Catholic Natalism: Peachy Keenan on Faith, Family, and Fighting Cultural Decay

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the world of Catholic natalism with special guest Peachy Keenan, author of "Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War." In this enlightening conversation, Peachy shares her journey from secular upbringing to devout Catholicism, offering invaluable insights on raising a large family in today's challenging cultural landscape.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] HEllo. My name is Simone Collins. I'm here with Malcolm and today a very special guest as well.

I'm so excited. This has been months in waiting. We are joined by Peachy Keenan. She is the author of Domestic Extremist, a practical guide to winning the culture war. Her substack you can find at peachykeenan. com. And in addition to regularly sharing top drawer hot takes on Twitter and her handles Keenan Peachy she's actually working on a new media startup called Lost Riviera, which maybe we'll hear about at the end, but Peachy, welcome.

Peachy Keenan: Thank you so much, you guys. It is so great to finally be here. We were scheduling it for such a long time and to see your smiling, happy faces. Well, you,

Malcolm Collins: you were speaking at the pronatalist conference and you were the funniest speaker there. So I am thrilled to have you on. Although I have to say some of our fans recently have also said my wife is really funny.

And I, I, that must be incredibly gender disconfirming for you. Because you know, the [00:01:00] stereotype is, is women, women aren't that, that humorous.

Peachy Keenan: That is, except for the women on, who are kind of like more right leaning, I feel like they are actually very funny and that's why they're kind of drawn into this, I think.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, I had a specific question that I wanted to focus on with this episode. Okay. So, there was a report that came out and looked at the fertility rate of the American native born Catholic population. And, and, and so for For those who don't know, P. G. Keenan is, I think, sort of the number one Catholic pronatalist in terms of like anyone I'm seeing.

And it came out and said that the average fertility rate was 1. 64 in the United States. Now, that's pretty bad considering the report was done in 2008. It was called Religiosity and Fertility in the United States, the Role of Family Fertility Intentions. When we look at Europe, The average Catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only 1.

3. And in Latin America, we've seen a rapid fertility collapse as well in the Catholic majority countries. [00:02:00] Now there have been studies and we know what's causing this. Catholics actually have exactly the same fertility rate once they're married as any other highly religious individual. But they get married much later than all other Christian denominations.

And so I wanted to brainstorm with you. Why do you think this phenomenon is happening? And how can we fix it?

Peachy Keenan: I've got all the answers right here. Hold on. Yeah. You have 30

Simone Collins: seconds. Go.

Peachy Keenan: Well, I'm going to just take a step back a little bit from that. I'm a Catholic convert, but I didn't, you know, I'm not just sort of one of these sort of regular, normal, normie American Catholics who kind of goes to mass at Easter and Christmas and like has two, 2.

5 kids, like that's not me. I'm more, I definitely joined the like more fundamentalist traditionalist Catholic sect, okay, because honestly, like I was coming from a very secular nothingness, you know, like actually like my mother was like a committed atheist. And when I was going to do it, I was like, okay, I'm, I'm in, [00:03:00] I wanted to like do it, actually do it, like actually do the real thing.

I want to be authentic. You know the authentic Catholic experience. Okay. And so I found this like, you know, group of, you know, our little like Catholic cult. There's these bubbles that are in various cities in America. You can find them. They're very based parishes where it's not watered down. They're not, they're not mimicking the Pope.

They're not saying, you know, who am I to judge their judging and they are okay. It was

Simone Collins: just great

Peachy Keenan: in a healthy way. Okay. They are like, if you listen up and you're like, oh, that you, it will lead you to good places. It will lead you to all this.

Malcolm Collins: Social pressure towards positive action. Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yes, exactly. How it's always been.

That's

Malcolm Collins: very old Everyone is supposed to be able to do whatever makes them feel good whenever they feel like doing it and be affirmed for believing whatever they want to believe about themselves. There's no way that could lead to any sort of psychological damage. Exactly. [00:04:00]

Peachy Keenan: All you

Malcolm Collins: have

Peachy Keenan: to do is like walk down any street where I live and you'll see the consequences of that.

Right. I, yeah,

Simone Collins: you're in the, Malcolm, you know, she's in Southern California, right? So like

Malcolm Collins: in LA, so one, we're going to have to get to why you're living in LA before this, I want to hear that, but I want to hear about your marriage story and your conversion story. Cause did you convert before you got married, after you got married?

How did you think about this when you were dating your now husband? Hmm. I got, I

Peachy Keenan: converted 10 years after we got married. I had already had four children. Whoa, we, yeah, so when we got married, both of us were, you know, basically former, former kind of liberal, basic nothings who had kind of found our own way to kind of more conservative political thinking, I think because of 9 11 and because of all the like failures of Republican presidents and all these things.

