Birth Rate Debate: “40% Of Girls Will Never Be Mothers”
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Why should anyone listen to anything that you guys have to say? >> I mean, you you've brought in an interesting group, right? I mean, whenever people like don't want to read something and they just want to like watch something to understand falling fertility, inevitably I'm like, well, there's there's this movie you can watch online um about how fertility is falling, why, what's going on, and I reference your work and I pass them
basically to you. Um I mean, I'm I'm a demographer. I'm uh at some point today I will during this conversation I will probably try to draw a graph in the air with my hands. Um you can you can you can like lunge and slap my hand down when I do it. Um but uh so I mean for me I'm there's that and then of course the Collins's are like practically the people who've like made this an issue for a lot of people
>> with the punchable face of pronatalism. So, I guess I'm kind of introing like multiple people here >> and then you're like, >> it's so true. [laughter] It's so true. I don't want to punch you, but it's uh Yeah. Yeah. Simone, have you got this just a passing interest, a passion for you? What is this? >> We are we're hard effective altruists. We care about the long-term future of humanity. And you can actually see this
among many people who are famous like Elon Musk, right? like his interests track with what appear to be existential threats to humanity. He's concerned about the environment. He he works on Tesla, right? He sees these things. Now he's trying to get humans to space. Um so people who are very interested in long-term human flourishing are naturally likely to care about demographic apps because it is one of
those things that is a civilizational level threat. I mean when when Stephen mentioned, for example, that this does affect everyone. Yeah. boomers who are like h like not my problem. They're still in just a few years going to be receiving only like under 80% of their expected social security payments which are being paid for by Gen Z who's not expecting anything. So, everyone is affected by this. And yeah, this is
something where basically even if you don't care about the long-term future, you're affected, but because we do care about it, we care about humanity in 100 and 10,000 years. We're we're at the precipice of a tipping point that could either take things in a very cool direction or a very bad direction. So, we care about it from that perspective. >> And you've been working on this for two decades flying around the world.
>> Um, it's just over one decade. It feels like two. Yeah. I come from a very different perspective. I came out of the commercial world uh where I ran a data science company doing advanced data modeling for 20 years. And I I could have and maybe should have continued in that line. But once I saw in January 2016 that the birth rate issue wasn't just limited as I thought at that time to Japan and Italy that effectively it
was spreading globally and had been spreading for 50 years and I didn't know about it and for sure I was bringing up my kids at that time as teenagers as they were for a world where birth rate decline was not going to be a factor for their the entirety of their future. I got scared that why do we not know about this and then going to research to find out well what's a common factor because we can't have independent factors alone
explaining why this happened in Italy and Japan and Germany and Spain and Austria etc at effectively the same time and I found that no one was looking at it from that way so I you know I really have devoted uh 10 years into what I would call you reproductive dynamics what are the patterns So rather than looking at demography from the point of view of how do we explain changes or rather what levers can change things is
it linked to salaries is it linked to housing of prices I come at it from a different point of view is what's the same what are the underlying structures across societies and over time that are really locked in or mostly locked in and so it's an interesting I would describe it really as yeah reproductive dynamics or structural demography. >> One thing that I think is worth uh not noting is that for all three of us uh
your backtory, I know your all's backtory, none of us like grew up as kids and we're like I hope someday that I study low fertility. >> Um like and and also like none of us are actually coming out of the tradition of academic demography. Okay, I started writing on low fertility and then went and got a PhD because it was like a like a a necess a necessity of the job, right? The reality is on the question of
low fertility by and large academic demography has to a considerable extent been missing an action. Um yes >> that you kind of noticed this was a thing and then got into it from a very different background. You all you all were like living in Korea right and kind of freaked out by no one having kids. Um, for me, I was working on totally different like regional economic development stuff and then I kept
bumping into fertility and being like this is this weird super powerful slowmoving force in the background of everything I'm writing about. Maybe I should just write about that. >> Um, and I think that that's the story for a lot of people who are concerned about falling fertility is that none of us just woke up and said, "I'm deeply concerned about falling fertility." There were other things we loved in the
world and we gradually woke up to the fact that if no one's having kids, the other things we love don't last. Global fertility is projected to keep falling, reaching around 1.8 by 2050 and 1.6 by 2100. By 2100, only six countries are expected to still be at or above replacement level. The US recorded its lowest ever fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman in 2024. Around 710,000 fewer children were born in the US last
year compared to the nation's peak in 2007. Since 2007, the general fertility rate has declined by 23%. And in the UK, being childless at age 30 is now the norm, rising from 48% to 58%. >> Yeah. And I I think those numbers really don't even do a justice to the reality of what that means for a society. Um, you know, people often still think, many still do, that there are too many people on the planet and having fewer people is
a good thing. But when you look at the dynamics of this, I like to talk in the periods of time in which births will half >> and then half again and half again and half again. A curious one I was uh looking at the other day is if you have a fertility rate of 1.0, zero. That's very low, but it's above what we're seeing right now in Korea and Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc. If you take 1.0, and if that doesn't change,
the total births in a given generation is equal to the total future births of all future generations. Because you keep halfing and halfing and halfing and halfing and you add up all those halves of halves of halves and you get no more than the total of the current generation. >> Mhm. Now that's 1.0. >> That's a fun homework math problem. You're like intro to demography. >> Let me give you another one. Can I? I've
only had two of these and I haven't shared these before. But if you take a fertility rate of 2.0 almost replacement level and 1.0 Z and I were to ask you what's the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0? Well, there's actually two answers to this question. If you're talking about, well, today's generation, you know, the number of average children people have, of course, it's 1.5. But if you're looking at the future,
the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0 is 1.92. >> Yep. >> Cuz at 2.0, zero births are going to half every 800 years. You get down to about 1.92 and they're going to half every 400 years. You've half the length of time for birth to half already. When you get down to that 1.5 point, 1.6 point like the US and Europe and yeah, well, you know, frankly, um I think we're all on the path to South Korea. Maybe we'll get to that at some point in
the conversation, but where we are right now, births are halfing in the industrial world every 50 to 60 years. What happens if the population declines? I think a lot of the time people ask the question, why should I care? They maybe got some defenses. We're worried about climate change or overpopulation or this or that or the other trying to get women out. We'll get into that. But like what happens to the world? Forget
individuals. Forget happiness and connection and stuff like that. Like what just happens to what what's the impact of having fewer people next generation than now? >> Well, I think there's so many answers to that. I mean, economics and the social side. I mean, I spent 7 years in Detroit, Michigan, uh, around the time of its bankruptcy in 2013, and there was a city built for 2 million people with only 700,000 living in it. Very
different reasons. But you have the same issue of a a society, the city in this case, built for a certain number of people, and you look over a period of decades, what it's like for a city, a community to be hollowed out. I remember was filming for the documentary uh driving around and you see some clips of this. But there was one moment driving down this street of what would have been very fancy houses
in then a very scary area not far from the center of Detroit. And there's just decay everywhere except towards the end of this oneway street. There was a family having a picnic on the garden outside young kids running around. And for me that was just the image of this is the future. >> So that's a book chapter opening, right? Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. You know, you've got this joyous moment for a young family
surrounded by decay. And do you know what? I bet you now that family isn't living there. I bet you that Well, Detroit has kind of re re-energized itself. It's come back, but that's that's not going to happen while fertility is low. >> So, I say I I hope we come back to the question of what will happen in terms of people's individual experiences, happiness, because personally, that's what I care about most. But there is one
area of this that I think is dramatically underappreciated in terms of the effects of falling fertility. Fertility doesn't fall evenly everywhere. And as we just heard, um it is the case that small differences in fertility once you're below replacement, small differences in fertility, quote unquote small differences, can create radically compounding differences in military age recruitable populations.
The result is in the 20th century we worried about how large groups of young men would impact internal stability of countries. Too many young men they start a civil war you get communist revolutions and the US built a whole foreign policy apparatus around managing communist revolutions and civil wars in other countries. The 21st century we already know is not like that. Civil wars are not the problem. Interstate
conflict is okay. We're seeing an explosion in conflicts between states. Why? Well, one very plausible reason is that when fertility decline becomes very rapid and becomes very differential. You get a lot of countries that realize one, this is their last chance to make a go at it before they don't have a fieldable army anymore. And two, that the guy beside them declined way before them, that they're a generation farther down
the path. And so, a lot of countries in the next few decades are going to be at a place where they realize that they will literally never ever have a better time to strike ever again. That being the case, the 21st century fertility decline. I mean, you can think about this North and South Korea. North Korea's fertility rate is something like two times that of South Korea. China has low fertility, but still has this this
big uh age bump that Taiwan does not have. And Taiwan's already smaller. Now, you can say, well, you know, automated weapons will fill the gap and all these things. And that is happening in Ukraine. I mean, Ukraine's trying, but Ukraine's also showing how hard it is. Um, that even with the full support of lots of industrialized technological societies helping them innovate and develop, it's still taking a brutal,
ghastly cost for their entire society just to barely cling to their turf. So, I would say that one of the real realities of low fertility will be the resumption of zero sum interstate conflict. And we know that because stable population societies or even declining population societies have existed many times in the past. Most of human history was a situation where there was no longrun population growth
and it wasn't peaceful. The idea that as countries decline they'll get so freaked out about war that they stop fighting is nonsense. Instead they will realize now's our moment. But it's even more local than that because I mean basically we our government and most developed countries governments are set up like a Ponzi scheme and you're not you're bought into it. Like this is a problem because you're bought into a Ponzi
scheme and even if you're trying not to like let's assume that you're like well I know I'm not going to get my social security. Well I know I'm not going to get Medicare or Medicaid if anything's hard for me. It still matters because hospitals are going to start shutting down when the government stops reimbursing them. Your 401k. Yeah. you're bought into the stock market, if you have a 401k, if you have a
state-based pension fund. Also, keep in mind that as cities start to spend more and more of their budgets just paying for pension funds, where is the money to pay for their existing police forces, for their fire departments, who's going to come to your house when it's burning down? A lot of these things that we've come to depend upon that we're like, well, obviously I'm going to get this. These are relatively new inventions.
United States is a socialist utopia, and people don't even realize it. You we're like, oh, you know, China's social. No, they're not. We're way more socialist than China. People don't Well, you have to pay for school in China, all the all the health coverage that you get in China. Yeah. Is it's it's not you don't get like if you're poor in the United States, if you're at or near the poverty line, especially if you're a parent, you
typically have child care paid for. You typically have health care totally paid for for your kid. You have food assistance for your kid. That doesn't exist in China. That exists here. And it's not going to exist much longer if demographic labs keeps playing out without serious intervention. >> Why? Well, we already see this in a lot of towns. I mean, I'm from Kentucky. Uh, Eastern Kentucky has massive population
decline over the last few decades and whole communities, municipalities that just disband and they say, "Okay, we're just done as a municipality. There's not enough taxpayers." What really does is you get to point, they'll abandon the school, they'll abandon the roads. The town disbands when there's not enough taxpayers to pay for the salaries of the bureaucrats. Okay? And at that point, they're like, "Well, we'll disband." And
I'm like, I think most people would have preferred if you fired yourselves and kept the school a little longer, but um I mean, you can buy towns in Kentucky, school, fire station, everything. Now they're grown over with weeds and vines and all that, but um it's great great place to start communes, right? But uh um but ultimately, you can you can see this all over the country. I mean, Chicago, where Illinois where teacher
pensions, okay, there's like a microcosm what's going on. teacher pensions are driving this massive constant runup in educational spending even as actual money spent on instruction is not rising and surprise surprise people are like well all this education money is not getting better outcome for kids yeah because the education money is just pension money we just file pension funding as education funding and I'm
like no pension funding is welfare >> okay there's a classification issue here but >> so like ultimately localities are already They have this pro having the states, localities are having this problem where the needs of the old are cannibalizing the futures of the young and just I mean to put a point on it now you you see more and more older property owners then saying well we shouldn't have to pay property taxes once we've
paid off our mortgage because we don't have kids in the school system. >> I'm like first of all you went to that school system you can pay it back. Second of all you did have kids in it and your property taxes didn't pay their full cost. And third of all, we discovered during CO when you shut the schools down, the youths burn your city down. So pay your protection racket. >> I remember we had a conversation. I
said, "What happens if you have a country's population decline? What does that look like? Is it just that towns are half the size?" That's not the case. It's that small towns that are less desirable to be in just disappear entirely and become abandoned. New York will be the last bastion >> of wherever the population decline goes to. >> Is Tokyo suffering? Right. I mean, you look at Japan right now and you look at
the forecast for population movement within Japan. Um, and the rural areas are absolutely dying, but the growth within Tokyo is continuing and will continue for a generation more. More I call these magnet towns or magnet cities. Young people will gravitate to where there are jobs, where there are supermarkets and the older people will be left sadly in these rural dying communities. >> And you'll call it population triage,
right? people look and they realize this town has no future. So they move to the places that will survive >> which are more expensive >> which are more expensive >> and which have lower birth rates >> lower and then they move again and again and again and so you get it's actually and you can see this everywhere. It's not just it's not just Japan I mean in Bulgaria Sophia is doing fine. Um I mean in England, London does okay. Um around
the world once you see it, you can't not see it. That low fertility societies often have thriving primate cities because what's happening is all the people who can get out, there's this incredible filtering effect that everybody who has the ability to look ahead at the future, everybody who's kind of a long-term planner, an investor, a builder looks and goes, I don't want to be here when when the, you
know, the stuff hits the fan. and they moved to the big city. >> Why is it the case that declining fertility impacts the economy negatively? Like what what's the reason for that? Because you said 401ks, we don't have the money to be able to put into the system. Like people might not naturally just understand why that's the case. >> I mean, when when you have growing fertility, you have growing population,
growing demand, you have more people paying into a system. Also, we didn't set up things like our social services in a way where, you know, you you you actually pay money into social security and it stays there. No, we we we first created social security and we paid people out immediately and we're like we'll just keep funding it as we go along. What could possibly go wrong? Um so when you stop that again because it's
a Ponzi scheme just like the basic design is you have to pay people in and then you pay someone out and then whoever's last holding the bill is going to have to feed more young people in the bottom in order to be able to pay for the old people at the top. because we've got an aging population, this inversion means that there are fewer and fewer young people with more and more old people and that is going to be the
problem. So the point here you >> so but so I mean that's 100% true but when I think about the real economic crime of low fertility you know I benefit so much from the existence of Albert Einstein. Okay, he invented things that everyone in the world benefits from ideas, concepts or um uh or we could say Elon Musk, okay? Or any of these high productivity geniuses who have done things that have revolutionized the world. Innovation is
non-rivalous. Everybody benefits. The odds you get a genius are just a function of population times education times, you know, some latent genetic difference, but times capital density. Okay. So if a super genius is born in a country with no education and no capital density they don't live up to their potential. So basically as fertility is falling particularly in industrialized societies that have deep capital markets
education where a genius could rise to their potential. Everyone loses. A bigger population particularly in those countries yields innovators for the entire world. The fundamental engine of economic growth is not population structure. It's just ideas. It's productivity. It's it's division of labor. It's innovation. And that stuff slows down. Even on the consumption side when a new What are we drinking here?
>> Newtonic. >> New tonic. A productivity drink. Um and this is a relatively new product. It's only been around for >> couple years. >> Couple years. Okay. Um I would bet if you did a marketing survey on your consumers, most of them aren't 65. They're probably relatively young. Partly because your market is young, but also because the market for every new product skews young. Demand for innovation skews young. Older
people are fine with what they have. So it is not just that a higher fertility population makes more innovators. It's that a higher fertility population wants more innovation, demands more innovation, can absorb more innovation. As fertility falls, we will simply not have as much innovation. I know Robin Hansen uh an economist uh who writes on this argues that we're basically facing the end of innovation. that we're going
to see essentially the end of human progress or at least a dramatic forcehortening in pace. Maybe AI revolutionizes that. But when I think about the economic costs, yeah, there's there's the wasted consumption of reallocating young people's savings towards old people's uh consumption. That that's that's a a real burden on the economy, but you just you need those innovators and you need people who buy
their product. >> I think there's several ways to try and to me crystallize this. Um, [snorts] national debts, we've all got them. National debts are there to be paid off somehow or their interest to be paid off. If few if you have fewer people in future, those debts don't just disappear. You're going to have your national debts as they stand now paid off by fewer and fewer and fewer people. So, it's not just
pensions. A lot of this skews to the problems that we're going to have when people get older, >> but the tax system is there to support the entirety of how societies operate and national debts are a very real tangible thing I think that everybody should be focused on. Now, you're right. We're going to lose human capital, talent. I'm less concerned about that because I think the problems are, you know, [snorts and crying]
if you're a young person today thinking of setting up a business, any business, whether it be a cafe or a spaceship company, and you're looking at a business plan, and you're looking for investors. And if your cafe or your drinks company is dependent on a certain number of people and growth and you're actually looking at, let's take a cafe in a town with falling birth rates, the investor is going to be much
less likely to say, I want to invest in that. I'll keep my money in my pocket. I think you're going to have a a massive uh move away from entrepreneurialism, the investment in time and funding to create innovation. And then we haven't even touched on capital markets, the whole entire bond market. >> Mhm. >> Which most people are unaware of. We don't go around thinking about what the bond market's going to do
today. But the bond markets are what drive economies. And when governments issue bonds, they issue bonds for new projects to support their national debts etc. There's a cost to that. And those bonds can be today 20 years out, even 50 years out. And those bonds get traded. So you can go today and you can buy probably a 20-year bond that's got 15 years remaining on the city of wherever in Kentucky or the country of Japan.
the cost of those bonds, the interest of those bonds is effectively going to be negatively impacted massively in the decades ahead. And what does that mean? It's going to be harder and harder and harder for governments to raise more money, which means again less investment. And this goes back to my passion for this project. We haven't even if you were to think there's too many people on the planet and if you
were to think you don't want kids, this is going to impact you. It's going to impact societies in ways that we aren't yet talking about. >> We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's
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and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. This sounds like quite a leftleaning idea that we're worried about the welfare of people. We're worried about especially helping people who are more disadvantaged. That it's really important to ensure that there is enough in the pot to be able to support the people who really need it, including the
old and the poor and the people that are injured, etc., etc. If you ever want a nationalized health service, you're going to need to have money to be able to fund that as opposed to just relying on the wages that people can put in so that they can pay their insurance so that everybody else can get it redistributed like that. Why is it the case that having this conversation is so unpopular on the internet and immediately gets thrown the
right-wing conservative misogyny, the fascism? Why do those arguments get thrown around so quickly? I think people understand correctly that there can be there certainly can be and often in fact there is a tension between sustainable fertility rates and the gender egalitarianism that I think most of us cherish, right? that like I'm I'm not like a radical left feminist, but like I do want my wife to be able to
vote and own property and have the right to like the police hear her out if I'm beating her or something like I'm, you know, like little egalitarian in that sense. Um, and a lot of people fear very sincerely. They say, "Well, I would I do worry about low fertility, but I would never say so publicly because, you know, I stand with women and the pronatalists want to force women to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen."
Um, and and I I mean, I'm sympathetic to that and and unfortunately some varieties of pronatalism have tended to play into that. Um, the reality is and and there's and there's genuine tension. I mean, it is true that a lot of the most sexist countries in the world have the highest birth rates. It is true that within society, people with more traditional gender attitudes have higher birth rates. Um, these are all true
things. There's real tension between certain gender models and high fertility. Now, does it have to be intrinsic tension? Can we find a way through it to the other side? I hope so. And I think that's what what you all talked about as well is that you want your progressive friends to be having kids so that their values can survive in the future, too. Um, and so I think there's a lot of people who feel,
rightly or wrongly, feel trapped between two things they want. Okay? They they don't love the idea of a low fertility future, but they also feel like they don't have an option other than to like, well, if a low fertility future is the only way to protect the fact that like I'm a woman and I basically want to have rights, then like screw fertility. Who cares? um or you know trust that it'll get solved somehow and just don't think
about it. So and and I think on some level pronatalists have not always done a great job and I probably I would count myself in this to some extent of uh of trying to communicate that um yes right now feminism broadly construed is pretty strongly negatively correlated with fertility. it is on almost any metric. But we don't know that it has to be. We don't know that there's not a future version of feminism that's pronatal. We
don't know that such an ide ideology couldn't be invented. The problem is most of the people who selfident identify as feminists won't even try. So they won't even try to come up with a version of the ideology that's pronatal. So uh and there are people are like uh uh Leia Sergeant has a great book on this um where she's trying um but uh um so I I would say I I agree with what a lot of you're saying, but I'm a little
I'm a little more sympathetic to people who feel between a rock and a hard place. >> Well, I think the other the other point here is that it's obvious what you need to give up now and it's not obvious what the costs will be in future. >> Sure. >> And and for the most part, you're not going to pay them, right? And if you're not intending on having kids or if fewer people around you are intending on having kids, then you're not even
attached to people who might be having to pay them. So it's having to give up something that you want in order for something that you're being told that future people need. But they were not good in a society at doing that at the moment at the the old staving off of the gratification. you really value gender egalitarianism and then you have daughters and then you learn that the future is going to be one where like all
the crazy far-right people had all the babies and they're going to outvote you and now your daughters live out Handmaid's Tale. Okay, like this as silly as that sounds to like my rational brain. I personally know people who really think that's what's going to happen that any kid they have is just going to be like governed by zealots. And so they're like, "Well, I don't want that for my kid. I'm not going to have
Yeah, but if feminists stop having kids, there will be no feminists left. >> This is why I'm like, be the change you wish. You can prevent forest. >> This is the gap. The mean change uh the mean children by ideology. Conservatives at 1.67, which has actually gone up since the 1980s. >> Yeah. >> And liberals from 1.29, which was nearly the same, 1.44 to 1.290, conservative to liberal, to now 1.67 to87.
