Sweden's Declining Fertility Rates and Cultural Challenges

We analyze the recent collapse in Swedish birth rates, despite its generous pro-family policies. As Sweden embraced feminism, state-supplied daycare, and progressive values, we predicted their fertility incentives would prove fruitless. Sure enough, financial subsidies cannot overcome the cultural antagonism modernity holds towards childbearing. We reiterate that culture- not money- drives birth rates. Until having children is celebrated and prioritized, the developed world will continue on the path to slow suicide.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Even men have become feminists.

The state supplies universal daycare and flexible employment for mothers, fathers take up their share of domestic labor, and both parents are awarded generous leave from their jobs to raise the next generation

across these countries that had been implementing these policies, they have begun to see their fertility crash. And we told you, but I want to hear you pontificate on this first.

Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, this was very much. And I told you so kind of thing, because we're like, it's not the money.

It's not the money. It's not the money. It's a culture. And here it is. There's, there's no exogenous celebration of people being parents. I think one of the big problems is, is there's this dream that you can have a pronatalist culture and everyone can work and everyone can participate in the modern economy and identify as career people.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Remember when we took that trip to Sweden and you paid like 30 for a hot dog and then we decided to stop eating

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it's funny so [00:01:00] we we did this trip to Sweden and I love the the trip that we did there actually because This was what Simone gifts me when she's giving me a trip. Like we don't go on normal trips I should say before we went to Sweden Simone had me for me, she emailed every one of the VCs in, in the city we were visiting and every one of the private equity company owners and all of the famous startup people.

And so when we went there, just cold email, but, you know, I have a Stanford MBA and she was a Cambridge student at the time. So a lot of them responded. I mean, we would go to their offices and we would see what they were working on and everything like that. Because And they know where all the

Simone Collins: good restaurants are.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's important to never allow yourself to come to indolence. To do a trip just for idle curiosity, I think, is sinful. And so, while we can see the world, we need to make sure that we learn how to improve ourselves on these trips. And At this point, I was also trying to learn, because I was working as a VC in South Korea how some small economies were doing well with their venture capital investing, and others were not, because this was very interesting to me, [00:02:00] like why you would get some economies creating these giant companies.

And just for

Simone Collins: TLDR of your theory, which I think is very astute, is that basically for countries, Startup economy to work well, if they're relatively small and they eventually have to leave, they can't be, they can't have a sufficiently compelling market like South Korea does, because then basically you go big in your own home market, but never really make yourself ready for an international market.

If you have a very, very, very small market like that in Sweden, you immediately have to be international from day

Malcolm Collins: one. You need to be so small that the first market you are attempting is an international market. So this means that this is why areas like Germany and France have such bad startup marketplaces.

Whereas domestic markets are too big, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, stuff like that, because they're so small that the initial market needs to be somewhere else. I think that was a very

Simone Collins: astute observation on your part.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. So anyway, we go there. The food there [00:03:00] is so expensive. It's obscene.

We were starving the whole time. Basically, I would only eat street food when I was there or food that the people we were meeting was hands

Simone Collins: that we got at the grocery store. But that was okay. Also, you know, Swedish people are not dreadfully obese because they can't afford it. Can't afford

Malcolm Collins: it. But anyway, I I want to talk more on the topic of falling fertility rates in Sweden because a lot of, for a while, this narrative had existed that in the Nordic countries, in this land of gender equality, there seemed to be some level of resistance to fertility collapse that wasn't seen in countries, you know, like the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, which had lower fertility rates.

And so every

Simone Collins: progressive pointed to it like, Oh no, Sweden proves. That you can have a very progressive gender policy, you can have men and women treated the same, you can have you know, really semi

Malcolm Collins: socialist policies. I can read this quote from an article on this, right? Even men have become feminists.

The state supplies universal daycare and flexible employment for mothers, fathers take up their share of domestic labor, and both parents are awarded [00:04:00] generous leave from their jobs to raise the next generation. As one 2015 study claimed, it is precisely in, quote, extraordinarily equal, unquote, Sweden, where family friendly public policies are especially effective.