And we just kind of became like kind of radicalized really for both sides. And but I was when I met [00:05:00] my husband, I was so still, I was sort of politically conservative, but I was still socially liberal. That's how I had grown up. I went to the Ivy league. That was just what was, you're just absorbing. You weren't a savage.

I was, yeah, I was civilized. I was at the, I was at all the cool parties and everyone around me was. You know, a card carrying pro choice feminist. So of course I was also, but it was for all of us, it was very skin deep, you know, we, we, we didn't think much about it in that era. It was politics. Wasn't identity in those days, it was like, you thought about it once a year on election day, or if it came up in a class, like you didn't think about like my reproductive rights, like that was not even a thing.

Really, although, you know, people were definitely exercising those reproductive rights all around me. And so I met my husband and he had already been red pilled. And so when we first started dating, we were like in the process of, you know, I just moved to New York city and it was very like romantic.

And then we were kind of, you know, falling for each other. [00:06:00] But in the process I was discovering like very alarming things about him. Like he was a Republican. Oh no. Exactly. My parents were Republicans, but I had never met a Republican, like in my peer group. ever was open about it. He, he liked guns. He had a gun.

He had been in the military. I was like, all of these things were sort of like red flags to me and my like feminist bubble of like Oh no, like what will my girlfriend say?

Simone Collins: Yes. No, totally. Totally. I know this feeling. It came from that background too, of just actually I had someone who knew me from childhood recently write to me and be like, but you're a Republican?

Then just that kind of shock, right? Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Trigger. Like it was crazy. But again, it was still not political. Politics was not just identity. He was cool. And my friends were, we were just, it wasn't our thing. We were just having fun going out and doing karaoke and drinking. And then, but you know, the more I hung around him, I was kind of like, well, you're kind of right about all this.

And yeah, you're kind of [00:07:00] right. Like, and he was actually happened to be pro life and but we weren't religious. He was just from a kind of a logical standpoint and like, yeah, that kind of, wow, maybe you're right. You're onto something here. I hadn't really thought ever about it deeply in any way. And so, you know, he was raised like me, kind of secular nothingness because he had been baptized as a baby.

His father had been a, you know, altar boy in Kansas city in the old days. And so, but then it had been completely fallen away and had never set foot in a church since So we got married in his parents backyard with a judge. It was all very civil. You know, zero religion involved. And that was fine with me.

And we I became pregnant, like I think that first year, you know, we were like, you know, we wanted to get on it just like you guys. We jumped right in and like, very sadly, we were unprepared to find out like at three months. Went in for the ultrasound, you know, there was no heartbeat that we had, so it was a miscarriage, and we were so, we were like lambs to the slaughter because we hadn't even thought it was a thing.

You know, you see the heartbeat, you [00:08:00] think, oh, we're outta, no one had prepared us. We were like, I'm

so sorry.

Yeah. No, it's, I mean, it, it all worked out in the end, but it was, it, it was. Such a shock, you know, emotional shock. Like we were just like, no. And he said to me the next day, I'm going to convert.

I'm going to become Catholic now because I can't,

I can't

deal with this. So really the miscarriage was his kind of inciting incident. And he was like, I need to do this. And honestly, my reaction was like, all right, buddy. Like,

Malcolm Collins: sorry, I might be Out of line was this question, but don't Catholics think that, that, that a baby like that would go to purgatory because it wasn't baptized?

I have no idea. That would be comforting. Sorry, I'm just I don't know.

Peachy Keenan: I do know. At the time, I, I'm not sure. I do know, I mean, at the time we weren't Catholic at that moment and I didn't realize. Now that I have, I'm around a lot of Catholic people, I can tell you that I've had friends, for example, who have like a tubal pregnancy.

That's it. [00:09:00] They will actually get the tube, the fallopian tube with the like embryo that they have to surgically take out of you so you won't die and they will get that baptized.

Simone Collins: Oh, so the baptism is important.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. So in terms of what happened to me, I didn't know anything about it. And I had, I went in for a Dini, which is like basically an abortion, but it's a dead, you know, you're, they put you to sleep and they do it in the hospital.

And I didn't even think about any of that stuff. But later on, I thought, Oh, wow. They just kind of threw it in the garbage.

Wow.

So I do feel, when I think about it, I feel like, sorry and sad that I didn't. Think about it, but it is what it is. So what happens to those? I have no idea, Malcolm. I really don't.

I'm like a very non educated Catholic, to be really frank. Like, I don't know.

Simone Collins: I'm thinking to when Malcolm and I spoke with a priest about this, because we were speaking about IVF and we're like, well, what about the frozen embryos? And I mean, I think per the current Status, like the current [00:10:00] stance with the Catholic church embryos have souls.

