Do Smartphones Brainwash Women into Hating Babies?

<p>In this episode, the hosts delve into the complex issues surrounding fertility declines and the possible impacts of smartphone use on marriage and birth rates. They examine fertility statistics, research from the Financial Times, and discuss various arguments, including those posed by Adam Conover. They analyze whether modern technology, especially smartphones, plays a significant role in reducing marriage rates and birth rates. The discussion extends to geographic differences, cultural impacts, and the broader implications of modern lifestyles on fertility. Offering various perspectives, they also touch on the need for new cultural systems to motivate higher fertility rates and the challenges presented by current societal trends. </p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be going over a lot of fertility statistics, a lot of graphs, and we are going to be asking a question that has been posed in a few different ways. We're going to be looking at a number of different articles and research pieces today.</p><p>One is the question of, Is fertility collapse primarily due to a breakup in marriage rates downstream of cell phone use Or is and then a second argument I heard actually Very interesting for me. What is it adam ruins everything that guy adam conover. He has like a podcast You know, and he had a competent pro, like progressive pronatalist on who was arguing that it was cell phones that were leading to all of this.</p><p>This</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> is not something I've heard before. I mean, certainly cell phones have been blamed for the lack of children's literacy, the mental health crisis, but marriage rates?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Well, no, she argued it was making kids that wasn't happening to the phone. So we're going to go over these two related arguments.</p><p>Okay. Okay,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> sure.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And I'm going to start by reading a piece from [00:01:00] the Financial Times and then going occasionally into other pieces that exciting, but from a marked fall in the number of couples had U.</p><p>S. rates of marriage and cohabitation remain constant over the past decade, America's total fertility rate would be higher today than it was then. And here I am putting a graph on screen that is total fertility rate varied widely by marital status. And what it looks at is what your total fertility rate would be.</p><p>If you had been having kids this whole time, so some numbers look really high, like the married and spouse present looks like it's been hovering around 4. 5 for the past decade, right? And so the question is, okay, why does that look like it's hovering around 4. 5? Why does separated look like it's hovering around 2.</p><p>5? Why does married spouse absent look like it's hovering around 3? Like they seem weirdly high, right? Okay, so here's why. While women are married, they tend to have very high birth rates. Note, the chart above does not show that married women [00:02:00] will have four or five kids. It means that the average birth rate for married women ages 15 to 50 sums up to four or five kids.</p><p>You started at 15 there. That seems a little like you're massaging the data. Okay. I don't think many women are getting married at 15, sweetheart. But that's a 35 year span when the average woman will actually only spend 12 and 20 of those years married.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So, okay what is shown here, which I find compelling is that for period married, the number of kids people are having is not declining over time.</p><p>So if you can get people married earlier, you are going to have more kids. Yet we've said that before. I do not think that that is the core of the problem, but we'll talk about that in just a second. As you can see above, there's been a decline in married fertility since the peak in 2009. But [00:03:00] married fertility rates today aren't actually much lower than married fertility rates in the mid 2000s.</p><p>For divorcees and widowers, age adjusted birth rates are actually higher now than they were before the recession. Never married women, again, have about pre recession levels of fertility, too. By fixing age specific marital status, 2001 to 2008 levels, we can model a counterfactual scenario of what fertility might have been had people gotten married and form families at the same rate as formerly.</p><p>And what you see here is that, yes, the fertility rate would have fallen net negative, but not by a ton. You're looking at, like, by negative like 0. 2 here or something like that. Okay. But, we'll get to why I'm not super compelled by this. Essentially, all of the decline in fertility since 2001 can be explained by changes in the marital composition of the population.</p><p>Married, single, and divorced women are [00:04:00] all about as likely controlling for the age and marital status to have kids as they were in 2001. But today, a smaller portion of women are married during those peak fertility years. Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile. In egalitarian Finland, it is now more common.</p><p>For couples who move in together to split up than to have a child. A sharp reversal in the historic trend and this is from a paper here Partnership Dynamics and Entry into Parenthood Comparison of Finnish Birth Cohorts 1969 to 2000. Any thoughts before I go further?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> No, keep going. I want to hear more.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> When pictured as a rise in happily childless dinks, dual income, no kid couples, with plenty of disposable income, the social trends accompanying falling birth rates seem benign. But the rise of singledom and relationship dissolution is a less rosy story, especially considering the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest.</p><p>Of course, many people are happily single. The freedom to choose how to spend one's life and with who or without [00:05:00] is to be celebrated. I don't believe that, by the way. People aren't happily single. Everyone hates their life when they're single.