That we supposedly see how, quote, the spread of more egalitarian values on the national level and more progressive family supported policies will have a positive effect on fertility and family stability, end quote. The problem is, I guess I'll, I'll get to where we are now. Since 2021, the number of births in Sweden is down more than 12 percent and the fertility rate has fallen by almost 14%.

The country's 2023 total fertility rate, a projection of lifetime fertility of all women. In a particular year, we're surely, I think, below 1. 5 children per woman. That's catastrophically low. Marriage rates, too, have been falling in Sweden for 15 years. Precipitously, since 2016, inmarital unions aren't being replaced by long term cohabitation.

[00:05:00] Since the Swedish state began Counting such quote unquote consensual unions in 2011, there has been a steady decline in their rate of formation. Most notable are the falling rates of marriage and union formation among parents in 2021. They were doing so at rates of around half the level of just a decade earlier.

Fertility and family formation are declining in Norway and Finland even more dramatically. France's 2023 fertility figures are especially troubling in the light of the country's recent ability to buck falling fertility trends across Europe, generally credited to its huge family policy budget, which amounts to 3.

4 percent of GDP in 2019. So wow. So, you know, these are measured in, in chunks of GDP and across these countries that had been implementing these policies, they have begun to see their fertility crash. And we told you, but I want to hear you pontificate on this first.

Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, this was [00:06:00] very much. And I told you so kind of thing, because we're like, it's not the money.

It's not the money. It's not the money. It's a culture. And here it is. There's, there's no exogenous celebration of people being parents. I think one of the big problems is, is there's this dream that you can have a pronatalist culture and everyone can work and everyone can participate in the modern economy and identify as career people.

And we really saw that when we visited, you know, there was a lot of that, you know, like, well, no, we're all like very serious people. We work really, really hard, but then, you know, we still have our families, et cetera. But I think this focus on the industrial economy is, is kind of a core thing that was missed because when you focus on that, you are ultimately punished, not only for having kids, but also for getting married, which is also, I think it was, it's really important.

To highlight that marriage and even just like unions between people that are long lasting that aren't even necessarily marriages are plummeting too, because these just aren't things that get you ahead in society in [00:07:00] Sweden. And if you create a society in which you don't get lauded, you're not celebrated.

You're not like the cool people for getting married and, or having kids, you're not going to do it because you're not an idiot. And I just, yeah, it's, it's sad and it's frustrating, but. It is, we would argue, more confirmation that culture is at the core of this issue, the

Malcolm Collins: very, very core. Yeah, well, so I have a lot of friends who were Swedish when I was in college because I went to college in the UK and it was a, you know, St.

Andrew is a uniquely diverse in terms of the countries that people went to. So I had a number of Swedish friends. And one of the things they marked to me that I remember finding interesting is that they never really planned on getting married. My Swedish friends, they explained that culturally it wasn't normal there that within their generation to get married.

You know, you would. Meet someone and you would do this cohabitation thing that they were describing in the article, but marriage wasn't something they expected from their lives. Interesting. And this is one of those areas where I feel like as we have gotten rid of these old structures, like marriage we, we at first are like, what's the point?

I mean, you can have [00:08:00] kids outside of marriage. You can have, you know, It's so many of these, I forget what it's called, the something fence. It's so many of these fences that we just removed. Chesterton's fence. Chesterton fence. Like, we don't know why the fence is there, so let's just get rid of it. And then we are now learning why all of these cultural fences were there.

Why we, why we did these things. I think so often in society. People will say, why did people do this thing that seemed to hurt some people? Why did people slut shame? Why did people pressure spinsters? Like, why did they so degrade women who didn't get married? Why did people laud mothers? Why did we give men special roles in society?

Why, like, typically if something seems grossly unfair or seems to be making people unhappy, like, why did we regularly have to fast? It turns out that we were doing it for a reason. And I think that this is just broadly something that we're seeing across society right now is that a lot of these cultures that thought that they could culturally innovate insofar as [00:09:00] just removing rules, removing rules isn't cultural innovation, removing rules is to cultural innovation.

