The Progressive Pronatalist Book that Broke My Wife ( "What Are Children For?")

This episode examines a new pronatalist book from a progressive standpoint, offering a critical and reflective perspective on modern parenthood and societal expectations.

1. The book attempts to address the complexities of deciding to have children in a modern context but falls short of providing clear guidance.
2. It explores various societal and personal reasons people may choose not to have children, including environmental concerns and personal fulfillment.
3. The hosts criticize the book's heavy reliance on literary analysis, which they feel complicates rather than clarifies the discussion.
4. They discuss the lack of a strong pronatalist argument within the progressive sphere, suggesting a disconnect between progressive values and traditional family structures.
5. The episode exposes the cultural and intellectual biases that may affect individuals' decisions about parenthood.

1: Introduction

The hosts introduce the book and its themes, setting the stage for a detailed critique. Simone Collins: "We're super excited to read this book because maybe it speaks to pronatalism in a way that gets progressives excited."

2: Book Critique

A thorough analysis of the book's arguments and style. Malcolm Collins: "It's wild that this has become the case. I think the parties have flipped basically with Trump."

3: Implications for Parenthood

Discussion on how the book's ideas impact real-life decisions about having children. Simone Collins: "Reading all this literary analysis actually took me back to my high school days."

4: Cultural Analysis

Examining the broader cultural implications of the book's arguments. Malcolm Collins: "The urban monoculture... it's this cultural framework that exists around the world, mostly concentrated in urban centers."

5: Conclusion

Summing up the discussion and reflecting on the broader societal impacts of the book's thesis. Simone Collins: "What the fuck happened to me? Everything is terrible."

• Reflect deeply on personal reasons for wanting or not wanting children beyond societal expectations.
• Consider environmental impacts and personal lifestyle in the decision to have children.
• Seek diverse perspectives on parenthood before making a decision.
• Engage in discussions about the value of children in society.
• Explore personal values and how they align with the decision to have children.

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dissect the new pronatalist book "What Are Children For?" by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. This in-depth discussion explores the challenges of promoting childbearing within a progressive framework and the broader implications for demographic trends.

People

Anastasia Berg, Rachel Wiseman

Books

"What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice"

Content Warnings:

None

Simone Collins
Hello, everybody. It's Simone Collins here. And I'm so glad to see you here today. I am taking over this podcast. Oh, no, it's been taken over.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. Because I am going to lead the discussion today. I've decided not to phone it in. And we are going to talk today about a new pronatalist book that came out called what are Children for? Which is basically the left attempt at pronatalism.

Simone Collins
It is a book that we were just told about by a friend at a conference, and she basically explained it as this is the pronatalist argument, but from the perspective of a uneducated Brooklyn elite who's highly progressive. Well, they got like an opinion piece in the New York Times, for example. Yeah, it got an opinion piece from the New York Times. It got a write up in the New Yorker, obviously, and they would never even consider giving us, we have done. We'Ve reached out to them before.

They don't, no, they don't talk to us, but they do talk to them because this was co written by two of their people. And so obviously we're super excited to read this book because, oh my gosh, maybe because we cannot apparently speak to pronatalism in a way that gets progressives excited. Maybe two progressive pronatalists could speak to progressives in a way that gets them excited. And so they did. And so I read the book and.

Okay, let me just start off by giving you the book's description, Malcolm, and I want to get your impression because I've read the book, Malcolm, is not. Let's see what you think. So this is what are children for? On ambivalence and choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. It came out on June 11.

So right now only like three reviews have been written about it. It's very new. Here's the description. Becoming a parent once the expected outcome of adulthood is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self fulfillment.

We want to liberate women to find meaning and self worth outside the home, and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing on the pros and cons of having children, millennials and zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in favor. With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a woman's issue, but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction.

Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life, not only in the present, but in choosing to have children in the future. So what do you think of this description? Would you like to know more? What's your impression here? I mean, that it is what you said it is.

Malcolm Collins
It is pronatalism and progressives are screwed if they can't figure out a prenatalist cultural sub faction. Their entire value system is going to go extinct. Yeah. And a lot of people look at us and they think that we're like secretly trying to save the progressives or something like that. I would like some aspect of their culture to survive, but I don't want them to have the cultural dominance they have now.

I think that they've shown that they basically become nazis whenever they gain cultural power and they start dividing humans by ethnic group. I'm going to say a lot of the things that progressives fight for that they say they want, pluralism, freedom of lifestyle, et cetera, are things that we very much support. It's just that in terms of what they actually allow for and support, progressives don't tend to do that in practice today. Yeah. In a way that aligns with our.

