divides fertility of women in the United States into
00:02:25.700 four groups.
00:02:27.640 Age brackets.
00:02:28.280 Age brackets.
00:02:28.940 Age brackets, yes. 20 to 24, 25 to 29, 30 to 34, and 35 to 39.
00:02:35.240 What is fascinating is that only one of these groups is declining infertility.
00:02:42.620 If you were looking only at the 30 to 35 women, their fertility has actually gone up a bit over 0.99
00:02:49.740 time.
00:02:50.260 Same with 35 to 39.
00:02:52.200 Same with 35 to 39.
00:02:53.020 Anyone over 30 is having a higher fertility rate on average now.
00:02:58.260 25 to 29 has gone down marginally, but only marginally. It could be a statistical error.
00:03:04.460 All of the fertility collapse in our country is coming from women under 24 years of age. 1.00
00:03:11.300 The lion's share, at least. The 25 to 29 range went down from around 2.1 to 2, which is non-trivial, 0.97
00:03:19.620 like just under 2. But what we see from 20 to 24, is it going from just under 2.1 to 1.8,
00:03:28.320 a pretty big draw.
00:03:29.540 I'd argue it is trivial. It isn't non-trivial. It is trivial.
00:03:33.020 In the world of fertility collapse, a 0.1 decline in a period of like 10 years is
00:03:39.860 basically irrelevant. The vast majority of the decline is coming from this incredibly
00:03:46.320 young group.
00:03:47.860 Yeah. They went from just below 2.1 to 1.8. They're certainly, yeah, the youngest 20-somethings
00:03:53.620 that used to be having kids are taking the lion's share of this.
00:03:57.440 Well, this is fascinating. And there's another thing you may not have noticed here.
00:04:04.580 If you add up these groups, they then don't match to the overall fertility decline.
00:04:11.580 There is additional fertility decline that is not being captured in these statistics.
00:04:15.600 Do you see that?
00:04:23.000 Okay. Do you see the dotted line?
00:04:25.440 Yeah.
00:04:26.200 Okay. That's the total TFR, right?
00:04:28.200 Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
00:04:29.640 The total TFR shouldn't be able to go below the lowest of the indicator groups.
00:04:36.500 Yeah. I don't get that.
00:04:37.360 Okay. So there's two things that could be causing that. It could be women under 20 have maybe 1.00
00:04:45.140 just completely disappeared as a fertility group, which we actually know is true. Teenage 0.99
00:04:50.480 pregnancies are way down.
00:04:52.000 Yeah.
00:04:52.220 So teenage pregnancies, it could also be, as we know, people like to fiddle with fertility
00:04:57.780 data to make it not look as extreme as it is.
00:05:00.240 Right.
00:05:00.580 But all of the trends here are basically the same. So I don't think we need to read too
00:05:04.140 much into this. The core answer here is that the thing that is causing fertility collapse 0.90
00:05:10.420 in our country is women under the age of 24 not having kids.
00:05:15.180 Yeah. Which is like what everyone's been saying is happening.
00:05:18.080 In Latin America. Yeah. In Latin America, we knew that this is where fertility collapse was 1.00
00:05:22.580 coming from. And you can see our Latin Americans going extinct video that we put out because 1.00
00:05:26.720 their fertility collapse is way faster than the United States fertility collapse.
00:05:30.580 And they'll likely be below us, Latin America, in terms of average fertility rates by the
00:05:35.380 end of the decade. But yeah. So this is really interesting if you're thinking about solutions.
00:05:42.560 And it actually leads to a different solution than the one that she proposed. But I suppose
00:05:46.320 it's one solution that you and I need to like seriously discuss.
00:05:49.460 Uh-oh. Teen pregnancy? Making it, bringing it back? 0.97
00:05:52.160 Teen pregnancy. Not teen pregnancy. But do we advocate younger motherhood? Like younger 0.99
00:05:59.780 women going back to these earlier ages of first fertility? Like should we make that a key advocacy 1.00
00:06:05.480 position in terms of alerting people to this data? Or is it about better?