What tearing down a building, like putting a wrecking ball through a building, is to architecture. Yeah. It's not cultural innovation. It's, it's just destroying things. And then you reap consequences of that. And as we have pointed out, you cannot pay people to have kids. And I'm going to get this to with the Korean numbers because it's like people do not get this.

They keep trying to pay. So in another article that came out recently in Korea, they're now giving out 20, 000 or 22, 000. Per kit to increase fertility rates in subsidies and stuff like that. So we are now entering the stage where I think a lot of people are like, what if you tried meaningful cash subsidies?

Like enough, they would make a difference. Yeah. And

Simone Collins: that's a hefty chunk of change. And is that up front?[00:10:00]

I mean, most economists argue that it's, it's most effective when it's upfront, so, but anyway, let's, let's not quibble about

Malcolm Collins: that right now. Let's not quibble about it. I mean, they've spent 22 million in the last 16 years on trying to get their fertility rates up and it doesn't work. You cannot do this.

You must do cultural innovation. And, but again, Cultural innovation is not just tearing down culture. Okay. It's not just putting a wrecking ball through things. It's new rules and not just rules to make you feel good rules that motivate the continuation of our species. When progressives create rules and they do create rules, all of the rules are structured around.

feeling better. They are all about knocking down the building faster. They are about removing things in society that might create pain. And I think one of the things that I constantly see, and this actually goes to the video we filmed recently around Adam and Eve to a comment you made, like, did people in the past really have it that much worse than we have it today?

And it's like, yeah, yeah. Like really, really, really, really, really. And [00:11:00] they were happier. And, and how were they happier? Because they contextualized their lives differently. Because this way that we live today where we contextualize it as a struggle, like, oh my god, I can't believe I have to go to work.

That, that somebody would have this mindset of, like, the expectation of privileges that even the most spoiled aristocrat wouldn't have had a hundred years ago. shock when they learn they actually need to work throughout their lives. I think shows the level of indolence we have allowed to spread within mainstream society.

And it's something we need to fix and we need to fix it. Where do you fix this? Where, where does all of this fix is at the educational level? And we're so close to getting our educational system done. I'm really excited with where I am now on this. I've got some big challenges on it right now, but I'm excited to move forward.

We're getting close. We're getting really close. But yeah, the educational system is the core of all this because where are people learning this culture? Where is culture being normalized? Where are these high fertility cultures being erased right now? It's [00:12:00] not our schools. That's what's happening.

So, it is, it is horrifying that we are seeing this happen.

Simone Collins: But what I want to emphasize, though, is we're not saying, haha, like everyone pointed to Sweden as proof that progressive culture could be pronatalist, and they were wrong, and it's because they gave women rights, and education, and jobs, because we argue that you can, You can have progressive values and a, a sustainable culture.

Like you don't have to have demographic. Like

Malcolm Collins: progressive values, gender equality and sustainable fertility rates, but the gender equality you have, doesn't look like progressive gender equality. Yeah. It's,

Simone Collins: it looks like a very different kind of gender equality for sure. Yeah. Progressive gender equality.

Malcolm Collins: You know, we have gender equality in our family. Basically, you know, she's CEO of our companies. She co hosts our podcast. She co writes our books. But [00:13:00] it is not the type of gender equality that feminists want to structure society around, which is a totally atomized gender equality. Where do I work separately from the husband and the kids.

And basically in every moment you do whatever you feel like doing. And this is Atomization

Simone Collins: is

Malcolm Collins: disempowerment. It's so yeah, this, this is something I constantly see, you know, I was seeing somebody talk recently about how they have all these young friends and like none of the young friends they know want to have kids.

And they'll say that, well, we can't afford kids. And they're like, what do you mean? Like you are a tech worker who you have a job at Facebook in, you know, and they're like, well, I just can't afford to raise them within San Francisco, blah, blah, blah. And what's really being said in a lot of these cases is I cannot have kids without incurring sacrifices into my And that is true.