So like, there are, there are souls to save, but like per older stances,

Malcolm Collins: I'll just ask AI,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): So when I asked AI, it said that currently this is a question that does not have a hard clarified answering Catholic doctrine. I went to be like, where did I get the idea that this was the case? And it was Dante's divine comedy. , that is where I got this idea, because this is what Dante believed that limbo was where all of the unbaptized infants went.

, and I just remember

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: this image of billions of crying, unbaptized, infants, looking for their parents and maybe a few thousand.

, noble pagans having to look after them in limbo is this visceral image that I was never able to get out of my head after reading that book.

Malcolm Collins: but I actually have a question here. I love that. All my theological questions go to AI. Now I'm like, what's the correct stance on AI God is here. I want to ask so you decided like you were keen to [00:11:00] have kids because as you know, in this lefty cult that you guys started in, right?

Like having kids isn't the normal path, but like you were planning to do it soon after getting married.

Simone Collins: You did it right away. And did you get married young or like right after college or in college? Oh yeah. So young for today. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Say you were like a child bride or something, like how did you feel?

Babies. Having babies. Yeah. What was the motivation here? Because I'm, I'm, it's, it's interesting to me that you likely, like when I'm looking at like Catholics getting married later, unfortunately you almost sort of are the exception that proves the rule. Mm. Because you got married before you were a Catholic, so it wasn't influencing your decision making yet.

And then I can look at somebody like, oh who's the Pearl Davis or something, right? Who would start to the Catholic but isn't married or Nick Fuentes, who starts the Catholic but isn't married. And I went through a list of like young Catholic influencers and they're almost all unmarried. And and and like [00:12:00] maybe if your husband had been Catholic, he wouldn't like this is really interesting to me.

So what motivated you to have a kid before you had the religious motivation?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah, I think it was actually becoming, you know, my parents had not been religious, but they had been And when I became a political conservative, that did require me to, you know, let the feminism fall away from my eyes. And so when you do that, suddenly you're like, oh, my maternal instinct.

Oh, I do want kids. Like, maybe I don't want to wait until I'm, you know, in my late thirties. And then when you can kind of let yourself be, you kind of have to suppress all that a little bit when you are in the kind of, you know, basic feminist mindset. You actually do because you're going to go right to work and you're going to delay everything.

And if you get pregnant, you'll abort it and then you'll go get your whatever. So your career comes first when you can kind of, when you, when you can kind of break out of that mentality, that brainwashing, really that, that, that programming they put into you very young as a teenage girl you're more in touch with their maternal [00:13:00] instinct.

So I, I did, I did want it. The minute we got married, I was like, babies, let's go. I had never been a baby person. I was never one of those, like, let me take the baby. I didn't care. You know, I was Neither was

Malcolm Collins: Simone. Simone had all these fears that she wouldn't love her kids. She's like, I don't It's common.

Peachy Keenan: That's really common if you haven't been around them yet, when you're a first timer. We don't live in a baby centric culture. I had two cousins growing up. I didn't live near, I never held a baby from the time my little sister was born. Like until my own baby, like I didn't hold babies. And so you're not having that, like, aren't they so cute.

And when you see babies, it does fill you with these like endorphins. Like I never had that. But when I, when I got married, I just knew, okay, I'm old. I got to do it now. I just, I knew I hadn't been like, you know, memed out of my biological clock. I wanted to get going.

Malcolm Collins: So now I want to go back to this story.

Your husband converts. What are you thinking at this moment?

Peachy Keenan: Right. I thought he was a little bit crazy. I was like, that's your journey, bro. But like, I [00:14:00] married you. So I'm kind of like, what are you going to do? What are you going to tell your husband? Like your new husband? Like, f**k you. Like, I'm gonna, I'm sorry, baby.

I'm gonna, I'm out. Like, no, you want to support them. And I understand, you know, you're in mourning, right? So he went through the whole conversion process. And it really was a process of me going along with him, you know, being kind of dragged to mass, dragged through. And that was my education. So that was when I was like, and meeting other people, women like me who are actually Catholics, like cradle Catholics,

who

were so cool, so open, so accepting much more so than my, You know, liberal Ivy League girlfriends who are very judgmental, very critical, very dogmatic, very conformist with the Catholics.

I was kind of like, could let my freak flag fly. And I was like, kind of, they kind of brought me in as like, here, you know, here's this, here's peachy and she needs us like to kind of guide her through the way. So it was really like a new peer group. Who were so much more [00:15:00] like cool and awesome than the, than the, than the friends I had had.