It seems to be the case from well put together surveys that let's say 90%ish of people at some point in life either have or want kids. >> Yeah, >> that's not all rightwingers. 90% is pretty much everybody. And I think the issue here is that the left have found it more challenging because of the frictions >> uh with some of their traditional beliefs to come up with a narrative here that en enables them to come up with
some form of voice. And I think people on the right uh and I will say also I'm not pro-atalist. That surprises a lot of people. I'm a researcher. I call myself pan natalist. And a panatalist is someone uh who supports people to have the kids they they want to have but also respects people who choose not to. >> Oh, we do too. It's great. >> Okay. I think that's called that palatalism. But >> yeah, >> no, we only want people who like kids to
have kids. >> I I think pronatalism to me is interpreted rightly or wrongly as people who would encourage others to have kids. And I would encourage people to think about it. I don't know if that's >> that is a fetish on the left. That is all these women like, "Oh, Mr. Trump, don't send me to the Mara logo breeding pens. Why are they wearing those Handmaid's Tail costumes?" Cuz it is it's hot. When you look at what women
read in romance novels, don't breed me, sir. This is It's not real. No one is asking progressive women to have kids. When you look at like faright conservative men who are marrying women, they're marrying women from Latin America. They're marrying women from Eastern Europe. They are not wearing marrying progressive white women. There's that return to land uh colony in the Ozarks. It's for whites only. And
they have to keep saying to the men, sorry, like you have to actually marry a white woman if you want to come here. And they can't get any men who are far-right conservative white nationalists who have married white women because they're they're not there. I I'm just saying this is fake. This whole like prenatalism, we want you to have kids. No, don't have kids. So if you want kids, have them, but otherwise
you can just not inherit the future. All right? because they they've screwed it. They've screwed it. This is a toxic culture. We have to wash our hands of it. We have to take to the stars and leave them behind. That's it. >> So, I think it I so I would what you call panatalism. Yeah. I would that's how I would describe pronatalism. Okay. I don't think pronatalism means forcing people to have unwanted children. I
think it means um pronatalism pro meaning in favor of natal meaning births. It means you're in favor of births. In practice, I would say you're a proatalist if you support actually doing things that helps people actually have more kids. [clears throat] >> I think the problem with that, Simone, is that there's it's all well and good kind of victim blaming people and saying you believe an ideology that's
self-defeating because of your belief in it. You have been SCPed or gas lit into not wanting something or having a life that doesn't permit you to have this thing despite the fact that 90% of women have or want kids. So it seems to me that I understand if you've been in the trenches as you and your husband have for a long time that you go, "All right, I'm [ __ ] done. I can't the the the project to like try
and change hearts and minds. I've kind of lost faith in that. I get it. I understand why you might be exhausted at doing that. But that is condemning a huge swath of women who are left of center who and men. Yeah, of course. Who because for each, you know, the toango like >> you are condemning those people to kind of be at the mercy of an ideology that you think is bad. And I don't know, I I would like to think that we can try and
sort of stir the pot to bring some of the silt up and go, hey, maybe what you believe is good in many ways for the world, but also perhaps it's got some side effects that even the people that are espousing it aren't going to embody. Like these people are endorsing beliefs that they don't embody and they're leaving you behind and it would be important to get you on site. One of the things I worry about if you say like,
"Hey, if you're on the left and you don't think that kids are good, go [ __ ] yourself because my kids are going to inherit the earth." Like, I get it, but that's not actually what would be true if you were to continue to try and do the hearts and minds change thing. And again, for every step that you take forward, there's 10 people saying you're trying to take rights away, force handmade, etc., etc., etc. And I get why
that would be exhausting, but I think trying to work out how to bring people into this because if you really care about birth rates overall, you should be trying to get as big of a bucket as possible to scoop everybody up. >> Market forces are going to bring them in. You can already see this. Um the the the rates of women who are who are like supportive of the concept of a girl boss have gone way down. A lot of more women
are interested in becoming a tradife. Uh we're seeing because of AI this bottoming out of email jobs, bureaucratic jobs that were disproportionately staffed by women. Um and I think women are >> that's really uncomfortable. People don't people don't realize this is like cutting edge normie realization that >> it's happening. It's tipping >> the first jobs it's called the lanyard class. >> The lanyard class are the first ones
that are going to lose their jobs to AI. And unfortunately this is the exact sort of job that women who have got soft skills HR marketing stuff that they've worked hard they've done the career thing. They've done the socioeconomic thing. They've done the education thing and now five guys and a lot of code has come into >> I think it might be the opposite though. I mean Claude can replace your hard skills. Claude can't replace the human
touch, right? And I mean I say this as aid I say this as an avid Claude user like I can I am hiring people now. We're staffing up at IFS. We don't need to think about their hard skills as much, right? because Claude will do it or claude will train them, but their soft skills really matter because if I'm going to put them on camera, if I'm going to put them in front of a journalist, if I'm going to do like that
stuff matters. So, I'm not we don't know exactly what's going to happen with AI. And there's some things AI will replace soft skills on. I mean, apparently AI is like replacing a lot of people's girlfriends and boyfriends. or maybe also like art and maybe also writing and phonics and you know therapy just like all the soft skills that even if you ask an AI now >> it'll be disruptive in a lot of industries but I think there's a reason
that programmers in particular are freaked out >> because it definitely replaces >> it's not programmers it's women and they and their sentiment is already shifting and what's going to happen is women are just going to be driven by simple economics there is less opportunity for me in the job market maybe I will start treating homemaking as a career u they're They're going to jump off the sinking ship that is our current economy
and start moving back into familyoriented businesses. And that's not bad. I mean, history for the past 2,000 plus years has been families working together. And this isn't women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This is women, you know, the husbands out there like, you know, butchering pigs and women are, you know, in the front selling the meat, right? These are businesses that families work on together. And I think we're going to see
a return to that. And I think it's really cool. And I think women are already leaning in that direction. And this isn't about saying, "Women, screw you. I don't care about you. we're leaving you behind. They're going to come to this on our own. But I think this is not about me trying to proactively go out and change their minds. It is about me being like, "It's okay for you to do this. It's okay for
you to like this." And just letting market forces play out. I was one of those women who were like, "I'm never going to have kids. I'm going to live on forever. I'm not going to get married." Um the most progressive you could possibly imagine. Um and when I discovered like, "Oh, I'm allowed to have different feelings. I'm allowed to want this. And there are ways that I can do it that allow me to still be very
intellectually engaged and high achieving um but also have a whole lot of this whole other thing unlocked in my life. Like it's it's super doable. I just it's a tactical thing. >> So I asked Grock to scrub the most common reasons given on X to explain why birth rates are declining. Economic pressures and affordability was by far the most cited. People repeatedly argue that raising children has become
financially impractical due to high costs of housing, childare, inflation, stagnant wages, and the need for dual incomes. Single salary no longer supports a family, making kids a luxury many can't afford. Variants include asset price inflation favoring the wealthy, gutted job prospects for young people, and wealth inequality like billionaires driving up the costs. Around 25 to 30% of people in the UK
site money as a reason for not having children, and lower income individuals are twice as likely to intend to remain childless. So economic pressures and affordability. Is it the cost of housing? Is it the cost of living that's stopping people from having kids? For every one of those examples, true as it may appear, wherever you're living at, you can find counter examples around the world. I mean, housing for one, for
sure, I understand housing is a major challenge. It's a challenge for for for my grownup kids. Now, you look at Tokyo with birth rates as low or lower than most places in the world. You've had mortgage rates of less than 1% for over 30 years. You have a society that doesn't necessarily crave more space. I have never met any Japanese per I've been to Japan 9 years now. I have never met any young Japanese person who said
that the barrier to them having kids is housing or income. They say no, it's gender imbalance. It's life work imbalance. So I I think it's easy for societies to become programmed and assume that oh yes life is expensive here or there's some other imbalance or there's too much youth unemployment in say Italy that that must be the reason that that's my reason. But what I've noted in these surveys often is that you ask those same
people the 20 whatever percent who blame finances do they have a partner and the answer is well no. So, would the answer to the question be different if they did have a partner? And really, how much more expensive is it for two people living independently to live together and have a small infant? >> Why is it the case then that so many people on the internet and so many people when we talk about this, it's
obvious, it's obvious it's impossible to afford a child and raise a child in this economy. Why is that response given if you're saying that it's not the case? >> Costs do matter. So, and I think there's there's two ways to help think about this. The first is let's say you have bad eyesight. Okay? And the reason you have bad eyesight, you know, of athmological traits are overwhelmingly genetic, right? The reason you have bad
eyesight is because your parents have bad eyesight. We could we what we would say is you have bad eyesight because of your genes. There's a lot of people who would say, okay, so if genes are causing bad eyesight, you have to fix it by changing your jeans. But I would say no, you could get LASIC or wear glasses. Okay, costs are not the the the root underlying cause of low fertility. It's not like it's not like in societies
where costs are a bit better that like they just have no fertility decline because fertility decline is happening all over for cultural reasons and technological reasons, all kinds of things. But they are locally a cost. They are locally a factor everywhere. And we see that there's ludicrous amounts of evidence that costs matter. Um, a lot of times people say, well, if costs are such a factor, why do higher
income people have lower fertility? They don't. That's an error. That's a statistical error caused by looking at women's income instead of household or husband's income. Um, fertility is positively correlated with income and has been forever. Um, even in non-human primates and non- primate mammals, like social status predicts higher fertility everywhere. Um, so costs do matter. The eyesight analogy is a nice way of
understanding causes and responses. Causes and how you fix a problem are just not always the same thing. Second way to understand cost is what I call the blueberry problem. Okay. When I was growing up, if I said, "Hey, mom. I want some fruit." She would go into the cabinet and she would pull out these plastic cylinders that inside them had some kind of chunks of I don't know, maybe it was peach or pear or some kind of fruit in in like a
liquid, like a sugary liquid. I don't even really know what this stuff was. It was probably plastic rolling off a a thing, but it was like 15 cents for a little cup of fruit. You can still buy them at the store. They're still there. I see them. I don't buy them for my kids. My kids get fresh blueberries. They'll knock back like $10 of blueberries in like 5 minutes. Why do I do that? Because social norms changed.
Okay? Because the social norm now is if you're the parent at the park and you're not giving your kids real berries. I mean, what are you? And also, it's not just social pressure. I like the idea of my kids eating fresh blueberries or fresh blackberries, whatever. >> A curse of knowledge in that way. >> Yeah. Okay. But when you think about it, is that cost or culture? Well, they're the same damn thing. There's no
difference between cost and culture. The demand curve is shaped by culture. And also, uh, culture itself shapes the demand curve. If you ask, "What's the price of a prostitute?" It's going to matter what people It's going to >> It's going to matter what people think the appropriateness of using a prostitute is. Okay. Any price contains in it both material supply and demand factors and culturally normative
judgments. And so when we think about the cost of of kids, people say, "Well, it's not that having kids got more expensive. It's that your social norm of raising kids changed." But look, if all people want is to have kids, you can donate to a sperm bank. Your genes will get out there. But people don't want to have kids. People want to have a family, a partner who loves them, children that they get to share their life projects
with, a house of a certain type. They want to have a package of goods that go together. And that package is defined by prevailing cultural norms. And it is the case that the prevailing cultural norm of what a middle class family wants to have is really freaking expensive. And you see it on Twitter >> comparatively. >> Yeah. And you see it on Twitter. Just yesterday there was this thing about people shared this like farmhouse with
like a kid running in a field and they're like this used to be affordable and I'm like that farmhouse was definitely like a planter aristocrat's house like 200 this was not affordable. The other factor going on here is because fertility has always been status correlated for men. Every generation of kids is basically the children of the top 80% of men, which means everybody's expectations intrinsically ratchet upwards because
the bottom 10 or 20% of men filter out of every generation. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me 5 years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every morning for
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get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, AG1 flavor sampler, and that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modern wisdom. That's drinkagg.com/modern wisdom. But you've touched on the core wicked problem of falling fertility. I mean this began not in the 70s like a lot of people tend to think if they're looking at this as outsiders but in like
with the industrial revolution and that is when we fundamentally changed the way that we lived. We shifted from living in family units with cottage industry businesses to working in cities to working in factories and suddenly everything about the family that used to come from within the family, you know, your food, your clothing, everything was made mo more or less within your family or community to suddenly being bought
peace meal. Everything was atomized. And that is a fundamentally unsustainable lifestyle. And it makes kids very difficult to have. And now kids are being raised like they're aristocratic millionaires. I mean, even the children of noble families in the past would be raised in a way that would have CPS called on those families today cuz the kids are off running in like the garden. They're down in the kitchen like almost
getting burned in the fire or something, right? Like the parents were like, "Go away and leave me alone and like come presented to me dressed up by your sometimes present governness at the end of the day." And that god forbid, no, we have to chauffeur them everywhere. We have to buy them fresh blueberries, you know, like this. And and to a certain extent too, this is this has been legalized. you know, you you can't even
legally raise your children sustainably anymore. So, it it makes sense. Basically, there is no affordable way to have children, especially a lot of children, >> and opt into mainstream society. You have to be a weirdo Menanite Amish person. You have to be off in some cult. You have to live off the grid in some way. You have to be in some high fertility Catholic community where everyone kind of takes care of each
other's kids and keeps quiet with CPS and stuff like that. That is a really tough thing is you can't now really opt into to a high fertility lifestyle. >> You're talking about a non-typical volume of kids >> that >> Well, yeah, but I mean like you know, keep in mind most people aren't having any kids at all. If you're going to have any the outliers for not having kids is coming from people not becoming mothers,
not from people not going from twos to sevens, right? It's non-mothers as opposed to family size overall. Once you have one, you're likely to get to an or like a relatively similar number, right? >> Yeah. But they're not going to sustain the rest of the population. Like, you know, if just a few people are going to have none, you have to have a bunch of people having >> I understand this is how you look at it
from a populationwide perspective, right? We need to compensate. So, hey, you guys, you can go over here, start your commune, do the thing, and the kids can run around in the dirt. The reason I'm trying to get it back to people say that the reason they don't have kids is because it's too expensive. that uh that what it seems like is the current culture has made people think that they need a very high
level of income in order to be able to it's it's believe like I said like >> they feel it in their gut. >> Yeah. No, no, but like literally CPS will be called on you if you're like, "Hey, son or daughter, can you walk home from school today?" Uh literally like when our son was in public school, he couldn't walk from the school bus to our house. We had to be out there. M >> there's no such thing as a latch key
kids anymore, >> right? So, but surely there's still a problem here which is dual income households. It is hard to support a family on a single parents income. Yeah, >> that didn't used to be the case. So, it's not just material changes in terms of lifestyle inflation and I I've watched too much Instagram and now I think that I've got to have the the newest stroller and the best car seat and all of these. It's not just that.
There's material changes that have >> occurred. A great example is actually and building on what was just said, we could, you know, and CPS is coming up a lot here, so you know, don't call it on me, but uh a lot of times I like I like housing for this because housing is interesting. Unlike the price of blueberries, housing might also shape marriage in really interesting ways and coupling in interesting ways. But a lot
of people when you talk about housing, they say, "Well, back in the day, people used to put like five kids in one bedroom. Why not do that?" And the answer is because it's illegal. Because now in most states, there are occupancy rules that say no more than x number of people per room. Sometimes there'll even be things like boys and girls are legally prohibited from sharing a sleeping space. And it's kind of one of
those like wink and a nod laws where like as long as you're white and educated and you don't make trouble, it's not a real law. But as soon as somebody calls CPS on you, now the law applies. Or if you get CPS called for something else. There's some jurisdictions where it is illegal for CPS to deem that your children be re need to be removed for no other reason than that they are sharing a bedroom with the wrong sex or that there's too
many of them in a room. So when we say like, oh, social norms changed and people want more space for their kids, it's also a crime. >> Most people, is this what most young people are thinking about, though? Are they not? >> Yes. No, they're looking at like the cost of daycare, which is insane. You know, they're looking at really basic things. And again, you can't opt into modern life and also do this
sustainably. >> I'll say the CPS stuff is very prevalent for people who don't share our skin color. Yeah. Um, in the US, it's it's quite a concern. So all of these things that are going through young people's minds is in the context of misinformation that it's easy to start a family at age 35, 40, no problem. I've got time. And if if you're in that context where you believe you have time, you can easily see where you're going to
think, well, if I just get that little bit farther in my career, Or maybe I'll meet a more attractive girl next week, next month, next year. I got time. Or a more stable, more successful man. And this to me is, and I, you know, I've started a nonprofit, I hope you don't mind me saying, called XY World Y. And we're setting up volunteers around the world to simply go and talk to younger people about the reality of the timing
>> Mhm. of when people realistically can start families and the stat >> explain what this graph is, please. >> Sure. >> So, um >> Oh, that's one of ours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Well, yeah. And I I have my own way of driving it, but I saw that it's the same it's the same thing. So, you know, the way I like to state it is for each individual country, at what moment in time does a woman have a 50% chance of
ever becoming a mother and that means you you look at the people who have already become a mother and in the US this is around 27. So if you look at the American women who've become mothers at 27 and then look at all other women currently childless 27 how many would be expected to become mothers at current prevailing fertility rates and in the US that's 50/50 at age 27. um that shocks a lot of people. And back to
your point that I I do sense, you know, a shift you were saying uh about the idea of things are starting to change and maybe prioritize and pe maybe we will see people deciding to prioritize becoming a a mom again over purely career. But one of the things I think is so important that will help this is people understanding, not just women, that the window is actually much much shorter and the likelihood of
childlessness at age 35 >> decline. It's not like you're good all through your 20s and then it falls. It's just >> Yeah. Well, to to be honest with you, um you know, I I think this plays into an explanation of the political differences that we've seen. I don't know, but I imagine that conservatives, Republicans in the US are having kids at a younger age. >> They are. Yes. >> And if that's true, it makes sense that
more are going to become parents and that the liberals, the left, given again that the vast majority of people do want kids. I think what's happening there is that more and more are leaving it to a point in time where they still think there's time to have children. >> What are some of the other realities around the timing stuff? So, you know, this this will really shock you, Chris, to hear this. I know you're
not very familiar with this topic, but there are some problems in dating right now between men and women. >> Why' you say why' you look at me and say [laughter] problems in dating? >> I just I know that you you haven't really written about any or talked about masculinity or anything like that ever. I know that's unfamiliar terrain to you. Um but, uh so yeah, I mean people are marrying late. Uh they are and not just
marrying late, they're coupling late. the rate of people who are, you know, have no partner of any kind, not having any sex or anything like that is is declining or the rate that are not is rising. Um, and I think there there's a lot of different ways of thinking about this. Um, one is, okay, people think they have all the time in the world. Fertility knowledge is really low. Um, there's a lot of great work on surveying
fertility knowledge, figuring out what people really think. It turns out people's knowledge about fertility is not much better than stors. Um and uh and so people postpone because they think they have all the time in the world or they think IVF means there's no clock at all at all more. People postpone because they think they need to have a ton of money saved up. I'll admit I actually had my first kid before I
learned that people save up money before having kids. I was like after I had my first kid, somebody was like, "Oh, you all must have been saving a lot." And I was like, "I mean, we paid down our student debt, but wait, what?" And they're like, "Yeah, I mean, you know, you need like USDA says it'll be like $250,000 of spending over the course of a kid's life, so you probably want to have like a big chunk of that saved." I
was like, "Oh, no. We we didn't do that. We we we just hold the pen and >> yeah, we just had a baby fertiliz." But then the other the the the dynamic under all of this is it used to be when I say used to I mean as recently as the 1950s but certainly back in the 1700s or something that a guy in his guy who was 20 22 25 was at his peak income his peak earnings ability. He basically that guy you know exactly what his social status
is going to be for the rest of his life >> partly because he also started working at like age 11. >> Yeah. Yeah. So he's way into a [ __ ] chimney sweep for two decades. No, but this thing also, he's going to inherit the family's farm, so you already know what his real assets are going to be. Now, determining a man's trajectory is harder at reproductive ages because his peak is later. Peak income now for most
men is at like 47. Okay. >> And you think that people are pricing that in? >> There absolutely are men and women. Women because the ability to bet on a man's future is a higher volatility bet now. And so men are just not as safe a bet. >> Have you seen this new data? I only got sent this today. There's some new data showing that women who wait longer to couple with a man do get a man of higher mate value, but they trade that at the
risk of never having kids at all. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. >> So, it's this sort of game of chicken where higher or lower where you just keep on going and going. Yeah. Okay. I'll pull the pin now. >> Yeah. That's exactly. >> So, there there are incentives here in order to prioritize what you want. >> Men have the same incentive. Yes. >> Because men know that >> if I wait, I can maximize. Yeah. we just
go to 47. >> And so and so you get this situation where you know it's not like 23 year old girls are are like fending off thousands of suitors, right? There's that's not happening. Um uh in terms of marriage at least depends Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> how you look at um but uh um in terms of marriage. Yeah. I should stipulate that. Um >> because again men have incentives to wait when they can most clearly
demonstrate their own mate value. And so it's not even a question of like, oh, are young people richer or poorer than in the past? They're richer. Incomes have gone up, but they're not as rich as they will be. So as peak income shifts, >> as the extent to which your early life income predicts your peak, you become a more uncertain marriage bet and people have every incentive to kick the can. >> What are some of the realities of trying
to do it later? >> I mean, you have less time to hit your desired family size. In fact, one of the best predictors um of having fewer kids than you said you wanted, we had these longitudinal surveys where we ask people, "How many kids do you want to have when they're like 18 and 22 and 25?" We'd follow up for decades. And so then we can see who hit their goals, who didn't. Um and one of the best predictors of hitting your goal is the
age at which you marry. And if you marry before age 27, on average, you have basically no gap between your desired family size, early life, and your final family size. Marry before 27, you're before 26 maybe and you're pretty much going to have your desired family size. Marry later than that and your odds fall and fall and fall and fall and fall because the reality is now if your desired family size is one, you might do
it, but if it's three, it's going to be harder because the reality is you're trading off time, but it's not just number of kids. Get married at 35, maybe you have the number of kids you want, but by the time they want to play soccer, your knees hurt. by the time their grandkid comes along, your ability to remember your grandchild's name is not as good as you might have hoped. Walking your grand, you know, being
there for your grandchild's wedding, not going to happen. Later doesn't just mean you have fewer kids. It means you spend less of your quality years with your kids, with your grandkids. That is just I said earlier, I hope we get to that the happiness problem. Yeah, all these like social effects of falling fertility are bad. But to me, the reason I care about this, the reason ultimately I've chosen to devote my life
to this at the peratalism initiative is because there's just a lot of people who are going to die miserable because they don't have the families they want. And as a Christian, I'm called to love my neighbor. I don't have an option in it. And I think that this is one of the most severe problems in our society that so many people are foregoing. One of the great intrinsic goods in life, one of the most meaningful parts of their life.
