Can Women Be Convinced to Have Kids? (Probably not)

In this engaging episode, Malcolm and his guest discuss various concerns raised by ambitious, upper middle-class college-educated women regarding motherhood. The conversation covers fears about losing independence, becoming less 'cool,' cognitive decline, and balancing a career with parenthood. They explore studies on cognitive changes during pregnancy, the impact of career-driven mothers on their children, and the health benefits of having children. They also dive into deep philosophical questions about societal values, the role of women, and the transformation that comes with parenthood, all while addressing fears about personal and professional identity shifts.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I'm really excited to be speaking with you today. Today. We're responding to actually a based camp listener email and comment. He basically interacts with through his friend network and through dating a lot of what he describes as upper middle class college educated women in New York City.

Who typically went to school around or near New York or upstate New York. Many of them went to elite schools and they don't want to have kids or they're nervous about having kids. And the question here is, can I effectively counter the arguments that he is getting from them pretty consistently and he outlined them, I think very well.

The arguments map very closely to what I experienced or like what I was concerned about before I met you when I was still a single. Ambitious young woman. Not that I'm not ambitious anywhere. I think I'm more ambitious now, which is. Part of the discussion here. So let's just dive right into his compiled complaints of these young, ambitious, successful women.[00:01:00]

I know before we

Arch: do any of them, I will be laying out my premise, which is going to be what I'm repeatedly going to go back to in this.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Arch: Because I think the questions miss the point in terms of how do you convince women to have kids or be okay with having kids?

Simone Collins: Okay.

Arch: Because many people are like, oh, if you create like one that focuses on female They're basically like make the movement illogical because I'm like, well, you can just explain to women that if they do not do this, like if people who believe that women should have a choice around having kids if those people can't find a way to motivate above reproductive populations, people who believe that won't exist in the future.

You know, women will not have these choices. If people who say, oh, women should be allowed to be educated, they're breeding well below replacement rate, then people in the future won't believe that women should be allowed to be educated. Bye. And that this argument is just completely uncompelling to this group, I think shows how very non serious that they are.

And they're like, no, come up with a way to convince me that is compelling [00:02:00] to, to what? Like, that makes your own life better? Like, that's not the point. It's like when people are like, tell me about how great having kids is going to make my life. It's like, well, no, having kids isn't about making your life better.

Okay. And if you think it

Malcolm Collins: does though, and so that's why I, I'm going to disagree with you on some of the

Arch: secret. That's the secret, the hidden secret. We can't let them know that the people who want to have kids just to improve the quality of their life. But I, I, I here want to say that why, how has society gotten into this place?

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, it's, it's like that, that really annoying Zen monk thing where they're like, no, you won't achieve enlightenment until you give up trying to achieve enlightenment. That's so fricking annoying, but it's also kind of true in this case.

Arch: So yeah, so I was playing in an AI scenario around the Omegaverse.

And so people who don't know, the Omegaverse is a popular online fiction used by women in a lot of like erotic artworks where like men can get pregnant and, and it's weird. It's like, [00:03:00] there's the two genders, males and females, but then within the two genders, there's alphas, which are like extra dominant iterations, betas, like normal humans, and then omegas, like an extra submissive iteration.

Anyway and the, this, this genre is used as a super normal stimuli. For many women around like ultra dominance in a culture. And so I wanted to explore one of these worlds. I'm like, that sounds interesting. I'm going to explore one of these worlds.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. And

Arch: what comes up in these worlds and I, I, you know, the concept of Omega rights.

Is a really big part of these worlds, right? Like, should Omegas have more rights? Why are Omegas treated as second class citizens? And yet, what I love is that these women, right, they are fantasizing about a world different from our world, where, like, some humans are born wanting to be submissive and sort of treated like second class citizens, but, like, it's a good thing because that's just how they're born.

Well, and some of them are dudes. Some of them [00:04:00] are dudes. So it's not just Some of them are dudes, that's what it is. It's not just a Well, you know, but the point I'm making is they have basically reinvented the concept of a male female split and then built it into a fantasy world where it's all it's not, it's

Malcolm Collins: not, it's not anti feminist because yeah,

Arch: I, but the funny thing about Omega versus is that the genders otherwise are generally equal.

That males and females are generally otherwise equal. It's just that sometimes. They're born having a pension for dominance. Sometimes they're born having a pension for submission anyway. So when I was talking to an Omega rights activists in one of these and I was saying to it, you know, they're like, well, you know, we should have all of these, these things, all of these freedoms, all of these abilities to work, all of these blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, but. You only decided that those are things of value because in this world, most of the works that are published [00:05:00] you know, most of the famous books in history, most of the world's philosophy was determined by alphas because they're the ones who everyone saw and heard. And this is where I realized, oh, the patriarchy created feminism in a way.