And then we went through the whole process. We baptized all of our children because I thought, well, You know, rationally, this is a great way to raise a child, much better than what I had, which was like basically anything goes just, you know, it was wilded, right? And I didn't want my kids to have that. I wanted them to have structure and, you know, have a, a, an infrastructure, a moral framework that they could just take and grasp and help them, you know, go through life, which is, I think so great.

And then, but finally I had three babies under three. Okay. I had a zero, a one and a two, three diapers at one point. It was wild times. So finally I found like matching shoes like 10 years later. I was like, okay, I'm ready. I'm now I'm going to do it. So I went down to the local parish. I went through the process myself.

Explain matching shoes.

Malcolm Collins: I don't understand.

Peachy Keenan: Oh, because I was pregnant and nursing for like 10 straight years. And then I finally found shoes. I could match [00:16:00] and go leave the house. That's my joke.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, okay. Sorry. I'm not, it takes a while, but hold on. It sounds like, and this is something that, that I've noted a lot is.

I think a lot of people when they're in what we call the urban monoculture, like this, this, you know, the old group of friends that you had, and you start interacting with educated religious people, you're like, often really surprised by how real they are and, and, and open they are when contrasted with the other communities, like it's not as much of a status game.

One of my favorite lines about this was they were asking It's whatever, one of the, the fifth horsemen of the ACS apocalypse or whatever, that former Muslim, right? Is whatever, I'll let it impose. But why, why did she go to Christianity instead of Islam when she became, like, theistic? And she goes, well, of all the years of attacking Theistic people.

And that was my job. She was like, it was attacking Christians. It [00:17:00] was attacking Muslims. The Muslims would always say, send me stuff about how they were going to kill me or great me or whatever. And the Christians would always send me stuff that was like, we're praying for your soul. We want you to, you know, Just try it.

Like, will you come to mass with me one day? Like we really want what's best for you. And she realized that they had never really responded to her with anger, not in a, in a big way. So she was like, when I started thinking about joining one of the communities, naturally, I'm going to go to that one, even though it's not my birth community.

And I thought that that was, it's something that I've definitely felt. Is that these communities are dramatically more accepting than individuals would think, even with significant theological questioning, which individuals know we do on this channel, like we do like deep theological questioning on this channel like, oh, this part doesn't make sense.

This part doesn't make sense. How can I do this better? And I think people would assume that That religious Christians would take that negatively [00:18:00] when in reality, most of them are actually quite excited to be having a theological conversation.

Peachy Keenan: Oh, I'm sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I'm sure it's something that you, you saw as well.

So you get in the community, you, you convert. What is, was that process like beginning to go to church, beginning to, yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. Well, we've been going to mass, you know, every week with the children. It was, it was very much a part of our lives. We were hanging out with all these people. And so I was like fully on board.

I think it just. It was just like the chaos of my life at that time was like, I wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't able to like go and take every afternoon and go do this thing. And then when I finally did it, you know, in a very lame, my, my local parish was very, at the time it was very lame. It was very, you know, unorthodox, let's say very liberal

and

you know, the Catholic school, my, our kids went to that, there was a school attached and you wouldn't, you would see zero.

of the families at the school in mass on Sunday.

Oh, wow.

One family who [00:19:00] was like, you know, come area or something. They were not. They were just doing it because it was a way out of the public school.

So that was

part of my driver also is like, well, I don't want this like water phoned in. watered down. If I'm going to do this, I believe this now, like I'm on board, I want to do the real thing.

So we ended up moving to actually moved our house. We moved the whole family across town to a parish that is actually much more, you know, I guess you would say conservative, much more traditional. And which was where a lot of these families that we had been hanging out with were and they're, you know, to them, I have five children.

I'm something of a lightweight. To be frank with in this

Simone Collins: particular community,

Peachy Keenan: like our TFR is off the charts. We're like meeting out and like, you know, Sudan, like where

Malcolm Collins: this is good stuff. Yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. Like I have a friend who has one of my good friends. You know, these women are my age, she has 10 kids, another woman my age, 12

[00:20:00] kids.

I'm like at five, relatively on the low end. But the thing is, there's friends of ours who have, they have one child, they have two children. It's not, and no one ever would say like, what are you, what's wrong with you? Like, no. Like any child is welcomed. You want to have whatever God gives you is great.

There's no, no, you can't go too high as my point.

Malcolm Collins: How did you break it to your kids that you were Catholic now? Like, was this like a conversation that you remember having? Were they old enough that they had known that they'd grown up and yeah.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah, they, they fully were. I mean, I think I think my oldest, when I did the whole, the whole, like I did, you know, they do for adults, they do it on Easter vigil and they, they, they do everything at once.

They do all the sacraments once they baptize you, confirm you, first communion, all one shebang, right? Like they, you're in the white robe and they're dump water on you. And it's just like, You're done like you're and they, they were, they knew they were so excited because they'd been doing, they were, you know, cradle Catholics.