00:06:11.280 Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think a lot of this is women don't understand when their peak fertility 0.92
00:06:19.640 period is because it's very poorly communicated. Yeah. And then they miss their chance. Like that
00:06:23.680 really the, if we were looking at this graph and people planned properly, we'd see a much bigger spike
00:06:29.540 in the 30 something range of people having kids because they will have frozen eggs. They will have
00:06:36.240 planned adequately. And that's what's going on. It feels wrong to encourage really young pregnancy 0.99
00:06:44.960 and people just don't feel ready yet. But. But here's what I think is happening. Here's the gist
00:06:50.280 of what's causing fertility collapse from this graph. Okay. Is that people are two things. One is,
00:06:56.460 is I think there's just fewer teen pregnancies. It used to be that some communities were able to
00:07:01.520 motivate a high fertility for their population through utilizing people with low amounts of
00:07:07.040 self-control. A great example of this is some cultural groups historically were known for their
00:07:13.460 high fertility rates, as we've talked about a lot, because they banned condoms and they banned
00:07:19.720 abortions. And so when people had sex, they had babies and that caused these groups to have higher 0.88
00:07:25.100 fertility rates. These are the groups that fertility, that have their fertility rates collapsing the
00:07:29.880 fastest. And in part, it's because I think that their community is using condoms. Like I think
00:07:34.800 that condoms are just so normalized now across the world that they are playing a pretty big role here
00:07:40.380 where, where, you know, they tell their kids don't use condoms, but their kids are still doing it.
00:07:44.860 And I think that the lack of teen sex, which has also declined dramatically in the past 10 or so
00:07:51.360 years, people who aren't aware of this, like it's like just dropped like a brick is also leading to
00:07:57.500 this. So the communities that sort of cheese their fertility rates by getting people who did not
00:08:02.040 plan to have kids to have kids. Right. This strategy isn't functioning anymore. And I never
00:08:07.680 really was okay with this strategy to begin with. Right. It seems non-consensual. Yeah. It reminds me
00:08:13.980 about the fertility conference and natalism conference. And again, at the conservative
00:08:17.420 conference that we were speaking at, somebody was mentioning banning condoms, right? As like a
00:08:22.020 mechanism of getting fertility rates up. And I'm like, but we don't want those kids. Like we don't
00:08:26.920 want the kids who are being had accidentally by people who don't want them and don't feel ready
00:08:31.980 to raise them. Exactly. Like that seems like a mistake. So what we have to do is up the pressures,
00:08:39.920 which appear to be constant throughout this period, which, which is what's really interesting is these
00:08:45.280 middle-aged parents are not falling in terms of their fertility rates. Right. So the pressure for
00:08:50.460 people who wanted to have kids to have kids seems, you know, just as big now was in the United States as
00:08:56.320 it was in the 1990s, which is really fascinating, which I think goes against a lot of the intuitions
00:09:02.300 that people had. I mean, it's a little bit less, but it's, it's about the same. No, the, the, what I
00:09:09.160 suspect is happening overall is that if we were to make a chart, people are just pushing back when they
00:09:17.320 plan to have kids like women specifically by about eight years, I think on average, they're pushing 1.00
00:09:23.540 back when they would have had kids. If it was 20 years ago, about eight years now in terms of their
00:09:28.700 planning and a lot of them, and this is something we see that I doubt we saw historically as much
00:09:34.400 because we keep seeing these among our friend groups. A lot of them just then aren't having kids
00:09:39.120 because they hit the end of their biological window because they don't know when the end of
00:09:42.800 their biological window is. They come and they go, Oh my God, I'm 42 and I can't have kids. And it's
00:09:46.460 like, yeah, I mean, duh, nobody told you this. They're like, but 42 is young. And I'm like,
00:09:53.560 Not reproductively speaking, sadly. Not reproductively speaking. Yeah. And it's because
00:09:59.660 they haven't thought through the various stages. They're like, we'll talk to like 28 year old men
00:10:05.420 who are like, yeah, I'm beginning to think seriously about getting married and stuff like that. And it's
00:10:09.680 like, bro, thinking seriously about getting married is something you do in your early twenties, not late
00:10:16.160 twenties. If you want to have a large family. And they're like, but that's so young. And it's like,
00:10:20.440 no, society has just historically, no, that wasn't so young. The age of average first births in the
00:10:26.880 1970s in the United States was 21 average. That meant half of women below that. But I also think that men
00:10:33.840 at that point didn't have as high of expectations, nor did women, of course. And that caused people to 0.98
00:10:40.860 be more pragmatic about the marriages they formed, that they weren't trying to marry supermodels slash 0.63
00:10:46.460 super successful people in their careers. I think maybe part of what's going on with this and bear
00:10:52.300 with me, cause I'm not going to articulate it particularly well is in the past, we had more
00:10:57.320 people blindly getting into it and then figuring it out as they go along. And I'm talking about both
00:11:02.780 marriage and having kids. Whereas now people are only willing to do it when fully educated about
00:11:08.780 it and actually ready, which is not practical. That makes a lot of sense, which is why our school
00:11:12.980 system, we teach a lot on sort of life stages, life strategy, rearing kids. We have courses that
00:11:19.920 you take on every stage of like raising children at different stages and knowing the current research
00:11:25.200 on all of this. And it's something that's just not covered at school. It's like, this is something
00:11:29.160 you do not begin to think about until after you have a stable career. Definitely not until after
00:11:36.680 college. And that's just not, you know, it wasn't the way that I was taught or my brother was taught.