Simone Collins
Values and that's what you're talking about. We actually do care about progressive values, but the progressive movement now does not actually support those values. That's what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Malcolm Collins
It's wild that this has become the case. I think the parties have flipped basically with Trump. But anyway, interesting thing as a person like me is hearing you read this and seeing your reaction to this. And you guys haven't had to live with Simone while she was reading this. No.

Simone Collins
We're gonna go over all these things and you're gonna react to all my little bits. I have all these little things I can share with you about the book, but we're just, I'm just getting your impression on the description as provided by the publishers. I feel like I've just been read like Miranda rights. This is about to like. That was a trigger warning for conservatives.

Malcolm Collins
That entire intro was a trigger word for conservatives. Okay. All right. I'll give you my tl, doctor, because you say you should never bury the lead in these videos. I read this book.

Simone Collins
It included things like literary analysis because that's apparently a necessary part of discussion of prenatalism, which this is clearly why we're not convincing any progressives. We forgot the literary analysis in this context. What do you mean? Huh? Explain literary analysis.

Malcolm Collins
I, as a listener, don't know what you mean by they did. Okay, the authors literally talk about a series of books. There's one chapter where they just talk about books on motherhood that were written by various highfalutin fiction authors. And then there's another chapter where they talk about books that are about climate change and climate disasters. In fact, one of the reviews of this book complains of about the fact that there were spoilers in the literary analysis.

Simone Collins
That was one of her primary complaints, because she cared enough to actually go and read these books, which is, I think, also interesting. Reading, all this literary analysis, it actually took me back to my high school days, and I realized that the reaction I had at the end of this book was very similar to the reaction I had after finishing the grapes of wrath, where you read that scene with the weird birth in the barn that was supposed to be like, analogous to Jesus or something, and you're just like, what the fuck happened to me? Everything is terrible. And that is where I ended this book. What the fuck happened to me?

And everything is terrible. And before I wanted to bring all my criticisms of the book to you and actually air them on this podcast, because I am very concerned about leaving a somewhat critical review of this book in video form without being justified in Ithoodae, I went and looked at the other reviews to be like, am I crazy? Did this book basically leaves no reason to have kids. So the punchline to what are kids for? Or reasons for having kids?

There are none. Bad, because I do not think you can justify above reproductive childbearing rates within a progressive moral framework. Genuinely, it seems like what children are for is nothing. Children? It's a book?

Malcolm Collins
No, but from what you told me, it's a book about why you may want one kid that not even that. I can't find justification in this book, even for one kid. But anyway, it turns out the three reviews that exist so far, there's a total of four, but one on Amazon was also published on Goodreads. All of them were by people who were sent the book by a publisher who clearly wanted them to post reviews. Two of them are from mothers, one a mother of six.

Simone Collins
And I'll just read you from the one person who left a review as a member of the actual target audience, which is a progressive woman who does not yet have kids. Shannon Whitehead wrote, I appreciate the book's premise and liked it overall, but it's not the guide it bills itself as the summary describes. What are children for as, quote, an argument with, quote, unquote, guidance on how to overcome parenthood ambivalence. However, it's more a collection of various people's thoughts on having children throughout history. The authors definitely add to these perspectives, but as someone who absolutely is the target audience for this book, I don't find much of what I would consider guidance or advice which.

Okay, so I'm not crazy, because part of me was like, oh, I'm just too dumb for this educated, progressive view. Like, I'm just. It's going over my head. The literary analysis, reading a cultural framework that we are not familiar with and may not pick up some of the nuances in, like, jewish literature. I'm not going to necessarily catch everything a jewish person would catch.

Malcolm Collins
Yes, but here is, I think, what the book actually is, and I think that you are engaging with it incorrectly. Okay. I think that a progressive woman was thinking about having kids and then decided to do what was essentially a progressive literature review on the subject of having kids. Now, if you think like us, like, you're some sort of a rationalist nerd and you're doing a literature review, you're going over all the research and everything like that. If you're a progressive and you're doing what is for them, a cultural literature review, they are going over all of the thoughts anyone in the intellectual intelligentsia zeitgeist has had in modern times or in history about having kids.

So this is like a the arts literature review of what the intellectual intelligentsia has to say about the meaning of human life. And I think fundamentally, what you and this other person took away from it is that they just don't have strong arguments for it, because I think that the larger. So when people. We say the larger progressive ideology is fundamentally antinatalist. I should probably explain what I mean by that.