And I think that that is. A good thing. I think that we are culling the portion of the population that is incapable of sacrificing for another person is a good thing. But I don't think that we fully [00:14:00] alert people to the dangers that they're walking into around all this. And I think that that's really what we're trying to do.

You know, we're not out there saying. We should have all these pressures to have kids in society again but we are saying is if that's the only way to motivate high fertility or sustainable fertility the groups, the mindset around not doing that is going to disappear from the human race. Yeah.

Also, this one last generation and this one last period of prosperity could live like infants sucking their thumbs and crying all day, which is really what a lot of them do, you know, it is, it is, it's actually interesting to me. I now think that, you know, I know some parents today where they'd see it as a sin.

Against this urban monoculture to stop your kids from sucking their son, because it's what they want to do. How dare you stop your child doing something they want to do.

Simone Collins: And you think Well, and also like, they're not doing it because they're dumb or broken in some way. They are doing it because they [00:15:00] lack sufficient responsibilities and purpose in life to have something bigger to care about.

I remember being so much more neurotic and full of anxiety. I can barely leave the house, Malcolm. And then I met you and you and I embarked on a life in which both of us had much bigger things to care about. And the first bigger thing I came to care about was you. And it was amazing how transformative that alone was for me in terms of just Giving me something else that was a bigger deal than my own dumb neuroses.

And when you have nothing else in life, when you have no other responsibilities, no other people who are counting on you, no other bigger values you're striving to serve, no big challenges you've taken on, no children to take care of. Yeah. The only thing that's left is your demons. It's terrifying. So we're not trying to de legitimize the anxiety and suffering and neuroses and infantilization of people.

Who have been sucked into mainstream society [00:16:00] and this atomization and this mental healthification of life. It's, it's just a natural result. If they could get out of it, it would probably go away.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and the thing that you're focusing on, the thing that you're living for, right? Whether it's your kids or your husband or your neuroses it expands to fill your life and your mental landscape.

Simone Collins: 100%. I'm sure everyone watching this podcast knows people who do like, get retired. Or whatever, like they, they just have absolutely nothing to do, but to them, their days are full, their days are full from wake up to waking to go to sleep and they're stressed out about it and they're like, Oh, I've got so much stuff.

And first I have to make my drink and then I have to shower. And then by then it's like 1 30 PM, you know what I mean? If you

Malcolm Collins: live to suppress your demons, your demons become the size of your entire life. Oh, totally. And that is the way the human brain works. And that is what has been elevated by our current society because it's told people to live for what makes them [00:17:00] happy.

And you know, we've talked about this in other recent episodes, but I also want to talk about something else here, which is interesting. So Sweden had this phenomenon as is the Nordic countries where they had a fertility boost in the 2000s. And it's led to people believing that they might have another fertility boost, naively.

Like the demographers who are Mm, like a new surge. Huh. Yeah. So why isn't that going to happen because it's actually important to understand why this isn't going to happen So there's two and I like that you're

Simone Collins: coming out and saying that because then you can be proven wrong you know, there's so many people never do

Malcolm Collins: that measurement you can do there's cohort measurement and then measurement among any slice in time Usually on this channel when we're doing fertility stuff, we're doing it in slices of time Like what's the ftr in a given year, but when you're doing cohort?

What would happen in a cohort just just so you sort of understand how this works is women. The ages of how, how do I explain this? Well, okay. So within one generation, a bunch of women might put off having kids until they're a bit [00:18:00] older due to like economic concerns or something like that.

So you have a temporary depression, right? Or a war or something like that. And this is

Simone Collins: discussed a lot in Latin American. In Latin America, for example, like a lot of the, the most births that are no longer happening are unwanted teen births to, you know, what I'm talking about. Well, no, but what I'm saying is they're hoping that they're going to get a surge just well, similar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're like, Oh, well, don't worry. Those women will have children. They're just going to do it when they're actually ready now. Cause

Malcolm Collins: they may happen. I don't think it will, but it may. And so Latin America still has hope. Sweden doesn't because you can do, you just said they were hoping for a search.

