How To Save Dating & Relationships - With Louise Perry

In this episode, we are joined by author and podcast host Louise Perry to discuss solutions for improving modern dating and relationships. We cover how to better find a spouse through social connections, college years being optimal, and why delaying marriage and having "practice" relationships often backfires.

Louise explains why dogs are a poor substitute for children when it comes to satisfying maternal/paternal instincts. We discuss arranged marriages, the risks of teenage relationships, and why conservative women often have an advantage. Louise argues frustrated maternal impulses can motivate young childless women toward "empathetic" political causes.

We also touch on policy ideas like giving tuition incentives for having kids in college, supporting multi-generational living, and reforms to enable combining work and motherhood more smoothly. Overall, a fascinating discussion on improving the "dating market" and cultural approaches to marriage and family.

Louise Perry: [00:00:00] The other thing that I'd add, this might not apply as much in the workplace, but definitely in terms of politics, I would say that frustrated maternal impulse is a very politically potent and potentially dangerous force. Yeah. And I think that like, say, I dunno, attitudes towards refugees in the UK, this might not be as, as acute in the U S I don't know.

But I, I. Or any number of political causes, this is just one example, I, I think that the reason you see disproportionate numbers of young women who don't have children drawn to these kind of high, like, highly charged, empathetic situations where you are like trying to save groups of people, right, who may well be adult men.

But I, I honestly think that a big part of that is, it's, it's like, it's like with getting the dogs, you know, it's this, it's this tug towards mothering. Something is really good

Malcolm Collins: heart take.

[00:01:00] Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, this is Malcolm Collins here today with, of course, my lovely wife, Simone Collins and Louise Perry, our special guest today. You would may know her from the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast, or you may know her from her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

And if you do not know her we recently did a tour in the UK talking with a lot of rising political, well, conservative political stars, because of course that's who talks to us. And, she was repeatedly named as the number one conservative thought leader in the intellectual side in the UK right now.

And so we are thrilled to have her on our podcast. The question I wanted to focus on was in this episode, is how Can we make dating? Because I think if we look at the world today, everyone who is being honest is saying gender dynamics do not seem to be working right now. So what do you advise when you're advising young girls or young boys [00:02:00] about how to go out there?

Because let's be honest, they are in a dramatically worse situation than we were. How do you advise them to go out there and find partners and how much you build a new systems that could help them?

Simone Collins: It's

Louise Perry: really difficult. And I say this as someone who's, I've been with my husband for 10 years and I, and I have that feeling of being the sort of, um, last chopper out of Saigon, right?

Because it was, because it was, because it was pre dating apps that we met and, and we just met through, it's through friends, the sort of good old fashioned, well, not quite good old fashioned, right? Like good old fashioned is actually an arranged marriage. But there was this sort of, like, brief window, right, post sexual revolution, pre dating apps, where, where you generally met people through actual existing social connections.

And I would always advise, where possible, to meet people through actual existing social connections, because apart from anything else, it means you have some kind of vetting process available. The problem with a dating app is it's just a stranger from the internet. And they can, and people will admit people who, who [00:03:00] like friends of mine, male and female who've used dating apps will admit that they behave worse with people they've met on dating apps in terms of ghosting or whatever, because they know there are no social consequences because you know that no one is going to then spread a rumor that they're.

That they're like a shitty person who ghosts people. This is, you know, particularly if you're in a big city like London, there are just so many millions of people that they disappear into the night. It's like, it almost doesn't feel real, I think, when you're used to dating out. So, yeah, real social connections is better.

It is difficult though. I'm sure you've, you've seen these graphs about how people meet over time and you went from being like an enormous number of people met at church for instance and then and then and then you see all of that stuff and or at work and then you see all of that stuff declining and um uh the apps taking their place and hey sometimes people do have flourishing marriages that started on the internet.

It's not, you know, it's not nothing. One of the things that we've tried to do with the podcast is we had a, we had a matchmaking event in [00:04:00] London a few months ago. Yeah. And we're going to do another one. We're planning on doing another one on Valentine's day. In fact, I mean, I'll tell you, they are not a good way of making money because you have, you can completely see why the people who created the apps are, you know, multimillionaires plus, right?

Because it's that the internet is like endlessly reproducible, whereas in real life events are not endlessly reproducible and actually put a lot of work and effort into having, I mean, I think it was 60 people who came to the first one. Having all these 60 people in a room is actually very like logistically demanding.