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I don't know. I loved being single, but I didn't. No, you existed.</p><p>So there's that. Okay.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Okay. Quality of your life when you were single versus quality today.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Much better now. More stressful though.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. But the point being is, is you would hate your life when contrasted with today, if you knew this was a possibility. Yeah,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> totally.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But the wider data on loneliness and dating frustration suggests not as all as well.</p><p>So we're going to put some graphs on screen here. Here you can see the share of children born outside of wedlock by mother's class. And this is in the United States, 64 percent of your poor. 36 percent of your working class, 13 percent of your middle or upper class. Millennial family passed by class.</p><p>Do you have a kid before marriage or do you have marriage before a kid? If you're poor, 61 percent chance you have a kid before marriage. Only 16 percent chance you have a marriage before a kid.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Wow. Okay. If you're</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> working class, it's [00:06:00] 44 percent chance you have a kid before marriage. 34 percent chance you have a marriage before a kid.</p><p>Kids are forcing marriages in our society. If you're middle or upper class, it's actually only a 19 percent chance you have a kid before marriage. Any 51 percent chance you have a marriage before a kid. Wild, right? And when you, when you look at these disparities, why an almost worldwide decline and why now the fact is that this is happening almost everywhere.</p><p>All at once points to more broad changes acting across borders than country specific factors. The proliferation of smartphones and social media has been one such exogenous shock. True. Geographic differences in the rise of singledom broadly track mobile internet usage, particularly among women, whose calculus in weighing up potential partners is changing.</p><p>Both of those things are true, but maybe not as strong as you think. Surveys of childless women tell us that the top reason is not career, lifestyle or financially related. [00:07:00] It is that they just haven't found the right partner. This was the second most UK study of 42 year old childless women right by behind not wanting Children.</p><p>Focus on career was way down the list. U. S. Studies echo this fertility rates within marriages have stayed fairly steady since 1990. And I'll put a graph on screen here or chart on screen here. The most important reason for remaining childless. This was a 1970 British cohort study. So a very old cohort study first of all.</p><p>Um, And if you look at men versus women, actually for men trying to find a good partner, it was the harder problem than it was for women. This was 28 percent of men not wanting Children, 23 percent of men not finding the right person for women. It was 31 percent not wanting Children, 19 percent not finding the right person.</p><p>So women are the bottleneck in not wanting Children, not not finding the white person. This is a little bit of pocket sand here. Okay, mobile phones and attitudes towards women's participation in politics. Evidence from Africa. So in this study, [00:08:00] they are showing that women adopt more liberal views of a woman's role in a relationship and with kids.</p><p>when they get access to mobile phones. And this is where I will bring up the secondary argument. I heard that I found pretty compelling from that Adam Conover show, which is to say, okay, well, so, and I actually think this argument is way stronger than this argument in the financial times. Because the financial times is like, well, it's, it's, it's women becoming more liberal and not getting married.</p><p>But the problem is, is that we know in societies where women are still getting married, which we'll get to in a bit. You know, whether it's Iran or India or anything like that, we're still seeing precipitously dropping fertility rates. Right? So it's not marriage, it's just not, it's just not, we, we don't, we, we, we should see a huge difference in the societies where marriage is still happening and where it's not still happening.</p><p>And we don't see that huge difference. Mm-hmm . So whatever it is is everywhere. It's in rural Guatemala, it's in Iran, it's in India, it's in China, it's in the us. What is everywhere? Mobile [00:09:00] phones. So what this other person argued, she goes, well, what you don't understand is how much boredom people used to have.</p><p>She's like, you know, when I was growing up, yeah, we had phones and I had like snake on that phone. I had snake on my phone. A very good. I remember</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> fondly. Yes. Yes.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And when you're deciding, do I want to go over to a friend's house or play Snake, you usually want to go over to a friend's house. Even if they don't have, like, something specific planned, you're like, almost anything is better than Snake.</p><p>Snake is only better than, like, sitting alone in a car or something like that, right? Now you're dealing with a completely different phenomenon. Do I want to go to a friend's house or enter like a fully immersive three D world, right? Or do I want to chat with an AI or do I want to like, that's lot, lot harder, especially.</p><p>And, and within cell phones, you've got these whole, you know, even when you didn't have things like Reddit back then, you didn't have things like social media, as we understand it today, where there is constant feedback, constant dopamine loops. And. [00:10:00] The idea being that the main reason people had kids historically was just that they were born.</p><p>That's the main reason they dated. That's the main reason they hung out with friends. That's the main reason they did all of the things that made society work.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Because what we're also seeing is rates of like the number of friends that people have are much lower now than they were before as well.