Well, idiots are who don't look at the data.

Simone Collins: Everyone else

Malcolm Collins: has given up the 2000s was caused by this. It was caused by women putting off having kids until a later age, but you can do cohort analysis to see if that's happening, and it's not happening. So we know that each cohort, each age cohort of women, during their [00:19:00] reproductive lifespan within these countries is actually decreasing every year, basically for a very long time.

And so we're actually not seeing that that is not what is causing this particular drop in fertility rate. So it is not that these women are just waiting to have kids later. It is that they are just choosing not to have kids. And I think

Simone Collins: even if that were the case, they would have fewer kids because they're going to have more fertility problems.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but there's, there's types of waiting, like, okay, for example during war or something like that.

No.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Waiting for a couple of years where it's

Malcolm Collins: not that big a deal, but that's not what we're seeing in the data here. And it's very important to point that out because demographers on the left love to lie.

Like they just pretend like it's not an issue at all or it can be solved with immigration. And in both cases, that's just not true. I was reading this piece that really chilled me. About it was in a UK thing and it was like, oh, all these people saying you know, fertility rates [00:20:00] are a big problem are lying to you because the population of the UK is growing.

And then in the same article, it also said, we haven't had a stable fertility rate since the 1973, since the 1970s. And I was like, what, what, how did, then is that not a problem? And they go, well, because all. people living in the UK are of equal value. It doesn't matter that we're using immigration to make up for this fertility downfall we have like this fertility gap we have.

And you know, this is the type of twisted logic that people who have predated on other cultures for their own laziness into secure lifestyles of indolence have always used. Oh, we're uplifting the poor savages or something like that by bringing them otherwhere and erasing their culture and. marching their children through the streets.

You know, it's, it's in, in, in celebrations of European cultural victory over the cultures that these people came from. It is not a good thing or something that should be lauded that you as a cultural group have to import people [00:21:00] who have done some form of labor that you have chosen not to do to support your lifestyle.

That is not a of honor or value. That is a bad thing. Don't be proud. Yeah. Don't be proud of that. And, and you'll see this constantly, you know, in the EU reports and everything like that, they constantly are trying to hide scope and scale of the problem. And they do it by saying stuff like, well, look at when their birth rates up went up in the past.

And I was like, that was because of a cohort issue. And we know that's not the case. We can look at the bigger data. Now we know that's not the case.

And then they're like, well, how do you know there's not going to be a sudden cultural change? And it's like, because I can ask the people who haven't had kids yet. Do you plan to have kids? And I can tell anyone who is out there engaging with society can tell how big this problem is.

And

one of the biggest things that we're trying to do with the pronatalist movement and the pronatalist foundation is just to edify governments and policymakers that subsidies don't work. They do not work. I can put a graph on the screen that will show you studies done on [00:22:00] subsidy.

And you will see a direct correlation between the size of the margin of error of the study and its probability of saying that subsidies help. They do, the studies with almost no margin of error almost always show that subsidies are irrelevant. And this is very important because Every year you waste trying to solve this problem with subsidies is a year you get closer to this becoming an impossible problem to solve a year you come closer to becoming a country like Korea now where 60 percent of the population is over the age of 40 they cannot solve this problem anymore it would be almost impossible at this stage and yet they're still having a 13 percent you know year over year in 2023 fertility collapse.

And what can you do at that point? You can't do anything outside of like dictatorial or fascist

Simone Collins: efforts. Well, and that's the problem is like their culture can be a good sustainable solution and it really is there. And the scary thing is that governments are also like [00:23:00] apparently too dumb to figure that out.

So the, the next dumb solution after the current dumb solution, which is too much money or more money or whatever. Is, oh, let's start coercing people. Let's start taking away their rights. And that's what

Malcolm Collins: China has gone to. That's what Iran has gone to. We know that's what comes next. Not the correct solution, which is a promotion of high fertility cultural groups.

But do you know why they won't go to the promotion of high fertility cultural groups next?