By that, what I mean is the fact that men have been the dominant gender on Earth for so long and written so many of our foundational philosophical works, so many of our foundational narrative works, so much of our foundational religious beliefs, that those things were written with an assumption that Of a male's desires and life path in mind and women, when they began to achieve freedom and the ability to act independently, instead of having some big backlog of women written literature, they could turn to instead determined what had value, like freedom and independence and [00:06:00] career and from male literature, literature that was written by males.

And so they didn't have a deeper philosophical well that they could mind that was female coded. Like

Malcolm Collins: what would we want to do if we had full autonomy? Right. Theoretically with like a male dominated world, we can see through male literature and actions and, and behavior under power, what they will do if they have their druthers.

But because women historically have been in this. More suppressed, more secondary, more submissive role. We don't know what they would do if left to their own devices.

Arch: Well, and they didn't build the philosophy, I guess is the way I put it. Like philosophy more broadly was built by men for other men.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

So what is the female philosophy?

Arch: Well, here's the thing. I think that women had such an unevolved and unadvanced philosophical framework to fall [00:07:00] into that the framework they slipped into is what we would call super soft culture. You know, the sort of pre

Malcolm Collins: evolving to the most Basal human instincts and sympathetic magic, folk religions, this is why I'm enjoying magical spells and it's not good.

Magical

Arch: thinking, you know, crystals and crystals and zodiac signs and, No, it represents the types of religious and metaphysical beliefs. A group of humans would likely independently evolve if you just left them on an island, you know, without civilization.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Arch: It's without a civilization to build on because women didn't have a civilization to build on because women historically did not write and the civilization that was given to them when, when people were like, okay, but.

And you do have some, you know, early female literature. You're like, look, y'all be satisfied if you find a man who you respect to spend your life supporting and have a bunch of kids. That's

Malcolm Collins: There's these different, there's that, there's the [00:08:00] You'll be happy by serving men. And then there's also the other philosophy of you'll be happy by being a man, which is also not really working out.

Arch: No, no, no. But the, the happy serving man, I mean, that's what they had to go on. And they're just like, wait, why does this look so different than what the, the male code book is, what the developed code book is. And it's very much like an Omega talking to an Alpha in Omegaverse. Why, why do make Omega's get.

push towards these pathways and it's like, well, because you're evolutionarily optimized for these pathways, you find the satisfaction in submission the way other individuals could not. You find satisfaction in child rearing in the way other individuals could not and do not. So to,

Malcolm Collins: To, to, oh God, to pass this on to fiction that is more widely read.

There's this whole, kind of annoying arc in the Harry Potter series where Hermione Granger tries to free house elves. Who [00:09:00] find it extremely insulting, this idea that they would be freed. They really don't want to be freed. They really want to serve their house. And this idea of giving them rights is, is totally not what they're into.

And you're kind of, this We're in our house elves! Is what

Maybe you're kind of saying, well, it's funny that you mentioned this because a lot of people don't know this today, but the anti suffrage movement, i. e. voting for women movement was led by women. Women were like, this is a bad idea.

I decided to Google this just to make sure I wasn't b**********g. And here's the first search result I got.

And I will quote from Wikipedia. Well, men were involved in the anti-slavery movement in the United States. Most of the anti suffrage groups were led and supported by women. In fact, more women joined anti suffrage groups, then suffrage associations until 1916. While these groups openly stated they wanted. Politics left to men.

It was more often women addressing political bodies with anti suffrage arguments.

[00:10:00] During the fight to pass the 19th amendment women increasingly took a leading role in the anti suffrage movement.

So

the suffragettes are Hermione Granger and the.

Right. And they're fighting against other women.

Arch: A lot of, a lot of people don't, don't realize this.

Malcolm Collins: And yeah, Phyllis Schlafly and her earlier predecessor.

Arch: Well, and what do we see? Were they right? As women have gotten more rights and you can see this on charts of female happiness over time female happiness goes down.

Female happiness has been going down dramatically since. And it keeps showing

Malcolm Collins: up in all these different ways. I mean, you have one generation. There's Phyllis Schlafly, the next generation, you have stayed home girlfriends and you have Brad wives and you have, yes, it's glorification of a softer, slower life.

And Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's, it's something that, and it feels so toxic to, to succumb to it or to wrap [00:11:00] yourself in that warm blanket because we've been normalized so much to male standards of success. That like the average male would, you know, find it insulting to enjoy or appreciate that.

And I think many women have, have been raised. I certainly like to hear that myself. I'm like, Oh no, like, no, my entire programming has been built around very masculine standards of success. Have a business, make a lot of money, get powerful, get famous, get, you know, like change politics, change the world. Do it myself.

And this idea of, hey, maybe you can take care of kids and, you know, partner up even, even just the idea of partnering up with a spouse, male or female, but like a husband, certainly. Oh my God. Like there, it just goes against so much programming. And, you know, for context, I grew up in The heart of the Silicon Valley Bay Area right next to San Francisco.

Like, I definitely [00:12:00] grew up in what you describe as urban monoculture culture. But again, this is why I think I'm very qualified. You're answering this question of, why should an ambitious young woman have children? In a very Malcolm way, which is you don't answer the question and you just say what you want to say, which is not speaking to the audience.

I can answer these questions speaking to the audience. I can speak to

Arch: the audience because you, you did it. You now have this life and you seem to like it. You find it more satisfying, I think, than the life you would have had.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, but I'm also kind of cheating because who actually is making the money in this family?

You know, who actually is controlling all the finances? Who actually? Yeah, that's kind of the problem. I'm not very trad wifey, right? Like, who's the stay at home partner who is, you know, engaged? Actually, you say this, but I

Arch: have found that this is the norm in a lot of relationships I know today that work.

As we talk about short sword and shield partnerships, the wife is typically in charge of the [00:13:00] stable job and stable income streams. And the husband is in charge of things that could move the family up. The venture

Malcolm Collins: capital versus the stocks

Arch: versus the bonds. Yeah. The stocks versus the bonds are the venture capital versus the bonds, right?

Like the man going to Viking

Malcolm Collins: versus the homestead farming.

Arch: Yeah. Starting, starting You know, the, the entrepreneurial venture, they might be starting a podcast, you know, like those sorts of things where the

Malcolm Collins: person has like a salary job with benefits. That's, I mean, who does all the work for this podcast, right?

You know, you,

Arch: you do

Malcolm Collins: the talking. Yeah. But anyway, continue, create exact

Arch: arguments against there. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Because I'm, I'm very grateful for the arguments that this base camp listener compiled because they definitely were the concerns that I held as an ambitious young career woman. Working in San Francisco, you know, 23, 24 years old.

Who was absolutely vehemently against the idea of having kids. So let's go into it. [00:14:00] So he says, I've heard concerns like pregnancy makes you give up your old goals that make you cooler. So you become a boring mom. I definitely felt that way. Now, my answer to that is okay. Just what were these old goals and how cool were they?

And that's the thing. People aren't thinking about the counterfactual and just how boring basic people are. I would also argue it's

Arch: Here is defined by distance from the dominant cultural group. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: or, or just relatability to you. So like, if suddenly someone just starts talking about, you know, their kids and family logistics and you have no Relation to that, of course it's not interesting to you, because you, you, you, you don't engage with that.

But if they're talking about

Arch: the logistics of the orgy, now that's cool. Yes. Right? That's weird and subversive

Malcolm Collins: and um Well, but I would also argue that most people who become boring moms We're boring before they became moms. Like maybe now all they do is talk about parent stuff, which by the way is bad etiquette.

Like no one should just talk about the boring. I think

Arch: you're [00:15:00] making a fundamental mistake here. They are defining cool. And this is important. And I think it's a big problem. Why women have a big problem in terms of engaging or getting through fertility collapse is Men, generally speaking, if you're talking like the difference between male and female brains, what they're cued to determining is the objective truth of reality.

A depressing number of people are not cued to determining the objective truth of reality, but what is this socially normative view on reality? A reality morals, everything at the end of the day, that's what wokeism represents is a desperate drive to boast, determine untethered from actual reality. What are the normative views on reality?

Malcolm Collins: You're not answering in terms of their language though. I would just argue that one, they're probably already boring if they're like that. And there are many women who become Extreme and stay extremely [00:16:00] interesting after having kids. I think it's more just like the people who become boring as moms were boring before that.

I don't know. I

Arch: don't know very many interesting women who don't have kids.

Malcolm Collins: No, I can name, I can name. Well, I can, I can name plenty. And I can, I can name plenty of boring moms and I can name plenty of not boring moms. I would say this is, this is a factor independent of it. Let's move on though, because there's tons of subjects here.