00:11:41.360 It was, you're supposed to find your wife in your undergrad. And if you haven't done it by then,
00:11:45.060 you should be seriously panicking, which I was when you met me, you know, I was just out of my
00:11:49.760 undergrad. And I was like, I, I had really tried in my undergrad to find a wife and I couldn't find one.
00:11:54.440 And I knew that, you know, really your last sort of shot as graduate school is what I told you,
00:12:00.700 because I thought you, you are basically deciding to be in like the way that I'm going to raise my
00:12:06.840 kids. And I think the way that people should be approaching this psychologically speaking
00:12:09.820 is culturally embedding in somebody that if they are still an old maid, i.e. not partnered,
00:12:17.140 you know, this used to be a really scary thing in society. By the time they finish their education,
00:12:21.740 they will not find a partner or they will not have kids. They have basically committed to
00:12:27.220 themselves that they are not having a family, which is really interesting because, you know,
00:12:31.040 we have friends who are in like orthodox religious communities who understand the need to have kids
00:12:36.580 and they're like older, like 31, 32, but they're like, ah, I can do it later. And it's like, you
00:12:40.440 really can't like, you should be pants on fire doing nothing but looking for a spouse right now.
00:12:46.480 I mean, I do think men have a little more flexibility there. And even in the past,
00:12:51.700 the reason why women became very concerned was that men of any age were always looking for the
00:12:57.960 youngest women, like early twenties, very late teens. So they knew that once they were past that 0.96
00:13:03.920 zone, even if there were many eligible men available, they were just going to be looking
00:13:07.780 to a younger demographic. Whereas now we like to fool ourselves into thinking that men are still
00:13:11.960 more interested in like people their age, which is not accurate.
00:13:17.380 So now let's talk about her article, which is really interesting to me. So basically the position
00:13:22.780 it takes, which is interesting is we shouldn't try to pay people to have babies. We need to pay for 0.89
00:13:28.400 marginal babies. By that, what she means is that there's no point in paying for the kids who would 1.00
00:13:33.440 have been had anyway. We need to pay for the kids who otherwise wouldn't have been had. She's like, 0.99
00:13:38.660 you could do something like state backed IVF, which she estimated would be around 200 K per kid.
00:13:44.900 But she didn't see it as having a major impact on fertility. Then she's like, okay, well, let's do
00:13:49.680 the mass and see what you actually could pay people because she goes against our stance. She doesn't 1.00
00:13:54.220 think that religion is the only way to solve this. Or we use religion as court shorthand for extreme
00:13:59.820 cultural changes and supporting high fertility cultural groups.
00:14:03.900 Well, I know the argument that she makes to be a little bit more pointed with it is that in the
00:14:10.240 past, large governing structures, and she includes the Catholic church as an example, have in the past
00:14:14.860 successfully changed marriage patterns and infertility. So there's no reason to believe that
00:14:19.980 government policy could not also do that. And she does cite our arguments around religion, but points
00:14:27.440 out that, and also cites Robin Hanson saying this, it is difficult to create a sustainable new
00:14:33.800 subculture. And we totally agree with that. I think we also wouldn't disagree with the fact that the
00:14:38.220 Catholic church has significantly changed marriage patterns in the past. And that from a top-down 0.99
00:14:42.840 perspective, you absolutely can change fertility. Our argument is that governments as they exist today
00:14:49.800 simply don't have the political appetite to be able to invest in the way you have to invest.
00:14:54.580 This is what we need to point out here. So we actually, I actually agree with her piece. Like
00:14:59.280 a lot of the times I'll read political pieces about how this could be fixed. I agree that if she could
00:15:04.520 get her policy proposal passed, it would work. And so what her policy proposal would do is give people
00:15:11.800 $511K per kid. I think it's after the third kid or after, no, it's after the second kid.