We argue that the urban monoculture, which is what progressivism largely is, it's this cultural framework that exists around the world, mostly concentrated in urban centers. It's a modern memetic virus. You can look at our video, the anatomy of the urban monoculture, if you want to go deeper on this. But its core draw is come to us, and you won't have to experience any in the moment, emotional suffering. And so this is where, like, trigger warnings come from.

This is where the haze movement comes from. This is where, like, we're gonna hand out meth. Meth on the streets comes from, like, it. These things make no sense if you are operating within most moral frameworks. That's why I bring them up like the idea of telling somebody that eating too much is going to make them unhealthy and suffer in the long run doesn't make sense in most even like basic utilitarian frameworks.

So you need this very strange moral set where like in the moment, emotional pain is the ultimate negative. Trigger warnings, for example, fall into this as well. And there is the way that you resolve emotional pain in this framework is clearly remove humans, you remove humans, you remove emotional pain. Every additional human is, is just a being that might at some point experience emotional pain and therefore should not come in to exist. And you also have this problem downstream of broad utilitarian frameworks.

It's just less immediate, which is say, if you take a broad utilitarian framework, but then lean heavily on the negative utilitarian side, which progressive culture definitely does like, it sees the fact that humans suffer as much more of a negative than the fact that they feel emotional good. There's not a way that you can motivate when telling a parent, if I'm telling them, you need to have over x many kids, the argument I need to be presenting them with. And I think that the good book that does this is selfish reasons to have more kids. Brian Cavill I think that's the book that has actually convinced a number of progressives. And he's actually been emailed for like at least 100 people that exist in the world today or more.

But these are like the ones because selfish reasons to have more kids engages with progressive culture as it really exists, which is a woman asking, how will having kids improve my life? The problem is that the kids often don't improve your life. That's not the point of kids. It's to give them a good life. And so when you have kids to improve your life, you end up with all of the stuff we talk about in our video about the parents who regret having kids and why this is a rising trend.

I feel like the people who would be convinced by this book would end up regretting their decision to have kids. And you mentioned that at the end of the book, even the author seems to regret her decision. Yeah. One of the two authors has, has a kid at the end of the book and describes her experience as a mother. And she sounds like a genuinely miserable mother who regrets having kids and is still extremely ambivalent about the choice to have kids and is trying to just be like, but it's meaningful, which is crazy.

Simone Collins
And I think what you're saying is right about them just doing a literature review of the experts when trying to evaluate this, but then not really finding anything that justifies it. Like one mother who wrote a review says, this book has a lot of references to feminist text, often citing works, the works of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Hetty. This provides the reader with additional materials to seek out and read more about direct experiences with motherhood and ambivalence. I don't necessarily think this book would be a directly helpful guide to those struggling with the decision to have children. While there is an exploration of different arguments, including climate change, not finding a suitable partner, financial concerns, and self interest, there is perhaps obviously no direct path to coming to a conclusion for yourself.

I would also say that the author's perspectives on motherhood seem to skew slightly negative, which is obviously not everyone's experience who chooses to have children. So even like other reviewers of the book who've been given free copies, presumably because they will write positive reviews, are kind of like it's clear these women don't want to have children, which is crazy. I actually think that what this book is, and I think it's something we're going to see increasingly as the culture wars shift in the direction of pronatalism, is there is a faction of progressive women who will recognize that having kids is a moral good, like their worldview, that everything we say, their worldview, their perspectives on reality are going to die out. This progressive cultural framework that they champion is slated for extinction right now. And therefore, from their perspective, it is a moral good to have kids, and now they need to come up with a logical structure that can motivate this decision that they've reached at from a logical deduction from their higher order moral framing.

Malcolm Collins
The problem is that there is no real or good logical framework that motivates kids in a progressive worldview. I think something else at play is that intuitively, I think a lot of progressive women really want to have children, and yet the culture they've adopted prevents them from enjoying it. And the lifestyle that they choose and the approach to parenting that they feel they have to take prevents them from enjoying it. When I read the final chapter where one of the authors describes her experience as a parent of a young girl, it's clear that she could have had a good experience as a mother. But the way that she chooses to raise her daughter and the fact that she only has one child actually makes it just really hard and stressful and a fairly miserable experience.

Simone Collins
But let's, let's go ahead. I wanted to discuss with you because I think this is something interesting. Some of the central themes and claims of the book, there are three. So I'm going to read them off to you, and then you can tell me what your thoughts are on them, because I think that these are the core things with which you and I would probably disagree. And I found it quite interesting.