We thought, no, we're going to do it because. The podcast, if you're listening to my podcast that tells you something about your values, right? It's

Simone Collins: culturally selective. They're somewhat aligned values.

Louise Perry: Yeah. It's a very useful filter. What was the structure of these events? So we got people to email or to fill in an online form where they gave some basic stuff.

The kind of demographic details of photo and a [00:05:00] few other things about like. religiosity and stuff. And then we we, we mostly just, we mostly selected on the basis of having even numbers of men and women and having roughly the same age ranges. Like for instance, we had, we had like too many young men apply.

So we had to exclude some of the young men because a 35 year old woman is not likely to be interested in it. 20 year old man, right? So we did a little bit of tailoring like that and we'll do that for the future. I mean, people have requested, you know, specific age range events and things like that.

So with sufficient demand, we can do that. But like you can see why this isn't as popular as you'd hope because it is, it is like, it is labor intensive and it's quite small numbers that you're dealing with, but it's also much, much higher quality. Because you're filtering on the basis of one, everyone there had to want to get married.

Like that was one of the key things. So no one was there just to hook up. And everyone had, you could kind of have a basic assurance of shared values, which you can't really find anywhere else, except maybe in religious communities. But then I hear from, I mean, I, I [00:06:00] have a friend, for instance, who met.

who met his who met his wife at like a young adults Catholic thing, you know, that you can meeting through church is, is probably this, I would say meeting through extended friend, extended friend networks, meeting through church or whatever other religious organization. Now meeting through one of my podcast events is obviously the top of the list.

Cause I want to be, I want to be invited to the wedding, but in terms of like the. That you definitely want to be prioritizing real social connections. But I do have enormous sympathy because it's like, that does limit your pool a lot.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I want to pull on something you said, because it's something we're doing for our kids.

And I'm wondering if you were, had you ever considered doing this for, for, for your kids is arranged marriages. We are looking at specifically the way we're properly going to structure it is around the age of like 24, 25. They get a partner assigned to them that we chose from a network of other family friends who are open to doing this.

And if you want to join, let us know. And we basically say, look, this [00:07:00] is the one chance you get. Like, we're not going to find another partner for you. If you turn this down, then you're on your own. And it's funny. I mentioned this to a lot of like millennials and they're horrified. I mentioned this to Gen Z and they're like, Oh my God, I wish my parents would do that

Louise Perry: for me.

Please relieve me of my suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So I think that probably the, the ideal, well. If you look at different, how different cultures deal with this problem, which is a very, very difficult coordination problem. Like we must not understate how difficult this coordination problem is. It's, it's through like softer range marriages, right?

It's not the, you've never met this person and you're betrothed at the age of 12 or something like that, right? That is unusual. It's more likely you hear about that or you read about that in history more often because aristocrats would be more likely to do that, but normal, but normal people are normally not doing that.

It's more like you basically have a curated pool to choose from. from, or you can choose and then we have to, we can veto like the family can veto, which I think honestly is actually a great way of [00:08:00] doing it because, and in practice, you know, often does my, my husband and I often joke that sort of on paper, we could have been in arranged marriage in the sense that we have very kind of similar families, like there's just lots of ways in which we're very socially sympathetic, right.

As a couple, as it happens, we just got lucky, but, you know, you can. I think that what does typically happen, honestly, in the best kind of matches is you, you meet the person yourself, but the families have to be on board for it to actually work. And it soon becomes evident if the families are not on board.

And, and then maybe the relationship with us, you know, but any kind of scenario where the families are completely not on board is just, is just so likely to end in tears. I mean, so, so that's a softer range barriers and that's probably is the ideal scenario.

Malcolm Collins: I think in the context of this is interesting to sort of reflect on how sort of crazy the way our society right now is like, we know we're supposed to find a spouse.

So I think [00:09:00] initially the idea was, well, you still get spouses, but then you get this younger age where like. You, you sleep around a bit and you get to play at what it's like to be in a relationship, but you still basically get an arranged marriage. Like that is a softer range marriages. I think are what we still had in the U S you know, up until like the forties and the, and then it began to become like, okay, you actually test out a bunch of potential relationships and then you choose when you think you have found one that.

could be a marriage. Now, what's interesting is people don't do that. They're not like, no, I'm going to wait until I find the perfect one, right? Which is a very different thing, but that's not even what they really do. They sort of now what I've noticed, I think that this is actually the way things work in secular society, even if secular society wouldn't say this is you play musical chairs.