00:15:19.480 Yeah. I think it's for three plus kids. Yeah. You get over half a million dollars. Now, one,
00:15:26.420 I think that this is what is interesting about this proposal and what makes me like it so much
00:15:31.260 is I think it's realistic. I think that $500K really would push people to have kids.
00:15:35.940 I think it does this marginal thing of only targeting these really high fertility families
00:15:40.880 and doing so in a way that is economically meaningful to them. And it does so in a way with math,
00:15:46.680 hold on, Simone, before you counter, with math that works, like that is economically viable for
00:15:52.880 a country to undertake. Political appetite wise, I think it's completely insane. This would never
00:15:58.380 pass. And I'll let you get to your point really quickly, but I want to point out how I know this
00:16:03.640 would never pass. Korea right now has a way worse fertility situation in the United States. I always 1.00
00:16:11.400 point out for every hundred Koreans, even at their current fertility rate, there would be around six
00:16:15.440 great grandchildren. Yet their fertility rate is falling super fast. Year over year, it fell 11.5%
00:16:20.640 this last year. And they're already in a situation where there's probably nothing they could do
00:16:24.860 because 60% of the population is over the age of 40 already. And they just now got past $22,000 in
00:16:33.540 subsidy per kid. She needs an order of magnitude higher subsidy to make this work in a country that 1.00
00:16:41.960 is in absolute death throes at this point. And that is much more politically conservative than the
00:16:48.040 United States. And that recognizes this as a national issue. They haven't been able to get that
00:16:52.780 past anything close to that past. Like, it just seems like a complete political fantasy to me. But I want
00:16:59.280 to hear your thoughts, Simone. You had something that you wanted to say.
00:17:01.480 I agree. It's a fantasy. And I also question its efficacy in bringing in wanted children,
00:17:07.620 because it is very tempting to take $500,000. And I think it would incentivize a lot of families to
00:17:14.220 have kids that are not necessarily wanted or loved as much as the money is. I'm much more in favor. And
00:17:19.960 what I think would be more palatable, but still isn't going to pass, would be a tax break or tax
00:17:25.300 waiver to families that have three plus kids. Like either you don't pay any income tax or anything
00:17:32.820 else. And what this also does is families that are already relying on a ton of state services,
00:17:38.340 et cetera, they're not going to be incentivized to have more kids that they cannot necessarily
00:17:42.640 take care of because what does a tax break mean to them? They're not paying any taxes or they're
00:17:47.540 paying very little. I think that this is very true. And it's something that freaks out a lot of
00:17:51.460 people when you point this out, but $500,000 doesn't have the same value to everyone in a
00:17:56.100 population. It has a differential value to your least productive cultural groups. And even if I
00:18:03.420 discount all of the heredability of various things that are tied to the economic productivity of an
00:18:09.280 individual, if we're just talking culturally speaking, okay, people will admit that culture is
00:18:15.860 passed down to people's kids. And people then should also be willing to admit if they're like
00:18:20.500 logical, sane people that the less productive cultural groups are going to be differentially
00:18:28.500 rewarded by these systems and the kids that they have are not going to be as economically relevant
00:18:35.260 as the average kid in her calculations. And therefore, when we say, oh, what is it?
00:18:40.060 The point I'm also making too, is even if we want the best outcomes for people who do rely on
00:18:45.800 government payments for things like childcare, or even just food, even if they're not having kids,
00:18:49.920 whatever it might be, medical care, you want to, the point of why governments need to encourage
00:18:56.300 pro-natalism is because they need to produce more taxpayers. If governments only produce more
00:19:01.780 non-taxpaying, very low-earning citizens, their infrastructure is still going to crumble.
00:19:07.480 They're still going to be politically unstable. They're still going to have pension fund nightmares.
00:19:11.940 What you need is high taxpayers. And so any government incentive to have kids should
00:19:17.920 disproportionately incentivize those most likely to pay a ton of taxes.
00:19:24.120 Which this does the exact opposite.
00:19:26.960 Yeah. If they were to give subsidies of $500,000, that's why like payouts are not only,
00:19:32.860 not only it's, you know, to get to that $500,000 that you need, it's impossible to get there.