</p><p>And that does correlate with smartphone adoption. So there's, there's ancillary evidence that suggests this is true. People are just not, they don't need.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And in some countries, they're like banning cell phones in schools and stuff like that, which was a lot of this. It's like, I'm sorry, that's not going to work because then they're going to have access to cell phones outside of school. Do</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> you plan</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> on finding their partner in high school? Like you don't seem to.</p><p>So why are you acting like that's the solution, right? So one, even if this is a problem, I'm not particularly compelled by it. And then two, this doesn't explain the secondary issue which for me is much bigger. Okay. which is that fertility [00:11:00] rates are going up for every single age cohort except for under 24.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Or, or going up or staying around steady. It's under 24 that is, that is dropped. And then under you know, 20 where you've had the precipitous drop. And so what we need to find is ways to motivate fertility at these, these higher ages. More than you had historically. Dramatically more than you had historically.</p><p>And so you can't explain new technology, which you might say is actually the drop in fertility rates is a good thing, and we need to increase fertility rates. In older generations through increasing the desire, like you need to have a more a desire to have lots of kids and even your ancestors did and also none of this really to me like the boredom thing that doesn't explain 50 percent of people saying they don't want kids if you're talking about like Gen Z, you know, like That doesn't explain that.</p><p>When, historically, as we went over in a recent episode, only 5 percent of people said that. So, and 20 percent had no kids, historically, by the way. That was what [00:12:00] we learned in that episode. I don't</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> know if it's necessarily boredom, or if it's also that we've lost an ability to be comfortable dealing with humans at all because of phones.</p><p>People are far less comfortable now interacting in person, let alone picking up a phone to make a call. You know, that's like seeing this kind of flick. Palsy move, you know, I think it's palsy when dares to give me a call. And That, I think, adds the friction significantly to bringing another human into the world and being aware of the fact.</p><p>Well,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I agree. I, I think what we need is, is, is new exogenous ideological motivators for child, for, for having kids.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Absolutely. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And not modifying or banning technology that we cannot control in terms of how our kids are interacting with it.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Absolutely. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And when I say they're like, well, I can't control when they're young.</p><p>Yeah. But then you can't control when they're not young. And now you've, you've, you've given them this horrible thing. They have no immunity to. [00:13:00]</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. That, that's a really important thing is this idea of raising kids screen free. I get the, so an argument I hear a lot of. People make is, well, at least I can give my kid inhibitory control and the ability to live without screens as long as they're in my household.</p><p>And I do see benefits in that. Absolutely. It's great.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But getting them inhibitory control, if you are removing the screens, you have done the exact opposite.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. I mean, the thing is, you have to learn how to have that control despite the presence of the screens, unless you plan on isolating your kid for life.</p><p>Because otherwise they will get access and which the</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Amish do in some righty communities do functionally speaking, but yeah It's not one of those groups, you know Yeah, I guess convert if that's the way you want to play the game I think it's it's I want kids who can engage with technology Because I think that technology is gonna be key to them crushing their enemies And [00:14:00] so I'm not, I'm not keeping them away from this stuff, you know, but to continue the fall in coupling is a deepest in extremely online Europe, East Asia and Latin America, followed by the Middle East and then Africa.</p><p>Single Demerarians rare in South Asia, where women's web access is more limited. This is really interesting to me because I didn't know that web access for women was so limited in South Asia, and it is true that the places where you've seen the biggest fertility crashes have been like East Asia, where phone use is so much more common than it is in Europe or the United States.</p><p>And then in Latin America, phone use is also super, super common in terms of like recreation and stuff like that. And it's less common in Africa from what I've heard. So, 6 in 10 women internet users who took part in a study faced some kind of restriction from their families when using the internet.</p><p>This is in Pakistan. Women disconnected. Feminist case studies on gender digital divide amidst COVID 19. This is a paper. The majority of respondents of the survey said that they are only allowed to use the [00:15:00] internet. for attending online classes or talking to family via WhatsApp.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Wow.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> More than a third of those surveys acknowledged higher restrictions on the use of internet for girls than boys with 16 percent saying girls are not allowed to use it at all.</p><p>16 percent said girls are not allowed to use it at all.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Gosh. Keep finding But boys are fine.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. Why, why the difference? Well, because they're not incepted with the feminist mind virus, which is the key thing that's causing a lot of the changes in the way women view one, the right to not have kids, I think.