So one central claim and theme is that either going back to or creating a hard culture is impossible. That's a big thing. And of course, clearly we're of a. How do they present this argument? This is obviously our.

It was explicitly discussed, but in a very offhand, of course, we can't go back. And we also couldn't create a new one. That was basically just said like that. Oh, so they just offhandedly are like, you can't read. Yeah.

They're just like, offhand, of course you couldn't just go back and create a new culture. It was that explicit. So I thought that was really interesting. That just basically the pithiness with which that was expressed demonstrates the extent to which they've given very little thought. I actually think that this is really important because you need to ask, like, why didn't they say that could be a solution, like, altering their cultural framework?

Malcolm Collins
And the answer is because you could not stay within the urban monoculture if you created a side cultural group that wouldn't see the threat to it. So they literally can't. Like, if they did. Struggled herself to sleep, by the way. Oh, you're awake again.

Simone Collins
Sorry. Carry on, if. That is so sweet. If she did present it. God, I don't remember what I was saying.

Malcolm Collins
They're looking at. If they did develop a hard culture, they, by definition wouldn't be progressive anymore, which is big deal. Yeah, it's funny. That's basically what we did. We were then ended up developing our culture and are like, okay, now we are more than puritan framework.

Simone Collins
Yeah. Yeah. So here's another very pervasive theme, and I think this is especially crucial, which is that the readers. Sorry, the authors and the readers of this book, and basically every woman whose perspective they mention in their literary analysis, in all of their other references, lack an objective function. We define an objective function as basically a few or just one thing of inherent value that you yourself have chosen to optimize your life around.

It is the thing you're seeking to maximize. And it could be the well being of all humankind. It could be the well being of all sentient animals and beings. It could be serving God. It could be having fun.

It could be whatever, right? No one reading or writing this book has an objective function. And this is the very source of that ambivalence about parenthood, because as soon as you have an objective function and then an ideology on how you're going to maximize that thing or those things that you're going to maximize in your life, you have an answer as to whether or not you're going to have kids, period. This is what I'm optimizing for, by the way. If you don't have an objective function and you are interested in developing one yourself without a lot of bias, read the pragmatist guide to life.

Malcolm Collins
We wrote that during a time in our life where we were much less ideologically biased than we are now. And I think it is as close as a true neutral resource for finding an objective function. Exactly. Yeah. To clarify objective function.

In other words, as to what you're saying, it is a moral framework for interacting with reality. That is, this is what I think is good. This is what I think is bad. And at what measures do you think those things are truly good and bad? And then you can just use that to plug into a moral equation when you're making individual decisions, should I have kids?

But I also would say the answer, if you're like, how do I. If you're genuinely like, how do I morally justify having kids? Like you're in this progressive culture? The actual argument I would most use is to say you're doing it for them and not you. Don't think about you or society or anything like that.

This is an entire human who's going to live 100 years or 80 years, who knows? With technology being what it is now, who's going to experience an entire life? And you can create this multiplicatively based on the level of sacrifice you're willing to make. How much are you willing to sacrifice to give other humans the chance to live? And then you could say, oh, but then I could take the money and the whatever and just give it to people in Africa or whatever, right?

Yeah, but those people are different from you. They're culturally different from you. They're genetically different from you. They're not going to experience the same type of life your child would be experiencing. So you are exchanging one of those lives for another one of those lives.

Here is where progressives can't come up with an answer to this. They would then say, yes, but all lives are exactly equal. And I might be like, that might be true from a universal perspective, but that is not true from a parent's perspective. Your child's life as a parent is not equal to every other child on the world. I'm telling you that in absolute sense, the parent who says that my child's life is equal to a random child growing up in another country, I'd say nope.

And there's probably something emotionally wrong with you if you think that, because even if at a universal perspective, all human lives may be equal, we do disproportionately value ideologically even the lives of those who are closer to us than the lives of those who are further from us. And it is one of those lives that you are creating was the sacrifice. But the progressive moral framework doesn't allow them to say that, so you can't really pierce with this argument. Anyway, continue. So the third element and core premise of this book is that the authors and pretty much everyone that they're describing as well, are raised by parents who are in soft or super soft cultures, or even parents who themselves were raised by parents of soft cultures.