00:19:37.980 But then once you do get there, you're incentivizing the wrong group of people
00:19:41.860 to have more kids because you're not going to solve the problems that the government's trying
00:19:46.100 to solve. It's stupid legislation to pass. Like I wouldn't pass that legislation if I 1.00
00:19:50.220 were in an elected position that had power.
00:19:53.200 You literally run the pro-natalist movement and you wouldn't vote for this.
00:19:56.080 But it's, it's, it's actually really important to note how severely bad this would be because you
00:20:02.000 sort of touched on it, but I really want to highlight if you are only like, if you keep
00:20:08.420 the U.S. popular, let's say double the U.S. population size, right? But you have only doubled
00:20:13.360 the, the, that through increasing the number of people on welfare, you have done nothing.
00:20:18.360 You have made the problem infinitely worse.
00:20:21.180 Yeah. And if you-
00:20:23.200 Granitalism is not about more people. It's not about spamming the world with people at all.
00:20:26.880 I need to be clear about statistics. If somebody's parents are on welfare, there is a higher
00:20:32.520 probability that they will be on welfare, a dramatically higher probability. This isn't
00:20:37.660 some like loose correlation in, and we're not saying you don't need to even presume some
00:20:42.880 sort of genetic link here. Even if it's merely cultural, the number is going to be way, way
00:20:48.800 higher. You have not made, you have, you have done the opposite of fix the problem with this
00:20:53.360 sort of prop policy proposal. You have made the problem much, much worse. And so you've kept the
00:21:00.420 population stable. Hooray! But you've made the problem worse.
00:21:04.480 Yeah. The government needs cash cows, not cash drains. 1.00
00:21:07.640 Yeah. I, I, and this is one of those things where like, you know, we're talking about the
00:21:12.340 perennatist movement. I would always rather have a, an additional productive immigrant in this country 1.00
00:21:18.480 country than an additional kid who is going to grow up and live off of the state.
00:21:23.960 100%. Yeah. An additional natively born native, like, you know, 17th generation American, whatever.
00:21:29.700 Right. Yeah. That is, that is like, it's interesting that people like, oh, they're perennatist. No,
00:21:34.100 no, I just care about the productivity of an individual. And, and, and, and, and so I'm pro
00:21:39.140 the immigration of productive individuals when they're, they're heavily vetted. And I think that
00:21:44.120 those individuals are something that we as a country should potentially even pay for in terms
00:21:48.960 of advertising, in terms of how we go out and get them because productive people are the thing
00:21:54.020 that's becoming scarce in this world. It's one of the things that undermine governmental and
00:21:59.900 infrastructure and pension stability. It is not a lack of people. It is a lack of, a lack of tax paying
00:22:06.580 people, which is probably why people are freaking out so much about refugee influxes in various
00:22:13.760 nations, right? Because they're realizing that, oh my gosh, wait, so all these people here that
00:22:17.980 we thought were going to help things like, no, we're just paying for them and not paying for
00:22:21.540 anything. So who's going to pay for the stuff? And you have to have someone pay for the stuff.
00:22:25.520 And then we've got to talk about the next stage of this, which is, which is, sorry,
00:22:28.760 where was I going with this? Oh yes. There is a solution inspired by her argument that I think
00:22:34.060 could work. Now I don't think it could pass office, but it could work. The solution is, is to create,
00:22:39.340 not just like you said, basically you don't have to pay taxes, kid number three and up. And, and I
00:22:45.560 think, or maybe have some sort of incremental, like you pay 20% less taxes per kid after your
00:22:50.880 second kid. And then I think that once you reach kid number three or four, you should achieve some
00:22:57.280 special societal status, similar to like a war hero or a veteran in our society. Like those Russian 1.00
00:23:02.980 medals of honor for mothers. Yeah. Essentially you get special parking everywhere you go.
00:23:07.820 Oh, sweet. On airplanes. Yeah. Priority line in the DMV. That would be so cool.
00:23:12.700 When you go to airports, they have special lounges for you. Very similar to what we do as veterans.
00:23:17.060 Or they could just, yeah, they could just use military lounges. So it's all veterans and people
00:23:20.880 with way too many kids. Yeah. It might actually be a good idea to loop it directly into the veterans
00:23:25.440 thing. Yeah. Yeah. Use the infrastructure. Well, because you are in a big way, somebody who has lived
00:23:31.960 your life for the state. Yeah. And maybe even kind of ruined your body for the state.