</p><p>Yeah, but I mean, having</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> phones is damaging for everyone, you know, the effects are universal. No, it's not.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Not in the same way. The ideological spread to a guy, like you're not gonna F up a guy's image of his attractiveness with a phone. You're not going to F up a guy's image of his market value in dating markets with a phone.</p><p>I don't know. I mean, the existence</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> of looks maxing implies to me that that's not true.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Looks maxing is a minute community. When you contrast it with [00:16:00] the women who think that their value on the marriage marketplace is their value on the sexual marketplace. It's like not even, this is the majority of women versus 0.</p><p>01 percent of guys.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I don't know.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> No, no, no, no, no, no. What do you mean you don't know? Do you argue that the number of looks maxers is higher than 0. 01 percent of the</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> US population? Well, also women though are far more likely to end up obsessing about their appearance because that tends to be A major factor influencing their desire.</p><p>Okay, so you're saying</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> that it is way more damaging to women than men</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Well, yeah, but i'm also not so sure that Realistically, no,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> no, no, no you back up your your position here What but also I mean</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> what you still i'm not just talking about the development of body dysmorphia I mean, you're also screwing up inhibitory control.</p><p>You're also distracting people like why that</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> doesn't matter I don't think that matters at all to having kids.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> So are you saying it's a culture, I mean, I mean, but also look at the cultural ideals that are presented [00:17:00] to young men online. They're basically, you know, forced infantilization for most of their lives.</p><p>Men are encouraged to live like teenagers for as long as they possibly can. There's very little celebration of parenthood in early marriage.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> That's true. I think that there are some online communities for men that do push that. But the number of men that gravitate towards them is the vast minority. I think that this is the difference here.</p><p>You are talking about the vast majority of women versus the vast minority of men. If you look at the women who end up making inaccurate judgments about their value on marriage markets, Due to interacting with online dating pools, I would say the number is probably 95 percent to 80 percent of women.</p><p>If you look at the number of men who develop an obsession with their looks versus the number of women who develop an obsession with their looks based on online, online women, I'd say over 50 percent of women, men, I'd say Less than 3 percent of men. You're just not talking about the same numbers. Are you just trying</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> to blame body dysmorphia on why [00:18:00] women aren't having kids?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> If it's one of the things I'm saying, for example red pillism, for example, is much less damaging to having lots of kids than feminism is a guy who enters a. Even an inaccurate representation of a historic male female relationship, as depicted by the red pill community, is likely to have kids. It's my</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> intuition that the bigger problem is the normalization of a culture that puts hedonism over all else and doesn't reward having families or living in alignment with values that aren't just Pedonistic or highly progressive values.</p><p>I, and I think that that affects men just as much as women.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I disagree really strongly here. It doesn't, I mean, like it obviously does. I'm trying to walk you through this. So I'm trying to get you to like, think of numbers in your head. Okay. What percent of men who engage with the internet do you think are engaged with like toxic, like red pill communities?</p><p>Probably not that many,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> [00:19:00] but I'm not sure. No, no, no research on the number is, is, is maybe between five to</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> 25%.</p><p>Low. Okay. However, you also know how many women who engage with the internet engage with toxic progressive communities. You can just look at the data. It's 70, 60 percent. It's not even close.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah, I think, well, and it's not, not to run counter to my own argument, but the fact that Spoonies are almost entirely comprised of young women. This is to say people who believe that they have chronic illnesses, and sometimes really do, but often don't. And that can be really damaging to their lives.</p><p>And what about Stoics?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Right. How many female stoics have you heard of on an online community? Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Fair. I mean, that, that is true. So the</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> internet is more [00:20:00] damaging to women than it is to men.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Heard this thesis before, but I'm going to have to think about it. I'm going to have to think about it.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> All right. So, key findings from the research indicate that around 40 percent of the women surveyed used the Internet every day. So a lot of them are still using it every day. And even in these countries with usage becoming higher as family income rises.