So they were very, you know, mommy, when are you gonna do it? When are you gonna do it? Mommy? So they're thrilled. They're thrilled because now That's

Malcolm Collins: amazing. So your kids converted [00:21:00] before you did. I know. Right. That is, that is

Peachy Keenan: like, that's funny. That's amazing. Well, they were born, yeah. Born into it. They were baptized when they were little babies.

So, it's It's been so I'm like, you know, I hear about this like the Catholic you're talking about in the beginning about the birth rates among Catholic

Malcolm Collins: school where it was all sort of like fake Catholics. The problem is that Catholic is, I guess you'd argue that Catholic, like, maybe Jew is almost a cultural identity.

Instead of a religion for a lot of people, and that's what's towing down all the fertility statistics.

Peachy Keenan: The Jews are the, I think, having the same schism, where the Orthodox Jews, the, the, the sects that are kind of, you know, keeping the kind of fires burning, like the ways they did it in the old country, are having lots of children you know.

Even in LA, you'll see, you'll go through the Jewish, the Jewish neighborhoods and they're walking to shul and they have like, you know, bigger families than me. And so, but, but in both of these, you know, You [00:22:00] know, I grew up around a lot of secular Jews the West side of LA, that was like the norm and all these private schools.

And maybe you have two kids, like, you know, maybe max. And and the same for, and the same for like the wishy washy Catholics the families at the, at the kind of liberal Catholic parishes, same exact thing. Maybe they have two kids. In other words, there's like no daylight between them and some like purely secular, Non religious at all, public school family, maybe, you know, two kids, maybe.

And, so, I mean, continue. No, I was wondering, how do you take back the church? Like, how do you? Well, right, that's the question that you have to wonder. So, when you say, like, Catholic TFR is falling. Well, it's, there's just no daylight anymore between, kind of, mainstream American Catholicism and mainstream American liberalism.

It's, it's basically that's the same group of people. I mean, I saw some statistic that was like 65 or 70 percent of, you know, self self proclaimed Catholics are voting for Kamala Harris. Right. Right.

[00:23:00] I

mean, I'm sure that if the Pope could vote, he would vote for Kamala Harris, like 100%, like that's the world we live in here where Catholic is really like, you're like a Sino.

You're like a Catholic in name only.

And

there's like a big schism between the conservative Catholics in America. And the kind of normie. And so, how do you reconcile that? Like, like you said, like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I'm actually like psychologically, I really wonder when the Pope, when you feel like the Pope, who's like the head of the church has moved in a direction that the church doesn't like, Like, how does that work?

I guess

Peachy Keenan: it like doesn't, but I think is you know, me and some of my friends are always like, you know, like, Oh, like this guy, like, who is this guy? He's a Jesuit. The Jesuits have always been very liberal, but he's really, to me, a politician and first a politician first. Like, why is he meeting with Alex?

Why is he meeting with bill [00:24:00] Clinton all the time? Like what? What? He's doing a

Malcolm Collins: good

Peachy Keenan: job with the politics.

Malcolm Collins: The Vatican, you know,

Peachy Keenan: sorry,

Malcolm Collins: what? I think he's genuinely doing a good job with the politics and doing a good job with the optics. I think removing a lot of the flair from the popeship, like, like going a bit more austere was a really smart move.

Even if his theological stuff might be,

Simone Collins: well, what I feel like is happening when I look at it. sort of the analogs of demographic collapse more in general, is that he's trying to essentially do what the United States is doing, is they're like, well, let's just turn to immigration. Immigration will solve the problem.

And he's like, well, let's just loosen the rules and let's make this a big tent religion and everyone can join and you don't have to make any sacrifices and everyone goes to heaven. Kind of like, he's just, I'm seeing policies loosen and, and the borders The board is softened and become more porous. And I feel like that's kind of the same approach, but that it's not working.

Just like how depending on immigration for [00:25:00] demographic collapse is not going to save a nation, opening up to everyone and also relaxing on rules and going as softer as a religion is not going to save Catholicism. I could fudge the numbers for a little bit, but I also don't think that this is necessarily the factor that's at play.

Solely for lower Democrat. Sorry, I was going to say demographic lower Catholic birth rates because it seems that the birth rates are really high with Catholics. in general, but that the issue is that they're marrying too late. And I'm curious what you see, even within the small data point of your Catholic community, what's happening with young people?

Are they getting married in their twenties? Or is this a genuine issue even among the more hard religious Catholics? Are they getting married too late?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. I it seems to me that the, the solution that some of the families I know have found, which is very effective, To creating, to producing early [00:26:00] marriages is all about call college selection.