00:23:37.080 Ruined your body for the state. Undergone some risk for the state. Yeah. No, I mean,
00:23:41.200 somebody who's had like six or seven kids. Yeah. I absolutely think that they have in our current
00:23:46.700 world made a sacrifice for the state that is equivalent to the wellbeing of the state of most
00:23:52.800 veterans. And that might be a really scary position to take politically, but I think most veterans would
00:23:58.320 probably agree that. Well, female voters would fricking love that. Come on. 1.00
00:24:02.620 Yeah. Well, no, no. The female, like hardcore conservatives and natalist mothers. 1.00
00:24:07.780 Oh yeah. I guess they're the ones who have had kids.
00:24:09.720 Does eight cats count? Why don't cats count? There was that famous article where the woman 0.93
00:24:14.300 was really mad that her mom.
00:24:16.120 The Miss Manners article.
00:24:17.320 Had given, what was it? Article?
00:24:19.600 It was a Miss Manners. 0.98
00:24:20.700 Miss Manners. 0.92
00:24:21.000 Her mother had given some kind of either inheritance or she'd written, obviously the one of this woman's
00:24:27.600 sisters children into the will. And she was deeply disturbed that her own cat, she was childless
00:24:34.240 herself, was not also written into the will because she loved her cat just as much of presumably as her
00:24:40.700 sister loved her child. Why should this cat receive nothing when this useless child is receiving 0.97
00:24:47.500 so much seemed unfair to her? And Miss Manners told her what for. 1.00
00:24:53.200 This article also touched on something that's really important to touch on, and we haven't
00:24:57.560 highlighted it since the whole beginning of this movement, but it's actually, you know what?
00:25:03.220 I think it's a different episode.
00:25:05.440 Oh. Cliffhanger.
00:25:07.740 I'm going to do it, but I'll mention what the topic is.
00:25:10.260 Okay.
00:25:10.720 She mentions that the post that was sort of the kickoff of the prenatalist movement was made
00:25:15.140 on an EA forum, and it was heavily downvoted.
00:25:18.240 No, no, no. She's, Malcolm, she's referring to the post that we made.
00:25:22.520 Yes. I made the post. That came before any of the major articles on prenatalism. That came before
00:25:29.200 the prenatalist.org website. That was the first major position piece we made.
00:25:34.580 Yeah.
00:25:35.480 And it is worth noting because now we are having EA people go into prenatalism as if it's a mainstream
00:25:41.880 EA cause, and it's just really interesting to me.
00:25:44.500 Hmm. That could be fun. Yeah. All right.
00:25:47.360 So let's do that piece next.
00:25:49.040 Okay. Asso, I love you and you're beautiful.
00:25:51.760 I love you too.
00:25:53.020 Oh, and we have a Discord server now. Well, actually, we've had it for a while. I just
00:25:56.880 keep forgetting to promote it. This link should take you to it. I will include this link in the
00:26:02.560 episode description. So, and if you're on a podcast, it'll be in the podcast description. So go check it
00:26:09.300 out. I don't actively moderate it or anything. So I don't know how pleasant it will be.
00:26:15.320 You know, that, that scene from the princess bride in which the dread pirate Roberts is
00:26:21.920 falling down a hill and he says, and then princess buttercup comes after him. I feel like that's how I
00:26:29.400 move around our house. I'm just like,
00:26:31.620 like everything. She is so clumsy and, and ungraceful, which is not true. You're the very
00:26:40.880 picture of womanly grace. Who fell up the stairs on her way to begin podcast recording? Hmm. You 1.00
00:26:46.680 fell up the stairs again on her way into the master bedroom to do podcast recording.
00:26:51.260 She is an angel. She is an angel. She is an angel. She is an angel. She is an angel. She is an angel. She is an relacion. She is an angel. She is an angel. What I
00:27:03.760 you do to do. So I am a du coconut. She is an angel. And she is a du Ronald voucher. Yeah, I I care this one
00:27:04.100 m'. She is an angel. And she's an angel. And you keep going back at her meeting. I have my
00:27:07.920 1l to the door and being aторmated room. She's an angel that's been a broad, and the 0.65
00:27:11.140 Hello mother and and to the next door and FR is her 5 Four funds. Yay. Yeah. She is an angel. Iidores
00:27:16.180 Don't remember somebody else. I'm afraid I'm.
00:27:17.480 There.
00:27:18.180 I drink this one na. She is a will. I fight it and get this one. Is there a birthday. It