</p><p>So again, family income. This probably shows why you have the negative correlation here. A whopping 80 percent of the respondents. Who are unable to use the Internet are from South Rizikistan, one of the newly merged districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa something province. Anyway you may, what, what sort of birth rate does this lead to?</p><p>Well, Pakistan's birth rate is falling You know, as recently as the 1990s, it was over six per woman. And now at 3. 41, but it's still quite high when compared to something like India, which is below replacement right now, or Bangladesh, which is below replacement rate. This is not to overstate the [00:21:00] role of social media.</p><p>Other cultural differences between countries and regions mediate both the spread of liberal ideas and people's ability to act on them. Caste and honor systems encourage high rates of marriage irrespective of media access and female education, income, and employment differ markedly between regions. So remember we're talking about India has a unusually low fertility rate for its income level.</p><p>So let's look at India in marriage rates. Okay. In a 2018 survey of more than 160, 000 households. 93 percent of married Indians said that they came from an arranged marriage. Just 3 percent had a love marriage and another 2 percent described theirs as a love come arranged marriage, which usually indicates that the relationship was set up by the families, and then the couple agreed to get married.</p><p>There has been only a slight change over time. 94 percent of octogenarians had an arranged marriage and the figure remains at over 90 percent for young couples in their 20s. Did you know that? That's really interesting to me. [00:22:00]</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> That is really interesting.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Manisha Mondal always thought that she would have a love marriage.</p><p>I was used to fighting with my parents. I fought to attend college. That was a little far away from home. I thought, okay, love marriage will be the next thing to fight about. Manisha, an office assistant in Bahli, a small town in eastern India, told me. But in the first few days of college, a few boys approached her to talk.</p><p>And older female students took her to the bathroom for a talking to if she spoke to the boys, they warned her reputation would be ruined to keep an eye out for her. Her older brother would drive past college a few times a day to make sure she was not talking to boys. College was important to Manisha and she's incredibly oppressive and then work, then take a chance on love.</p><p>So she cared more about work than she cared about marrying who she wanted to, which I thought was really interesting. It does sound oppressive, but it appears to be working, by her last year in college, her wedding had been fixed, was the son of her [00:23:00] father's friend from the same community. I see my parents.</p><p>They have never had a fight. So I think it will work for me too, the 24 year old said, showing her crossed fingers over the WhatsApp call. Marrying within your caste remains an essential feature of marriage in India. In 2014, a survey of more than 70, 000 people, fewer than 10 percent of urban Indians said anyone in their family, , anyone in their family had married outside their caste.</p><p>And not many more outside their jahiti or subcaste. Interfaith marriages were even rarer. Just 5 percent of urban respondents said that anyone in their family had married outside their religion.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh, wow.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Did you know about that in India?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I didn't. But India and Pakistan aren't famous for great quality of life for women.</p><p>So I just don't know how I feel about this. Like, the solution to me is not Let's just roll back human rights. Let's just roll back [00:24:00] education. Let's just roll back human rights a smidge. I don't accept it. I don't. And I think that carrots are more motivating in the end than sticks. I think that empowerment is better than disempowerment.</p><p>And I think that there's plenty of history in the world in which women have had a lot of freedom, but have used it well because they weren't exposed to A terrible culture, and I agree that smartphones are a vector for very unsustainable and dangerous cultures, and I agree that those cultures have also hurt me, but they also hurt me as a teen well before smartphones existed.</p><p>I don't think just taking them away.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> You look at what motivates fertility in our family, conviction, ideology, religion, none of it would be at all mitigated by cell phone or internet exposure.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Also you [00:25:00] would not have gotten kids out of me. If you were like, well, I only want to marry a stay at home wife who doesn't go on the internet.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I would not have gotten kids out of you. Squeezing, squeezing you for all Well, like, your</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> whole, your, your selling point to me was, you don't have to give anything up if you don't want to. You can keep your career if that's a really</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> good selling point for most people.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I do see that that's an unrealistic selling point for most people, but</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Also, I'd, I'd point out here that, that you make it sound like totally magnanimous towards me, but the actual term of the contract we came up with is not as unfair as it may sound.</p><p>The rule was is that you would always be allowed to pursue your career and if it came to it, I would become a stay at home dad. Not that I would always support you no matter what the rule was, you were going to support us no matter what. I just gave you the privilege of supporting the family.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> The option optionality, giving [00:26:00] women optionality, I think gives them empowerment.