You, you date random people and you have sex with random people. And so one day you realize, holy s**t. I need to, like, the music has turned off, I'm on the chair I'm sitting on.[00:10:00] And that's actually how I think things are structured right now.

Louise Perry: A friend of mine has, agrees with that, with that analogy.

She actually, funnily enough, she this couple that we're friends with, they actually met when they were teenagers, so unusual. Yeah, and now they're in their with, with, um, with a baby. But the, the, her line, which always makes me laugh is like, not only is it like playing musical chairs and therefore, you know, losing options with every, every round, but also that those options are selected for badness, right?

Like there's a reason those chairs are still there and it's normal kind of dysfunction. So I, the worst possible advice that You hear so often and it's so horrendous is that you should hold off on choosing a spouse until a certain age point. Yes! Yes! You should not choose a spouse, for instance, until you're in your thirties and there's something suspect about any relationship that starts.

Before then, like the university boyfriend must be dumped, for instance, you should dump the university boyfriend, you should, you should [00:11:00] try a few other musical chairs, and then you can actually start seriously thinking about setting down your thirties. And even aside from the biological clock problem, which is a very serious one.

Like, no, anyone who's, anyone who's in the same boat as you in their thirties and, and, and for some reason unmarried, unless they've been like widowed, there might be a good reason why they're not married. Like there might be some kind of whatever, like aversion to commitment, like a whole host of. A whole host of reasons why people would have selected themselves into that category.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so one thing I would advise, so this is for our younger listeners because it's advice I would give my kids, is the one place I think secular society does give good advice on this is you probably shouldn't marry someone you're dating in high school or middle school. And the reason I say high school, you know, because this is where this is most likely to happen, Is because these are the first times you're feeling these emotions and you don't understand that, you know, this is just a random person who you happen to have met.

And you are unlikely to, because you just haven't been exposed to that many people in high school to really have [00:12:00] found that optimize a person. I think college is when you really should, like you should aim 70 percent to find who you're going to marry in the years if you don't go to college in the years you would have been in college.

Don't

Louise Perry: get your BA, get your MRS.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't, do you remember Princeton mom, mom, she was this woman who was this was a few years ago now who, who's. Children, one child maybe was at Princeton and she had been to Princeton herself and she wrote a sort of letters as young to female students in the college magazine.

Oh, I remember. And it was so controversial, but she was completely right. She said. You know, listen, listen, ladies, like you are never going to be surrounded by this many eligible young men ever again in your life who are, who are single, who are selected for their intellect, conscientious, all these good things.

And like, you have nothing to like, come on, like university students are so idle. You have basically nothing to do. You should, you should be [00:13:00] trying to find a spouse. That should be your goal. And it was incredibly controversial. And the

Malcolm Collins: good ones do get snatched up. I don't think that's the thing, you know, there's these.

the, in a way we're always sort of like we get annoyed by progressive culture, but we're always like, it always ends up punishing the progressives the most, you know, the ones who are susceptible to these ideas. They're the ones who are lapping up guys. The, the young aggressive conservative women are the ones leaving the college with all the most emotionally stable, caring guys.

And that's why. When women are like, Oh, there's no good men anymore. It's like, yeah, cause you missed them. You had your chance. Yeah.

Louise Perry: I mean, I, I make fun of progressives. Right. Because obviously it's, it's fun to do so, but I'm saying this as someone who, who used to be a progressive. Right. And I basically just got lucky in, in getting, in finding my spouse when I did.

It wasn't through like, especially good judgment. It was just pure luck. And actually, you know, like for all that we, for all that we make fun of them rightly, and I'm not talking about the really crazy blue haired kind of end of the spectrum, I'm just talking about sort of normal, [00:14:00] middle class, progressive, you know, they're actually great people generally, right?

They're generally like hardworking. conscientious, like talented, intelligent, economically productive, all this kind of stuff. Like, I actually really, really desperately want the best for these people. And the culture, the progressive culture, actually, as you say, it hurts progressives most. It actually channels people towards making decisions which are really bad for them long term and, and mean that they don't reproduce themselves as well.