The the great project that they will build as much or more than any company is going to be the company of their family. Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker. At least not anymore. But even if you too are not drinking, sometimes you just want something cold, frosty, and tasty without the fear of a hangover the next day. which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Thank
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beer, terms and conditions apply. Athletic brewing company fit for all times. What is the truth around happiness? Marriage parents are happier. You get happier when you get happier. >> No, not true. Especially women take a happiness hit. Women in diapers. >> They do not. Their happiness. No. Intentional fertility causes a rise in happiness. The problem is we mix unintentional and intentional fertility
in the data. It's very difficult to separate because you don't have preferences. I guarantee you in longitudinal data, happiness rises shortterm. >> In the long run, it's a little more ambiguous because happiness scales reset over time. Happiness rises with engagement. that is it rises before marriage basically but then marriage locks it in. If you don't get married the happiness of a cohabiting union
rapidly returns to baseline. The happiness of a married union uh tends to remain above baseline as long as you remain married which people don't always. Um but widowage and divorce tend to return you to your premarital happiness level. There's three different longitudinal surveys I can demonstrate all this in. Having kids that you want to have, which is a big stipulation, unwanted kids, unintended kids is a
different dynamic, but having kids you want to have increases happiness. Um, in the most robust models we know of, unintended fertility is a different beast. Um, and it is true that in every in almost every survey, um, unless you add like a million controls where you're basically controlling away the effect of having kids, people with kids are happier. And one reason is because happier people have more kids
>> especially when there's like abundant child care in that in that country but more social in places where there's less social support which is like the modern developed country like in the United States where you're not really getting a lot of help especially if you're a middle class or above woman especially do take a short-term hit per the research that I've seen and then it goes up over the long run but I think
this focus on hedonistic happiness is is overrought and again it's cultural you have to look for meaning beyond that um and I mean we also have to look at reallyions I would say meaningfulness is more important. >> We can talk about broken dating markets, but like what are we we can't we can't fix it. I mean what my my husband and I literally have an index of other parents with kids close to our age. We're going
to inter marry our children. My new way of skezing on people is like I want our children to intermar. Like we're we parents used to be very involved in matchmaking their children. And so we have to talk about what are we actually going to do because we can't fix the swipe based dating model. That's gone. It's done. Uh what we're trying to do now is just manually matchmake again. Maybe bring back the Lynon seed. Oh,
matchmaking is coming back. It is totally coming back. Arranged marriages. People are like I mean zoomers are like sign me. Where do I sign up for the arranged marriage group you guys have? Like it is it is a real church. >> Well, church is [laughter] a big thing honestly like Catholic colleges, religious colleges are like the new hottest place to find a spouse. I mean we need to look at what practically to
do because we can talk about this big problem. The whole thing is like so what? I guess I'm going to like die alone and and without any sort of support or I'm never going to marry. There are many things that people can do now. And that's what's important too is this is a wicked problem. It's very scary. But like with every endemic and existential problem, there are manageable things that you can do. Like
if you're worried about, you know, changing sea levels, like maybe we should look at like managing um a mass migration and getting people off coastlines and shifting the home insurance market and shifting regulation, expecting it to happen. We need to look at how we on a micro and macro level are going to manage falling and declining fertility rates and our own personal lives based on the expectation of that. And I think too
much of the discussion around demographic apps is like is this a real problem? Like how bad is it? Let's all like ruminate on that. When really it's like okay well what are we going to do? And some of the solutions are very radical. Like literally arranged marriages sounds kind of crazy but this is what we've come to. And I think very similar to CO, people are like, "Oh, this will like blow over in a couple
months." And like the world shuts down. This is another CO. You think this can't possibly get super bad. It's not going to be be so crazy. It's going to be profoundly more crazy than CO. This is cities crumbling. This is pension funds falling apart. This is people dying on mass. Millions and millions of people. Uh we need to realize that, but then also just actually plan for that. No more performative peratalism, actual
prenatalism. >> Can you comment on the dying on mass? I just want to mention because I don't know if if all listeners will will get this. >> In industrialized countries, our social support systems are probably good enough probably that for the most part most old people will kind of get through. It's places like >> Thailand >> where fertility is below one and the money is not there to support a big social security system for old people.
That's and where the health system is not as strong or like India or increasingly African countries. Those are the places where the death toll will become apocalyptic. >> Well, I I I agree. Places like Thailand are in for an extraordinary level of old age loneliness and challenges. India, my gosh, my worry about India population right now is its aging population two, three decades from now. No one's
thinking about that. That's a humanitarian crisis uh is a ticking time bomb. But in terms of happiness, I think one of the things we have to isolate out here is the 10% of people who don't want children. Now, in making the birth gap documentary, I interviewed five, six women, 40s, 50s who had never wanted a child ever. >> And they're completely happy. >> Yep. >> And >> that's why I emphasize wanted children,
>> right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh so when you average happiness across women and don't separate those out, you're kind of missing something. Now th those people who don't want women or who don't want children. I believe it's almost binary. Now you change from everyone has a price. But a a a life that's hedonistic and single and childless can be perfectly fun. And we should design around that. I mean like our it's
incredibly fun. I I think though that the the people who never ever ever have the desire, there is something that means that they will be happy. >> Yeah. >> Whether they have kids or not that does not manifest itself. And those people are just postponing it. >> They're going to be super h like we're we're big pornatalists. All of our time now is in developing. We're doing like we're building an AI platform. It's it's
called our fab AI. We're trying to replace humans, replace employees, replace husbands and wives. Like you can see this all happening with other people who are in AI as well who are also pronatalists. They're investing in all this repro tech. They're having a lot of kids themselves. Meanwhile, they're also replacing humans for all the people who choose to not create new humans, to not own the future. And those pe I think AI
can be this literal deis xmachina that's coming in and going to correct for a lot of this. A lot of the loneliness, a lot of the lack of happiness. These people are going to die in their little pleasure pods with their fake families or their fake realities and they're going to be happy and I want them to be happy. And we're literally trying to build things to make them happy. Are you Do you want them to be happy? There's a
There's a glee. There's a note of glee. >> It's gross when people aren't happy. It's very like disruptive. Their cries are annoying. Um, so I I do I want them I I believe in, for example, youth in Asia. I love this. I love I love euthania. >> No, I think it's terrible. >> It's Oh, it's beautiful. Aid is the smartest thing Canada ever did. That's going to be the solution to healthcare in the future. [snorts]
>> No, but I I I think it creates a society where I already see it. I've heard it from young people in Japan who are looking at older people saying why are they still here? >> No really they they need to we need made in Japan we need made in we need >> without debating youth in Asia. I think it's worth noting like just a second ago I was saying well kids might make happiness and you said well we shouldn't
prioritize happiness so much. >> Yeah >> but when it comes to youth in Asia well people shouldn't be unhappy but I would say no old people you know suffering people their unhappiness is not a problem. meaningfulness is ultimately the greatest value and I think we can argue is suffering meaningful or not but earlier you said you know suffering the avoidance of ne you know negative utilitarianism the avoidance of
suffering is a kind of bankrupt view and I would agree I would just strongly agree and say whatever the broader wisdom of euthania and I think that's a whole debate which we can do >> I want to see I want to see that book be written the wisdom of euthanasia >> but whatever it is I would just say that it's not about suffering uffing or happiness because ultimately what truly makes human lives worthwhile is not the
quotient of their suffering or the number of their util utils. It is meaningfulness and it is the things that they build of benefit for others. >> Well, then let the ones who lack meaning get out of the way. All right? And this is not like I will die by my own hands if I'm lucky enough to live long enough. When I'm no longer useful, I will end myself. >> Probably not the metric. >> But look, it's not. So one of the one of
the problems that I see with that again is that there are certain people who have not through really any fault of their own had 90% of women want to have kids right around about four in five childless women who breach the top of their reproductive threshold say that that didn't have kids say that they wanted to. 10% can't 10% don't want to. 80% did. It seems to me that we kind of have a duty to try and help people live
the better lives that they can. It's the same reason that we tell people that smoking is bad for them. The same reason that they tell people that they should moderate their alcohol. It's the same reason that we tell people they should get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. And that to someone that's in a health desert or someone that's in the equivalent of an information desert. This is the same for 80% of women who
reach menopause, can't have kids, and didn't have kids. 80% of them. >> Is this still correct this data? >> Yes. So you and to me even if we were to solve this phenomenon through let's say people having larger families, those who do have families and we still have this contingent large contingent of people who dreamed of having families and end up childless for life. That's still a major crisis to me that we still need to
address. >> I don't want it bad enough. Look, there are >> No, I don't agree. No, [laughter] there are agree I'm super infertile. I have five kids. How does that work? We made it work. We slept on a mattress on a floor for years. >> But you had someone to do that with. >> You You can do it by yourself. And we've met so many people who have. >> No. >> Well, but hold on. You can do it by yourself, but let's go back to this.
People don't just want kids. They want a specific kind of family. They might want it very, very badly. So, and what you all have is beautiful for you all, but it's not what everyone is going to want. >> Then they can go out and get it. >> But my point is some people's version of family something you can just take. So, let me put my vitality curve on the table. So, um I heard you with uh Richard Reeves giving a really good
>> I managed to molest your great idea and get it a little bit right. >> Yeah, you did. >> Um so, if you look at the age of motherhood and almost certainly fatherhood if we had the data, if you look at the age of motherhood, it falls into a bell curve shape. What does that mean? It means that if you take a society and most societies today have a peak age of motherhood of around 30. >> Mhm. >> South Korea 33, US a little younger.
There's a curve and that curve is almost perfectly smooth. If you want to throw R squares at it, and then we're not getting too scientific here, but it's like 98% R squ matched to a perfect bell curve. >> Mhm. >> Now that curve has stretched over the decades. It used to be the peak was really high when everybody was having kids around the same time, early 20s. And as the timeline has stretched out,
the curve has got flatter and flatter and it's fallen by a faster rate than it's stretched. So you can look at this coldly because I'm not talking to people to ask them do they want to have five kids even though they don't have a partner. Um I'm just looking at data saying do you know what you can actually predict what the fertility rate in any country is going to be any cohesive society by simply knowing the average age and the
width of that curve with very high accuracy. It means that in effect there there is a constraint. There's a limit here into the number of people in a society who can ever become parents. And that's quite a chilling thing even for me when I first saw this data. I don't need to know the name of the country, the year. I I don't need to know what the house prices are, the level of unemployment, etc. You can
simply predict what the rates of motherhood are going to be in any society from age alone. Well, the vitality curve is essentially everybody's at a dance party and the music is playing. Yeah. >> And people who want to leave the dance party used to want to all leave at the same time, which means that if you want to leave and I want to leave, we can leave together. >> They called they called last call and
they walked out. >> Yeah. [laughter] However, this new vitality code, which is flatter, so there's more variety. The likelihood of you being ready and the person that you meet being ready at the same time is less. also right shifted so it's later means it is harder for you to find someone compared to where it would have been in the past. So I I don't think it's fair to say that um they don't want it hard enough given that right now I'm
going to guess the vitality curve is also kind of a measure of difficulty. It's kind of like a measure of family formation difficulty mating difficulty mating crisis issues changing dynamics between men and women men's mate value. Men might want want to have a family. Like I'm being outstripped by some changing demographic socioeconomically here. Like yes, they could David Gogggins it and get up at 4:30 a.m. and
like triple their net worth and try and do that thing, but like it doesn't deny the fact that the difficulty of doing that has become significantly greater. And like that just causes casualties as you go along. So again, I I worry about saying they don't want it badly enough because it all it results in is sort of people being left behind. I think we can also just look at the honesty of people's uh suffering in another way and
that is again I've mentioned longitudinal surveys before we can just look people who hit their desired family size that is the number they said when they were young and then they get older are they happier or in a yeah okay happiness blah yeah it's not a great measure but unfortunately in this case I'm actually not talking about happiness it's the CESD scale it's a it's a scale for depression basically so how
depressed are Um, are people who hit their uh desired family size from earlier in life, are they more depressed, less depressed? In general, there's some exceptions, but in general, the people who are the least depressed are the people who hit the number they said when they were a late teenager or young adult. If you overshoot or undershoot, you're just more likely to be clinically depressed. And moreover, in IVF, we can see that
when people go, everybody who goes in for IVF wants kids. Almost nobody's like, "Oh crap, I fell into an IVF clinic." And and >> I was born and I just had to get a haircut and [laughter] freeze my eyes. >> Yeah. So, like that's not what happens if you're if you're getting IVF, you want kids. Um, but some people succeed and some people don't. And it's not totally random, but it's kind of random. And some people succeed faster. And we
can see what happens to people who succeed versus people who don't. And what we know is this from like Nordic data where there's no privacy. So all so researchers can see all your medical data which is super fun. Um uh we know that if if your IVF fails or if it takes just longer than expected uh you're like almost twice as likely to be prescribed antisycchotics or anti. Yeah. So I think we can just say that um a significant
source of suffering of misery of depressive symptoms uh in midlife in late midlife in this case particularly for women because that's who we have data for but I suspect it's true for men as well um is failure to hit fertility goals either overshooting or undershooting. Overshooting actually has a more severe negative effect. Like having a kid you don't want can be fairly negative, but undersshooting is so much more common in
terms of having fewer than you want. And so I think that tells us that when people say they want something, they're not bullshitting us. Um because when they don't get what they want, they're like sad and miserable and need anti-ind. >> They haven't manifested their own depression to say, "I'm going to prove them right." >> Yeah. Screw you, researcher. I'm going to get depressed now. Like people, there's consequences. Now, you know, I I
do agree that if people wanted it harder, they might have tried harder sometimes. So, I'm not going to say like everyone who says they want two kids is statistically identical to each other. They're not. There's obviously some people who want two kids and they want it so hard. Um, and there are survey questions. I've pioneered some survey questions to try and get at the intensity of numeric preferences, but it
it's it's hard to measure. So, I I'll grant not all numeric preferences are created equally, but um but the reality is they do matter and they they are a reflection of latent psychological >> What do you what do you think? I'm aware you've got your like long-termism EA hat on in a big regard. Uh does that does any of that land with you? >> Look, when we're all getting on spaceships and heading out somewhere
else, like to Mars, I don't know if I want to be sharing a spaceship with the person who couldn't get their act together and plan early, right? Like we used to lose a lot of humans to infant mortality. That was tragic. I think it's a lot less sad that maybe, you know, someone couldn't get their act together. Maybe they just didn't have what it takes. You know, they're not humanity's best and brightest or whatever. They
they were they were they were too much of a victim to culture and then they're just not going to inherit the future result. Like I I I'm okay with only the most big go-getters, most ambitious people who are going to push through no matter what being the ones to inherit the future. It is unfair, right? It's deeply unfair. But the world is relatively less unfair today than it ever was before. That's how I learned to
love fertility decline. [laughter] >> That uh that selection pressure is incredibly novel and I don't know if it's actually what you want everybody to be selected for in the future. In any case, do we want everyone to be like hyperutist agency maxes? I don't Yeah, I'm I'm sure. But I don't think that that is necessarily what you want an entire civilization to be filled with. We've got novel selection
>> pressures ASD uh spectrum symptomaticity and genes related for are associated with much lower fertility. >> All right. I'm using the colloquial for now. >> I'm using the colloquial version of autism, not the real version. It's like the autism I have, not the autism that >> not the AUTISM I HAVE.
>> LOOK, I'M JUST MY POINT HERE IS THAT THE the novel selection precious thing like people aren't hard charging and driving enough like executive function was essentially only required [ __ ] a hundred years ago. >> Yeah, but we're in a new world now. We can't go back. So, if you're going to be on one by modernity, you're not going to be here anymore. What if the future version of modernity because there would
never have been a period of selection pressure that would have changed as rapidly toward the direction of you. You very well may have been killed. >> Yeah. >> 200 >> I would have died like in childhood. Yeah. All my kids did. >> Scarlet fever 100%. And then child birth again and then child Oh yeah. >> You were killed multiple times. >> So many times. Okay. You're five times dead ancestally. >> For for real. No, this is true. And this
is actually the one of the first things that got us into >> my kids would have still died in like 1970. >> Yeah. No, for real. No, no, mine too. Um it's it's so real. Um and and I would have been able to have like I mean we wouldn't have either like >> Yeah. Well, and also like one of my kids would have died like right when my water broke. Like all these things, right? >> My kids would have none of my kids could
have been born before >> 2003. Yeah. >> All of you [ __ ] shouldn't be here. >> Exactly. for exactly this reason is why we got into prenatalism because we were less concerned with like look there are going to be fewer people for a while um it is it is inevitable that the population is going to decline that a lot of people are going to die governments are going to fall apart we want to prepare people
we want to raise awareness but there's no stopping that maybe AI can help but there's no stopping that what we were most concerned about honestly is it only like white conservative Christians and some Jews and some weird like space autists are going to inherit the future and then we're going to have this monoculture and we the environment changes rapidly again. What if it like kills the space Mormons and the space
audience and you only have space Jews left and like >> so you need space liberals? >> Yeah. Well, I want space Koreans. I want space Amiratis. I want space Native Americans and right now they're going extinct like quite literally. And so the first reason we got into this is we're like, well, can we at least have some kind of Noah's arc, right? Like enough people taking to the stars or surviving on Earth somehow where we don't have
this very dangerous monoculture. Um, and and and that I think it's possible because what we're looking at is logarithmic growth. You only need like 14 South Korean families to make it through. They probably already lost indigenous Americans. >> I think that's what's left. >> Yeah. Basically, >> South Korean fertility has risen from point from under.7 to just over one in the latest numbers. >> How the [ __ ] did that happen?
>> Money. They they dropped massive marriage. >> The marginal amount of money they spent on it is just going to accelerate their demographic collapse. marriage the marriage rate began rising for the first time in decades immediately after they put it into they can't afford it >> it's it's I mean all South Kore South Korea >> that's what I say spend the [ __ ] money make the money print South Korea replacement rate fertility
if they put 12% of GDP into child benefits I'll put down a mark >> I just hope they don't have to pay their pension >> it would only require them giving seven years of annual wages in a baby bonus >> only bargain that's a bargain right that kid's going to work for years. Yeah, exactly. Right. They're going to have like a 40, 50y year career. I mean, Koreans live forever. So, like they're going to have a long
career. All you got to do is pay off is pay seven years of their wages, right? >> Born into debt. >> Also, Korea's government is already like half the size of the US with an extra 12% of GDP on top. They'd still have lower spending uh as a percent of GDP than we have right now. >> Yeah, I wouldn't mind nuking the government apparatus here. That's it's all right. I'm just saying it sounds like a lot of money and it'd be like,
"Wow, it's a baby bonus worth seven years of work." Yeah. So that every South Korean mom never has to work again. >> It's still not going to work though. This is a cultural problem >> in terms of hospital. >> With enough money, you can't change culture. >> Everyone has a price. It's true. I just don't think we can pay that price. >> No, I I grant it's it's these are obscene amounts of money in terms of any
kind of public finance. It is less money than we spend on on old people benefits right now. Um but uh but it's a lot. But like we should be clear like there is an amount of money and the number I quoted by the way is not made up. It's from a meta analysis that's in review right now on over 150 studies of cash incentives. So it's not it's not fake. But the point is yes the amount of money is very large
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by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. So going back to this age structure um in terms of being able to predict birth rates without knowing the country without knowing anything even whether they're offering IVF or not uh what shakes out of it is that about 90% of the dynamics of birth rates are age related and about 10%'s money and
everything else on its own. So unless you channel that money or child care policy or whatever else it is into having children younger, it's probably not going to work. >> And with South Korea now, the average age women are starting families is age 33. So they've got a problem. Not only at that point in time are you way behind the curve. >> Yeah. >> We're seeing a huge increase in the incidence of one child families
increasing. >> What does starting family mean? Getting with a partner. Well, for most people that's a that's a key element. That's a key barrier. >> Is that what starting a family means? >> No, it means having a child. First child, first child. Okay. Wow. So, you're getting in a relationship at 28, getting married at 31, having >> that's the average. >> I love I love that your like modern timeline there was of course you dated
for 3 years. >> Is that is that unrealistic? >> I mean, I think that's probably what a lot of people do, but it just is always shocking to me that that's like normal. >> So, I'm Zuma. Sorry. [laughter] What do you think is appropriate? >> What do I think is appropriate? I don't know. Uh, I would say maybe dating for 18 months, two years, get engaged. One year 18. That's totally >> okay. Sorry. I'm I was trying to be a
bit more All right. I'm I'm [ __ ] twisting and a little bit. >> 18 months plus engagement, but engagements are too long. So, >> so cohabitation effect. We got to be careful. >> I mean, we're talking around the idea of age being important. I think we're all agree. It seems to be that age is a big big factor here. >> Don't start early, don't get done. Let's stop infantilizing society. I mean, we should have kids working in their teens.