So, concern two, I've heard people cite family members who used to be cooler and then became less independent and started supporting Trump.

Simone Collins: You're defining cool

Malcolm Collins: as for not being To them, they looked up to this family member, but it seems like they did an ultimate betrayal of their old independent personality once they got married and had kids.

Okay, what's your response to this then?

Arch: Within their culture by urban monoculture pilled, right? They literally think of supporting trump as uncool when what is more subversive in our existing society even supporting trump like For me, even if I'd like wasn't richy or anything like that. I'd be like, yeah, that's a subversive cool thing to do, right?

Yeah, that's [00:17:00] the independent minded thing to do the non independent minded thing to do is to do what every other single woman is doing you know And here what you can see is, I think there's a part of them that's afraid that they'll become this other kind of entity. Yeah. They'll become someone like you, who's satisfied supporting her husband and who finds satisfaction in raising kids and who, you know, you are different from them.

And it is true that the average married woman does support Trump, you know, a white married women support Trump overwhelmingly. White women support Trump on average. Anyway, white married women overwhelmingly, it's only single women who are still really stuck in this alternate reality bubble. And they are shattered that they will have this bubble burp burst around them

Speaker 9: out there, it's nothing but heartbreak. But in here, who wants pug sundaes?

Hand me a microphone, Zyler. Totally righteous, bro. Are we brothers?

Malcolm Collins: What I'm saying here is that the [00:18:00] key is to get women to open up to logical arguments, but the key to getting them to open up to logical arguments. Is getting them out of their alternate reality bubble that they're living in.

And I understand that this is a challenge people of previous generations didn't have to go through. We are simply dealing with harder times and they dealt with

But because a huge part of both the genetic and the medic and cultural pool is being washed out this generation. There were awards for successfully accomplishing. This are greater than they've been in previous generations..

So it's not a question of how you develop an argument that works for them while not forcing them to exit their alternate reality. Mindscape you need something that makes them a what to exit their alternate reality. Mindscape whether that's a relationship with you or a purpose or anything.

Speaker 6: Maybe we'll listen. I might not have all the answers. I'm not stylish, and I'm not cool, and I can't make [00:19:00] pugs appear out of thin air.

Speaker 8: But

Speaker 6: I know one thing well, and that's you. And I know that even though you might act like it, you don't want to be in this fantasy world.

You're scared of growing up. And who could blame you? I'm scared too.

Look, real life stinks sometimes, okay? I'm not gonna lie. But there's a better way to get through it than denial. Leave this fantasy world.

Arch: And those worlds are sickly and toxic and you should be trying to break out of it. And so their fear and what almost needs to be argued to them is like, actually forget about this whole, you know, have kids things.

Why do you still think Trump is bad in 2025?

Malcolm Collins: Well, but also if If you're wrong about something, wouldn't you want to be right? I think part of the fear is like maybe getting married or having kids will expose me to information that will make me change my mind about something that currently I, a position I hold very strongly.[00:20:00]

If ultimately you don't encounter compelling evidence that that, that is a stance you should shift to, then you won't change your mind. Don't worry about it. Like you're only going to change your mind and culture if you find that that's genuinely a better way to live and be, and they're, they're better ideas.

So I would also say don't worry about that changing if, if you do change those stances, it's going to be because they're better stances. But yeah, I would also encourage these, these young ladies to, to consider other people who didn't have kids, but also became less cool because you can also consider like that child.

No, no, no, no. This is what you're missing

Arch: here. Simone, you're missing what they mean by cool. That's what you're missing. Is that they be, they became Trump supporters. Yes. What they mean by cool is they broke out of the urban monoculture.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that is, that is a

Malcolm Collins: part of it. It's obviously thrown in there because he used the word Trump in this example, but yeah.

Okay. Another concern. Pregnancy makes you stupider similar to the first point they cite [00:21:00] people. They know that they think got stupider after having children. So let's just take a quick look at the actual, like, What what happens when you get pregnant? So several studies have documented mild cognitive impairments during pregnancy, particularly in memory, executive functioning and attention to make meta analysis and studies have found that pregnant women often experience declines in general cognitive functioning like memory and executive functioning.

Non pregnant women. But the effects are most pronounced during the third trimester so one meta analysis reported significant reductions in these areas, with memory performance declining between the first and second trimesters, but stabilizing afterward. And the primary, thing that's going on, aside from the fact that your body's being taxed by pretty hard work is that you're experiencing some pretty serious hormone fluctuations like cortisol and prolactin that can contribute to these changes.