Yeah, I

Simone Collins: heard recently about one governor. I don't, I haven't looked this up properly, so it may not be true, but the governor of Utah actually hosting a lot of events in the governor's mansion. But not necessarily just for matchmaking, like he's hosted events where he's just having like everyone who's into fly fishing, you know, come over for a party at the governor's mansion, everyone who's, you know, a married couple over, you know, 60 years old, like come and it, the, the goal I think was just to start connecting people more.

Because even in a place like Utah, which is insane, I mean, it's, you know, dominated by the LDS community. [00:15:00] There are tons of institutions where people are meeting, at least as long as they're Mormon, a lot of people. But even there, he feels like there's a need for people to foster more connection that it's even really hard to make friends anywhere.

I mean, this isn't just a dating problem. This is a friendship problem. Rates of friendship are down. People report having fewer numbers of friends. I'm wondering if you think this is something where the government is right to get involved or wrong to get involved? Like if governments and some governments and other nations have started organizing matchmaking events for youth matchmaking retreats for youth, would that be scary or dystopian to you?

Or would it be cool and encouraging?

Louise Perry: Doesn't the government basically do that with higher education? I mean, going back to the meeting in college,

Simone Collins: really, because there's a lot of disincentivizing people. Yeah. It could

Louise Perry: do so through higher education.

Simone Collins: When we've heard many people with regard to demographical apps saying like, well, you know, a really awesome thing a government could do is for any government sponsored or supported university you could give women entirely free tuition or room and board, some kind of incentive [00:16:00] that not every student gets so long as they promise to graduate, perhaps in a longer period, like they have more years to do it.

with a child and then they have a child while they're at university. They meet their spouse at university. And I mean, I think it really would create a big incentive. So do you think something like that would be a good thing or do you think it would be too on the coercive

Louise Perry: side? Well, look, I sort of think that that, that ship has already sailed in terms of the amount that the government interferes in our lives in all sorts of ways.

Right. I mean, the first thing on my list would be to stop. I mean the UK government, although this is of course true elsewhere, from doing like explicitly anti natalist things. I mean like the way that our tax system works in this country is insane. For instance, you stay at families with a stay at home parent, typically mother, pay a tax penalty, for instance, in this country, right?

There are all sorts of things, which is. like radically anti and right, radically anti traditional family. So if we've already accepted, for instance, that the government is in the business of educating everyone, if the government is in the [00:17:00] business of providing socialized health care and things like that, then you might as well pull levers to try and encourage people to make decisions, which are in the interest of the country long term.

Because of course, that's what we're talking about, right? These are, these are, these are questions of national importance. I like that idea of another idea I've heard is to give free tuition to mothers. So, because one of the things that would be useful is to, is to, I mean, women live longer than men, right?

And women also, everyone lives a long time in Western. and societies. Why is it that we have to, we have to encourage women in, say, their mid twenties, the peak fertility period to be investing in their careers when they could just delay that section of their lives by five to 10 years and then work an extra five to 10 years at the end?

You know, if we, if we could, the problem is that the current career. The current career plan is designed for a male life cycle. It's not designed for the main,

Simone Collins: unless you start right at university. Like if you get married freshman [00:18:00] year, have a kid, like you could have two kids before you graduate.

If you take four

Louise Perry: years to graduate and then you can, and then if you stay at home with them as preschoolers, you're still entering the labor market in your mid to late twenties with a

Simone Collins: fresh degree.

Cause then the bigger problem too, is that women get their degree, they work a little bit. And then they take this huge gap from working and then, you know, the degree is no longer fresh and their job isn't fresh. Like, if you can somehow get everything like you, you sort of finish most of your time off the market as a parent.

Bef like right as your

Malcolm Collins: degree. True. That's only two kids, you know? Yeah. Kids that you don't take yourself off the market because you're a parent. That's turn down. Or if you do, you, you have a real structure for that.

A really interesting give extreme pro natalist policy, a, a young college aged girl we know proposed for Korea, you know, given how absolutely severe their cases right now. Is to make it so that as a woman, you cannot graduate Korean college until after you have had your first kid[00:19:00] and you see, you can start college before that, but you don't get your degree until you have a kid.

And given how important college degrees are within the Korean status hierarchy.

This would immediately and dramatically affect the number of kids people were having. Of course it is a little coercive for my taste, but it wouldn't be effective.

Malcolm Collins: But I think a really key problem that we keep having here and this was shocking to me when we were in the uk.