We should we should deemphasize people getting university educations, and we should shift high school back to doing what universities used to do. I'd like to see >> we should graduate high school ready to work. >> Somebody had a tweet where they're like, you shouldn't encourage uh women who are 23 to have kids. They're barely adults yet. And I was like >> I was like, >> bring back teen pregnancy. >> They've been adults for half a dec
decade. >> Yeah. >> I would not go that far. >> But I know you would. And I and I respect that. Yes, >> I'm ready. I'm ready. >> Is there a relationship between female education and fertility rates? A causal relationship? >> Not causal. No, >> it's correlated. It's messy. >> Because what I've what I've done with the I've tried to do it, although it took an hour. The first big reason that people give it's too expensive typically
comes from the left. This reason, which is women are getting educated, bro. Mhm. >> Slow life strategy come careerism, workism, etc. Although this one's specifically around female education, like that's usually what comes from the right. >> Yeah. But when Iran started curtailing female access to higher education, their birth rate continued to plummet. Like >> so I'm asking what's what's the relationship?
>> There's a couple of studies that try that use credibly causal variation. So they're looking at like places where mandatory school enrollment was raised by a year or two. Um, primary school education does have a causal effect. When you go from like, oh, you had six years of education to eight, that does reduce fertility. >> Um, tertiary education, college education doesn't appear to be, >> which is usually what people are
pointing the finger at. Now, >> usually we aren't like those women should have stopped at fifth grade like that. But that does matter. Like just getting people basically literate and agential in the world does matter. Um, >> if anything, it helps now because it's how women are finding their partners. >> Yeah. Yeah. But tertiary education doesn't seem to have to my knowledge there's not a credible study showing
that expansion of tertiary education reduces >> okay so the most used reason for people left of center is wrong >> is there's a grain of truth but it's more complicated >> and the most used reason for people right of center as long as you believe that kids up to the age of 16 should be educated is also largely wrong >> this entire conversation Mostly it's mostly the declining marriage issue, right? And this is
>> Okay. So, is it is it is it just a coupling prof it's it's a cultural problem. It's it's either you value this kind of lifestyle or you don't. But if you buy into mainstream society, you're you're going to fail. Like you have to go off the grid sort of mimetically to a certain extent. And some people like a lot of people are getting into that. And what I'm so excited about with AI disrupting a lot is it's going to jar people awake
or force a reckoning that could get a lot of like more people just interested in in doing this, you know, like nothing makes sense anymore. I'm going to find a partner and have a family because that does make sense. >> It's it's good. >> We'll say the supply of trad propaganda was dramatically increased by high quality image generation models because there aren't actually enough like trades baking.
>> Like real trades are terminally offline. Like the trades that you see now are not actually trades. the [ __ ] they're too busy touching grass to come back and go on Instagram. >> Yeah. So we don't see that. >> But AI propaganda is filling the gap. So um >> I see. >> So So marriage and mating is a big part of it and you can see this in all your work on like declining motherhood that first births are the locust of most
fertility decline in the industrial >> total maternal rate. >> Yes. So um or or what uh what you know nerd demographers would call the the first parody progression rate. >> Can you explain what that is? >> First parody progression. to tell them to tell them, right? >> Oh, it's your concept. You want to walk through the math? >> Yeah, it's very simple. If you take the numbers that we traditionally use, we've
used them here. Total fertility rate, it's the average number of children that a woman would have in her lifetime in a given country if birth rates remain the same. So, pick an easy number. Let's say that's 2.0, much higher than most nations today, the ones that we're talking about. Well, it may be that underneath that you may have some countries where almost 100% of women are are having children and they're having
an average of two each. Or maybe only half of women are having children. >> It's like the Soviet system where almost all women had kids but they had like exactly two, >> right? But you don't know what's in behind that because it could be that or it could be only half of women are having children and they're having four kids. You still get two. The total maternal rate is looking at the incidence of motherhood. Basically, how
many women and effectively therefore fathers to how many men are becoming fathers or women becoming mothers. >> And a lot of the decline we've seen around the world is at that first parody. That is the odds at which somebody with two kids chooses to have a third have really not declined very much in industrialized countries in the last 20 years. >> The total uh the TMR is like 2.6 to 2.4 in America, right?
>> Uh the CPM, children per mother. Yeah, sorry. Children per mother is around 2.6. >> It's actually in fact it's slightly increasing since since the >> Meanwhile, the total number of women not becoming mothers is just [ __ ] gone through the roof. What is it now? >> Well, it's 57.5% the last one. It's so effectively we're getting to a state that's not the share of women who that's not the cohort that won't like a
synthetic moving [ __ ] synthetic cohort nerd. Guilty. Guilty. Yeah. >> Look, maybe a way to think about it is if you're 15 years old today in the US >> and you live the next 25 years throughout your fertility window, just like fertility patterns right now in the US, pretty much six out of 10 will become mothers and four out of 10 will not. >> No way. 40% of 15y olds today won't become mothers. That's the most [ __ ]
insane stat that I've heard. >> 40% of 15year-olds will not become mothers. >> And the reason they won't is because well, I mean, nonmarital pregnancy is declining. Um, that is part of it. But the biggest one is people just aren't getting married. They're and they're not cohabiting either. They're just they're just living. >> They're waiting. They're waiting until they've got until they're 35, 40, IVF.
That's where it goes wrong. >> This is when we're talking about what it's to do with education. It's to do with employment. Those things can matter. Okay, so like let's on the whole like you don't want it enough point. So there's a there's a grain of truth to this. Okay, one reason people might not get married is because a lot of people decide they want to get married because they feel ready to have kids. Okay, so
if people are never feeling ready to have kids, the pressure to marry declines. But if you make kids super attainable, people might get married more. So like I'll >> I'll be honest, like I'm like a I'm very much a a a promoter of the idea that like it's really about marriage. Okay. And I've sometimes been criticized for ignoring this like backdoor method through which kids reshape like kids walk back in time and shape the
marriages that form around them. Um but that is a real effect. And so same as the eyesight thing, it might be that declining marriage or bad dating markets or whatever is the cause of low fertility. It also might be that fixing dating markets is really really really hard. >> Well, there's a lot of anti-marriage propaganda. >> Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Women are given the impression that they're going to take a significant hit
to their their lifestyle if they marry that the women are happier after they divorce. >> Well, and men are told that once you marry then like the exciting times of your life are over and there and now like you're done building the exciting things. >> Oh, but there are way more men when you look at like the priorities of young men. Marriage is up there. Kids are up there. Women are like, "No thanks."
>> Why do you think that why do you think that's the case? Why do you think that we've got this sex difference now in desire for marriage and desire for kids? I mean I would say personally uh not being a Zoomer woman. Um that uh it seems a lot of it is related to emergent norms of what we call low like small F feminism. And what I mean by that specifically is the convergence of things like me too giving a lot of women
the impression that men are fundamentally unsafe. Just yesterday I saw someone saying men do 95% of you know intimate partner violence. That's not true. men do about 57 to 60% of intimate partner violence. Um maybe not even that much if you trust the raw CDC data. Um you also so you get this idea that men are like a deep danger to women. Um you and I mean yes men do most of the crime in the world but
specifically on intimate partner violence it's actually way more equal than than you would think. Um uh or you get things like women being told that like when you get married, you know, it's like your individuality is done. I mean on some level, yes, that's true. >> It is. No, that it's our modern culture that basically has shifted our values in favor of individualism and hedonism and >> but men get told the same thing about
the individuality. >> That's true. But I think women have a lot more to lose. So, uh, it it sort of men feel like they become complete when they have their wife and their kids. Whereas women, what you're being sold is you're going to lose yourself once you have kids and your husband. You no longer exist as an identity. And in a world where everything is about you, you you that's terrifying. Also, women are
are raised to want to always be 20, to always try to look 20. When you see, you know, older female actresses now, they still look or they're trying to look like they're 20. Um, like there's no there's no model for like a a m matronly middle-aged woman who has a lot of kids who's kind of cool like that that sort of thing can't be flexed on Instagram. So, I think the way that >> I mean it can be, >> right? But it's not but the current
market dynamics aren't exactly rewarding that, right? People aren't showing the diaper changes at 3 in the morning other than to say, "Look at how horrible this is." And I think that this is it's it's an important thing to kind of give compassion to women about which is >> the uh things that you are rewarded for and that are most visible have changed rapidly over the last 30 years. And what is now being valued more than ever is
youth, fertility, freedom, status, the opportunity to do what you want, independence. And that is not just something that you have always kind of wanted a bit of in the right doses, but it's the sort of thing that your entire world is going to feed back to you. If most of your communication and most of your integration is mediated through the internet, mediated through social media, which is where most of this is because
you're an an atomized non-religious non gener pongerenerational house. This is the only way that you can get some sense of semblance of belonging and and recognition from the people around you. So, you're obviously going to play into that game and it's tough because you go what you have been SCP and gas lit into believing and that's not to say that every woman wants to have kids etc etc. [ __ ] caveats and throw clearing out
of the way. Like for the women who do, there is this market that they're existing within which doesn't allow you Okay, put the glasses on. I can tell this is going to get good. Um, there is a market you're existing within which penalizes lots of the things that come along as a byproduct of becoming a mother. >> Well, and there's no market for hagmaxing. No one's going to make money by selling hagmaxing. Um, you know, you
can't sexy enough. >> It's not Well, and who's going to make money from it? Like if you invest like hot dress companies, >> no, not even that because they emphasize, you know, your busty youth, right? The milkmaid dress is all about perky breasts. If you've got saggy pancakes, you're not wearing a milkade dress, okay? Like it's just there's no one's going to make money from a woman stepping back and investing in her
family um and and supporting things from behind the scenes >> this year. So like last year for the pronatalism initiative, most of our work was focused on housing. We thought housing was super important and we think it is and we still have some more on that. This year, most of our work is going to be on non-material drivers of fertility culture. So, looking like cult because we all know culture matters, but
what is it about culture specifically? There's one norm that comes up a lot in surveys I do, and I didn't take it seriously for a long time, but I'm gradually coming around to you didn't have tin foil for me to put a tin foil hat on, so I'm going with the the funny glasses. And it is that we've underrated the extent to which travel has fundamentally rewired particularly young women's sense of identity. What I mean
by that is globalization, cheaper airline tickets, Instagram, all this stuff has actually changed the world. Like vacation is different, leisure is different specifically. And there's also we can like point to a technology shock. Basically, deregulation of airlines, improved uh airline technology for like better fuel usage. We can say like isn't it weird that the share of Americans with a passport has like tripled in a
generation and a half? Isn't it weird that everybody v vacations in all these countries like the end of the cold war deal uh deregulation all this stuff and in surveys one of the things that shows up repeatedly over and over is when you ask people you know okay you say you want to have kids but you're like not what is it and one of the most commonly volunteered responses when we don't give it as an option is I want to keep
traveling and once you have kids you can't travel and I'm like here's a picture of me with my kids at like a mountaintop in Georgia here's me and my kids in Vietnam And yes, granted, I'm a high earning man with a flexible job who can give my children an elite aristocratic upbringing. >> And it's a bit more of a nightmare than doing it on your own. >> It is. >> Honestly, I love it. And I I I tried to
bring my kid here. We were just talking about this before. I was going to bring my kid here, but she wanted to stay at home and go to the racetrack with mama and put on fancy dresses and watch the thoroughbreds workout. Um, so I love traveling with my kids. I had a speaking gig in Hong Kong a few months ago. I brought two of my kids with me. We had so much fun. It is more logistical challenges and it's way more expensive.
It's so much more expensive and it changes the type of trip. But I genuinely love it. And I see so many people who really believe and again cost stuff stipulated. It's expensive. But I see so many people who really believe that like once you have kids, travel's not fun anymore when it's super fun. You see the world through a kid's eyes. You go to a place and there's a green taxi and you're like, "It's green taxi." And
they're like, "It's a green taxi." And again, like I see this time and time again that travel particularly there's a sex difference on it. Women increasingly see this as how you find who you are. You go and sample all these cultures and this tells you who you really are. What kind of pray love generation >> and you and you build this like cosmopolitan multicultural identity whereas men are like is there a cliff I
can jump off? Can I like shoot a rocket launcher in this slightly regulated African country? Like can like what? like and they do things that are fun, but it it's a whole different thing what men are looking for in travel, to the extent they do it at all. And young men controlling of income travel way less than young women. >> Um, >> and in particular, as women age, travel becomes more and more associated with
childlessness. Like middle-aged childless women travel a lot and so travel culture starts to cater to them. You get this whole thing where, again, I have these on because I will admit the empirical basis for this argument is not fully fleshed out. 2026 is the year where I have a research budget to flesh it out a bit more. Um, but I really think as we think about culture, a specific cultural norm we should be
thinking about is the extent to which for young women, international travel has become a fountain head of identity that they see as hostile to >> antiatalist. We've literally had close family members say, "Well, but if you have more children, how will you be able to travel?" And we're like, "Okay, so which of our future children are you going to just say that to? Like we're literally going to have another kid and
be like, "Hey, why don't you tell them that you thought they shouldn't have existed >> vacation?" Because we could have gone on a cruise. We could have gone to Thailand. Like it it's it is it is so antiatalist. And I I get that there are great experiences. Our kids lose their minds when they just see an airport shuttle with polka dots on it. Like oh my god, like Valhalla. Um but it's not actually that rewarding. If you go on a
trip now, you see a lot of people who look hot and tired and dehydrated going and taking the picture and going to the hotel and paying their >> hot dehydrated in Vietnam. >> I mean, like, it's not it's really not as rewarding as as you as you think it is. And people are literally making trade-offs between bringing a whole new life with the entire range of their experiences and a whole new generation
into the world versus one international trip a year. So, I want to endorse that and I agree. But I will say there's there's swimming upstream and then there's, you know, trying to just divert the river a bit. >> Swimming upstream, all in favor of it. Fight the travel bug. Okay, I'm not going to because I actually really like traveling. Um, so I'm child of my generation, but I think that's a place where you can say, okay,
>> a gigantic baby bonus that costs 10% of GDP might be expensive, but like allowing people with children to skip all the lines at the airport literally costs nothing. >> Or requiring airlines to seat you together no matter your fair class, provided you buy all the same fair class. >> You have one business class seat. [ __ ] you, everybody. I've got crying children. >> Or like bassinets in business class. A
lot of airlines literally don't have them >> or don't allow >> or don't allow them. Yeah. Yeah. So like there are choices we could make that might the issues um or like like there there's a lot of things you could do to make and actually Secretary Duffy has done stuff on this like trying to get more playgrounds inside of airport terminals. Um unfortunately the US is so latigious that we suck at airport.
>> So you're trying to you're trying to make child child travel more childfriendly. I think God I endorse the attempt of the Collinses to just fight back. [ __ ] that. Let's make an alternative culture. Endorse also for those of us too weak to do that. I think we should make >> Speaking as someone that did 100,000 miles around the world in 72 flights last year. I'm I'm in that. One one thing that was interesting on the sort
of loss of identity point that we were talking about, there was this new statement article that came out last week and one of the quotes in it said, "It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers." This is a group of girls that they're interviewing. It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. We have to get rid of our career. I'm not fully against kids. I just really don't want to lose the other
things and become just a mother. I want to still be me and I will probably lose that. That final sense, I'm not fully against kids. I just don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me and I will probably lose that. I think that that like yeah, travel and Instagram and all the rest of it, this hits really close to the center of what it is that women viscerally feel. It's real,
>> right? That like holy [ __ ] >> I spent a long time getting myself into education and employment and really really pushing the limit and like the world recognizes me and maybe I've got followers on Instagram and my Instagram's going up and maybe I've got my own business to a degree or whatever it is that I'm doing. I don't want to become just a mother. I want to still be me and I will probably lose that. Why is that a new or novel
identity shift challenge that women are facing? >> I'll tell you what, like the one thing that convinced me to have kids, uh, second date with my my future husband, he's like, I want to have a lot of kids and I'm like, I'm never going to have kids and I'm never going to get married. And he's like, well, what would have to change, you know, to to change your mind? I'm like, I don't want to give him my career and identity. Exactly that
issue. And he's like, well, what if you didn't? What if by default in our relationship if anyone had to step back it would be me and you would never have to do anything you don't want to? And I'm like well I'd have infinite kids then. And I think a lot of women are the same way and they're not presented with that opportunity. I think another issue here is that now >> I really hate the crap you all get in
the media when Malcolm is like paradigmatically the thing that a lot of like feminists [snorts] would say they want is like a man who will be like I would like to have kids. I'm willing to take the hit for it. Like >> that's something I have always admired about him and about your >> So Malcolm Malcolm's a stay at home dad. >> He Well, he's right now with like all the kids, right? >> Stay at home army [ __ ] platoon
commander. [laughter] Um while >> Sorry I interrupted you, but I just wanted to do some >> No, no, no. But the fact the fact that he does that, but you guys get kind of castigated as the conservative TRC con. Uh no one's going to pay attention [laughter] to us if we if we give the nuance perspective because no one likes nuance in the end. You got to catch them with the candy. But identity don't want
to become just a mother. >> So women in the past used to complete their identity to fully become themselves by being a mother. You know people would you know all the arts like the Virgin Mary with you know that's like pony needles propaganda like all the most beautiful women always have a baby in their arms right like this this was so endemic in sort of the culture that women grew up around that they were
willing to die in childbirth because that happened a lot you know they they would know someone who died in childirth who lost babies you know this was clearly something that was very dangerous. women were willing to endure that anyway. And it just happens to be now that we live in a culture where all that we're presented with is a loss. And we've grown up with mothers who've done that. I mean, the reason why I I really
felt this way is I saw how it hurt my mother to basically sort of fall back and become this caretaker. And then um I I think she kind of gave up on getting cancer treatment because she didn't really have an identity left anymore. She just decided to stop treatment because there was no one for her to care for anymore. She was done caring for me. she was done caring for her parents who died like what what left was there
because she lost her identity in that wash and I didn't want that for myself and I think a lot of women feel the same way we need to fix that in society and I >> does that mean therefore that somebody needs to leave lose their identity now in the modern world >> we need to shift to a new way of living but we will we're about to enter such a period of massive disruption with demographic collapse with AI with all
these other things that are going to happen I feel like it's going to shake out for the best but people need to be aware of the dynamics at play I mean I'm glad you're having this conversation with people. >> Can I just Sorry, we've talked a lot. You and you you're getting >> Yeah. I mean, for me with at the risk of repeating myself about the importance of age, um we're going through a lot of shifts right now. So maybe now is a good
time to look at the progression of education, career development, because the way societies are set up right now. And you're absolutely right. I mean, women absolutely do and should want to establish themselves in some way on a on the career path. Of course, they should because they just spent n years studying, going all the way back to elementary school, all those exams, right the way through college or
training or whatever it is. Of course, career development is a natural thing. So as societies what we have done is effectively formalize a system that is antiatal. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. >> And unless we start having conversations with all respect truly I mean the travel question is you know as a dad who divorced dad traveling with three kids around the world and uh you know can I tell you a little story? I was flying
between LA and London with three children onto the age of seven. uh >> on my own. >> We you who are about to die salute you. >> Yes. >> And my daughter was she was two at the time. I mean she was so sweet. Um she started playing peekab-boo with the but not saying a word just looking at the man behind her. And it was a little annoying, I'm sure. And I tried to stop her. But at one point the flight attendant came and said to me, "Would
you please tell your daughter stop looking at that man?" >> Oh. >> And I said, "What?" And she the flight attendant was saying this in a way that she wasn't comfortable. The man had complained. And my response was, "Who's going to pay his pension?" >> Correct. >> Nice. >> Correct. >> Nice. >> And the flight devil, what do you mean? >> A baby crying on the plane is a sound of a healthy society. >> Right.