There is a kind of a smallish list of colleges in the United States that if you go there, you are very likely, if you wish to find a potential spouse. So they're like the

Simone Collins: BYUs of Catholicism.

Peachy Keenan: The BYUs of Catholicism. And it's like ring by spring is like an actual phenomenon. And it sounds like a natural thing.

But these are kids who are ring by spring and you'll get the alumni magazine and the back is like all the weddings from the, you know, class of 2022, like 25 weddings from that class.

Malcolm Collins: We have some listeners whose families may have lapsed. Can you give them a few colleges that they should be checking out?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. So actually a great source is something called the Newman's List, Cardinal Newman's List. I don't know the exact website go Google Cardinal Newman list and they actually have a list of all the colleges They recommend was the usual suspects, but also some smaller ones that people may not, you know have heard of I have friends who go to [00:27:00] Franciscan University in Steubenville University of Dallas In Dallas, Thomas Aquinas College has two colleges.

There are a whole host of these sort of smaller schools. I don't even know if Notre Dame is still on the list. They might not be because they've gotten so wishy washy, but there are these schools where if you go, you are, I've been to now three weddings of kids who met their spouses at a school like Thomas Aquinas College, which is in Ojai, California, which is a very kind of trad calf great books.

Classical, you know, those are all the kind of like the dog whistle for finding a wife. Great books, classical, find your wife at one of those places. Not that, not to say you want, you went elsewhere, but I think, yeah, Christian colleges, it really does seem to be that the marriage rates are doing fine. If you're going to an explicitly openly Christian or Catholic college.

Simone Collins: So colleges to a great extent, at least in the United States are, A modern shorthand for marriage markets. [00:28:00] If we can't, if we're not creating organized marriage markets, like the LDS church has a bunch more like youth conferences and youth wards, but if you don't have those, or even if you do, I mean, they still rely, the religion essentially still relies heavily on BYU.

So college is kind of the modern.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think this is a really powerful, and I hadn't considered how powerful it is, sort of social framing is you should be married by, you know, you're not married, but have a spouse partner lined up by your second year of college. And if you don't, you effed up. And I remember feeling Shame on you,

Simone Collins: Malcolm.

You didn't do that.

Malcolm Collins: You know I was freaked out about it. I told you when I met you, I was like, I should have found a wife by now. I'm going to grad school so I can find a wife there because I didn't, I didn't nail it the first time. Yeah, you're

Simone Collins: like a 24 year old woman

Malcolm Collins: on the London season. Are your kids doing this?

You have one, you just sent the first one to college.

Peachy Keenan: Yes, I have one who is in a school. It's. It's basically a non denominational Christian school. I'm not going to say the name, but there are many [00:29:00] potential prospects. There it is. It is a school where they, you know, there are, is the ring by spring phenomenon does happen by senior year.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Peachy Keenan: And he's the kind of boy who, you know, on him, it all took, okay. Like I don't know, like he's just the kind of guy it all, all the religious indoctrination we did for him. It, it took great guy. Okay. He is extremely devout. He's extremely chaste.

And

he is, wants to have, you know, not wait too long. I would never tell a boy, you must be married by this age.

Like 22, you have to be married by this age. Not at all. Because it depends on what a million things.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You need to find the right person.

Peachy Keenan: Yeah. But if he did have a serious girlfriend or was thinking about getting engaged in his early twenties, I would just be happy as a clam. So, so I mean, fingers crossed, you know, he's definitely on it.

We got one, right? Okay. So. Yeah. That's amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Because I don't understand this. What the hell are you doing living in LA?

Peachy Keenan: Yeah, I know. [00:30:00] Really my fault. I didn't choose. I was, I wasn't, I didn't choose it. So my parents are New York immigrants. They immigrated from New York city to Los Angeles right when they got married in the seventies.

In the mid seventies. And so they had us all here. We grew up here. And to this day, you know, my mom is here, my dad is, they're divorced, but they both live here. My brother and Sister Mo, at least my brother is still here on my husband's side. He grew up in Santa Monica, right? Five minutes from where I grew up.

He was almost the boy next door. His parents are here. He has six siblings, they're all here.

Oh wow.

Children are here. So, you know, our Thanksgivings are these like huge family affairs in Santa Monica. And it has always felt like, well, should we get out? Where are we gonna go? How old are the parents are older?

And the other thing is that my, it's sort of like, it's your home. And I, I drive around Malcolm and I see like on my, just two blocks away, tense, homeless junkies. You see them just like doing drugs right in [00:31:00] front of my kids. See this. Like almost on the way to mass. Oh, there's a guy, you know, ODing on Fentanyl.

Like we see that every week and I'm like, we gotta get outta here. And my husband's like, you know, I just, to him California is like his, he's seventh generation.