Simone Collins
So we are seeing either one or two generations in to soft or super soft cultures. And I think that's also really important, is that these people predominantly were raised by also people who were not from hard cultures. And that definitely shows there are some, there are just a few exceptions in the book. But I think that's important to note is that at this juncture in society, it's not that, like, people for the first time are going soft, it's that we're seeing multiple generations into soft culture. Yeah, well, we abandoned the religious systems that we co evolved with.

Malcolm Collins
A lot of people, I think expected the majority of the effect of this abandonment to happen in the generation that was abandoning these systems. Exactly. But it turns out most of the. There's a certain amount of inertia. Yeah, there's inertia, but also, I think most of the benefits of these systems are actually transmuted during childhood.

So even if, for example, and I see this with Mormons we've talked about in other videos, even if a Mormon leaves the faith, if I interact with them and they were raised in a Mormon household, I can immediately tell that they were raised in a Mormon household. The way they interact is very different than the way other people interact, and it's generally more emotionally healthy than the way other people interact, whether they stayed in the face or stayed out of the face. And I say this as a non Mormon. So this is me just elevating. Also true with Jews I've met Jews who grew up in religiously observant households, even if they've left, typically have that vibe as adults and are more emotionally healthy and stuff like that.

You don't begin to see the mental breakdown that comes from leaving a hard tradition that you were raised in until you get to the generation that was raised in their childhood without even that tradition. That's right. And what these people look like from the perspective of society when you see them, when you interact with them, is like a robot that's like short circuited the book feels. From what Simone was telling me in terms of reading, it is like the active breakdown of progressive culture in real time. So derived from any sort of hard cultural framework that makes demands of an individual that puts, that expects discipline, whether it is external discipline or self discipline on an individual.

That's why progressives freak out at us. So we've said that's why they freak out at starship troopers. This world. You should watch our starship troopers videos that is totally equal ruled by a black african female sky Marshall to hot Marul. The entire planet is where the all the genders are the same in the shower.

What's the one thing that's different? What's the one thing that makes it the fascist dystopia to them that you are expected to do something, you are expected to sacrifice something yourself for the rest of humanity if you are going to take on a role in terms of deciding the future of that society that is voting. And when you completely remove discipline from individuals lives and the expectation of sacrifice from individuals lives, and you do this intergenerationally, you get this short circuiting and static, which I think is what this book is. And I would encourage if our words end up being remembered in the future, because I don't think this book's going to end up doing very well given the number of reviews it has so far and stuff like that, we're doing. Our best to promote it right now.

Simone Collins
By the way, I know, for example, that at least one of the listeners of this podcast was present with me at manifest when we were told by another woman, a friend of ours, that, you know about this book, and she said, this is great. This is exactly what I need, because she herself is progressive and she wanted to hear this argument. So even people watching this podcast are the target audience for this book, and I am here to promote it. We were going to have the authors on, but that the follow up and connection never took place. Y'all are welcome, by the way, to come on and talk about this.

Malcolm Collins
Hold on, I have to finish this statement. When you future anthropologists are trying to understand how progressive culture, how the dominant culture in the world, the first culture that basically ruled the entire world through the UN, through the american government. How did it suddenly kill itself? Within one generation, this book will hold the keys to their way of seeing reality that you, in the future, are no longer able to model. Yeah.

Simone Collins
Anyway, some positives. I learned some things that I didn't expect from the book. For example, they cited one study which I had not come across. They found that many women freezing eggs are not in highly paid careers. They just needed to separate fertility constraints from finding the right partner.

And I think that's quite interesting. We might even do a whole podcast on this, because they pointed out that one of the major constraints, of course, is actually finding the right partner. And someone who listens to this podcast had pointed out to you, Malcolm, I think that really what we should be promoting isn't having kids, but just actually having a wholesome, healthy marriage, because that is the bottleneck in so many of these cases. I think we do that through our interactions as we show, and we model a possibility that I think a lot of people are just unaware of. And I would say for the women who are doing this is the problem, because I've talked to these women, okay, and they're not finding good partners.

Malcolm Collins
There are a lot of good Mendez out there looking for a wife right now. They are not finding good partners because two, they are using as a benchmark for the type of partners that they can get as the type of partners who, while polyamorous, will date them. Look, lady, let me tell you what. If a guy is dating four other women and he's also dating you or he's dating you, but he's saying it. I'm not gonna be exclusive with you.

Of course I'm gonna be dating other women. That person is going to be a much higher quality male than you can secure within a monogamous market. That's just clear. Like, you will not get that. You need to be dating, like, three or four.