As the one person sat at the table who doesn't have children here, I feel like I'm having to pay a cost that everybody else gets to benefit from. My sleep is being damaged. What about my sleep? It's hard. >> You got plenty of sleep. You don't have a kid waking you up at 3:00 a.m. >> Oh, okay. >> That's true. I'll get back I'll get back into business classes. >> If I can if I can I the part where it
says just a mom. Um, this is a I hate this so much. Um, so my wife is a stay-at-home mom. Um, she wasn't when we, you know, when we, uh, the first several years of our marriage, she actually earned more than me and then we were kind of equal and then we had kids and she stepped back and we honestly we didn't really discuss it at first. It just kind of happened, which is what happens for a lot of couples. Since
we've discussed it, she's like, "Oh, no, no, no. This is what I wanted. This is great. You go and earn money and I get to like raise my kids the way I always dreamed of. is perfect. Um but uh and once our kids's grown, maybe she'll go back go back and restart her career. But it infuriates me when people are like, "Oh, you're just a mom." And it's like, "Hold on. My wife is a business manager for a complicated business called Our
Family that has a lot of complicated financials." And um I mean I'm not the one like handling all of that because I'm a nerd who says things like parody progression ratio in wide audience podcasts. Clearly I'm not the guy who's going to like sit down and solve day-to-day life problems. Not me. My wife manages that because a complicated high-income family needs a business manager. My wife is an educator. We
homeschool our kids and she organizes personally three different homeschool co-ops that she thrives at and they give her a chance to play in curriculum, to oversee other people, to manage things, to lead projects. She is a huge contributor at our church community where she's functionally a center of social life for a lot of people. My wife is living she's she is a girl boss in a sense. She's a mom boss. Okay. Yes. She doesn't
get paid for it um by an outside employer. Um and she doesn't unfortunately she doesn't get the recognition she deserves because what she's doing is a complicated skills inensive career of raising people who are going to be incredible adults. And look, there's a lot of stuff that's genetically baked in. My kids are smart because they have my wife's genes and some of mine. Um, my kids are, you know,
decent and pleasant people to be around because they have my wife's jeans and they're unpleasant because they have some of mine. Um, but their cult their acculturation, the specific manners they use, a lot of their culturally specific morals and values, I would love to say a lot of that is me and and some of it is me. Um, the fact that they enjoy archery and hatchets and swords is me, but their actual like day-to-day functional
operative practices and values are because of my wife. She is building civilization every day in our house. And it blows my [ __ ] mind that there are all these childless people who are like, well, I don't want to give up my identity and become a mom. You get to transform from a cog in civilization to building it to being the person who defines what the future is. How is that not a promotion if you can
land it? And we just we don't get that. And it infuriates me that my wife's career is treated as a demotion when she like we upgraded her to a what I see as a higher status career. There was a a conversation I had with a friend who had two kids while she was still working, very highowered job at Google, and then one kid after co uh where she decided she was going to be a stay at home mom. Kind of missed a good bit of the done
the daycare thing previously. This time I'm going to be stay at home mom. >> She's an awesome one. >> She's a [ __ ] she's a sick she's a sick mom. Um and she went to a local mom meetup thing, alope parenting thing. And uh one of the moms said to her, this a while after she moved into this new place, one of the moms turned to her and she said, "You know what? I wish I'd known you a few years ago when you were
still working, you know, when you had a lot going on." Oh. And she rang me after this and was like [ __ ] distraught that basically these other moms who were also working moms saw her as less than. They they saw her. And what she said to me, this is a real kicker. She's like, "Do you know what it is?" And she's mum, right? Mum mode. Left the big paying job at this company behind. I'm so jealous of people that
had kids during co, you know, cuz they didn't feel like they were missing out on anything. So even her as somebody who's made >> say having kids during co was kind of [ __ ] maybe not necessarily for the reason that it didn't feel like you were missing out on what was going on. But like this is the point that to me having a population that's not this shape, an upside down [ __ ] Giza pyramid shape, seems like the sort of
thing that would be good if you cared about social redistribution and you cared about looking after people that were in worse situations than they would like to be in because you've got enough money to be able to pay for them. In the same way as pedestalizing mothers who decide that they're going to raise the next generation of humans seems like the sort of thing that should be approprierism working their way through things which
they are free to do and they should do if they want to do but them being the only women that are seen as ones worthy of respect. That seems to be the most misogynistic thing that I can think of. Oh, the thing that you naturally can do with your body, the thing that you were literally built to do is of less status than something which is more coded as that of a man and what men typically have done throughout history. Like, is
that am I [ __ ] insane here? Or is that not the most like misogynistic viewpoint that you could think of? >> It's not it's a systemic problem. It's not misogynistic per se. It's that this doesn't how can you measure this in terms of GDP? How can you measure this in terms of output? What we've lost, it's this silent death of this huge amount of utility that just wasn't sufficiently measured. But keep in mind
like even >> and this is the joy of building a family. >> Well, but I mean in the 40s and 50s and and even 60s there were home economics classes. Women were taught about managing household finances and about cooking and about family care and nutrition and all these things. It was treated like a career. No, it's like I really want to bring it back in autoshop. We I I love that. >> Some schools still have, but they're
like electives. >> Yeah. Well, I I've never seen a school that that does that. But I mean, we we used to as a society do that. And to a certain extent, it just isn't it isn't captured. It's not measurable, and therefore, it's not valuable, right? We can't see it, so it must not be valuable. And it's not just this parenting and and all this community support. It's it's all the philanthropy and community support and elder care and
all these invisible services that women who are like in your wife's specific. She's not just raising your kids. She's also contributing to I'm sure she's also contributing significantly to our community. anxiety on her back, >> but no one's measuring it. Like if if no one hears it, did it happen? Like >> is this why it's low status? >> Yes. I mean, right now status is sort of measured by like did you take a picture
of it? Like is it online? Like is it measured in GDP? Is it making money? This is how we decide in our society now if something's valuable and all these intangibles. I you know, as a world becomes increasingly online, people are being rewarded for what is tracked. >> Also, you think about elder care. There's an older woman in our church who's uh in cognitive decline and knows it and needed help and didn't know who
to ask. She got talking to my wife at church. Me and my wife were over there a couple nights ago setting up a Roomba for her that can clean her house for her. My wife is is helping arrange her like pickups for church. My grandpa who's in his upper 90s and is in memory care. My wife is over there one or two times a week with the kids to sing to him and read the Bible with him. a lot of the labor of caring for it's
like oh we need these women to be in the workforce to generate tax revenue to care for to do old age pensions. you might want some of those women who are not doing 40 hours a week at work because they might be doing some elder care. >> And the inefficiency, right, instead of doing that, the state's like, "Oh, well, let's pay all these other services to provide elder care, except like like 90% of it goes to fraud, apparently."
>> A friend a friend made a good point the other day. If you took two women who both ran a bespoke daycare service and looked after each other's kids for the same amount of money, the net result would be the same as if they looked after their own kids full time, >> except they'd be respectable. In the former case, the women would be seen as girl bosses. In the latter case, they'd be seen as an ambitious.
>> Also, as long as you incorporate them as a business, that's actually currently legal and you could get a tax credit for it. >> But if you watch your own kid, it's not it. The IRS would come after you if they found out it was purely onetoone. But if you had like 12 parents and you all took turns, you could that'd be perfectly legal. And so, I'm not going to lie, I've brought this up at my church like
we could come up with like >> childare laundry >> daycare that's really just like a like a child it's just a mom. Are there enough Somali people around to run this? >> No. No. No. [laughter] No. No. But like for the even just like for the childcare tax credit, like then we could all pay into this the same amount, all claim the same amount out and we all get a tax credit. >> Look, if they're doing it, we should do
it, too. [laughter] >> I I I think, you know, with huge respect to your wife, huge. And also to you for raising five kids so far. >> But most people don't want those lies. Most people want a smaller family. They don't know they don't want those laws. >> And most women do want careers and do want dual identity. >> And my wife had one and probably will again, >> right? So we need to engineer societies
in a way that enables that and we're just not right now. >> That's and that's how society mostly was though. It's there was never this world in which women were always not working. Women have always worked. Your wife is still working now. She worked before. And this is very natural. And I think we've I think there was this I think a lot of it has to do with this golden age of media. Like when TV first came
online, we had this very short period of the nuclear family where women were a leisure class and because we all anchored to that cuz that's when TV first came online, we had these like foundational shows. Everyone was like this is what tradition is when really no it's never been like that. What we saw was this weird aberration and it's always been that women have worked and and also raised kids and it's very
dynamic and cluji but we don't we're very we're not very creative. We have to see a model for it and there's no model left. There's no model left. That's absolutely right. But but what we've done is put um career paths which involves education and training in place that mean that the jump off point where you can now consider realistically both being a mom and working in some form >> uh is really impossible for for most
people to get their their mind around. And I, you know, okay, we talked about finance and I want to go back to that, but there's a lot of financial vulnerability to young people and with divorce rates as high as they are as one example, for sure a young woman is probably going to want to think things through if things don't work out. So if I'm right that the age is the key determinant of the level of
childlessness the TMR in the country we need to be thinking of ways for mass re-engineering of societies to make careers and education and pathways to parenthood simultaneous >> at a younger age. But there's no there's no conversation around that. Yeah, there should be though because the coolest thing about prenatalism is this is the lowest stress cause in the entire world because everyone on a family level can
make this possible. You can matchmake your kids. You can help them start their careers in high school earlier. Like everyone on a micro level has the capability of creating an intergenerationally durable culture where they're all about high fertility and starting families early. You can do this on your own personal level and other people can do it. It can matically spread. Let's say we're successful
collectively in that people should become more aware of the risks of delayed parenthood that the likelihood of becoming a mom in the US I think at age 35 or older is around 15%. Once people start to understand that and if we imagine that okay not just the US this is becoming more of a global problem on mass that younger people do want to start to have families again at a younger age. There's nothing in this conversation
that I think we've really approached yet that actually enable that. >> Absolutely. >> And you know that's that's where conversations including ours I think needs to go. Simone Simone does have a solution for this which is [ __ ] him. >> That's your solution currently. >> But as with travel, Simone's like ah screw it. Travel norms are bad. >> It's overrated agree. But >> there is a bell curve also at the table
too. And Simone happens to be toward the tail. But for those of us, you know, for people who are not are going to have a hard time saying, "Ah, [ __ ] the norm. I'm going to just do my own thing." Which I think that's a great thing to do. But if that's not you, I do think talking about compatibility of career trajectory and family trajectory is really important. And I think during co we all woke up and realized a big one,
remote work. And there's growing evidence that remote work unlocks a lot of fertility. And so great, but it's unlikely that remote work is literally the only technology out there to do this. Yes. >> One of the big ones, I actually have an article that's come out about going to come out about this I think tomorrow is that >> just being able to take a break for like four years in a career. The problem is
when women exit the career force, they take a huge hit and re-entry is often almost impossible, >> right? You It's so hard to reenter. >> Is the same thing true for men? I'm going to guess not to the same extent. Well, men never exit. They just don't exit. Um, for those that do exit, I'm not sure. But >> re-entry is so hard. That is the place where we can make a huge difference because the reality is it's not just
that a lot of women exit the workforce when they have kids. Most women do not want a demanding career when they have a one-year-old. Some do, but most don't. And in surveys, we see this. When you've got small kids at home, most people are like, I might work a few hours to keep my toe in the market. But if you're told, look, you got four years where you don't have to have a workplace job. If you want to work a little, you can, but
basically we expect you to just like pour into your kids. I think 80% of women if they knew they could return >> at a comparable place they left would. >> The problem is we don't have that and maternity leave doesn't solve it. And from what we're saying, mothers of young families are highly skilled at organization, dispute management, time management, etc. >> Hostage negotiation. >> There you go. >> And if I were an employer today, um, I
would be, you know, here's what I'd love to see employers get to. that [snorts] in annual reports at hiring fairs, employers state the number of their staff that become parents. >> Yes. Like the like the you say how many board members are minorities and how many of your new hires are >> or your environmental footprint. You have to do that legally right now. >> Support the total fertility rate of your
employees. And then you see where college young people gravitate towards those who don't want kids may well go to the employer who you know is highest salary and everything else but very low rates of of motherhood. I was at a conference with a there was a Chinese businessman actually a couple of them who run large companies. Um and uh and I was listening in translation so this might not be entirely I might have the
exact details wrong but basically they were like we've started doing this. We're tracking the fertility of all of our employees. When they have a baby, they get a huge bonus. If they're a woman, they get like, you know, a certain amount of, you know, they get way more than like the maternity leave that China provides. Um because we feel like it that um if they have kids first. One of them said, "Well, better people
have kids and I want the best people." And I was like, "Okay." Um >> are you sure that wasn't Simone? >> No, but like it was funny. These like Chinese and these were unusual. Okay. These were self- selected by Chinese businessmen worried about low fertility. Okay. But like they were being very blunt about like, oh yeah, we've started like hiring interviews for like our junior like executive fellowship things.
We ask about their family plans and we hire the ones who want more kids. >> Well, what about what what about free college tuition for mothers? >> Okay, so this is an interesting one because you could say when people have kids, they tend to drop out of college. We want to encourage women's educational attainment by providing free tuition for moms. So, it's interesting because you're saying we want to encourage
education when >> obliquely what you're actually doing is you're encouraging fertility for students. And I think it's a fantastic idea. Yeah. >> School is a great time to have a kid. Your schedule is easy. I mean, I had three kids during my PhD. Okay. >> Uh four, sorry, I had arguably I had four kids during my PhD. My first was while I was applying. Um >> it's a great time. First of all, you have a lot of young peers who can watch
your kids. Um, second of all, most universities have on-site child care that you might be able to get into and is often discounted for students. Third, you're pretty young. Fourth, your schedule's like flexible in different ways. If you are married during graduate school, that is your time. Crank them out. >> But that also means that free college tuition for mothers would allow somebody who's 35 to go and get an education.
>> Yes. Oh, so you mean going back? You could Yeah, you could have like a a VA or like a GI bill for moms. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's not a terrible idea. >> I like it. >> Yeah. GI Bill. Yeah. >> I I I um interviewed a young German woman um medical student about fertility or making making birth gap. And uh I I didn't realize but she already was a mother at age 21. So I was interviewing her as a medical student thinking I was
going to be asking her about her future fertility plans. And no, she's already a mom. And by the way, she was traveling and um so that wasn't never a problem to her. But her data point for starting a family young was she looked at all the other doctors and so many were >> childless. >> Yeah. >> And she talked to some of them and said, "Well, there's just never been a moment in time. Life just sped up and sped up
and sped up." So she decided, "Well, let's let's do" and she ended up cohabiting with an a group of other young people who all the kids and you know, so there is something for it. It's not for everybody clearly, but you know these pathways to make education, training, careers, career development and parenting something that are entirely compatible is I I'll go further. Well, I don't think nations are
going to survive this. >> No, >> unless the age of parenting becomes much younger. And you know, so this isn't a marginal idea. It's something that goes to the core. The point that you mentioned there which I think is really important is the sort of felt sense that women have especially now of that loss of identity and the fear and the uncertainty cost of living is higher for a lot of people especially at the
lifestyle that they think that they're supposed to have which is what it is right regardless of whether or not you would just inflation >> or imposed correct you don't choose your >> social you're suffering in this thing regardless of whether it's true on a spreadsheet when you would come for inflation and all the rest of it that's what it feels like and one One of the re one of the things I've been thinking I
got in a lot of trouble at the start of this year uh for talking about birthright decline. It's interesting when it kind of breaks out into the real internet right not the people that are maybe a bit more familiar with this and I hadn't done the appropriate land acknowledgement throat clearing that I do usually and that means that if you don't and it hits kind of like the normet you get in a lot of trouble.
>> It made me reflect on things. I'm like, okay, if I'm if I'm interested in this topic and I don't want to have to take a ton of slings and arrows when I do it, how do I do it without having to do this sort of unnecessary landing in Australia thing each time before I I start talking about it? I think one of the problems that I encountered was the cost of having kids to a woman is so high, like physically incredibly high. They're the
ones that risk it. They're the ones that their mate value changes way more than the father. Give a dad a kid and get him to walk around a park, like his mate value's probably gone up. Yes. As opposed to a woman who your beauty, your sense of selfworth, all of this stuff that society is imposing on you and is now trying to extract and monetize from you. That's >> say nothing of health complications >> and the physical the cost, the pain, the
uncertainty, the fear, all of these things. And I think what happens is if you're a guy who is talking about that in anything that approximates flippency or dismissiveness, you come across as being very callous. If you talk about this topic without the appropriate level of sensitivity, it's all well and good me steaming in and going, "Well, look, we know that D." It's like, "Hey, hey, I don't think that you're fully
appreciating the gravity, the felt gravity of the situation when we're talking about lost identity for women in their careers, which are now a more important part. It's the thing that's imposed self uh reinforced from all of the people on the internet. This is your primary source of selfworth. Your work, your career, your education, your independence, your freedom. And then there's real legitimate reasons to worry
about it, too. You say, "Well, what if I get left? What if we get divorced? I don't want to be a financial prisoner to my husband. I'm going to be in a relationship that I can't leave. How many marriages stayed together 75 years ago because the woman had literally nowhere else to go?" Like all of these things together have created a situation where this conversation's really [ __ ] hard. And the conversation's always about women.
>> Yeah. >> The conversation always lays this at the feet of women and goes because as I asked you this question over WhatsApp, I was like, why do we why is it like total children per mother? Why is it the mother? Why is it mother mom woman? >> Because men lie about their fertility. >> Never. they don't know how many kids they have in Sweden actually tracks this data pretty aggressively and uh the the
total number of children born uh by administrative data matching to fathers is about 8% less uh than to mothers or sorry it's about 6% in Sweden in the US it's about 11% >> um about 11% actually I think in the newest data it's 10% but about one in 10 kids have no medically acknowledged paternity >> well also like the ONS just collect data about mothers. They just there is no data about fathers. No, the ONS has has
father data, but it's missing for I want to say 7% of births, but it is it is there. >> But in terms of the regular fertility data around the world, you know, we focus on mothers because it's easy at a hospital to get a birth record and ask some questions to the mother. Age, birth order is nice to have. >> I think we found it uncomfortable or we did in the past to ask you as the mother, by the way, who's the father
here? Or it might be in some and we've stayed away. I think that's changing. I know there are initiatives around the world to collect more timely meaningful fatherhood data. But one interesting thing back to this >> California where they're phasing it all out. >> Okay. Um you know this timing curve in countries where we do have data on the timing of fatherhood really is just a slight delay of the same curve of
mothers. A little little flatter little stress. >> A little flatter especially at the high end. Yeah. So I get the idea that men think that they can wait. They're in the same race as I've called it the that that women are >> for now. Listen, I mean this is going to be centered on women for a while and then we get invogenesis and we get artificial wombs and that tech is in development today. >> It is.
>> So >> it's not going to work though. >> I think if you look at fertility treatments for a small population but once this scales it scales. Uh, so you know, I'm looking I'm I'm far future, right? So I see this as a is a viable solution. There's another really important part of this though is what there's this this big sort of scop with women in pregnancy that it's like this horrible thing that destroys your body.
Uh, which clearly isn't necessarily true, but it's one of those sort of um self-fulfilling prophecies. I think when women buy into this and come to believe it, they're way more likely to have actual and very real perceived worse pregnancies and worse complications and worse recoveries because they expect it and they live it. Like spoonies, you know, these people who sort of believe they're deeply sick online actually
experience real symptoms. Spoonies, they they >> it's like munchousins. Um it's like new new munchousins and there's like whole social networks where like they post the pills they take and they sort of buy into it and feed into it and they're feeling real sickness but it's not real. Um, and I think a lot of this does happen with pregnancy and and and there's just there's the amount of women who think that this is going to destroy
your body and it's going to be painful and horrible. When you expect that, it's going to happen. And so I I appreciate that it needs to be acknowledged and that this does fall to women and that pregnancy isn't easy. But I mean also people run marathons, people climb mountains, people honestly the travel that you do is so I vomited more times acquiring businesses and traveling around the world than I ever did in any
of my five pregnancies. >> Also, there's actually a cure for morning sickness that's in trials because we identified the specific protein combination that causes severe morning sickness. So like couple of years that's going to be gone. Yeah. >> Um, I will say my, you know, all of all of my wife and I's pregnancies have been high risk and my wife's my wife is missing a considerable part of the port of the vision in one of her eyes because
of a of a unique pregnancy complication. So, I'm very aware of the incredible uh I mean pregnancy is not just like a a minor medical thing, right? It's not. It's um and yes there's also definitely psychosmatic post pregnancy syndromes that you know is this really going on or um but uh I think that that makes it just one it's so much better than it used to be. >> Mhm. >> Like it blows my mind that like to the
term is tocophobia which means fear of giving birth, fear of pregnancy. It blows my mind that we are living in such a tocophobic age when we we are finally in a period where when you correctly measure maternal the the causal effect of pregnancy on women's mortality. We're at an age where it's not detectable. That is women who experience pregnancy do not have detectably higher mortality rates than age ma age and race matched
women who are not pregnant. >> But think about what what the rest of life is like. Think about how sterilized everything else has become. That this is now the scariest thing you're ever going to do in your life. >> Time. We live in a time where, as best we can tell, there is no causal effect of pregnancy or birth on mortality of women. Maternal mortality is deaths linked to a maternal cause, but it's not
always causal in the sense that that might have been a woman who is higher risk of dying of other things anyway. Okay? But and yet we live in this massively toophobic age where we're so afraid of all the things that can happen. And it's because everything else has gotten so good, [laughter] right? Like nothing happens to you hardly. And and so on the one hand, it's like I want to recognize the risk women take on it.
My wife has chosen to take on and and I'll and if she were here, she would say this that I'm the one who's like, "Are you sure we like we're debating if we're having a fifth, right?" And I'm like, "Are you sure you want to do this again?" Like, >> "Yeah, I've got to beat the Collinses. I need to we need to [ __ ] beat those [ __ ] That's the way that we're going to [laughter] do But yeah, we can't lose
to them. But uh um >> but my wife is the one who's like I mean honestly like if we did like suppose we got pregnant unintentionally like would you want to tell that child that you himm and hawed on whether we had them because you were worried that like I might have a complication. There's probably medicine for >> Yeah. >> And I'm like when you put it that way but on the other hand what if you died?