We're meeting with a lot of conservative, you know, leading intellectuals, policymakers, stuff like that, but a lot of them young women. And I repeatedly kept seeing them making the same mistake over and over again in regards to their relationships, which is they had found people they wanted to marry. And they're like, yeah, but of course we need to be dating for like three years before we can get married.

And I was like, what the are you talking about? If you found someone who is good for you to marry, you need to aggressively vet them and marry them. Wasn't like Three months or six months. And

Louise Perry: don't [00:20:00] get a dog. Don't get a dog as a practice baby. Because one, dogs are bad practice babies. Two, it'll encourage you to delay having your first child.

And three, dogs are really annoying when you have a baby.

Malcolm Collins: Worse than practice babies. They are not meant to teach women how to have babies. They're meant to masturbate the instinct that women feel to

Louise Perry: have a baby. Yes. Yeah. They're a displacement tool. Yeah, the number of like, yeah, the number of yuppie couples in our sort of extended social network who are like, okay, so we meet at X and then we, and then we live together after, after Y, and then we get a dog after Z, and then it's like, 10 years down the track that you have a baby.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think the way to do this is to frame having a dog without having a child is perverse. And, and I do that when I, I mean, I see that as like walking around with pornography in your hand. It's like, it's the same thing. You are using it to, to masturbate an instinct that evolved to get you to do what you were supposed to be doing, which is having a [00:21:00] loving family.

And instead. You subvert that instinct and it may feel good in the moment when you're playing with the big, cute little puppy. But in the longterm it's causing you and your spouse is significant emotional distress. Well, here's, here's

Simone Collins: the thing that I'm kind of thinking about while I'm listening to this conversation though, I am feeling like teen pregnancy.

Is the most feminist option for an intergenerational, a durable culture. Cause hear me out, right? Like if you weren't to start in college, but instead in high school, then you have the support of your parents for the first baby, which honestly, like in a modern society in which, you know, we're more atomized and everything.

You know, we, we cannot expect as adults to have our parents move in with us to, you know, always be living in the same place because they may not

Louise Perry: be a little older as well. I'm

Malcolm Collins: going to push back very strong on this, Simone. You don't want to be a teen dad. No, I don't think that women can appropriately find good long term partners in their teen years because you do not know where the guy is going to turn out in terms of [00:22:00] competence.

I think a guy who like has his s**t together in college is somebody who's going to have their s**t together. Okay, so yeah,

Simone Collins: we're talking. Statutory rape, teen marriage. That's what we're looking for where you have, you know, a very good, you know, successful college grad, male college grad, you have, you know, 16 year old girl.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I suppose I am okay with teen marriage if they're dating college guys. And that sounds so

Simone Collins: wrong, but it would be so like, cause then, you know, the girl could have. three or four or even five children from high school through the end of college, get a great education, have an amazing family support network, have all the flexibility to both learn, develop really good skills and have help with children at the same time.

And then by the time she really needs to like lean into her career and like just kill it in the workforce, she's good. And then also when she's old, she's

Malcolm Collins: doesn't, you know, we got to be clear. This is mostly meant jocularly as a joke. In our society right now, because, While you could conceivably create a society that worked around the system she's talking about, [00:23:00] that is not the society that we actually live in.

And anyone who attempted this would be very likely to end up a single mother. Which is why it would be really stupid. I mean, this also comes down to my general advice of not trying to find a partner in high school. Because I know a lot of guys who seemed like they had their lives together in high school, but actually didn't have their lives together.

And a lot of guys who didn't look like they had their lives together in high school, who actually did. I mean, it's actually like the nerdy, like, rocket, uh, hobbyist kid, who is the kid who made a lot of money in the... And the jock captain, the football team, who's more likely to fall off. But by the time you get to, I'd say like junior year of college, you can broadly tell who's going to have their life together as an adult and who can't.

And that's why that's a good age to begin to, and not begin to, to begin to finalize. who you're going to marry. Not, not to start practice dating. High school is for practice dating. College is not practice anymore. But

Simone Collins: another concern I have about starting a parental career first, like if I'm [00:24:00] thinking about this from the perspective of mother is I wouldn't want one of my children.

Or both like male or female to like start as a parent and be really into it and then be like, no, I don't want to do anything else because I want our children to also grow up and have impact on larger society. And I feel like they have a moral obligation to do that. If they have the skill and connections and ability to do it, like they should be making society better.