And despite these findings, the cognitive declines are generally subtle and they [00:22:00] remain within the normal ranges of functioning. So it's not like you're getting lobotomized by having a pregnancy and they're typically just something that like the pregnant woman or their spouse notices. And then I, I would point out.

So like, these are things that happen, but like, if you're, for example, running a marathon or like we talked about in a previous episode, climbing Mount Everest, climbing Mount Everest causes permanent significant mental damage with these pregnancy and cognitive impairments, they, they pass when it's over.

You recover. And of course, like, it's almost like being jet lagged for a while. Like, okay, when you're jet lagged, you're sleep deprived, you know, because you were partying for a week or because you were traveling, you're going to have some mild cognitive impairments and they will pass. So this is one of those things that's, I think, I was worried about this.

That I've

Arch: noticed changed. I just think about you and the other mothers of Lots of kids that I know is your, and, and we've talked about this in an unreleased podcast episode, but becoming a parent fundamentally changes your brain in the way you relate to reality. When I say a parent, I don't mean one kid.

I mean like a real parent, like three, four [00:23:00] kids. It's, you know, the changes really seem to take place. And we were talking about this on the discord is three plus kids. Is when you get the, the pretty big changes.

Malcolm Collins: Research has very concretely shown that during pregnancy, even a first pregnancy The brain experiences reductions in gray matter volume, particularly in areas associated with social cognition, like understanding emotions and intentions of others, so that that that happens the first time around to, like, these are actual changes, but there's not any better equipped, not worse.

It's like they

Arch: assume that these changes mean that women are dumber, which fundamentally haven't been shown. It's changing the way they socially relate to things, the way they relate to the world. And it's about

Malcolm Collins: like, resource allocation, efficiency, understanding that the, the, like the brain is shifting gears and preparing for different types of terrain.

Arch: Yeah, the biggest change I have noticed in women who have like a real number of kids like three plus is that they typically lose almost all of their anxiety and almost all of [00:24:00] their borderline like personality features. It's

Malcolm Collins: amazing. Yeah. As, as it was put in Hannah's children, there was like one quote from one of the interviews that Catherine did something like having a certain number of kids.

Burns the selfishness out of you and I just love this Metaphor it really is like it just burns it away like this cleansing fire. It's so cool But also anxiety too

Arch: that women who don't have that they're in this state of constant I'd almost say mental collapse after especially a certain age Which is why they need all these therapists and everything like that.

Like you don't see any therapists You're not on any psychoactive medication. You're not and you're you're not Perfectly happy with your life, you know,

Malcolm Collins: way happier than I was before I met you. And before I had kids like incrementally, like I was definitely happier after. We got together and then I got even happier after having one kid and then way happier now after like four.

Well,

Arch: and it's because it's how your brain is [00:25:00] structured.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but it, you know, it's, I remember before we had our first kid reading this one book about specifically what happens to women during breastfeeding. And I, I described it as like the bonification of women. And like, it did have some like. mild kind of drugging effects.

Like it made kind of women blissed out and happy, but kind of, I, I mentally equated the effects to like, to cannabis consumption of just kind of blessing people out and making them comfortable with the fact that they're like being a cow yeah, as you know, I'm not very into breastfeeding. But yeah, I mean, that, that.

That is the thing. Oh, gratification.

Arch: Both. I love it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I may not be into that. So there, there are, there are things that, yeah, maybe could kind of do that, but I would also point out, and here's the thing is. There is research indicating that having children actually, especially as someone who's not [00:26:00] doing it in a really resource constrained way will stave off cognitive decline later in life.

So when it was children tend to have better late life cognitive performance compared to childless women. Having two or more children has been associated with modestly lower dementia risk compared to being childless. And this pattern is observed in both men and women, but is particularly notable among women.

And then research using brain imaging has found that women with two or three children tend to have younger brain age compared to childless women, which correlates with better cognitive performance. So that, I think, You know, you have to look at the big picture and while there are certainly like short term.

Look, look, look, who's here.

Arch: Oh s**t.

I am so sorry.

We had started a different episode, but hey, we got enough of this and we can finish it up later. Simone. Exactly. Do this

Malcolm Collins: episode now, then we'll do dinner. [00:27:00] All right. That sounds good. Yeah, we're doing, I'm doing my first experiment of Szechuan chicken.

Simone Collins: We're back. We were talking about our pregnancy, young, ambitious women think pregnancy will make them more stupid. And well, yes, obviously anything that is physically taxing is going to have some effects on you.