Simone Collins
Also, if you have a child with that man, his value on the market. Will plummet and suddenly, sometimes secure him. So do be aware of that. That is a pretty good gambit that we've mentioned in another podcast. The other thing I'd say is, a lot of these women are looking for progressive men, and there are two progressive women for every one.

Malcolm Collins
Progressive men. I do not think that most progressive men are emotionally healthy. They're generally like, psychological wrecks who are like seeing a psychologist every week. So, yeah, sorry. I know we're not supposed to shame seeing a psychologist anymore, but the modern iteration of psychology is just so harmful.

So to these women, you gotta break out of that. You gotta break out of that mindset, because that is not where you're gonna find the good guys. I also did not know that weapon, or sorry, that women try to weaponize their fertility. Tell me about that. By saying that they'll refuse to have kids or out of protest because others, such as family members, are not doing enough to fight climate change, or they're like not voting Democrat.

Simone Collins
And there are groups like birth strike and no future children that, oh, we. Need to look these up. I know I need to. Yeah, we need to maybe do a whole episode on those. I did learn some interesting things.

The reasons that they presented for not having kids are pretty much all the typical reasons you'd expect. Being forced to compromise their careers, which is totally fair. I think that's a huge reason to not have kids. That's why I said I wasn't going to have kids. Not finding a suitable partner, high cost, concerned about not being able to give the kids the same upbringing they received, like going to college without going into debt.

Then of course, there's just the typical negative utilitarianism, climate change, and then just misery being apparent. And I think that's due to the unreasonable expectation. This is actually really interesting, is the idea of a fertility strike. So fertility strikes only work on your genetic relatives, and yet progressives don't seem to understand. There was that case in Canada that we did the joke on that.

Malcolm Collins
I'll play here. Oh, good. Look, your friends are here. Hey, you're supposed to want to have children and this is your ultimate goal in life. It is a very archaic idea and an old idea and representation of a woman.

Simone Collins
You're getting people to sign a pledge basically saying that they will not have children until the canadian government takes serious action on climate change. Is that your blood? Well, no, no, it's college kid blood. And how many people have signed on so far? 1381 as of right now.

Malcolm Collins
I know what this is. This is a suicide pact. Oh, my God, that makes so much sense. We have got to hide all of the sharp objects. If only I was born with a vagina.

Amen, sister.

Holy mother of Goddesse. Some kid. He just hooked himself right into the wood chipper. What? Head first, right into the wood chipper.

It looked like it might have been one of the college kids where they tried to do a fertility strike for climate change. Like a bunch of young women. And I'm like, okay, me, as somebody who doesn't care about climate change, I'm glad you're leaving the gene pool, right? Like the people who already care about climate change, they're the people who you're appealing to. Is this right?

And so presumably you can't get them to vote more democrat than they're already voting, right. So they don't matter. Like the metric of similarity to yourself that you are demarcating here is the metric that decides your enemies and allies. So you're not really pushing anyone. So why would women think that this would work?

And it is because they view the world with a completely socialist mindset. They genuinely believe that all children belong to the date and not to the family, not to the cultural group. And because of that, they believe that a progressive woman threatening to not have kids is going to motivate a, for example, conservative man to change his perspective. When I'm just like, okay, good riddance. I would be the worst Noah, as I've ever said.

The fairies and the unicorns, they're like, I hate you, and I'm not getting on the raft. And I'd be like, give them the bird. Go on the raft. I'm like, I don't care. You guys can drown.

And that's really where we are right now is a lot of groups react angrily when you point out the truth, that if people like them cannot motivate fertility, they're going to disappear in the future. Yeah. There was also some butthurt in the book that just got me angry. They were complaining that egg freezing and IVF is tough because there are needles and you can't have sex during the egg freezing round. And I'm like, like, just the sheer amount of.

Simone Collins
And they also didn't point out. They pointed out a little bit how expensive it is, but I. It just. It bothered me. And then they also argue, of course, that women can't have it all.

And I think that goes back to this major issue of people who read this book and wrote this book did not have objective functions, because you can have it all. If you know what you care about, you can have all that you care about if you choose what you care about. Because then, you know, there are two different versions of having it all. There's having it all with an objective function where I literally have it all, but I have many of the things that people would want if they don't have an objective function that they don't have. For example, we don't do a ton of travel internationally anymore, obviously, because we have kids, we don't eat out.

I don't buy a lot of stuff. So I don't have it all in those ways, but also those are not things I care about. I literally have everything that I care about. And that's great. And I think that's how a lot of other mothers feel who have objective functions is they know exactly what they want.