</p><p>And I think most of. The choices among women to so optionality plays a role in choosing to not have kids because one of the biggest things we're seeing is just fewer unplanned teen births like that's what we're seeing in South America. It's not that people's intentions have changed. It's just that there are fewer mistake pregnancies and people are delaying fertility.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But I think the core answer to all of this is. Mistake babies is where the kids have disappeared.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah, like largely that is what has happened. And what you're talking about here is not mistake babies, but you're talking about basically forced babies by disempowering women and, and, and creating unwanted babies, which again, like I don't think That forcing people into anything is the solution and I'm vehemently against it.</p><p>Well, it doesn't seem to work</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> because there are countries that do this. Like Iran does this and it doesn't lead to an increase in fertility rate.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> How does Iran force [00:27:00] people to have kids?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Women in Iran do not have a lot of rights. And the marriage rate is really high. And it doesn't lead to a high fertility rate.</p><p>So the question is why, why? And the answer is because you can't, it doesn't work like this. You, you, you can't just do that, especially if they have access to the internet and stuff like that. And so I, I think that it is a you, you might be able to get around it if you're in a culture where widespread access to the internet isn't as common.</p><p>But I don't think that those cultures will end up being the cultures that end up dominating the human species going forwards. So I'm not particularly concerned about them or interested in emulating them myself. So the question is, can you build up the spiritual fortitude to interact with these types of technology?</p><p>And I think that's doable while still motivating, like, way higher kid rates than people had historically. And I think that that needs new cultural systems, new way of relating to what kids mean to your culture.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> There's a lot of the reasons why people don't have kids. Are based on false premises, you know, the idea that you should have your career and everything 100 percent in [00:28:00] place before you have kids, which now is increasingly impossible, who's ever going to be financially or career stable going forward in an age of a</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> wait to have kids until you're, you're stable.</p><p>Yeah, there's a bunch of</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> false, and you know, also this false perception that it's not a good idea to have a kid while you're going through college or graduate school. That's one of the best times to have</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> kids. Yeah, I was, I was talking to one of our followers about this and they were like, well, you know, my partner's autistic and so we need like a full time nanny to have kids and start having kids.</p><p>I'm like, no, you don't. It doesn't my partner's autistic. Okay. Like you'll figure it out. It's more,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> it is more stressful of a full time nanny if you're autistic, because guess what? Now your life is entirely about managing this party. Yes. Which by the way is incentivized to exploit you to disappoint you to only think about themselves and not about you or the baby.</p><p>So good luck with that. Being an autistic parent, I think is a lot easier if you're good at masking because you will do what doesn't feel natural, [00:29:00] but it's best for your baby. When a neurotypical parent would not. I act cheerful and playful around our kids as much as I can. And certainly I don't feel it a lot of the time, but I, I go downstairs</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> and just, you understand it.</p><p>She, she creates the perfect environment for my kids. She, she goes, I go downstairs and she is making a homemade pizza and playing Italian music like, like fine, like whatever music the kids are all helping. It is this perfect scenic family movement. moment. And I'm like, Simone, like, how are you this perfect?</p><p>And she goes, well, I thought this is what like a perfect family moment would look like. So I decided to do this because like, I don't know, like I'm autistic, right? So I figured this is what you need to do, right?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. So normal neurotypical parents do what they feel like doing and react to their children the way that they feel.</p><p>And a good masking autistic parent reacts the way a perfect, loving, playful, yes. And a parent will. And so I would argue that. And I would say also many, many, many women who are autistic are also [00:30:00] really, really good at masking. So they're among the very best parents you could possibly have. No, you don't need a nanny.</p><p>Because like, that is the one thing that autistic people really aren't that great at even being able to deal with with training, which is just other people being a******s and taking advantage of them. Which is a constant theme, right? Like with all of our old, like Childcare options before we found our amazing solution.</p><p>We have now you were basically like, Simone, you can't talk to them. Because I would talk to them and suddenly like all of the terms would be subverted. Suddenly they would drop out on us. Suddenly like their rates would triple. And</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> they sense weakness whenever they talk to Simone. Simone is not good at dealing with contractors.</p><p>Yeah,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> yeah, yeah. It's not good</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> because she's like, I don't want to be mean. And I'm like, you need to be mean. Like you need to show that you have boundaries.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> You don't. You, you enter like. Yeah, like they'll call me</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> trying to work and this, this is again, this isn't with our current childcare arrangement, which is amazing.