Duh. Like let's say you're running a marathon at the end. Do you think you're going to perform really well on like executive function and cognitive reasoning? Maybe not, but maybe that's because you're running a marathon. Maybe that's because you're climbing a mountain and maybe that's because you're growing a human, but guess what?

It passes after you give birth. And there's research that indicates that women Who have children have lower cognitive or lower dementia risk later in life and improve cognitive performance. So, again, I think this is really huge, especially the research that found that women who have 2 to 3 children tend to have a younger brain age as gauged through brain imaging is super interesting to me.

One thing [00:28:00] that's. Also interesting to me, which shows the nuance of this argument that I'm not just like universally like yes, have kids no matter the resources is that often this research that found that women had lower risk of dementia and better cognitive performance later in life found that that was primarily for women with two to three children and that women who had more than three children were more likely to show signs of dementia.

Okay, so there are no improvement and I think that's because that in the researchers theorize that's because these women were in lower socioeconomic stratus of society and more resource constrained. So these people were living with stress their entire lives. So I was going to go through. I thought you'd find this interesting.

Malcolm Collins: I collected a number of stats on how pregnancy changes the body and in positive ways. We were going to do an episode on justice, but I can quickly run through it. You should do a separate episode on just this, by the way. A 2017 study involving 1. 5 million Swedes found that people with one or more child, regardless of gender, tend to outlive [00:29:00] child free counterparts.

Adoptive parents saw even larger longevity benefits. Adopting one child added three years to your lifespan. Adopting two to three children added five. Women who had their first child after the age of 25 were more likely to live to the age of 90 compared to those who had their first child earlier. Women who had their last child after 33 had twice the odds of living to the top.

Fifth percentile. Now I would assume that this is probably a health correlatory issue here. Okay, mommy brain, all right, mommy brain, they often cited research when a mother forgets something is real, but it's actually fantastic. Research has found that having kids makes women's brains bigger in certain areas, particularly those related to motivation, reward, and emotional processing and reason and judgment.

Hey. pretty good compensation for occasionally leaving the keys in the fridge. Studies have shown increased acute pain tolerance during pregnancy in both mammals, animals, and humans. And a first of its kind study has revealed that the architecture of women's brains changes strikingly during their first pregnancy in ways that That lasts for at least two [00:30:00] years in particular gray matter shrinks in areas involved responding to social signals we found most pregnancy related gray matter volume reductions persisted six years after partition but you get benefits in other areas particularly emotional processing multitasking and efficiency and long term cognitive benefits.

One study suggests that parenting multiple children over a lifespan, they benefit brain health, particularly in later life. I think that if there were a vitamin or a supplement or a pill that you could market to people that said, this will increase your acute pain tolerance and also make you a little bit less, like, concerned about social stuff as a woman.

Speaker: The single childless woman would be like, what, where can I get this pill? This sounds great because it is

Speaker 2: basically what we're actually seeing here is a transformation and we've talked about this in another episode. I don't know if we don't go live before this one of a female's brain because this happens to men as well.

Like when you get over three kids, your brain seems to significantly transform and how [00:31:00] you're relating to things. Where and it would have made sense biologically that this transformation would make sense would be selected for which is women stop caring about what other people think of them as much.

They stop caring about social games. They stop caring about like the Machiavellian parts of you could take a pill.

Speaker 4: You would

Speaker 2: and that is what is being lost. It's a transition to a, a mindset that most women would prefer. Yeah. And as we know now, all those things that were like, Oh, a woman is less satisfied if she's married.

But you need the husband out of the room for this to be recorded. Well, it turned out that what that was asking is not like a husband had left the room. It was, has your husband died? They were less satisfied when their husband had died or had left them. So women are more satisfied if they're married.

Speaker: Yeah, now I do so I don't I don't want this to be propaganda video. All right I want to be realistic and I think it's important for us to point out that yes Pregnancy can increase the risk of certain health [00:32:00] conditions like hypertension gestational diabetes preeclampsia But it also prevents certain health conditions a lot.

For example, I have Pretty bad. Well, I came into my pregnancies, my, my childbearing years, having pretty severe osteoporosis. And this is a result of having an eating disorder in my youth. And this is a common thing for young women who had eating disorders and lived for a long time with low birth rate or had hypothalamic amenorrhea.

I took Fosamax to attempt to ameliorate this and took regular DEXA scans to check my bone density in response to the Fosamax dosage. Didn't really do a whole lot of good, to be honest with you. Plus it has a lot of risks associated with like, you have to tell your dentist even when you get, you know, a dental cleaning and you, you're on Fosamax.