They know exactly what doesn't matter to them, and they're able to have everything that they want because it's actually not that much. And that's why I think it's so important to have an objective function. But yeah, so to the point of literary analysis, it was actually within the literary analysis portion of the book that I inadvertently came across what I thought was their most clever way of convincing progressive women. Oh, tell me to want to have children. I told you this when I just listened to that portion of the audiobook.

They described this one. It sounded like a complete nightmare of a book about a, it seemed like partially or mostly trans polycule and like their journey into motherhood. And although maybe not motherhood, I think maybe there was an abortion in there. It just sounded like the ultimate progressive fiction book. But they described this one character who was a trans woman who desperately wanted to experience true motherhood.

And it really brought across the privilege that women experience and being able to be mothers and the fact that there are all these trans women who would genuinely, if you're a real trans woman, right? And like, you just desperately want to be a woman, you desperately want to be a mother. And you can't, you can just feel the entitlement, the spoiled rottenness of women in their ability to carry children and then just complain about it and be like, how dare you expect me to have children when there are people, both infertile women and like me, right. And trans women who take the same amount of estrogen that I do, apparently, who just desperately want to have children. And that was the one time reading this book where I was like, oh, shit.

Yeah. Like that argument would work on progressives. That actually would work on progressives. And it's interesting. Yeah.

Like, how dare trans women, women would die to be where you are. That was the most prenatalist argument in the entire book. So I thought that was very interesting. Wanted to point that out. Oh my God, these authors are overthinking themselves into abject misery.

No wonder university educated women are not having kids. Yeah, that's really how I fall through a lot of this. I think overthinking is a central theme here, and especially in the literary analysis, there's these descriptions of either books describing. Yeah, I think it's books describing this with feminist authors saying, oh, when I, I was breastfeeding my child, I, like, felt this miasma of whatever. And they're just these women who are overthinking it so much and they clearly don't have anything else that they're doing.

And this is why you shouldn't take maternity leave, because you're just going to go completely crazy. And it just bothers me how much overthinking there is in this process. And they also argue in the book. And this is a big thing that bothers me about progressives and conversations around pronatalism is that girls are taught from a very young age that motherhood is their destiny and that we live in a pronatalist world and that women are pressured to have children because I, until I met you and you talked with me about children, was antinatalist. I planned on never having children, and I was never shamed for that.

I was never questioned for that. So they claim that women are being shamed for. And I've seen this done before by people who make antinatalist arguments, that women that we live in this pronatalist world where they're shamed for being child free and they're shamed for not having kids. But I was in their position. I never felt questioned.

And actually, I felt quite judged when I wanted to have kids, even by my own parents. You're gonna be like. They were like, what are you guys doing? Why are you having so many kids? But at least my mother was like, oh, Malcolm, you're gonna be such a great parent.

And then she, like, turned to me and was like.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah, we have to one kid. Your mom was very clean. We're gonna have one kid. Yeah. After fertility, my mom began because your mom died before we had more than one kid.

But my mom started freaking out at two kids. She's, you need to stop. You need to stop. Then she gave up, though. She got Zen about it.

No, she said four was the perfect number and we needed to stop at four. I know she's a fan of the show and everything like that, and the first fan of the show, really, who really was watching it daily. But I don't think she could deal with the press we're getting these days. No, emotionally, she wouldn't be able to deal with it, and I would likely have to pull back or something like that. Agents of Providence act as they act.

Right. We are able to move as far as we can. And we actually saw that in her, like, notes after she died. That one of her dreams was that we got famous, but that couldn't happen in a world where we also weren't so attacked that she, you just can't be famous without being hated. These days, if you look at younger celebrities that are rising through the ranks, and that's one of the problems with this progressive mindset, is it is a desire to conform at the same time as to have pride in who you are and what makes you different.

And that's especially where those things aren't from progressive culture. That is the random things that turn you on. But your cultural background, your family's background, and pride in anything that is not granular in the progressive world is sin, which is so interesting that you are allowed to be as prideful as you want about the random things that turn you on. But having pride in your culture or your religion or your ethnicity, those things are seen as core sins in progressivism, and they must do that because all of those things represent alternate cultural frameworks that could compete with their own. So anyway, I came away from this book feeling pretty disheartened because I thought, okay, clearly we're not getting through to progressive groups in terms of making a strong prenatalist argument.