Simone Collins: Whoa. He's like,

Peachy Keenan: this is my, this is my home. And also his job. It's not really transferable. So we have this thing called like, you know, his income that we, we would, yeah,

Simone Collins: kind

Peachy Keenan: of nice to get an income from the, the man of the house.

If we could pull it off one day, I will get out. The problem for us is like, where do you go? Because you know, the, the, the, the blue cities tend to have like. The best food, the best culture, like things we are used to living.

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to push back here. Simone believed all of this. Simone believed all of this.

Simone, do you remember how hard I had to fight to get you to consider to live outside the city? You're going to live [00:32:00] somewhere in Pennsylvania somewhere. Tell her your experience of moving. Like, what happened after? It's true.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I was like, I'm never going to live outside a city. The suburb sounds like the worst thing in the world.

Like, why would I ever do that? And now I couldn't imagine doing anything else. The food out here is great. Cost of living is amazing. And also we spend more time socializing. In cities than we did when we lived

Peachy Keenan: in cities, right? Because you're doing it intentionally. Yeah. Yeah. And we have

Simone Collins: flexibility.

Like, well, we most commonly will do New York or D. C. because we can drive to either. No, when we were 30 minutes outside Philadelphia, but no one's there. So screw that. But, it's you're selling me.

Malcolm Collins: Simone forgot. So she, the thing she complained about, she's like, what about like getting a haircut or going to a grocery store? And then we get, get out here and she's like, Oh, I can just. Drive like we used to walk 20 minutes to the grocery store and then walk back with [00:33:00] like bags of groceries and now we just drive and put it in our trunk or she was like, what about the food and what she forgot about?

And I think this is what something that a lot of people in cities forget about. Is different immigrant groups settle in different locations? Yeah. So for example, if you love Italian food, you're going to get the best Italian food in the center of a city. But if you love Indian food, which is our favorite Indian, Thai, that sort of stuff, those populations generally settle in the suburbs.

And so there is. way better, you know, Indian food, sushi, you know, all the types of food that we actually like in our area. And she was a little surprised by this. I will admit I can't get good rendang out here. Like, the Indonesians tend to settle in cities more. But you're

Peachy Keenan: telling me I would be totally open to it.

I, it does feel like maybe we're just too old to move. Maybe we'll have to do our, when our kids migrate. Well,

Malcolm Collins: jobs matter, like cities have jobs, jobs [00:34:00] matter, things that cities have is some jobs you can't leave and well, and more

Simone Collins: than that support networks matter. And when you mentioned the amount of family, you both have living close by when you are raising five kids.

a local family is huge. I

Peachy Keenan: been amazing. And all my, of friends, we have, we h leave our school during t A lot of people fled to Da to Montana, Idaho. We to Charleston, South Caro They're returning, they just, they felt like they couldn't replicate the community that they had here, which is,

you know,

you don't realize that you can't just like pick up a whole set of friends that you've known for 20 years and replicate that elsewhere.

Although, I mean, a lot of my friends are just like on my computer, you know what I mean? They're just like on the, they're my internet friends. So I don't know how, how, like, I think that would mitigate a lot of that. [00:35:00] Like you said, it's okay to go like a couple of times a year and go to a party. I don't necessarily need like.

daily, you know, interactions with like my girlfriends. I'm not that kind of, do you have like a discord fan group? I have no idea. I'm not on discord. I'm just on, I just basically Twitter is my only social media. Is there a discord? I have no idea

Simone Collins: that you don't even know about

Peachy Keenan: discord

Malcolm Collins: and he can, maybe he could help me figure that out.

I have, I have, I didn't know. Like when we started this channel, I was like, Discord stupid. I don't like it. I, and then we kept having fans reach out to us and be like, started discord, started discord, started discord. And finally we started one and now discord is like my favorite social media platform because it's the only one where there's like no toxicity because it's all our fans, so you're just not going to get much toxicity.

And when there is, I can choose to ban them. So, you know, but I've, I've actually been surprised by but it sounds like you don't need it cause you've got your local community and stuff like that. I mean, this is [00:36:00] another thing I wonder that we've been building up is sort of like a community of like influencer friends that like, I want my kids to hang out with their kids, but like, we don't have anything like a genuinely local community.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that's, that's, that's not a thing of value to discount at all, especially when you have young kids, especially, you know, completely made the right calculation.

Peachy Keenan: Right. To, to misquote Sartre's hell is other people's children. A lot of the time. Okay. Because you can do all the indoctrination of your own kids that you want and tell them all the things, the truths that you believe, and then you drop them off for one play date.