Louise Perry: Also, we live a long time, right? Like, you know, there, there is a, I suppose one way you can do it is if you have so many kids, you know, if you have an incredibly long, I don't know if you know the the TV chef, Gordon Ramsey, British, British celebrity, right. His wife just had her sixth child age 49 and she had her first, right.

And she had her. first child when she was 24. So she's had this incredibly long reproductive career. I know I like amazing, right? It's a really interesting fact, actually, how many celebrities who didn't go to university who come from working class families ends up having loads of kids, [00:25:00] I'm sure, you know, that there's.

In the quadrant of like, you know, X axis is education and Y axis is, is, is income. It's the high education, low income people who have the fewest kids. And it's the high income, low education people who have the most. And you see there's like premiership footballers who have loads of kids. Anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's a lovely site.

So, you know, so one scenario I guess is that you have so many kids over such a long, you know, not necessarily tight pack, you know, three or four year age gaps, which is the standard for hunter gatherers, right? So that's quite a healthy, like physiologically, that's quite a healthy age gap. You have lots of kids with, with, with moderate age gaps and then by the time your youngest is growing up, you have grandchildren.

So then you do basically spend your entire life just looking after your children. That is one scenario. But many women are going to have two or three in our ideals. And that's completely, that's, that's great. And that doesn't actually take up that much of your life, therefore. So to have, to say, you know, for this, you don't want this scenario, I think, where women, [00:26:00] women are excluded from the workforce between the age of, say, 40 and 60.

For no good reason.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, that's 100%. Correct. We, we're so obsessed with having like four or five, six, because when you look at societal trends and the number of people who choose not to have any children at all, or even just one, like, so, you know, we have to make up for it somewhere. Plus there's one really interesting thing.

Bit of research that people did at one point looking at, I think people, Malcolm, was it in Norway or was it Sweden? But looking at intergenerationally, I saw that as well. Yeah. So like, you know, having just two kids is very, your odds of having a great grandchild are so low. So we think about it from that perspective too.

Malcolm Collins: So another thing to note, because you know, this is something that keeps getting said on this, this podcast, which is make sure women can, can work and participate in the workforce. And I think a lot of people, they may hear this and they might say that's anti conservative, that's anti traditional. There was a great the, the most recent Nobel prize winner, I want to say in economics actually did a piece on this and I'm gonna [00:27:00] put the graph on the screen here.

Which Shows that actually no women used to participate in the workforce at around the rate they do today. There was just a historical period where it went down for frankly, in a historical context, a fairly short period, which was really at its height in like the 1950s. But if you go earlier than like the 1920s, and then especially if you go into the early 1800s, female participation in the workforce was almost as high as male.

But it was often

Simone Collins: from home

Louise Perry: and that's the key thing. Yeah. So it's more about having sex. specific jobs, which most societies do end up basically, I mean, we do, frankly, it's just not explicit but having the type of job, which is easily combinable with having children is, is, is the way of threading that needle.

The problem is that the influx of women post second wave, the influx of middle class women into traditionally male dominated jobs has not produced, you know, like the plight of [00:28:00] the female doctor, for instance, I was, I was, I was I saw a friend yesterday who's a doctor who has a baby and it's basically impossible for her at this stage to combine being a doctor.

There is, there are points later on where you could, but she had a baby, you know, like too young, right? Late twenties, not very young, but within like, basically the other way that NHS medical training works is it depends on abortion. It depends on like you and contraception. It depends on women delaying having Children until they're at least in their thirties.

Because if you have a child any earlier than that, it will be almost impossible for you to progress in your career. You just have to Take an enormous break or drop out entirely, which a lot of women do. So like, that's an example of a career, which is now majority female in terms of medical student graduates that is completely incompatible with childbearing.

So you end up with all these, all these, all these accomplished women shredding their fertility for the sake of a medical career. Or their careers,

Simone Collins: which is just as bad. I mean, depending on what you [00:29:00] care about, like it's, it's terrible that women are with this kind of potential are just saying, well, I guess society is not going to get my help, you know, as a medical NHS really needs really good doctors.

And I think what's so fun about this too, is that this is super tractable. Like if the right number of. You know, people high in the NHS in the way it's, it's operations run, we're to decide we're going to fix this. This is, you know, a policy change we're going to make, or, you know, we're going to accommodate childcare in this way or whatever, like they can fix this problem.

And this is a really similar thing with, female lawyers, mothers lawyers who are mothers in the United States. There are, I think that there's a certain number of minimum hours that mothers, that lawyers, sorry, have to work in order to qualify and like maintain all their licensing. So effectively female lawyers in many States can't work part time.