Simone Collins
Actually, you know what? I'm going to take that back. Progressives don't think we're getting through to them, but we are. Because I'm noticing, for example, when we've gone viral twice in british publications, for whatever reason, Young Turks has done a segment on the piece that goes viral, and the first time they went in on us to attack us, they're like, wow, these monsters. They did not acknowledge demographic collapse as an issue.

Second time they're like, obviously demographic collapse is an issue and pronatalism is important, but, like, these motherfuckers are doing it in a super evil, bad way. Like, they're terrible people. And I think the important thing is that we are raising awareness and we're getting a subset of progressives to be like, oh yeah, it's an issue, and I hate these guys, but I care about this and I'm going to do something about it. I actually think our advocacy is doing a good job. I think doubling down on the reasons not to have kids, which is what this book does, is quite as much as it speaks to the antenatal sentiment of the progressive movement.

It's not solving the problem. And as the other reviewers stated, it's not giving a real practical framework. Now, I welcome either or both of the authors to come on and talk with us about this and give a defense for the book, and perhaps because I'm too low iq to actually catch the message that is inspiring women who read this book to have kids, explain what I missed and dumb it down. For what's the specific arguments? That's what we want to know.

Dumb it down for me. A meditation on children and motherhood. And I actually think this is the core thing where progressives fail at this is when they focus on children, they narcissistically focus on motherhood instead of focusing on humanity.

And actually that is what, when our friend told me about the book, that's what I thought it was going to be about. Because the way that she explained it to me was that it tries to take all the arguments that progressives are using for not having kids, such as the environment, such as negative utilitarianism, and just allow people to look at the inherent question of should I have kids? But that's not what it ultimately was about. So either she had not yet read. The book or that's what I assume.

Yeah, maybe it had just come out. So I think she had an advanced copy. She literally had a physical hard copy. With her, anticipated that it would address those issues. But maybe, but yeah, but I don't think that those issues are like, we address each of those in turn.

Malcolm Collins
In the pragmatic crafting religion, which is our pronatalism book, we have a section where we just go through every one of the progressive arguments, environmentalism, antinatalism, etcetera, and we give a logical counter to it. But the problem is that those are logical counters from first principle perspectives which do not register with progressives. I think you could also argue it's a very masculine take. Right? So the approach that we take to problems is what the boyfriend does when he's not being a good boyfriend.

Simone Collins
When the girl comes to him and he's like, she or she says, this terrible thing happened to me at work. And can you believe what he said in the boyfriends? Obviously what you should do is this. Here's how to solve the problem. And then she gets mad because what he was supposed to say was, oh my gosh, that's so horrible.

You must feel terrible. This book is a feeling circle. That's what they're going for here is, yes, it's so expensive and your career is hampered and you're gonna be miserable. You are heard, you are valid. Yes.

And maybe, actually, you know what? I think we just figured it out. I think we just figured it out. That's what this book is doing. It is doing the good boyfriend.

It is being the good boyfriend of pronatal. We are the bad boyfriend. We are the bad boyfriend. Shut up, bitch. This is how you handle it?

Malcolm Collins
We gotta. We're like, no, don't worry. I'll fix it for you. We mansplaine. Okay.

Simone Collins
We are mansplaining and this book is listening and acknowledging. And the readers are heard. They're definitely heard. Like, all of the progressive female concerns are aired ad nauseam in this. And that's it.

That's it. But I think. Here's the problem. Here's the problem is mansplaining and problem solving is still the correct pathway. And listening and saying, oh, this is so terrible, and you must feel so terrible.

The boyfriend who does that is enabling a girlfriend to develop more neurosis, to not solve her problems, to establish learned helplessness that good boyfriend behavior is toxic and ultimately abusive. I love you to death. You are the best wife any man could hope for. It's true, though, right? And tell me I'm wrong.

Malcolm Collins
No, you. But I'm the guy here. You're saying, you're. You are so right that I've never even seen somebody as right as you. You are the pick me of the already chosen.

Simone Collins
I am the chosen. I am not a pick me. I am chosen. I'm not a pick me. I am the chosen.

Malcolm Collins
Oh, that'd be great if there's a new group of women who call themselves the chosen instead of paper. Oh, my God. Yeah. You're like, I've already been chosen. I already have the kids.

Simone Collins
Yeah. I won this game. I'm in the post game. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Love you to death. Would you mind getting the kids and then locking the fence and then I'll make dinner while they play outside. Will do. Thank you. All right, little one, let's get you changed and get your dinner.

Simone Collins
You're awake now. You're awake now, okay.