</p><p>But like babysitters would call me and be like, Oh, so and so has a dirty diaper. And I'd be like, Oh, well of course I'll come down and change it. And [00:31:00] then, you know, of course I'm like super interrupted. It's a, if you give a mouse cookie situation where like, then I'm down for an hour. And here I am paying this person an hour later.</p><p>And</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> they demand that you talk to them. And they, you know, and you're like, Oh, I'm talking to them because it makes them like us more. And I'm like, No. They think that by talking to you, they are getting you to like them more so they can get more out of you. It's not the other way around. Yeah,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> anyway but yeah, that among other things, likes it in this like list of things that people Misunderstand about parenthood and just changing the culture around it can make a huge, huge, huge difference.</p><p>And it's going to have to happen on a community by community basis, but in the end, it's those high fertility communities that are going to inherit the earth. So it doesn't matter that only a small number of cultures are going to pass through all this, the ones that figure it out will. And I just don't think the ones that systematically disempower women.</p><p>Are, are, are going to make it</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> these</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> women,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> there'll be like a permanent [00:32:00] dysgenic spiral.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah, it's, it's not, it's not good. It's not good. Also, they're, they're not having that many kids anymore.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> It's not even that effective a strategy anymore. So it's like, well, why, why take all the costs?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah, the like going forward one.</p><p>I mean, because child mortality is way down. Women don't ultimately have to have that many kids to really grow the population because we're not losing half of them to tragic ends prematurely. However, sacrifices between fertility issues and delayed childbearing. People are going to have to be highly motivated if they want to have kids, they are going to have to Really, really, really, really try and either invest in a ton of like, just holistic health solutions and live healthy lives, which is hard to do these days or undergo fertility treatment and IVF to have the number of kids they want to have.</p><p>And that's a culture thing. That's not a female disempowerment thing, [00:33:00] but I do agree. And we're going to have to talk about this with our own family, but yeah, maybe you're right that phones. Are hurting women, young women, especially more than they hurt men, which is,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> well, I think that you protect them not by not having them access phones by having a strong memetic structures that can protect them from the types of memes.</p><p>It's a means on the phones that are hurting them.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah, it's not the phone. 100%. Yeah, the phones are amazing technology. The phones are amazing. And the way that we use our phones with kids, I would never not want our kids to be around phones because our kids know. I'm not</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> that worried about our, our daughters.</p><p>Like last night, Octavian was</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like, Oh, how do you make a paper boat? And I'm like, I don't know. Let's look it up. And then you can learn it. That's so cool. I mean, my mom used to look things up in dictionaries with me and I love that she did that, but now we can do that with literally learning how to do almost anything, you know, how, how to deliver a baby calf, how to assemble all sorts of things.</p><p>This is so cool.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Well, I love you to death Simone. Any final [00:34:00] thoughts?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I guess</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> not. Sorry. So, it's the accident babies. That's the problem. We need, not more accident babies, but we need to find a way to offset the accident babies that don't exist anymore. And the cultures that relied on accident babies to replace themselves, like Catholics. I'm gonna say like, but it's We need to make</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> We need to make childbearing an aesthetic desirable thing.</p><p>We need to make childbearing aspirational. We need to make it people's special interests. This has to be how people are competing, what people aspire to, what people enjoy, what their hobbies are. And when I</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> speak at conventions and people come to me, and like at the Prenatal Skin Mission last year, somebody was like, well, I mean, surely you want to ban condoms.</p><p>Surely you want to ban porn. And I'm like, no, those are the babies we're glad. Don't exist. The babies that somebody had because they couldn't figure out how to use a condom or they couldn't get access to a condom or the babies who exist because a guy didn't have access to porn. And so it was like, well, I want to get off today.</p><p>So I got someone to use my girlfriend. [00:35:00] Those are the babies that, that are, that, that are the accident babies. Yeah. How</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> can you be pronatalist? And even if it's just pronatalist in terms of like, Oh, I love kids. How can you love kids? And want people who resent kids to be raising them,</p><p>now, we need to change our culture and show people that actually they are ready to have kids. Yeah, but that is a very different thing than literally forcing it upon people. Because, face it, many people just never do get ready. And then they just start presenting it. It's</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> interesting to me that so many religions rely on our basic, most perverted, most animalistic biology to motivate reproduction.