So I had to stop taking it because you're not supposed to take it while you're pregnant because typically this is for like very old women who have osteoporosis, not women who are going through pregnancies. I had to stop taking it. I was really worried about things like pregnancy and breastfeeding because these things are known to leach [00:33:00] calcium from your bones.

Well, it looks like the body kind of has some, you know, measures to make up for that. So, though, yes, it can leach calcium from your bones and a lot of other things. Pregnancy can leach a lot from your body. It seems to also sort of reopen your body. To restoring itself much more effectively. Kind of like bringing back adolescence.

My bone density is better now. In fact, most of the areas in which I had severe osteoporosis in my lumbar spine around my hips has now changed to just osteopenia, which is a much like it's not great bone density, but it is actively improved and I'm no longer in super dire straits in several parts of my body.

Which is huge. So, like, again, like, to Malcolm's point, pregnancy can also help.

Malcolm Collins: It's not just you. So, another great example here is the other famous perinatalist Collins family. They're not explicitly perinatalists, but they have, like, nine kids, and she's a mommy blogger.

It's an interracial couple.

They're like, they, she, she seems like a sweet person. Honestly [00:34:00] the Fundy bloggers love to rag on them. But anyway it appears that now she doesn't appear to be drawing this connection, but she's been having kids pretty much constantly for like the past nine years or something like that. And before this, she had pretty severe, multiple MS, I want to say, or

Speaker 3: one

Speaker 2: of those, I'll add, I'll change it in post if it's something else,

but it's a neurodegenerative disease that we know from research pregnancy stops. So one of the fears that some of the people who watch her have is if she stops having kids, she's going to immediately die.

Her body right now is like. Like you can't go under 90 miles an hour. And your body explodes. There's

Speaker: like, speed. That's yeah. And so it just like, I think the research says for like in terms of just aging people, I think a lot of, Young women are really concerned about advanced or premature aging.

So, and it is true that several studies suggest pregnancy can accelerate [00:35:00] biological aging. For example, markers of cellular aging, such as telomere length and pregnancies may be sorry, such as telomere length and epigen, epigenetic shocks indicate women who experienced multiple pregnancies could age biologically faster, but this.

Effect has been observed mostly in young high fertility women and is linked to the physical stress of pregnancy. And a lot of these effects also seem to sometimes reverse or recover after pregnancy, like we've been discussing, but I just want to give some perspective to this, because basically what we're looking at is a stressful event having an effect on the body.

Oh, like, wow, being physically demanding on your body has effect, but keep in mind. So for comparison. Alcohol. All right. Most, most young people like to drink a little drinking more than 100 grams of alcohol per week, which is about seven drinks is also linked to shorter life expectancy and increased risks of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart failure.

Even one drink per day could slightly reduce your lifespan compared to a complete [00:36:00] abstinence. And, okay, let's say another thing you know people are really concerned about giving up. Because they're going to have kids travel, right? Oh, I just want to travel the world. I want to go to Europe and Asia. Well, keep in mind, chronic jet lag for every good time zone changes can disrupt circadian rhythms, which are crucial for regulating biological processes.

And the disruption can be associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and even cancer over time. Plus, really. Really frequent flyers, even like especially airline pilots also accumulate radiation levels comparable to those who work at nuclear power plants which has been linked to obviously like severe cancers like melanoma and breast cancer and flight crews.

I'm just saying like a lot of the parentless life isn't. Without its perils as well drinking and traveling and having fun can also accelerate aging

Speaker 2: But we also know as I said that the people without kids die earlier So yeah, it makes sense, but I I point out here. And I think that this is [00:37:00] A really big point, which is that you, and it's one that you made really well there, which is that everything you decide to do is a trade off in terms of your life.

And

Speaker: everything, everything kills you. Like, there's microplastics. I don't know. Like, everything's going to kill you. But what are you fighting for? We can even make this argument. One, one big problem of eating out. Is that there are extra microplastics in all the food that you get when you're eating out because one, like in, in many public health regulations, you have to use plastic cutting boards that gets more plastic in your food, there are microwaving stuff in plastic bags, things are being stored in plastic containers.

So like, okay, your eating out habit is also going to kill you. Well, I don't know. But the,

Speaker 2: the, the point I was making is that you have to consider what you are trading that sliver of your life for. Are you. trading it for a whole additional human life or are you trading it for personal indulgence? Keep in mind, it's like, Oh my God, even if it turned out that every kid you had lowered your lifespan by two years, you're trading those two years for somebody else's 90 [00:38:00] years.