Simone Collins: There is a reason. Because it undermines their sovereignty.

Malcolm Collins: Eh, close. High fertility cultural groups, because the world today, everywhere in the world, is dominated by some iteration of the urban monoculture. Even in China to a large extent.

At least the elite ruling class. You know, a lot of them were educated in the U. S. and stuff like that. So they have these Urban monocultural value says, well, that's the lowest fertility rate culture in the world. And so it is definitionally the interests of the elites are definitionally opposed to the groups that they would [00:24:00] need to elevate.

And the groups they would need to protect if they're going to fight their fertility rate. If you say you need to protect the high fertility groups, and they say, okay, show me these groups. And I go, well, they exist really in two categories. One is conservative religious groups. So you're conservative Jews, you're conservative Muslims, you're conservative Christians.

And they go, oh, well, we don't like them. They're backwards. They do all the naughty things. They follow all these old rules that don't really matter in our society anymore. And it's like, well, apparently they matter for something. But even those groups are crashing infertility, right? As we talk about in an upcoming article on that we're going to do in Aporia.

But there's another group and they go, Oh, okay, okay. There's another group. And I'm like, this group actually largely aligns with your value sets. And they go, Oh, okay. Okay. This is actually really good. And they're like, what do they look like? And I go, well, They look like families like ours, families like Elon's family, families, there are these high tech, weird, dissident groups that are trying to recreate new cultural structures.

And they go, Oh, well, we especially hate them. [00:25:00] Did you not know? And we're like, what are you talking about? Like he's trying to fix like global warming and stuff like that. Maybe, you know, not in the best possible way, but he's trying to and they're like, yeah, but did you know that he and, and, and you as well, I've heard you do this.

He promotes freedom of speech. I've heard that naughty people speak at your pronatalist events. You just let anyone speak at these events? Anyone? Yes, we just let anyone. Because we believe that bad ideas will fail. And good ideas will succeed. And, and, and I'm sorry that that is So threatening to you, but I understand why it's threatening to you because you have a chokehold on the media.

You have a chokehold in the education system. As soon as one cultural group has achieved a chokehold on all of these places where information is distributed in society, nothing becomes more threatening to that group than a free informational marketplace. Do you allow naughty ideas to be said? Yes.

Because if those ideas are bad, they will fail. But if those ideas are only bad insofar as they threaten you, i. e. falling [00:26:00] fertility rates are actually a problem and people should be worried, I had a professor at Harvard tell me that if it was known that if she cared about this, she could be fired. Even from a tenured position.

That is how severely people are trying to suppress these ideas. And I think that people don't understand how negatively this idea of falling fertility rates is. And It's, it's terrifying, but it's the world we live in today. Yikes. Well, I mean, what are your I guess my parting

Simone Collins: thoughts are, this is culture.

Culture, culture. Culture, culture. We told you. Culture. Please pay attention. It's culture. And the only

Malcolm Collins: thing The culture's so

Simone Collins: inexpensive, it's so affordable. Like, come on. What's so affordable? Culture, like cultural interventions from a policy standpoint, vis a vis

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, make kids watch those old Coronet films about how Jimmy needs to get married and Yeah!

And the importance of having kids and Yeah, and how to date Make walls! Disney, what I love, what Disney can't have a protagonist who is [00:27:00] less than five kids! Watch Cult That's the way people are like, What? That's an insane number of kids. Home alone. All other families had five kids. Like, this used to be normal in the movies that defined our culture.

And now, it is unheard of. I cannot think of a recent Disney protagonist that had more than two kids in a family.

Simone Collins: Well, there's Encanto. Oh yes, Encanto. That's a good point. Oh no, sorry. Wait, hold on. No, no, no. They're cousins. Oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah, they're cousins. So it's three kids to the previous generation and then max two kids per our generation.

Isn't

Simone Collins: it four kids? We didn't talk about Bruno though,

Malcolm Collins: did we? Oh yeah, we didn't talk about, but that's just, we don't talk about Bruno. But so the four kids, the grandmother had four kids, but each of those kids only had max two kids each. So even within our generation in this large stereotyped Latin American family, they still within our generation didn't have more than two kids

Simone Collins: per family.