And also maintain their ability to practice law. And this is stuff I never even heard about before we started talking with people about prenatalism. So there are so many really dumb things that we do to even just penalize parenthood [00:30:00] when, you know, yeah, there's enough,

Louise Perry: you

Malcolm Collins: can, you can look at this and see how solvable a lot of prenatalist issues are and, and, and why we need to be working on this front at the policy level.

You know, when you say, how can you with the skills of a doctor make money and contribute to society while being a mother? Well, I mean, historically, you, you could probably do that in the old model of doctor, which is to be a home care doctor, you know, to travel house to house to do, and it would probably be much cheaper to operate than our existing systems, but you have some big bureaucracy like the N.

I. NHS and they're not going to be able to do that. You look at medical regulation in the US and people are going to push back on that. Did you look at the lawyer thing that you were talking about? If you actually let them operate within a sane structure now, and this is one of the policies that I am most pro as a pro natalist policy for, for sane family structures that I have not seen.

Any politician push yet is one where if a company is going to demand that an individual works from the office, that they have to prove that they are getting [00:31:00] incrementally more productivity from that demand. I do not think that blanketly companies should be allowed to demand that people work from the office.

I think that it's a demand that can only be made with evidence similar to like if I was bringing over an immigrant and this is going to freak out a lot of these I'd say fragile CEOs. But as people who are CEOs who have worked with people working at home and in the office whatever you see, and we've written about this in our book on governance and running companies, and we've lectured about this, like Stanford and stuff like this.

Every time I've seen a CEO of a large company saying, Oh, it's just not working. We have to bring people back to the office. I've never once seen them provide evidence whenever somebody says, Oh, we're going to let people work from home or we're going to extend our work from home program. That's always accompanied by evidence.

Why is that? Why is it that no one seems to be able to show actual evidence?

Simone Collins: Well, and there are a couple of reasons why, right? I mean like a lot of people implement the back to the office policies because they want to lay people off and that's a really easy way to do it. And the other really bad reason [00:32:00] that exists out there though, which we've seen, we can totally vouch for this is, is a form of office theater where basically a lot of people like Malcolm says, have really delicate egos and they need their peons around them scurrying through the offices to make them feel important.

And it's just this like traditional vision of like,

Malcolm Collins: it's not real. I want to elaborate on what something you said there because I don't know if our audience would immediately understand what you meant. When she says they want to lay them off in a lot of developed countries right now, if you just lay somebody off randomly as a company, you have to pay some sort of financial penalty for that.

But if you told them to come to an office and then you said, oh, look, they couldn't make it to the office. After you had them like move all over the country because they could work wherever they want. Well, then you don't need to pay that penalty. And so it can be used as sort of a trap. Which of course, legally, I don't think is something we should be allowing because you shouldn't be able to demand people come back to the office.

And if that was the case, then people couldn't pull these shenanigans. No, we

Simone Collins: also, I mean, we're very much in the you should be able to fire someone at will kind of mindset. Yeah.

Louise Perry: I mean, also, even if [00:33:00] that costs. So we agree that remote working is pronatal, right? But like, even if there are costs to say productivity for remote workers or like the example, example that my friend gave yesterday is that one of the challenges of her stage of medical training is that she gets a lot, she gets, she gets given a rota, which changes week to week and she has no choice about that.

So she's, she's told, you know, you'll be doing, you'll be doing an early shift this week and then next week. should we like that? It's basically completely impossible to arrange formal childcare around that kind of rota. Either you have. So basically, you either just drop out entirely or you have a partner whose whose job is incredibly flexible or you have, say, a grandparent who can provide who's around the corner and can provide full time, including overnight childcare.

Like this is very, very demanding expectation. Like another example of the NHS being stupidly Another doctor friend, I know lots of doctors because I used to go like I was, I'm a medical school dropout. Yeah. Then for the grace of God when she had a baby at [00:34:00] medical school as a single mother, unplanned, but you know, peak, peak fertility, and she wanted to be given a job out of Out of university near her mother so that her mother could help with overnight childcare smart, right?

And it was like pulling teeth trying to get the NHS to give her this job because they had it they could understand if you Had a spouse who was living somewhere They could understand if you had a child in school that there were certain things but not a child to your resource But not but not a grandparent that didn't Count as a sort of like an important locus that you would need to be based around, right?