And they're going to come back and they're going to tell you a lot of things that they learned at the friend's house. Cause you didn't know the mom was some kind of like loony, you know, social justice. I happened to my daughter, she came back and she knew all the birds and the bees and that we, she was like four.

And this mom was like, it was like this new age, [00:37:00] holistic midwife or whatever. She was a dear, a dear sweet girl, you know, but she had, she had educated my daughter. And had never without me having anything to do about it. And I was like, so it's like, it goes both ways. The kids. So, you have to be careful

Malcolm Collins: who they are.

That's why I don't let my kids have friends. I, I've been very strict about this as a, as a, as a father and a husband. Yeah. Which is to say people are like, Oh, your kids don't have what birthdays? I'm like, no. ridiculous. We're going to have a lot of kids, they can celebrate the birth of their next sibling.

It happens every year. You know, they need to, they need to calm down with this indulgent stuff. Our friends, like, I don't know, like, do, do our kids, I know they have formed friendships with other kids at their, their stuff, but like, I haven't really tried to foster that.

Peachy Keenan: Well, I think that getting, having get togethers with like minded families who have children roughly your same age is hugely valuable.

[00:38:00] It's not something that they need to be stuck with them six, seven, eight hours a day. But I think that doing it on a, some kind of basis is obviously great. And you know, you never know, you can do a little like early matchmaking.

Malcolm Collins: That's what we're looking at doing. We've been doing that with our little ones with other like a long techno technophilic types.

Well,

Simone Collins: a question I have for you though, in terms of raising kids, and this is something that came up at natalism conference last year is that there were some parents we met who had a lot of kids, raised them in their religion, or at least thought they were doing that. And then reached a point at which their kids, We're adults and suddenly we're like, you know what, I'm not in this religion anymore.

And like had completely gone mainstream culture, no religion left, very unlikely to get married and have kids sort of everything was lost. You know, they, and it doesn't really matter from an intergenerational standpoint and how many kids any individual has. It really matters how many grandkids they have and how many grandkids they have.

Like, that's the sign of success. [00:39:00] You've created a thriving human who has been able to create a thriving adulthood and pass it on. Are there, are there things that you tried to do with your kids or that you think went well with your kids? Because I mean, you mentioned, for example, that your son actually is leaning in to religion.

He's not like leaning out, which is really exciting to hear. Are there things that you'd recommend people do or things that you've observed over time that you think would help with cultural retention?

Peachy Keenan: I think, I think the main thing and the main success stories I've seen with like the young couples who have kind of grown up, like within our little bubble and gotten married early and had their gun and actually gone and had kids like in their early twenties.

The main thing is keeping a little bit of a moat. Around them for as long as possible between them and like me, whatever, mainstream culture. So like people saying like, well, they grew up, I raised them religious. Then they just fell away. But again, there's a big difference between like being raised religious or being raised like with actual deep faith or with an [00:40:00] actual infrastructure, whatever it is, whatever form that is, and being raised to actually cherish things like family, things like, You know, your, your, your kin having a big family.

I mean, I think the reason we got into it really was one of the reasons was my husband's oldest of seven kids. And so his mother had this, you know, she was kind of like a boomer kind of lib, but she just loved babies. Right. Happened. Many as possible. And so just having this, like awareness of baby, giving your children awareness of babies are good.

Babies won't hold you back again. It's countering with young girls that you have messages that they're going to get. Everywhere else with no babies should not be avoided. Like they're poison babies are good things to have one day. You know, you should wait until you are, have a life partner. You should wait, you know, don't do it this, but these are a wonderful thing.

And you should embrace that part of your. Your, your biology. This is, it's, it's important to be able to express that in a healthy, good way. And so I think that just [00:41:00] countering the culture's messages with your own, like your, you have a very strong family culture. Creating your own family culture is so important.

And again, it comes down to really for kids. When they get a little older, they're kind of raising themselves in their peer group, who their peers are, who their peers parents are. What are they teaching them at the school? Are you homeschooling them? Like where, what are they, what is like the sum total? I'm going to get a lot of this junk on the internet and my kids are on the internet too.

Like they're looking at the stuff that. A lot of other kids are looking at, but they've kind of have already these kind of built in immunities and filters. Like they're not going to be looking at things that are pornographic or things that are blasphemous or things that kind of, you know, go against, like they would, they, they like kind of are kind of conditioned to kind of like, Oh, that's not for me, you know?

And so just kind of from an early age giving them the tools to discern, you know, the like good way to live and there's a bad way to live. This is what's good about our way. And it seems to, so, you know, it's a numbers game, right? You're not going to win them all. There's always [00:42:00] going to be, you know, one that gets away. One of the baby turtles gets, you know, eaten by the crabs. Like we're not going to make it to the ocean. That's why the mommy turtl