It's like well but the risk is is quite low of that. I mean >> we're so time logged though. I mean the thing is like if you even for like a brother an uncle and some you know a parent people are willing to donate organs they're willing to possibly even die to save them you know if a boss is coming for them are you >> but a prospective person >> I know it's very hard to think in the abstract of like this future human
you've never met when like the marginal risk a woman takes on now if she could somehow meet that child you know or the parents I mean like it just >> well it's just anchoring biasing is on is on policy costs right the most expensive estimates suggest suggest that the cost per life year added of pronatal cash incentives is like you might have to pay as much as 25 to $30,000 in total policy costs per life year you add. So
if a person's going to live 70 years you add 70 life years for each marginal child. Whereas like the best most efficient government programs like Medicaid, Medicare are like 35 to $75,000 for each life. I'm like, so you're saying that adding life years through this is too expensive, but these other programs that it would be like grossly immoral to cut are half as efficient. >> Mhm. >> I I just want to chip in
>> though death prevention has its own benefits. >> From a personal perspective, I mean, there are risks and I know I nearly lost my ex-wife during childirth. It was very close. >> It's terrifying. >> Oh, the worst night of my life and would have lost my one of my children, too. Um, so the risks are real. And then you talk to people who go through that and a lot of it uh well I know a lot of it in my ex-wife's case it was related to the
fact the number of ceserians she had and people don't understand that these risks you know ceserium becomes just the elective choice of norm and I think a lot of people would be best doing some research on that before necessarily go down that route anyway I don't want to get too personal but there are risks I would love to come back to something you just said because you did take a lot of stick in February in fact
you blew the internet because I did searches for >> How did I miss this? >> Yeah, I missed it too. How did you get what what interview got you in trouble? >> So, I did uh I was on Steven Bartlett's podcast. So, it was number eight in the world with number two in the world. Steven's got a very female audience and we did two and a half hours on how to do a good New Year's resolution. >> Oh, >> and I did 10 minutes on mating dynamics
and maybe 3 minutes or so on birthrights. And um >> so you for four so for two hours you hector women about having babies is what I >> is essentially what happened. I got in I look I I I got in an awful lot of trouble. And uh I mean it's it's one of those times where Scott Galloway rang me and he he spoke to me on the phone the same way that someone consoling a person that's recently bererieved. He's like,
"Oh no, >> hey buddy. What you how's it going?" And I was like, "Well, I thought it was [ __ ] fine. What's you haven't been on TikTok, have you?" I'm like, "No, I haven't been on TikTok. Should I go on?" He's like, "Do not go on Tik Tok." So, um, that that happened at the beginning of the year. That's definitely the biggest fur that I've been in and around this topic. >> If you look at searches on Google for
the world child word childlessness right at this time, it >> I impacted the [ __ ] Google search. >> You mean child-free, right? Because only a bigot would say childless. >> Exactly. >> Well, that's a whole other thing. I don't want to get I just hate that term. But but but you said something then that you you're not you're now thinking how to kind of not draw in that anger. Is that something you >> If you if you activate sort of the
immune response, you don't change minds. People dig their heels in. And again, like Simone's like [ __ ] we're on a spaceship thing aside, like first off, it's just not that enjoyable of a situation to get in. >> I understand there are some people that there is no amount of sanitizing that I can do to talking about this topic, but there is. And I have maybe I have a a brighteyed bushy tailed hopefulness that
I shouldn't and that's going to be eroded by just spending more time with you and Malcolm, but I I'm like, okay, I really think that the conversations that I've had with you and with you and with your other half have moved the needle and helped people to become aware about what delaying family formation, the challenges of coupling, what this really means, how what sort of a limit have you got, how much planning do you need to do
in future, all of this stuff. Like I really think it's made the world a better place. even if it's taught people some things that they really don't want to hear and is kind of antithetical to the world that they think that they want to live in and some do want to live in but they're the loudest people on the internet etc. Like I don't want to have to take flak for doing something that I think is really good. If that's the cost
then so be it. But I'm like I reckon I can be more effective. I think I can be more effective with the way that I talk about this stuff. I also probably hadn't fully priced in this like callousness response system that women have when it's it feels like a man, especially one that presents like me, is being flippant about what they're going through or about the the fears that they have in this new world, right? Because we're
often happy to give men or I try and push to give men, hey, they've lost a lot of their roles. They don't really understand what they're supposed to do. How are they supposed to add value in this way? They're falling behind. the school system and the work system don't seem to be designed in the same sort of way for someone that can't be a highlighter girl. They're rambunctious. They get [ __ ] put on meds because
they've got ADHD, which is just them being forced to sit in a classroom, etc., etc. And I'm like, I want people to understand that in the modern world, there are mismatches with how these creatures, the boys and the men, previously would have been able to operate. The same thing is happening to women. And I'm like, right, okay. I just don't fully understand. All of that being said, many of the criticisms that were levied
at me, we've gone through today. It's stuff to do with one of the ones I want to get on to, which is uh housework and childare. Um there's a kind of a very obvious playbook that happened, but most of them were this guy wants to strip women's rights away. He's disregarding how hard and challenging it is for women. And he's making an assumption that women who don't want to have kids want to have kids. Now, the third one is
really interesting because a lot of those points were being made by women who still could have kids, which means that you don't need to put your money where your mouth is. You have no skin in this game. You can say, "I'm not going to have kids." right up until the point that you can't and then you can rug pole everybody else where you got your I'm promoting what is currently kind of the trendy thing in feminism thing and then
I'm going to pivot last minute. There's a lot of very well-known women that have extol the virtues of no strings attached, casual sex where you don't need to have kids or do family formation to then do a kind of surprise announcement that he got down on one knee in a rose garden. Wasn't it so beautiful? Also, when it comes to the housework and the the cost of living thing, you go, "Hang on a second.
You're single. You're single and you're saying that the reason that people aren't having kids is because of the cost of because the cost of love, but you're not in the situation where you could have kids. So, what the [ __ ] are we talking about?" So, I'm like, "Right, okay. I understand that these are some of the sort of like early onset trigger points around this conversation. So I want to approach them
appropriately gently and say hey coupling seems to be the big issue as far as I can see. Yes, age related stuff. It's people are not in relationships. So you talking about how hard it is to have kids, the cost of child care and where are we going to get the money from and the living prices and the housing and all the rest of it's like that is a wonderful hypothetical but until you're in a relationship until
really you're married for the for most people. Like this is kind of just mental arithmetic that doesn't actually have a result at the end >> unless the mental arithmetic is demoralizing you from pursuing a serious relationship and right >> it has real world effects. >> It's self-defeating cope. >> Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, if it's one of these things where you're like, well, having kids is never going to be
attainable anyway, so why bother with a serious relationship? >> I don't think that's what people are saying. >> I think for some that might down to effectively, that might be what how reality. Anyway, you said I got in trouble. Where were you going? >> Oh, well, I was just going to respond to that one point first. That I I think for a lot of younger people, the idea of why bother dating seriously is absolutely
true. When you meet someone at age 18, 21, the person you start dating now, >> you're not going to marry him. No, you can't imagine that they are. So why are you going to take that seriously? So why is >> One of one of the great misfortunes of the modern world is to find a person that would be good for you to marry when you're 17 >> because what are you going to do? Actually marry them? >> Bro, one of my one of my really good
friends just got engaged. >> I It'd be great if you did, but like it's not normal. >> One of my one of my really good friends just got engaged and his fiance's workmates were fully a gasast and apparently the first thing that all of them said to her was, "How old are you?" Oh god, >> she's 28.
>> That was their response. Like, no. Congratul Like, what are you doing? You're highly educated. You've worked your entire life to how could you? And I'm like, hey, I'm saying this as a 38-year-old guy. I need to I should have put this [ __ ] disclaimer up top. I understand 38, unmarried, without kids. I that's that can be the [ __ ] header of this podcast. I get it. Okay. >> Where I was going to go with that was
>> working hard on I I think all of us um I imagine um have taken arrows for this. Well, you certainly have. I certainly have. >> Yeah. But did anybody else impact Google Trends data? That's a D level. >> But I I think back to this 10% who not only don't want kids, but I would suggest don't understand why anybody would want kids are always going to be voices trolling >> anyone having this conversation.
>> They're not. They're not. They're not because I this is so this is so interesting. I feel like most of the people who are involved in the I'm childless, I'm child-free, sorry debate, are feeling some cognitive dissonance because when I was in my child-free era, which was like basically up until I met Malcolm, my husband, I was like, "Yeah, I'm not going to have kids. I'm not going to do I was like, that's great. I
was celebrated for it. No one ever questioned that." And I was not involved in the debate. I felt super secure in my choice. Uh, no one questioned it. I think that a lot of it comes down to people really feeling ambivalent about it and that's because we live in a society where like if you are kind of interested in it, you still feel punished for that. And I think this comes from a place of interest.
>> So what would you have done back in those years if you'd come across Chris's podcasts on this topic? Would you have been ambivalent or would you >> be busy watching my like cottagecore content? you know just like oh like fantasy stuff and books and manga >> one of the you know I I will take artistic >> I [laughter] mean the magnet >> but that's that that that is how it is I we got to talk about child care or sorry
a house housework because this is this is something that really bothers me um and it's something that will build so much false resentment among women um and here's the thing women do disproportionately a lot more housework and cleaning and everything it's Not because their husbands are forcing them to. It's because their personal standards are higher. Women are like, "Well, you know, if we didn't exist, who
would organize all the parties for the men and who would put the doilies on their tables and who would wash their sheets every week?" And the men are like, "Wait, I thought you just wash sheets like once a year." You know, like women just they want these high standards. >> What's that thing that guys supposedly do? Figned incompetence. Is that what it's called? >> A weaponized weaponized incompetence.
It's lower standards. And women feel like they have to. I am always I around the house. I'm cleaning up and I'm grumbling and my husband is literally like >> to the stay at home dad >> is it going to make you sick? No, then leave it there. Like that's just how it is. So for a lot of the a lot of the comments that I got and there was one lady who I think had written an entire book basically on parody at home parody
on household. >> Oh, she's the one who made that deck of cards. >> I'm not sure >> the divorce deck. It's so stupid. Men don't care as much. >> Fair play. >> Fair play. Oh god, this is disgusting. It's this deck of cards that ruins marriages because it builds all this false res. >> It's supposed to be a conversation game where you you distribute cards that represent family tasks and they functionally speaking what it's supposed
to do is it's supposed to give wives a way of obliquely communicating to their husbands how shitty their husbands are >> officially resenting their husbands building resentment where it doesn't have to be. >> The there's there's people who believe >> do know for housewalk >> there's people who believe there's a that it really helps couples. I'm I'm not one of those people. Um uh but it's I yes I also my wife and I have also
referred to it as the divorce deck. >> Maybe it's just maybe it's just cuz I'm British but I I tend to try and give people at least like >> the little bit of room. I tend to give them the best uh interpretation of their work that I can. A lot of women say that men aren't prepared to assist enough around the house. They're not prepared to help enough with childare. >> They're really bad at it. If men
contributed more, women would feel more confident in starting a family. >> Men are contributing more than they ever have >> and they're they're super happy to >> the the share of domestic work being done, which means chores, child care, allin being done by men, has risen every decade for the last 90 years. Okay, it is at all-time highs. American dads do something like four times as large a share of domestic work as the most
involved pre-aggricultural society dads that we know. >> Well, when you look at it at like 1950s mothers, uh, now basically the the average American dad spends as much time on child care as a 1950s stay at home mom. >> There's so part of that is a change in classification of of what people mean when they say childare. But it is true there's been a huge change. Men are doing way more than they ever have.
We're still doing less than our wives on average. That's true. >> But they prefer doing that stuff more and they have higher standards which is why they they go into it. >> And the way we know it's a preference difference is cuz if you look at single men and women of the same age in the same race and you look who live alone and you look at their time spent on housework, those matched controls, those women
already do 200% more housework. Okay. So like, >> well, look at Asmin Gold's house. I mean, come on. Like the standard >> cleaned it up. Leave him alone. >> Well, yeah. And it's fine occasionally, right? >> But like, but like this is the point is like, yes, there are preference differences. And you do sometimes get the odd couple where actually the man is is more cleaning, intensive, but like um what you often get actually is a man who
values tidiness but doesn't want to do himself because his mom was very tidy. And that's a real problem some couples have is is you get mismatch on mom versus wife. But um and in which case he he probably just needs to like deal with it and accept that his wife isn't his mommy. But um but like it blows my mind when people are like if men did more housework fertility would be higher. And I'm like we are living
through the largest increase in male housework humanity has ever experienced and fertility is collapsing. Has it occurred to you that having a baby involves both people's choices? And often men are the ones who kind of are open to having more kids because they don't bear as much of the costs. If you shift more of the cost onto the men, the person in the couple who's more ready to start the conversation and say, "Have we
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considered this?" will not start the conversation. Like society, it's not clear that men sharing more of the burden increases fertility. What might is women having more broader support in society whether it's from government provided benefits or community organization provided benefits or just individual choice to do like you know various kinds of help with friends and family and stuff like that. basically alo parenting that does help
but when the total bill of work in a couple is not changed and you're just shuffling around who does it that's not boosting fertility because couples make choices together >> but also these conversations were often done by people who weren't in relationships again >> yeah like hypothetical I understand that the housework might be something that you've seen online I think when you actually add in emotional containment
you heard of that So it's the it's the uh >> task that man that men end up taking where there is some kind of emotional perturbment that's gone on either in the wife's life or around the home or with something that's happening close to the home and that the containment of that when you factor that in you almost basically zero out the work around the house. I don't know whether that's >> I'm fascinated how you how you quantify
that. >> Whoever is the voice on this topic is going to take arrows. I mean, there's no avoiding that. And I just want to say, I mean, I think it's three years since we first did a podcast, >> and at that time, no one was talking about fertility. It was incept weirdoatives. >> Right. Right. [laughter] It it was almost an unspeakable topic in the mainstream media except once a year when the fertility rate came out. Yeah.
>> And that would be it. Um I went through both US Congress and UK parliament you know records of speeches fertility or low birth rates was not mentioned once in any of those when Congress parliaments if you look now and it changed very quickly and it changed very quickly since you started talking about this. I I mean truly I mean politicians started talking about it. I know some of those directly map back to what you were
saying and the podcast that that that you were. So I guess I'm saying I'm hoping >> Elon effect I think. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. But Elon wants to be talking about this back to 2015. I saw him on CNN. So even in his early days talking about this, the media weren't prepared. So I I think you've done a huge um well favor to society to at least allow people to talk about childlessness. I mean that was completely unspeakable. And so when
I saw the internet explode with the word childlessness you taking off in a way it never has in February um you know well I mapped it to you and I'm pretty sure it was you but that's a good thing because even those people who say that they don't want children um at least they're thinking about it and at least they're able to talk to their friends about it even if it's >> it's not an unspeakable conversation
>> well and as a woman like there are many times where my husband will say the sensible thing and I'll get super mad about it and I'll be like, "No, you're wrong." And then I will I will, you know, I will spike the Google trends of our household >> and then I go and I sit and think about it and I let it sit. Um, and I ultimately see the reason in his argument. I think that sometimes when people have a very strong negative
reaction to something, it's just the first reaction. Um, and they need time to sit and think with it. And sometimes it's it's good to get a strong emotional reaction. When people are offended by something, it's only because something is credibly threatening their worldview, which means that basically they think there's some weight to that point you're making. They wouldn't be offended by what you said if they didn't think that
what you said might have a kernel of truth that maybe they're wrong. And it's terrifying to be wrong. It's terrifying to think maybe all the decisions I've made up to this point to be childless, to focus on my career first, maybe that's wrong. that that would make me mad. That would make me scared. And so the fact that you got all that anger, that is an incredibly good sign. You want to see people offended cuz they're
starting to think. >> I agree. And you know where this manifests itself, one of the most difficult things I've become aware of is the attacks on women from other women about whether they want to have kids or not. People who choose a life without children. I I I refuse to call it the CF word as I call it. I mean child child and free should not be put together. It's childlessness. People who choose childlessness attacking other women who
do want children saying but why would you want to do that? You can travel where you want. You can get up anytime you want. And seeing women on women attacking each other. That's the most sad thing in all of this. But again, you're right. At least people are. >> Is he saying if I identify as a woman, I might be able to see >> awake. I know. I love what people are trying to do. They like they don't want
to say childless. They don't want to say child-free is you see this with demographers. So they say null Paris. >> What >> which is the tech it's the technical term, but I'm like I feel like calling a woman null is actually way worse than less. >> Is this not a good thing because the climate's [ __ ] and fewer humans would be >> Look, we are not the first species by a long shot to cause global climate
change. This is just a normal thing that you can plan for and plan around. This is very different from climate change. >> I'm curious. Sorry. What? What other >> When biological life first came on to the continents. >> Oh, yeah. Fair. Yeah. I mean, just the advent of life here. >> Yeah. No, like when you when you study historical geology, you're like, "Oh, god." Like this. Look, it climate change is normal. We just have to plan around
it. Similar to demographic laps. You can't change it. With climate change, we can't stop climate. Like everyone was like, "Oh, well, if we meet these emissions like limits, then we'll be okay." And then COVID came, we met them. It wasn't enough because you can't stop it. Similar with demographic lapse. You can't stop it. You have to plan for That's a So that's an interesting difference I think between your corner
of the table and ours that the >> I want to stop it. >> Yeah, I I would >> it's not going to happen. >> You might be right, but I >> in from the iceberg on the Titanic. It's going to sink. Are you going to get on a lifeboat or not? >> I think I can keep that boat floating. >> Sure. You're [ __ ] I can get that boat through the Suez Canal. [laughter] Okay, give me a couple of guys and we can do it. Um, no. Okay.
So, on climate change, I think like um I'm I'm a climate change uh cautious optimist. Um, we have we have the technology. Okay. Or we're getting very close to it. No, like >> like solar panel like we're about to get there's a different type of solar panel that is about to come like the first commercial version of it is about to come online that's like 40% more efficient than the other ones. Nuclear
power is coming back. We're getting like small nuclear reactors. Like this is this is happening. We are getting Kentucky has one of the like reopened nuclear sites uh in the US which I'm super excited about. We're reopening the Paduka plant. Um I think we're going to beat it. I think though that a lot of climate declinists or kind of climate population declinists honestly just don't understand the math
>> because they are they are heerrained on the iPad equation which is impact equals population times affluence times technology. Okay. And so they see that as a causal relationship. If population goes up, impact goes up. impact on the climate that is if affluence goes up uh impact goes up but this is not this is an accounting diagram not a causal one the reality is we can look at countries that implemented population control
programs in the ' 60s '7s and ' 80s because the UN has been collecting data on this for decades and we can say what happened to their carbon emissions and the answer is the harder a country cracked down on population growth the faster their climate emissions rose now there's a variety of reasons that cracking down on population growth tended to be associated with really aggressive industrialization strategies.
>> But it turns out population just isn't the driver. It's actually all technology. The entire ver the entire equation really just boils down to t technology. If the technology is right, you solve the problem. >> Which means all you really care about literally the entire question for climate change and not just climate climate change, habitat production, species production is technology. Now, sometimes that's literal technology,
sometimes it's governance technology. Okay? So, like the quality of of government policy, particularly for like wildlife protection, that's the whole ballgame. Population growth doesn't predict uh uh habitat destruction and wildlife destruction um after you add any kind of control for governance quality. Um which is to say all you want is good technology or good governance. So, how do you get that? Well, I
mentioned earlier in this conversation, we know that larger populations innovate more. We know this. This is not ambiguous. It is a solved economic question. Therefore, if you know that your future depends on tech maxing and you know that more people gets you more tech, then the green future is a high population growth future. That's the only that's the only equilibrium it solves at. I think a lot of people are
[sighs] hopeful. People who don't care that much about birth rates but are still kind of like white pill on the fact that we're going to get through it is well it's going to be fine because we've got AI and AI is going to answer all of the problems. No. I'm struggling to sort of comport those two worldviews because what that does mean is that an awful lot of wealth will be concentrated in the hands of like eight people who
[snorts] all own those particular AI companies. And that doesn't seem to be typically the worldview that people who are not bothered about birth rate decline are interested in. It seems to be people who would typically not want to have eight people with 50% of the world's wealth but also people who don't care that much about but AI is going to solve the problem but the solving of the problem results in another thing that
they also don't like. So I think yeah the rubber's going to meet the road here at some point soon. I I think there is a lot of natural dissonance, cognitive dissonance um among societies who have been educated rightly that population totals are increasing and increasing and increasing. We've not been told at all despite knowing it for many decades that it's leveling off. So, I get the reality that people need a moment to stand back
and say, "Wait a minute. I've been told all my life that there's a population explosion and now it looks like that's over if there ever was one. What does that mean for everything else including the environment? But the topic of the environment is different ways you can come at it. But imagine that the crisis had not been population growth. It had been a meteor due to hit Earth. And imagine that we managed to
successfully divert this. So maybe a near miss. The meteor is not going to hit us anymore. It's gone. Will we be still sitting here talking about a meteor hitting Earth? No. That was then. And for me, when you look at the population growth challenge of the past, uh [snorts] total births on the planet peaked around 2013, I think 145 million in one year. It's way down already. That's total births, including Africa. Subsaharan
Africa. We're already past the point of a risk of populations going up further. So it is what it is. And the challenge we have now is how do we come out of this? Because I mean you can see here none of us have come out today to say here is the singular solution. >> Well, I did give a cost estimate. We could just buy example of how we can you know cut travel in somewhere. Yeah. And cost estimates. Yeah, I I you know, the
reason I believe this is a bigger topic for humanity to grapple with uh is the simple fact that there are potential solutions to every other crisis that I know. We might not like some of those, but at least we can talk about solutions. >> So, what are the solutions? I yours aside of [ __ ] it spaceship. >> We can't way out of it. >> No, no, we don't have the money for that. >> We do. We do. Okay. If the US added,
it'd be about five, six% of GDP a year max for the US to buy our way out of our current fertility situation back to 2.1. Um, if we added that amount of spending and taxation, we would still be spending tax. Oh, because that's going to happen. >> We would be spending and taxing less than almost any European country. Still now incentives aren't aligned. >> Okay, I agree with you. Politically, it's unlikely. But the question is, what
could we do? That could be done if we all Where would that money go? Just for clarity, >> baby bonus. You have a baby, you get a check. >> How big does the check need to be? >> In the US, uh, I want to say it's about 150,000 per baby. >> And what if you don't already have a partner? So, I don't >> have a baby, get a check. >> Find a partner, have a baby. >> Have a baby, get a check. >> Right. Okay. But you do need to find a
>> It sounds like a romcom plot. >> Why are Why are we not just >> Have a one night stand and don't tell them you're not using protection. >> Get out. >> You can just eliminate income tax fories. A real >> racket. So that is a real I actually agree you you could do things that are maybe a little bit less blunt >> that would only be to mothers as well. This would actually be a very safe >> so the interesting so obviously the
reason I I quote it that way is because to get simplified condensed modeling estimates we have to convert policies across all these studies into a common baseline. So the common baseline is a one-time per child unrestricted baby bonus. But you could do it otherwise. Yeah like France's quotient system where like each additional child multiplies your tax brackets. Or you can think about instead um actually one of my
favorite ways to do this uh the Heritage Foundation uh kind of teased this idea, but I think it's worth exploring more. They're like, "Okay, what if you do an investment for every child when they're born and then when they marry or have kids, they get the they get the realized return on it. Suddenly you have these big payouts that the government only put a little money in, but after 30 years of investment, it actually
>> accounts were kind of >> but it's not for kids. It's for like when you hit 18 or when you it's so it's not a kid. I thought I felt when I asked you earlier on is cost of living the problem you said no. >> No. And see that's the thing is money is not going to cause >> cost of living didn't cause it in the same way that uh you know bad genes might cause bad eyesight but that doesn't mean you have to fix the genes
to fix. >> Why are we going to throw money into a broken system cause the decline but >> it can fix it? >> No >> enough enough everybody has a price. >> Well the price No, most people think the real price is like $300,000 or above and you're saying 150. >> There's a lot of people who do it for 150. [laughter] Will those people be contributing enough in their future tax income to make up for that? >> Uh maybe, maybe not.