All of these kind of examples, it probably is the case that if say you had, let's say you have a parent friendly rota is what is like an option you can choose if you have a child of a certain age. And let's say you had special provision that you could choose. You had more choice of where you allocated your first job if you had a child, things like that.

It like it would come with costs, you know, there would be like, I think it's, I don't think that we should pretend like they wouldn't be downside for the employer [00:35:00] from providing that kind of provision. But what we're talking about here is like the survival of our civilization, right? You can't be kind of to like the birth rates thing is so important.

And people don't yet realize how important it is that we should be accommodating those kinds of trade offs very, very comfortably. And the State should be demanding that employers just, just, just eat those trade offs because like we're talking like some decades down the line where everything starts to go to pieces if we don't.

Well, and also,

Simone Collins: At least traditionally there was this perception that male fathers were better hires, right? Because they needed the stability. They would be loyal to the company. You could count on them because they had a family to support. And I, I really. resent. This is not the same for female mothers who accommodate because it, when you get a mother working for you, who's really talented and who you accommodate, she, one is amazing [00:36:00] talent and it's really hard to retain talent these days.

And if you give her All the flexibility she needs to, you know, do her job, which she probably loves if she's really good at it. And take care of her kids. She'll stay with you and she'll often go above and beyond. And we see this with our, our we, we have a company that we run. It's mostly female.

There are lots of new mothers. There's, there's a pregnant mother aside from me. Like we're extremely accommodating. We're like, just whatever, take whatever time you want, work remotely, like work with your kids. We really don't care. And Everyone who is a mother is so hard. Are there like among our.

Yeah, everyone actually, every one of our top players is

Malcolm Collins: a mother. In a previous episode, we had talked about, cause we've read these cases of like women who hypothetically try to create all women companies. And they always end up like with everyone tearing each other down and like fighting. And like our company is almost all women and everyone in there who's not a woman is a gay man, except for me.

Like our company disproportionately hires gay people and, and, and women. And It has no, [00:37:00] no drama at all anymore. And it's, it's really like a healthy place to work. And I suspect the difference is, is that other company was hiring women who didn't have kids. And our company specifically often hires mothers.

Simone Collins: Well, maybe this also comes down to the difference between the maiden and the mother and the matriarch the yeah The mother is in a very different cooperative sort of phase in life Where is like the maidens are far more likely to be competitive to be, you know, trying to show something And maybe there's something about that like leaning into that the different life phases that women

Malcolm Collins: have, I think you're absolutely right because a maid is, is competing for a mate, right?

So there is a reason to undermine other women in, in sort of status hierarchies and in competition. Whereas the mother has almost no reason to undermine other women because what they would be optimizing for is cooperation and child rearing. And, and the status just doesn't matter as much because they already have secured their mate,

Simone Collins: safety and cooperation and all that.

And that leads to great employees.

Louise Perry: The other thing that I'd add, this might [00:38:00] not apply as much in the workplace, but definitely in terms of politics, I would say that frustrated maternal impulse is a very politically potent and potentially dangerous force. Yeah. And I think that like, say, I dunno, attitudes towards refugees in the UK, this might not be as, as acute in the U S I don't know.

But I, I. Or any number of political causes, this is just one example, I, I think that the reason you see disproportionate numbers of young women who don't have children drawn to these kind of high, like, highly charged, empathetic situations where you are like trying to save groups of people, right, who may well be adult men.

But I, I honestly think that a big part of that is, it's, it's like, it's like with getting the dogs, you know, it's this, it's this tug towards mothering. Something is really good

Malcolm Collins: heart take. Yeah, I, I [00:39:00] like that take a little blurb at the beginning of the video here. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it.

If people want more conversations from us, one thing they can also check out is not just other. Our other podcast episode with you, but Simone has done an episode of your show. So that's a good check out made by the matriarch. And hopefully I'll do an episode of the near future. And yeah, it has been a joy to have you here.

So please do go check out her podcast. And if you want more in it there is one already out there with Simone. Thank

Simone Collins: you so much for joining us. This was amazing.

Louise Perry: It was such a pleasure. Thank you. Awesome.

Simone Collins: Okay. And then are you working on another book? Like what's next? What can we, you know, when, when will we have you back on?

Cause you have something new to

Louise Perry: promote. So I'm, I'm, well, I'm writing the case for having kids. So that's my next book.

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