</p><p>And that those, those groups are the ones that are dealing with fertility collapse the most. Because it turns out that this system just doesn't work in the modern era. And that you need to find ways to get people to value kids for the sake of the kids. Which, which does work, you know, for example, if you look at the Catholic communities, for example, they're doing really well in terms of fertility.</p><p>It's because they want to have kids. [00:36:00] It's not because they accidentally got pregnant or didn't understand contraception or they, you know, it's because they're like, I am all about having like as many kids as possible.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. And I think, well, the thing is, and what I think Catherine has it, right. The high fragility couples start out wanting a lot of kids for a setting and ideological reasons, and that gets them through the first three.</p><p>It's like loosening the jar because it is really hard to push through your first kids. It is difficult when you're doing everything for the first time and they're not there to entertain each other and you haven't yet shifted to commercial operations of everything. So nothing's really sustainable.</p><p>That's the hardest part. So you need that exogenous motivator. And then beyond that, the kids. sell themselves. Like it's, it just, it's hard. It's hard to quit after that point. As long as you have the physical, are you addicted</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> to pregnancy?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I'm not addicted to pregnancy, but I am definitely addicted to having more kids and wanting more kids in this world.</p><p>They're just amazing people and they love each other.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Child addiction. I know. I actually find it very interesting that progressives they always frame what we're [00:37:00] doing. It's like a breeding fetish. They're like, which</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> one is ironic because yeah. None of our children have been produced via sex.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Right. But the idea of like, oh, they're trying to force their breeding fetish on society. And it's like, what a perverse understanding of why people do things, right?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Like literally the only version of sex that is not an exercise of some kind of kink is procreative sex. Yeah. Everything else is some kind of kink or like, hedonic thing.</p><p>The only version of sex that is, like, actually Well,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> that's what it evolves for, right? Like, that's why you feel these things. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> But, you know.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Anyway, love you today, Esteban. Have a good day.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I love you, too. What are we doing for dinner? Gochujang chicken.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I was actually wondering if you could do fiery chicken with gochujang, but not the sweet sauce?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I don't know what you're talking about. Like, the same chicken you had last night? That kind of chicken?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> The chicken I had last night used gochujang and a sweet sauce. It</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> [00:38:00] didn't, no.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> It was just gochujang and what?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> No, there was no gochujang sauce in that chicken at all. That was not gochujang chicken.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> What was it?</p><p>You liked</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> gochujang. That was Sichuan chicken.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Really?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> That's</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> very sweet for what I thought.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> When I gave you gochujang chicken, I was like, wow, like, don't you think it's too sweet? And you're like, it's not sweet at all.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I'd be lighter. It's just right now I'm not really in the mood for sweet food. I'm more in the mood Would you just like</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mapo Tofu instead?</p><p>I just, I need to use that chicken.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yes, let's do Mapo Tofu.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Off I go then. I love you.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> You're amazing.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Everybody has been dunking on phones again, like we're back to it. I thought that with the threat to TikTok ban that people would start defending phone use and now no, suddenly phones are still bad.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I haven't noticed this.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I, I have noticed it offline, not, not necessarily online. Let me do the reminders.</p><p>Hey, guess what? We are going to be in Austin [00:39:00] at the NAIDL conference this March. We would love to see you there. So whether or not you live in Austin, this might be a great excuse to take a little trip. You can get 10 percent off your registration for NatalCon. The, this is the second inaugural pro natalist conference, by entering the code Collins at checkout.</p><p>So if you are going. We're really excited to see you there. And if you're not, sorry.</p><p><strong>Speaker:</strong> Nom, nom, nom.</p><p><strong>Speaker 2:</strong> What</p><p><strong>Speaker 3:</strong> does it look like when you eat, Testy?</p><p><strong>Speaker 2:</strong> It looks good. Small pieces.</p><p><strong>Speaker 4:</strong> I have green. Nom, nom, nom, nom, [00:40:00] nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. Does it look</p><p><strong>Speaker 3:</strong> crazy when you eat, Testy?</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>