Like how is that?

Speaker: Ooh. There's also the point, and this is something that you, that we have spoken with each other a lot in the past. But in terms of like, How to make it a life feel long versus feel short and a monotonous uniform life where not a whole lot changes like you kind of do the same thing every year like you take a trip and you work and you take you know whatever where it's all just kind of the fun same thing that doesn't change a whole lot can just suddenly like collapse and seem like it just was over in a second

Speaker 2: these people they don't even want to live that long i mean like this is the other thing right like a lot of these people plan to like off themselves when they reach a certain age It's, it's

the one you wait, you wanna live

Speaker 2: Like, who actually wants to be 90 anyway?

Speaker 11: And if it gives me cancer when I'm 80, I don't care, who the hell wants to be 90 anyway? So with a heidi, leidi, leidi, and a heidi, leidi, lei

Speaker: well, but there is a pretty significant group of people who don't want to die and who want to be young forever. My argument, though, is that If you want to feel like you had a [00:39:00] really, really long life, a really big way to do that is to have lots of really, you know, striking changes in your life and nothing makes every day feel new, like, being with a person who's constantly growing and changing and evolving and getting older.

It just makes it feel like. One year was multiple lifetimes because of just all the new things that are happening and developing. So, let's get back though to the grievances and concerns. And another one which I don't think you can answer to at all but, but I can is that pregnancy is scary and painful.

And I would argue that it is only scary and painful if you make it so. Anything can be made scary and painful. Travel can be mean, scary and painful going and leaving your house can be made scary and painful. So I wouldn't worry about it. And I would say and I was talking with someone else about this recently that giving birth in modern hospitals, if you don't want to feel pain, oh my God, you will not feel a thing in my last, when I delivered Indy here, the, the, I, I was [00:40:00] in insane pain, but you know why?

Because, you know, I'm like splayed out getting a C section, right? Like, the most pain I felt was I tried to crane my neck so much to see, like, beyond the curtain in surgery that I hurt my neck. And then I'm like, oh, my neck hurts. Like, that was my biggest grievance. That was what hurt the very most in the entire process of getting and recovering from a C section was, Oh, I twisted my neck a little bit trying to see a surgery to see the gore.

So I think that that's another really important point is that in, in a world of modern medicine, it doesn't really hurt that much. If you, if you, if you are afraid of pain, you can just get the epidural. It's fine. All right, keep going. Next question. All right, next question.

Okay. So another big concern. Is if they have kids, they won't be able to devote enough time to their kids because they're focused on their career and they feel like it's not fair to their children. They comment, the comment was paired with them saying they don't really value having kids that much and they, that they give up their [00:41:00] career, which was It's a career advancing science they valued so much they, okay I'll, I'll reword this.

Basically, the concern is that they really, really value their careers and they're not going to give them up to raise kids, but they feel guilty that the kids are not going to get what they need because they're so busy, focused on their careers. So

Speaker 2: this needs to be disintermediated as a question.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Specifically the point that they were making, which is a logical point, which is to say that I do more for the human race. I do more net good through promoting science or through moving science forwards in my profession than I would do having kids. And the core argument against that, and if you want to be logical about this, be like, yes, and how many people who have scientific competency are still having kids.

If you are one of those rare, rare humans that shows a natural talent for the sciences, that category of humans is the category that is disappearing fastest and anyone who is interested in [00:42:00] participating in a pronatalist family. Or a lifestyle could end up having a huge impact on the future of civilization if you have, as I said, eight kids and they have eight kids and they do that for 11 generations.

That's more descendants. And there are humans on earth today.

Speaker: Read more of this in reality. So many people that we know, and I'm sure that you can find in your own life. Have chosen their career paths or found what is within the bounds of their reach as a person based on the people they grew up around and just being a career oriented woman, a marine biologist, a nuclear scientist, whatever it is that you care about.

It's your career, just exposing your kids to that is increasingly odd. People in the workforce will end up doing that as well. And you value that including your kid's friends, like just having, Oh, well, my friend's mom, well, you know, worked for the CIA. I could do that too. And this has shown in studies kind of obliquely, like there's, there's some research that has shown that.

Children of parents who used government [00:43:00] assistance were way more likely themselves to use government assistance. Just because they kind of know, yeah, like, because they can, they know how to navigate that system, they know how to depend on it, and they also realize it's an option you can do the same in the opposite direction of like, Oh, you can show people how to have successful careers in an area, a domain that you think should be