>> That's why income tax >> also would this incentivize people would this incentivize people who shouldn't become parents to become parents because that's why income tax is a better solution if we're talking. >> I'm not saying that a gigantic single baby bonus is the optimal policy. I'm saying could we do anything? >> I am ready to genus Khan my way to a billion dollars. >> At the at the extreme level, could we do
something? Yes, we can. We won't. It's not going to happen. >> You didn't stop to ask if you should like, okay, I agree. >> 150k baby bonus probably not the optimal way to do this. It'd be better to start by just eliminating all the marriage penalties and the tax. >> That is big. What's that? >> If you're middle class and you get married in the United States, yeah, we're okay. Working class. Well, but
that is kind of the middle class now. And you have a salary, you're going to take a tax penalty when you get married >> or a welfare penalty. So there's a lot of people like there's a lot of single parents in in the US who they have one kid maybe and now their kid is on welfare for their healthare. They're getting housing benefits. They're getting food and if they marry the baby daddy they lose all of it.
>> We know a lot of people who are or because then you're >> now his income is included in >> welfare because you're only getting this these benefits based on household income. >> Yeah. The United States is a socialist utopia if you are a single woman living near the poverty line. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, but every country has this particularly if two people have similar income. So,
talking about work family balance, marriage penalties for middle and upper earners are highest when the two partners have similar incomes. For a people, for somebody like me who's a bread winner with a zero earnner wife, I get a huge bonus for being married. Like, if I was not married to my wife, my taxes would be way higher, but I get a benefit for being married because my wife has no income. But if
two people have similar incomes in their middle or upper end income and they get married, they have huge penalties, it's even bigger for lower income people, >> which is insane because these people would be raising the highest taxpayers in the future. >> So in principle, like solve marriage penalties is item one. Now that does cost money because like you can do it in a revenue neutral way, but doing so
creates a lot of losers from the policy change. So to do it in a way that gives you politically viable numbers of losers, you do spend money, but like yes, that's your highest impact thing. And notably, South Korea's increase in fertility in the last 3 years, which is like they've increased fertility by like 02 or.3 kits in three years. Like that's nothing to sneeze at. And yes, it's still only at one, but that's a lot
better than 7. Partly they did increase child benefits and child cash stuff. But the big change they did is they created an explicit marriage bonus and marriage rates rose for the first time in 25 years. Okay? Even though it's a bad luck year in East Asian culture right now. So I would just say like dealing with marriage, we already know marriage is a big factor. We know marriage penalty, we have tons of studies showing marriage
penalties reduce marriage rates. Um solving marriage, getting rid of marriage penalties is a basic first step. Dealing with housing supply, dealing with educational timing, that's something we've talked about that's related to age in a in a powerful way. There's all these things we can do. >> Yeah. That the housing crisis is basically manufactured because zoning laws restrict people who want to build
houses from building houses. If we were able to build houses wherever we wanted, there would no no longer >> or they only allowed them to build celibacy cells like basically like like uh studio apartments in >> never raise a family and no one wants to raise a family and it's not in conducive to a couple who may be living together in a studio studio apartment for going we should really start our family here.
>> Well, they might not be allowed to. There are many apartments that you can apply to that are like sorry we're capped at this number of occupants. So if you have a family of six, there's so many like getting an apartment that will take you in a city is incredibly hard. >> Okay. Okay. So money is one of them in variety of different >> and I disagree with that by the way. >> Yeah. I I don't see enough evidence
given the amount of spend and Hungary for example did spend 6% of GDP the amount that we spend on >> they claim to but it's a lie to be clear. They're not telling the truth about how much they spend. >> Sure. >> All right. If you look at >> they're counting sorry they're counting the face value of the loans that they will underwrite if people fully comply with the conditions. Many people will not fully comply with the conditions and
counting face value of loans you're underwriting on the day >> percent they spend I'll take your number >> about 2 or 3%. >> And South Korea >> uh South Korea is like 1%. >> South Korea is way below the OECD average. All the Asian countries are >> which is one reason why they have low fertility. Imagine it's economics an economic issue to be solved to some extent. You've got this thing called the law of diminishing returns which means
the incentive prioritizes people who are in relationships and we're thinking of kids anyway. It's like well we were thinking about anyway so why not now? Let's let's so there's something called the the the Swedish roller coaster in demography which goes back over decades which shows that when they brought out incentives to have kids that indeed the birth rate went up and then afterwards it went down and it often went down
below where it was before because what happened you had an acceleration of people who are going to have kids completed fertility it rose.3 children above a a plausible synthetic control. The policy created tempo effects that over time became cohort effects. >> And what's Sweden's birth rate now though? >> Yeah, it's higher than Italy's. >> But it's not enough. It's >> No, I agree. It's not enough. Also,
they're not spending that much. They're Okay, remember I said you could get there by spending an additional anywhere from 2 to 12% of GDP. Sweden spending is like three total. >> You're blindly discounting the other end of the equation, which is like demographic collapse is accelerated by two things. More government spending and fewer births. And if you just increase your government spending, you're going
to need even more births to make up for that. It just doesn't make sense to me. >> I don't understand the link between government spending and demographic collapse. >> If we run out of our funds as a government faster, we can't pay our pensions sooner. We run out of >> problem for small budget constrained countries like a euro country, but it's not a problem for the US where you can just print it. >> But eventually we're going to end up
with hyperinflation. I know that right now we're the default currency of the world, but the faith is shaking more and more every year. >> It I mean it is, but if with super with super powerful AI, productivity growth is going to be high enough to pay. >> Well, I certainly hope so. I I would love that and we're certainly betting on that. But I mean, I think that in the end, the solution isn't going to come
from government. It's going to come from culture, from individual. >> I agree that trying to solve it purely through cash would be a fool's errand. You I am saying theoretically you could. I would not actually I would I literally have discouraged a government from trying to solve it just that way. But I would say going to a public in a modern welfare state and saying we're going to try and solve this but we're not going
to give you any extra cash will never succeed. I agree with that. You could change the rules and the laws and the regulations at at roughly I agree that's the right place and that would make such a huge difference. >> Pension plans some countries give care credits. When you step out of work to watch your kids, yeah, >> you get a pin a bonus to your pension calculation. >> Again, it would be so much more
efficient if we didn't launder our child care and elder care through a ton of fraudulent businesses and instead kept it. Also, the quality of care is much better for a child or for an elder person if they're being taken care of by a family member. Like, the alignment is just better. And and so you're you're losing tons of money. You're losing tons of quality. like we can just tighten up the government a little bit without
spending that like materially more money. It's just that right now to untangle that from a policy perspective to get politicians to actually do it. We also just have to practically accept that it's not going to happen. So we have to look at what we can do to show individual people how to take manners into their own hands. We're we're going to see a drop in fertility. We're going to see that a lot of people are going to
disappear. Cities are going to crumble. Uh social services are going to fall apart. But in the end, like any given population whose perspective in the future I don't want to lose, um can just logarithmically grow into the future as long as enough families that share that culture. Yeah. Like for it's fine, you know, like so this is again very low stress. A couple people are going to get it from every
culture hopefully. I again we're losing indigenous Americans at the very least. Maybe Jane's too, but like a lot of people there's going to be enough and they will be there and and so I I really am more interested in them because functionally anyone else who can't get their act together is not going to matter. >> Well, are you saying though that we don't need to focus on policies to increase the likelihood of people
becoming parents at a younger age? I mean, it can't only be about encouraging people to have five. >> I'm all for increasing those policies. I mean, even if you just care about government efficiency, those policies are favorable. And I'm also all for making this as pleasant of a transition as possible. Um, but it's you, one of the remarkable things to me, um, I don't think I'm overusing it is that when you
look at the stability of family size over decades now, so in the US, it's actually gone up from around 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 children per mother if we focus on mothers. But underneath that the number of one child families 2 3 4 5 in Japan 6% of mothers were having four or more children in 1970 and it's the same today. >> You seem to have this really ingrained structure that throughout changes in political environment through crisis
mothers just keep on having the same typical number of children as their mother's generation. and in the case of some nations now their grandmother's generation now some societies have taken longer to get down to that lower level of two maybe three I can't see us as societies therefore easily going back to a situation where five becomes a norm when all the other types die off which is going to happen
>> I don't think it's about type I mean what type what do you mean by type >> cultural inherited culture. >> Well, the low fertility cultures die and then also all the low fertility >> say genetic sets die off you have left. The reality is if we as our cultures continue on the path we're going on, we're going to keep having every few decades and those cultures are going to be overtaken by >> well that's the point. [laughter] That's
my point. >> They don't matter like matters or subcultures who don't follow. So when the government falls apart, who's going to defend their way of life, right? You have to look at what technophilic populations have high fertility. So Israel, very interesting. I'm interested in going to space with them because they're going to be high fertility and they're maintaining a technilic culture, >> but they're having trouble. I mean, even
amid this dramatic security crisis that Israel has right now, the Hassadim are one of the most militaristically voting populations and yet they're still not conscripting them. Um they're still not sharing sharing the security burden. And so even Israel, I think there's a very open question about um whether their model is even long technophilic, so to speak. >> That's for them to figure out. I think
that there is um >> the real the real feel like their their way of life is threatened by their technophobic nature. Um I think we have very good reason to believe that they will do what they need to do to survive. >> I think I think the the strongest case is probably actually the Listadians, right? because they're high educational attainment, fully integrated. They're are political participants in Finland.
Um I mean they've had prime ministers. Uh they're a fully integrated community that still maintains six kids, so five six kids a woman. Um but uh but they do have high attrition rates. I mean they lose I want to say 30 or 40% of their kids um outside of the sect. Um >> well that's another here's another thing though. >> I would go to space with them because I I already commune with them. We're the same.
>> They sound cool. No, like when the coolest thing too about pronatalism is that the cultures that are going to survive long term. They're they're technophilic. They are they are um high fertility, but also they give the kids the best possible upbringing. This is something you win through love, through giving people such good lives that they're like, I love this so much. I can't wait to give this to my kids. And
that's so cool. In in the past, we used to conquer countries and nations and continents through war, through death, through killing. And now the entire world is your oyster if you just love better, if you give better lives, if you help humans flourish. And that's just another one of those things that's so great about this movement. Like when I was raised like in a very environmentalist mindset and it was
always like step back, sacrifice this, you know, do this. And it just wasn't very fun. Prenatalism, for those who practice it, um it's fun. It's about optimism for the future, a love of humanity, a love of life. Um, and that's super low stress. >> But I imagine it's also about having children at a younger age because Yeah. No, totally. And I bet you in Israel, it's not all of Israel because I know birth rates are very divided between the
different groupings there, >> but they do start earlier. >> But there's going to start earlier. So all maps, every way you look at this, so back to incentives and solutions, for me, the benchmark for any potential solution, whatever it is, is how can this >> in any way see people who want to have kids have them at a younger age? But if we can't for me, move on. Find something else. >> Yeah. >> I'll just say, uh, you know, again, not
to harp on cash, but I think cash is is misunderstood as a benefit. >> Well, then put kids to work earlier and have them earn their own money. >> But, uh, the effect on studies that look by par. So, we're looking not how did this policy increase the birth rate, but how does include how did it increase first birth or second birth or third birth rates. Effects were biggest on first birth rates. that is say people
going on to a third birth if you already have two kids or you're going on to a third or fourth or fifth you have intrinsic motivations for fertility >> economies of scale >> right well but also at that point like the person who's considering a fifth kid like like me or like you all were not too long ago I guess um they already have reasons to have kids like they don't really care about the money they've already demonstrated they can
afford the first four and that they just they like kids >> well the marginal cost as well the complexity the additional complexity of going >> not really like after four It's just so much easier. >> That's my point. Going from four to five, economists have always said that money should matter more at higher parodies because the marginal kit is so cheap that but it in reality the empirical estimates show the opposite
that actually money is most influential on first birth. >> Well, you need to get them over the line because once you've got somebody to become a mother, >> this is my point. Money for the people who are hesitant about a first kid about marriage, money does sway them. For people considering a fourth kid, it doesn't. >> I don't know. No, I don't know. They don't really because fourth kids come from values. First kids come from
feeling secure enough to make the choice when you're 25. >> Katherine Ruth Pollock did a lot of research on this >> and she's studying highly values motivated people who already have four kids. >> Yeah. Well, well, educated, so college educated women who had five or more. >> She's a great example. Money doesn't matter for >> No, no, no. Her what she found when she when she interviewed these women was for
so many of them, and this is to your point, their experience with their first child was really the tipping point. None of them planned on having a lot of kids. And what happened that she noticed again and again was these women had such a great experience with their first kid. They were like, I can do more. And honestly, the the hardest number of kids to have. I don't know what your experiences were, but for us, it was
just one. That was the hardest number to have. >> Was an only child that hit, huh? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, it's the biggest life change. It's like it's it's hard. >> You were really hard, man. >> You must have been a handful. I was a hand. I mean, like it's it's tough. And I think that, you know, it I don't think that money solves that. you know, you you can pay for all these things and we found at least personally that throwing
money at the problem didn't solve it at all that community ultimately did. What about what one none of the interventions that I've heard >> I agree I mean community is going to out >> pound for dollar community is going getting more pronatal more aloparentally supportive communities is going to be a thousand times more efficient than just throwing cash in I would just say it's hard for those communities to form in a
mo those communities are having a hard time forming in our society giving them a leg up by >> having giving the community the ability to say hey look I know you're nervous about having a kid but dude the government's literally going to give you $10,000 like you probably can't afford. >> Surely the although it might be the most difficult thing to do, the most effective thing to do would be to change
what is high and low status. If you make it high status to become a mom again, if you make it high status to have a family again. >> Oh, and I introduced this idea of having a medal for motherhood and what do they do? They call me a Nazi. >> I didn't say Stalinist, >> right? Well, no, and I think France did it first. >> No, actually a lot of countries have done it. >> Yeah. Um the the studies on I mean I I
have no opposition to motherhood metals in principle. There's only like two studies on them and they both seem to find null effects. But I think >> yeah I don't I don't think they'll actually real status not but here here's my thing. If you if you're a country that has a monarchy there's a really easy way to do this. The royal family every 2year-old born to citizens will be entered into a lottery >> for their second birth for their third
birthday. If they win the lottery, they get their birthday party with the royal family. Okay? And you choose 50 kids a year for each royal. If you've got a royal family, including all the random cousins, you've got maybe 30 royals. You could get a couple hundred, a couple thousand kids every year. That's a pretty good lottery. >> We don't know because no one's tried it. >> Well, that pastor in uh where was he? Uh
Georgia. >> Georgia. Yeah. >> Okay. I wrote the paper on this, right? And it worked. when he when he uh the leader of the Georgia Orthodox Church when he started personally baptizing third or higher ch children fertility rose directly in response people [ __ ] speed ran pregnancy dude I want to get baptized by that guy >> exacted women that women that he was targeting and the reason it worked is because he was beloved he was a figure
of national identity and he was offering to become a godparent which in that theological tradition means he's literally your family >> so like our discussion that we had about K-pop stars in order to be a K-pop star which is the most influential for all of Korea you can't kids and you have to be celibate for the entire time. >> Korea did this to themselves. >> Invert it. Say the only way you can become a K-pop star is if you already
have a child. >> I have advised multiple governments that h that host lots of con small countries that host a lot of concerts that have low fertility or that they're worried about fertility. Simple solution. It's illegal to publicly perform music unless you have children. >> Well, I mean, but look at So, Japan, for example, like relatively has a pretty good birth rate. The amount of anime that is pronatal at this point is just
off the chain. Like I think it it doesn't not help. I think we should have more of that. >> The problem Japan's birth rate is 1.25. It's sad that we're living in a time when that's considered >> I know they're holding on to it. So one of the things I'm interested in is how sensibly pro-natalist policies that incentivize mothers are interpreted when people put them out. Have you seen this? So guys, if you now live in the UK and
you don't have children, you now may be subject to the no kids tax or the child-free tax of which may be implemented now under a reform UK government. You see, under this new policy, people who do not have children should pay more tax. You heard that right. Instead of actually helping those or giving benefits to those who have more children, let's penalize those who chose to not go down that financial and
mental route. >> It's the same thing. Goodwin, a reform UK candidate, actually proposed this as the negative child benefit tax. And the purpose is quite literally in the name is to tax anyone without any offspring and to actually remove personal income tax to any woman with more than two children. He frames this to reinforce family values alongside reinforcing the nuclear family. Now already, don't you
think it's very interesting how they surround this entire thing around women, not men and women? It's almost as if they know that this is going to be specifically and disproportionately targeting women with this tax. And so if you need any more of a reason to vote against this godforsaken party that's actively trying to poison this country and if you want to respect the autonomy of your own body and not feel pressured
to do anything else with it, maybe, just maybe, you should vote against this madness. >> What do we uh what do we what do we >> I mean there's there's no difference between a child benefit and a childlessness tax. However, messaging does matter. So it's, you know, there's a couple of studies that look at cash benefits in developing countries and they've they've studied if you rename the benefit you're giving, does it
change how people use it? So if you tell people this is a benefit for having kids, does it change how they or this is a benefit cuz you're poor, does it change what they use it on versus if you tell them this is a benefit to pay for your child's education? What they found is yes. Literally just renaming a child benefit substantively changes how people use it. I do think things like renaming the child tax credit the parenting wage
might be useful. That said, I do think there's a there's a problem with statusbased approaches to fertility. Influencers talking about how great family is is probably a good thing, but not because it only operates through status. It also operates through perceptions of joy. Okay. Status can be very alienated. I would argue right now motherhood is already extremely high status. Okay. a lot of who >> to many people and what I mean by that
is a lot of people aspire to motherhood and see it as something they'll never be able to achieve because it's so expensive and so hard. It is high status. It is an aspirational costly good. >> When we say status, status is this like catchall term. What do we really mean? What we really mean is we want people to see it as an accessible way to gain >> attainable and aspirational. No, that that's so true because also so many
people have grown up never having held a baby. The number of only children that have grown up and this is another thing that that Dr. Ruth Pollik has pointed out, right, that like >> most people it's just there's there's no they can't they can't imagine what it's like and so it's very hard to make it happen. >> I had a I had a conversation with my housemate last year and his sister gave birth and this is the first baby that
he's held as a as an adult and it's his kin, right? his uncle and he said he held this baby in his arms and he said, "I understand why men go to war." >> He experienced chemistry >> and he was like, "Oh, I understand why I understand why men fight and die in wars." >> Yeah. First baby I held was my was my now wife's uh first nephew. Um he was also the first baby I babysat and like all this stuff. Basically, they they
were like boyfriend conscripted childcare. Um >> yes, it's absolutely a thing. And there's actually like >> mimemetic sort of self-reinforcing. >> There's a lot of studies that show that fertility is a contagious behavior on both sides. When someone in your social circle um adopts a long delay strategy for fertility, like they um they they have an abortion or they adopt a long acting reversible contraception or
sterilization or they simply take a long time to have a kid. It affects your odds of having a kid in a negative way. >> Same thing happens with divorce. Well, and a lot of things like being fat, having certain careers, like it's all about, you know, what you see and how you I mean, things are contagious. >> So, you're saying if you are the uh boyfriend or girlfriend of a girlfriend or boyfriend and you want to have kids
with them relatively soon, a good idea is to pick someone whose friends around them are moving towards marriage and family. >> Yeah. >> Babysitting your nieces and nephews is a great third date. >> Yeah. Like honestly, like >> that's [ __ ] wild. That >> no like seriously like >> like >> oh my god >> getting kids involved earlier >> is a really a really solid filtering mechanism. >> Apart from the fact that almost no one
lives within 50 mi of their parents anymore. >> No, actually 60% of people do. >> Okay. >> It's just like like highly educated people don't. >> Oh, >> awkward. I'm on the other side of the [ __ ] Atlantic. >> Okay. So, uh money throw money. It's one potential solution like that is it before we get on to and I am interested in the long-termism >> solution for this. >> What what do you propose because people
always say what are we going to do about it? How do we do it? And you can equivocate all you want and talk about this. What what would you put forward as some incentives, some uh uh uh policies that could work? >> Yeah, I for me for forget incentives. Um, for me the core issue to address is paraboning. If you don't have parab bonding, you don't get couples. You don't get couples. You don't get children.
>> And you knew I was right. >> And um, everything I'm hearing I I don't completely disagree with any of it, but for me it's in the margins and we've been >> how do you get more pair bonding? >> That's the question. That is the question. So for me everything comes >> the baby you get the bond. Well, there there is one real advantage that societies appear to hold, which is that the vast majority of people do want
to become parents one day. And that people today simply do not know that if you wait to 30, apparently it seems universally, the likelihood based on outcomes is less than 50%. And I know for a fact that once young people are told that, especially women, something goes, "What do you mean it's only a 50% chance? I thought 35 was fine." >> There's a couple of like randomized control trials on this showing this.
Yeah. >> Well, yeah. But but also, I mean, if you you look at outcome results, I mean, I've got a website coming up that's got the average age of the likelihood of childlessness by by country. And it's shocking even to me and I've been sitting with this data for a long time if we do not open up pathways no matter how much financial incentives uh we offer to enable young people particularly women to still continue the
careers they want to have and the education. So to be specific we've got to reinvent education. That's where it starts. I think lifelong learning is a great thing. I'm a lifelong learner myself. If I go back to college, I have done throughout my my 40s and 50s. And it's to take courses that I want to study. >> Not everybody's a learner. Not everybody's super keen about the idea of long-term education. Some people can't
wait to get out of it. >> That's fine. But why compress three, four plus years of young people's lives into studying things that they will probably never use. And for what purpose? >> Yeah. >> What else you do? What do you do instead? >> Well, earn money. Get out. become >> what 13. >> Yeah. >> Well, I think everybody society should be >> labor laws are ruining this country, right? >> The children yearn for the mind.