Well, fertility rates are crashing in Latin [00:28:00] America. This is just inaccurate. They're trying to be representative, Malcolm. Give them a break. They're trying, they're trying.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, Encanto, a great movie. I get a weak crash on some Disney movies. Great movie. Oh, and I was so disappointed we didn't talk about the new Wish movie because we haven't seen it in the episode on self control.

Should we watch it? Is it going to be really bad, though? I really don't want to watch it. But I've heard that Essentially the only bad thing that the bad guy does is demand that so, so everyone gives him their wish. This is what I've heard. I haven't seen it yet. And he has this because he doesn't think that all wishes can come true.

Like if you just granted every wish willy nilly, it would cause problems in society and hurt other people. Eventually. Yeah. How many people were dead? Use people's wishes to see if they are beneficial to society and he grants the wishes that are beneficial to society and he doesn't grant the wishes that he doesn't judge.

He's not like bad guy. Well, yeah, no, he ends up apparently locked in a mirror forever. That's how evil this is seen as being. That, that everybody can't have whatever they want, whenever they want it. [00:29:00] The ultimate sin in society. That is

Simone Collins: amazing. That's so amazing, that like, wow, that, okay, well, then I, we should probably watch it.

Although, you know what, I've just been re watching right before going to bed, and then going to bed too late. Clueless. So good. And you know what blew my mind when I watched it the most recent time? Is that, like, One high school teacher just consistently to almost all students. doles out C's which bring down everyone's grade point average.

And like, to me, imagining like a school teacher giving an, like a mean grade to students is so weird. Like actually grading them fairly, but I also really love how based the movie is because the, the father in the movie praises his daughter for. Negotiating a better grade. And we'd be so proud because like, you're not really learning anything that useful in school, but like, if you have the hustle to change your grade, like.

Malcolm Collins: You say that, but that was the culture I was [00:30:00] raised in. So my mom actually used that movie as a teaching thing for me. She goes the line there is, is a, a, a, a grade is just a jumping off point for negotiation. Yes. She said, I should always remember that. And that if I got a grade that I. Wasn't willing to accept in my record that I should just treat it as a jumping off point for negotiation.

How great was your mom

Simone Collins: that she used Clueless as the canon for your life lessons? And we're, we plan to do the same. It's in our family canon. It's official along with, you know, Starship Troopers, Indiana Jones movies. The importance

Malcolm Collins: of the class. Well, I mean, and teachers actually are generally more okay with that than you would think.

You know, you're like, look, I can't accept this

Simone Collins: grade. Not when it's

Malcolm Collins: like victim based. No, no, no, not when it's victim based. I say, what do I need to do to get you to make this grade higher? I am willing to stay after school every day. I am willing to do whatever is necessary. You tell me what I need to do.

I'm willing to do any extra work assignments. And, and most teachers, if you're putting in extra work and stuff like that, and it's [00:31:00] like substantive high quality work, they're like, yeah, sure. Whatever.

Simone Collins: Not mine. I had one a minus in college. Brought down my entire GPA. Well, because

Malcolm Collins: you never got a grade less than an A in college.

I should point

Simone Collins: this out. It was an A minus. And I was the only person, the only student, who went to his class right before Thanksgiving. Nothing. Nothing. No, like, no. Can I do extra? No. I mean, okay, I get it. I suck at accounting. But, like, it doesn't always work, is all I'm saying. And then, like, later when I

Malcolm Collins: Did you get any A's other than that?

Or was it only A pluses?

Simone Collins: I think I got mostly solid A's. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love that her trauma is an A minus, but it should make sense to people who know her anyway, I love you, Simone. You are a great wife and I am so happy to have you as my partner in this civilizational battle for the soul of society.

Simone Collins: And I hope that [00:32:00] this podcast might inspire some people with progressive values to think a little bit more creatively.

About how they might motivate higher fertility rates. So yes, I, and I adore you.