>> I will say there actually is a study showing the child labor laws in the in US history do reduce fertility. >> I think we can take two years of education. >> That's not an endorsement, by the way. >> Two years. >> Yeah. A year out of high school. >> I will say there is a there is there is a study. So Quebec is the great test case for this, okay? Because Quebec >> actually finishes education a year
earlier through a unique program where high school is three years and then there's like a two-year community college thing for people who want to do that and then it's a three-year university. So if you finish university it's at the same time as other people but a hu but everyone who goes to university does sageep for two years before and a lot of people are done at seep and so the total show you like go
on university is lower and there's been some suggest and the result is kebeekqua on average finish education a year earlier now earlier I said I'm not aware of a study that says that tertiary education shapes fertility in a big way and that's true. Um, Quebec is an interesting case because what they do is they have really high tertiary educational attainment. Lots of people get it. They also have some of the
highest fertility in Canada, but the way they do it is they do compress the length of the tertiary education. So, lots of people get these Sageep degrees and they're they essentially got a technical degree 18 months faster than people in Ontario would get the same degree. So attainment chemical people on some level are like better educated by some measures. It's a little complicated and yeah have higher
fertility but it's because they hit similar milestones like 6 to 18 months earlier and it seems to be in in I know there's some studies exploring this um nobody's conclusively demonstrated but does seem to be that compressing the educational timeline um like same credential shorter time might be part of why Quebec has higher fertility than the rest of Canada. Um there's some other good variation to explore with this in
Canada because they've changed educational timelines several times and I'd love for somebody to do a study on it more extensively. Um but uh um so I think that that goes to your point that yes like any way to compress would be a good idea. >> Yeah. And I think young people would be in favor like hey less less schooling that's good. Earning money sooner that's good. Employers able to hire more people
and and train them that's good. But I I would add in this lifelong learning aspect which is it's like you get twothirds way through studying something and you get some recognition for that. That's important. >> Well, the best learning is on the job. That's how you learn best. It's applied >> and you learn what you like and what you don't like and you may well shift. So for that last third of your education,
split over summer school over 3, four years, have employers and then government support people going back once they fine-tuned their education into something that they >> this doesn't fundamentally change the reward paradigm of the longer that I wait, the bet, the higher my sexual market value, the better partner. >> Doesn't change that. >> Which is ultimately like that's like starting the race sooner. Yes. But the
finish line doesn't exist. There is no finish line. You choose when you're going to give up. No, you choose when you're going to exit. >> If you think the finish line is at 40 and you find out actually it's probably at 3032. >> So the information shock that is I'll say I actually so for a variety of reasons education on fertility information is probably an effective and cheap strategy for some marginal changes
um and maybe big ones. It it remains to be seen but um but you're right that the educational timeline doesn't change the age earnings gradient. But I want to point out on some level cash does, right? Because if I told you you get a $150,000 nest egg for having a baby at 23. Okay. Like maybe the man won't have great earnings, but like you'll be okay. >> Yeah. Now, >> what are some just talking on that if
it's information shock is a strategy? >> Yeah. What are some of the pieces of information that you've found shock people the most? >> I mean for I mean just age gradient of decline is one another one and this one blows up men's mind. >> Hold on there. So like I give you a bunch of different billboards. >> Yeah. >> Around the world free. I can put them anywhere that you want. What are the three or five things that everybody
around the table is going to put on the billboard? >> My wife has told me that I'm bad at understanding how normal people think. And so I'm not a great judge there because I would just be like a graph and and there would be a line going down that is showing women's odds of conceiving in a given month of active sex by age. And then on the other hand would be a line going up and it's the number of mutations in a man's sperm by
age. Um and the point of it would be like >> you have less time. >> It's a frecon. Um because she doesn't have time to conceive and he doesn't have time to conceive the kids that he's dreaming of having. Um so uh people talk about this as a woman's problem and it's true a man can conceive children for a very long time but it is male age that's most predictive of most denovo of most pathogenic denovo genetic mutations
basically like bad stuff in your genes now women's age also matters for stuff like down syndrome um but so I would I would that's what I would want to communicate somehow I'd work with a marketing company to figure out the best workshop in my mind it's just a graph that's X. >> What would you put on? >> Well, it's a refined version of what probably we're saying here, but it's a very simple one that in every country, I
love the idea of billboards because it's simple. The probability of becoming a mother at age 30 is X or the probability falls to 50% by what age? And just that alone, I mean, >> if you don't have a kid by age 30, your odds of ever having a kid are only 48%. >> Yeah. Don't waste your life. They don't care. They don't care. >> No, they do care. They care. Oh my gosh. Randomized all say they do care. When
you give when you sit two classes of students in different rooms and you give one of them fertility education seminar and the other one just like a generalformational movie creates a large effect. And there's only one study that's done like a two-year follow-up on like it was like married couples who did it. And they found this the group that got an educa that got the education had twice as high off.
They were already married. The coupling has been fixed. letters from high school classes that have been presented pronatalist and antiatalist. They have zero interest in kids. >> It needs more research. But all of the randomized controlled trials that have been done mostly on college students or this one on married couples suggests the values do change in response to information. And the only one with
behavioral follow-up, which is this married couple one, the behaviors also changed. It could >> be couples and marrying is the first step to having kids. That's >> it. be that the values change in the college students would not translate into behavior. That could be. But right now, the evidence we have is consistent with the behavioral effect. I would love to see a bigger study on this. It blows my mind.
>> I'd like to see it, too. I would I would change my mind with with information for sure. >> I agree. It's not it's not a slam dunk. Yeah, but it's worth studying. >> Yeah, sure. >> I want to share why I'm so confident that people will respond to this this message, particularly women. You know, I I made the birth cut documentary and I I we were in editing during COVID for like two years. And during that, whenever it
was allowed in Japan, I would have these home parties and I'd screen it to people, Japanese, international people, men, women, mainly 30s, 40s, some 20s. Um I even invited a you know a group of feminists I would say who who came or I wanted to hear those voices too. I got all parts of the spectrum but I noticed two things after watching the early copies of the documentary. I couldn't get people to talk about
anything else. And this these were events where I was like tired of making this birth. Let's talk about the weather. >> Could you give your spiel again? >> Yeah. Yeah. No. Uh, but they actually didn't even need me. They were talking to each other. >> Sure. >> About how it is that they can meet their dreams of having kids or if they don't want kids or or or what whatever else. >> Here's where that goes wrong though. You
were speaking to the Japanese people who go to parties. What about the Hikumori? Okay. What about the vegetarian men? They didn't show up. You don't hear from them because they're in their apartments not leaving for months on end. >> Yeah. But I think that's downstream. I think we've created environments where particularly young men give up on the possibility of ever >> young women too. What about the fourbs?
>> All you're saying is that the effect size in the population will be smaller than he's describing, not that it will be zero. Cuz if it's effective for a subgroup, that's still something. >> That's good power to the people. That's Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I mean, you're doing really good important work and I love I mean, you you have probably caused so many families to have children. >> I get photographs of babies sent to me
quite a lot. be careful with the Epstein emails. >> So, but on information like I think fertility information is a big one, but I think we should it's worth talking about reproach a little bit because a lot of people have good and bad have a lot of people have bad information in different ways about repro. One is they over they overestimate the effectiveness of IVF often. >> Um but the interesting one to me is like
so my wife and I um we had a lot of miscarriages uh and we like did genetic testing to figure out like what's going on. Do we have like cuz some kind of incompatibility or condition? Nothing was identified conclusively. Um my wife had like blood tests. We didn't find anything specific. There was some like maybe indicators of something called antifphospholipid syndrome, but it wasn't a slam dunk. But finally our OB
was a university research OB was just like look next time you're pregnant we're going to start you on the drug for this condition like prophylactically. Um it's called inoxiparin. It's a huge pain in the butt injection that my wife has to do every day of the pregnancy. He was like, "Just prophylactically, we're going to try this. See what happens." Um, we've had zero miscarriages and three kids since. We had the first kid
before it in between some miscarriages. >> Um, and she barely survived infancy. Um, that drug is still not standard of care in any country in the world, even though it's been in been it's been around for 30 years. Even though recurrent miscarriage, if all we did using clinical clinically demonstrated effectiveness was get every person using that drug after their first miscarriage or even after their second, we would
have in the US somewhere between 2 and 15,000 extra babies every year. >> Wow. >> And miscarriage prevention is like very obviously just a good thing. >> It's so traumatic. >> And yet we're very Yeah, it's traumatic. And yet we are so hesitant about experimenting on pregnant women, about being like risk-taking with pregnant women. >> Does that make sense? It seems like it would be a good idea to be
>> Okay, it is, but like at the end of the day, when you're dealing with somebody who's who's had recurrent miscarriage or recurrent infertility, they usually want to shotgun blast. They usually want to try everything. >> And if it's opt-in and informed consent, >> throw everything, but doctors won't do it. >> Why is it that we haven't spoken about the impact of hormonal birth control and reliable contraception? Is that not the
line in the science? It's not that correlated with it's just so this is usually from the from the guys that are more manosphere red pilly this is the first thing that they throw out women's reproductive independence replacement rate fertility in the US not even controlling for mortality just below replacement rate fertility in the US is first directly observed in the 1920s and if every single married woman in
America today conceived at the rate of Amish women of the same age in marital status this fertility in the US would still be less than three children per woman. Okay? Because there's just not enough reproductive age women who are married. Okay? The difference between us and the Amish is mostly about marriage, not birth control. Okay? It's like birth control, it's not it's not that it has no effect. It does have some some
effect, but people use birth control was invented when it was because that's when people wanted it. Okay? The technology to invent it existed decades earlier. it was not actually that like breakthrough at like a chemical level. It's just that that's when the demand for it was there. So, but the my point about the miscarriage thing was not not to sob story about my own family. I'm very happy about my family. Um but uh but
because we didn't know, okay, we didn't know. No one told us how common miscarriage could be. No one was telling us there are options for for miscarriage. There's options for these things. So, and so much reprote research goes into IVF and that's for people who want IVF that's a great benefit. >> But there are so many conditions that make it hard for people to conceive or to have healthy children >> or that prevent them from even trying.
>> Yes. >> Like I was told that if you have C-section, you can't have more than three and then you have to stop. >> But you can. >> The world record is 11. >> Yeah. >> Like my surgeon who did my last one, her her record is eight. Like and and but everyone I talked to was like, "Well, I know you can't have more than three C. the same sort of uh justification that's put forward by people go well my cousin
she had her first kid when she was 43 and she had a second when she was 46. No, no. What she what she's saying is there are there are risks to subsequent births after C-section, but for many women, they are manageable with modern surgery and support that the risks are trivial. What I'm trying to say, there is a huge belief that it is impossible to have more than three kids >> or that the risk is gigantically high
when you do >> it can be for some women, but for many people the >> risk of a V-back is not totally random. it is somewhat predictable and risk of repeated C-section uh sorry vaginal birth after C-section. Um so doing a vaginal birth but even in the risk of repeated C-sections it's not like a doctor looks at a woman with prior C-sections like well gosh we have no way of figuring out if you could have
another one there. The problem is doctors are very riskaverse and so they often won't even tell you what they think your risk is. But the point is even things like GLP1s like like oyic and stuff like when people go on GLP1s they're suddenly more likely to have kids. Now one reason is because GLP1s interfere with absorption of hormonal contraception. The other one is they lose weight. >> Yeah. >> So you're hot.
>> You're hotter. But also when you're when you lose weight you also tend to have just like a healthier balance of hormones in your body. >> Super underweight or super overweight. You're less likely to get pregnant. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Again all of this is interesting. Clearly it's interesting but it's in the margins you know and all of these things can >> margins is a big thing. >> I don't think unless we find a way to
fundamentally open up society for people to pair bond at a younger age any of this will have a long-term >> look the societies that do that and there are micro societies that are doing that they will inherit the future like I don't see what the big problem is. It's happening. It's going to happen. It's it's done. Problem solved. >> Well that sounds kind of anti to me if you're saying it's done. It's not
because the pronatalist cultures are going to win, right? >> It's it's pronatalist just over a longer time time horizon. >> Yeah. Look, I'm not going to force people who don't want to have kids to to have kids. And also, if they are if they're not going to get their acts together and do it, and if they really don't care that much, then I don't want them to have >> Look, I do I so I understand where
you're coming from here, which is like, look, guys, no one and this is your whole thing, right? I want women to be able to have the number of children they want. And much of the conversation >> too for the record. >> Yeah, of course. But a lot of a lot of the conversation is that the number of children that you think you want isn't the number of children you think you want. At least at the age that you're at
at the moment because maybe you've got culture, maybe you've got other things in the way, maybe you've got fear. >> Revise the number up as they age. >> Yeah, I'm [ __ ] bet they do. Which is the opposite of the way that it works. Um, so I understand why that would be the right single person around this table is not saying at all to anyone, you need to become a breeder because there will be breeders in the future and
and they will be the ones that inherit the earth. I think what we're trying to do here is go, hey, and this is where it comes back to the information thing. I I like the idea of an information shock. Uh I do think it's, you know, >> you are the information shock. Keep going. >> Brilliant. Uh look, I used to work in nightife, right? And that was 18 to 22 year olds, a thousand of them in a nightclub, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday. Everybody was sleeping with everybody. Uh and nobody was really thinking about this this sort of stuff. But it wasn't as if there was an anti-natalist approach there. That was just like the fledgling nent first beginning of the moving of like that kind of free sex sort of thing that was happening in the modern era. You go, okay, >> at some point people are going to have to face biological reality until we can
IVG, you know, like pur potent stem cell our way through a [ __ ] herasite check of all of the different embryos that we've got. people are going to end up like with the future that they lay for themselves. >> Yeah. >> And I think that educating people so that as few people as possible regret it. I think that's kind of one of the outcomes that we should all be focusing for. As few people as possible getting
toward the middle end of their life and going, >> I [ __ ] it on the family thing. >> Yeah. >> I messed up on the family thing. That's what regret minimization, >> right? That's why I can't because I think there's going to be a ton of people who regret it. >> That was my point. That was my point earlier on that there are people who are in the middle. They're not going to be changed. Right. Chelsea Handler has her
I went on Ryer and slept with this guy in Paris and ate at Quason and drank white wine and it seems to be having a great time and that's great for her. There are some people who look at that lifestyle and think, well, that's the thing that I want, not knowing that they might get there and regret it. And it's really difficult to walk this tight rope without sounding like you're trying to pull people back from something that's
obviously rewarded and obviously very fun in the moment and what everybody else seems to want and I've outsourced my thinking to the group and isn't that cool without going like without sounding like a fddy duddy that's coming in and sort of like clamping down on top of everybody's fun and what they want in life. It's like who are you to tell me what I want? I know what I want. You go I I I think that what you think more is
I can have what I want and in future I can also get this other thing that I have this get out of jail free god. I have an ejector seat button and if the goal I if all of our goals is hey as few people as possible regretting the decisions that they made around family formation. I think that's like that's a pretty [ __ ] good outcome, but how we get there is still I don't know. It's >> raise awareness. Let let people think
about it. >> It's why information is so important, right? Like there's probably going to be people who will listen to this and be like, "What? Ability to conceive declines linearly linearly for women from age 20. Men's mutations in their sperm start rising at age 18." What? Blew my mind. Okay, hubby, wifey, time to time to time to do this. Can you try and put Can you try and put your best marketing hat on for me?
>> Mhm. >> What are the biggest headline stats that you think would change the most people's minds? >> The number of people who when they get to their late 40s will regret not having had more kids is about 10 times as many as the number who regret having had too many. There are some who regret having had too many. about 90% of the people who have any regret about their family size regret that they didn't have more.
>> That's going to be you if you don't get on it. Um and then on in terms of marriage, um people worry a lot about their odds of their odds uh their their finding a spouse. Um and I'm sympathetic to that. It is hard. Um, but a bird in the hand really is often better than two in the bush. That is to say, waiting until you think you're at peak mate value may mean that the marriage you have is never the one you dreamed of.
Ultimately, arbitrage is the name of the game. Yes. finding somebody who sees the value in you that nobody else does and finding someone that you see the value in them that other people don't. And I'll be honest, I mean, my wife definitely saw that in me from like a, you know, nerdy, weird, not quite showered college freshman. Um, she pretty much like stuck a marker on my back and was like, "One to watch like we'll keep that one in the
>> Bitcoin at 5centent." >> Yeah. Yeah. Um and and likewise I mean like um you know pretty early on I was like okay she's you know she's a little on the extroverted side but uh um but we can work with that. Um and I just think so many people they have the paradox of choice. They they they see all these things but more importantly they invest deeply in these relationships with somebody who's always looking for two in the bush. And you
would be better off having the hard hard conversations on the first date. And you know, and you know, proposing when you're 90% certain. >> What does that look like? Hard conversations on the first date. What should people ask on a first date? >> Number of children, views of divorce, what religion children will be raised in if they are born. Um, go babysit your niece and nephew's kid. What do you think about spanking?
>> Um, kids, not sexually. I mean, sexually, too, if that's your thing. But um these are hard conversations and I think they're great first date conversations cuz you shouldn't waste your time. >> Agreed. The sooner you get to know the better. >> Yeah. Also like so yeah I mean my advice on on marriage was a bit less pathy because I think it's in some ways it's a more complicated conversation. Um but
you you are very likely to regret having too few kids. The number one predictor of too few kids is late marriage. And marriage makes people happier. They get happier after after they're engaged. Okay, people are like, "Well, it's not after they're married. That's just it's not an effective marriage. It's selection." God damn it. It's after engagement. Okay, we know this. We can see in the in the data when they get
engaged. Um so, uh when you uh when you realize that you're going to be with that person for as long as you can both as long as you can both stand it. It's not that the wedding ceremony makes you happy. It's that the wedding ceremony is a lock in. It's like you wait to get the good interest rate and then you lock it in. And yes, you could wait forever, but ultimately the people who got, you know, a 2.9% interest rate during COVID, maybe
they're a little worse off than the people who got a 2.7% interest rate, but they're both way better off than I was in my 7.9% rate. Okay, which I realize that just sounds like I dunked on my wife right there in the metaphor, but I'm not. I got a great interest rate wife. Um, but like you could hold out for a while, but at some point you just have to say this is a great house. Go buy it. >> Whatever the interest rate may be.
>> Stephen, give me a couple of information shocks. There's data and data is important, but it's the personal stories upon personal story upon personal story of people, but women want to talk about this more, but it's men and women who age 30ome are on that cusp and they realize that they're probably not going to have kids. And I I think you know it's it's true to say that people probably approach me you
know when they're feeling because they feel they can because of you know the documentary etc. Even if it was just a minute percentage of people who get to 32 35 having been sure that they were going to become parents because everything was mapped up mapped out. they even had the partner and then there's that breakup and then they're back starting again at age 32 to try and find someone and realizing that the math
means maybe waiting a year to find the right person the start date two years to be sure and it's that you know lunchon I had as a Japanese woman 34 having gone through exactly that saying I don't want the flowers I don't want the you know I don't care about the honeymoon I don't care about fancy dates or dinners. I just want a family. And you go back to the 20some year olds you're talking to and the realization
when you tell them that the chance of becoming a mother beyond age 30 or in the case of Japan it's 25 or the US 27 the likelihood of ever becoming a mother in today's society is less than 50%. And you map those two things together and you realize that you know this isn't a marginal economists talk about children as normal goods. I don't know if you've heard that you know a normal good is like a TV because the more
affluent you are the bigger TV the more TVs you can have. No children is not anything normative that can be described in the sense of any other product. is something deeply emotional, deeply passionate that most people want. >> And seeing that transition from an aspirational 20-year-old still believing we have time and understanding from data that that might not happen to the reality of that 34 year old going through that transition.
That's the story I want everybody to know about more than anything. And um you know and then make the right decision for them. Simone, what else haven't we said? >> I think people should We haven't talked about how people should be questioning. If things are not working for them, then what should they be doing? Like a lot of people are are pursuing all these things that made them happy when they were
kids. Like they're still playing video games. They're still traveling the world, but they're experiencing severe diminishing marginal returns. Like they're just not getting the same high from that they used to, and they're not realizing that they're in a different phase of life, and that's just not going to make them happy. or a lot of people who are uh also very euphorically child-free and against prenatalism are
very critical of capitalism and yet they're like well I'm just going to buy more into the dank lifestyle and a capitalistic lifestyle but that might not be making them happy. So I think people need to information shock themselves too like is seeing a therapist helping me with my anxiety and depression or is maybe there's something fundamentally wrong about the way I'm living my life. Am I chasing a false
god? And just severely questioning their own lifestyle and their own way of life if it's not actually making them happy and contented. >> That's really interesting to think. How many people are super unhappy? How many people have got depression or anxiety? What percentage of young girls have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness and depression? >> I had that I could barely leave my own house. Um I I I have the potential to be
an extremely dysfunctional neurotic person. And there's something about like kids just gave me something bigger to care about. They filled the void. Um and and they they they burn away your selfishness. They get you out of your head. We're all so in our heads. >> Um and it's torture. I don't want to be stuck with my own thoughts. >> You need to fill the void with meaning. [laughter] Um, one of my really good
friends, very smart friends got this line, Bill Perkins, and he when somebody proposes a life strategy that he can see is maybe not getting them the results that he wants, he always asks the same question. He says, "And how's that working out for you?" >> Everyone should ask themselves that. >> And how's that working out for you? So guys, you're all awesome. I appreciate you all individually and having you
together as a group has been really fun. This is one of the first round tables that I've done. I'm sure we're in tons of [ __ ] mad I'm gonna put these on. We're in mad trouble in the comments. Tik Tok's gone crazy. Uh, but I think you're all trying to make the world a better place. So, thank you all for being here. Appreciate you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right. Goodbye, everybody.
>> Yo, longest one in the new studio. Wow. >> Go. >> Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one even more. Go on, press