Front Burner - The ‘pronatalists’ trying to engineer a baby boom

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Simone and Malcolm Collins are pronatalists: they believe many countries are headed toward a catastrophe of shrinking population, and that we need to have more babies to save them. Other supporters of the movement include Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.By choosing embryos with the genetic traits they want, are they practicing eugenics?Is their push to boost babies in rich countries really different from racist conspiracy theories about immigrants?Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and broadcaster, as well as the author of books including The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides. She recently visited the Collins’ home in Pennsylvania.For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone here, and we are happy to be talking about some pronatalist statistics and policy today. So this is from the YouTube channel for Simone and Malcolm Collins, the self-appointed faces of a movement called pronatalism. That's natal, as in birth, and pro, as in they're pushing for people to have more babies.

That's because for rich societies, they believe the existential threat they're facing isn't climate change. It's actually low birth rates and declining populations. France is digging its own grave here. What they need is groups like ours advising them, and we've reached out to them. We reached out to the population division at the French government. We're like, oh, we can help you guys, but never heard back from them.

And I think that's the thing. Better than the UK. The UK was like, no thanks. We're fine. The Collins present themselves pretty differently from religious pro-birth movements like the Quiverful movement. They're atheists. They say that they believe in abortionful movement. They're atheists.

They say that they believe in abortion and science. They're entrepreneurs. They run their own pronatalist charity. There's also huge tech industry names that support pronatalism, like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. But this supposedly rational approach has also led the Collins into controversial territory. By choosing embryos with the genetic traits they want, are they practicing eugenics? Is the alarmism about declining birth rates really different from racist conspiracy theories about immigration? And with the confusing blend of ideologies that we think of as coming from left and right,

what does this worldview they and tech giants are calling the new right mean for the future of politics? Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and broadcaster, as well as the author of books including The Price of Life, In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides. She recently visited the Collins home in Pennsylvania and wrote a very viral piece for The Guardian. Jenny, hi. It is so good to have you on FrontBurner. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So I wonder if we could start by laying out the problem that the Collins family sees in the world. Why do they think the lack of babies some countries are having could lead to disaster? having fewer babies. You need women to have an average of 2.1 babies per woman for population levels to stay the same. And the kind of average figure is way below that in most industrialized

countries. A recent report came out that said that almost every country in the world by the end of the century, the population rate will not be enough to keep populations at sustainable levels. And in the short term, that means there aren't enough people working to support older people with their taxes. But in the long term, it could mean the extinction of the human race if we are not having enough babies to replenish the population. It seems wild to me that we live in a world today where not a single country or culture, except for maybe Israel, has found out how to maintain a stable population alongside prosperity, gender equality, and education.

This as like a civilization is probably something we should start talking about. Yeah, we need to have them basically as quickly spaced as possible. So we're going in for our next round, essentially, next month. And we're going to have more than seven if we can, basically, until my uterus is forcibly removed in a botched surgery, I'm going to keep going. So you visited Malcolm and Simone in their home. And, you know, they are the self-proclaimed kind of faces of this movement. And tell me about, you know, the supposedly rational system that they have created at home for raising like a better future generation. How are they trying to like bust norms and traditions to make a better way of raising kids according to them?

Well, from the moment I walked into their house, it was clear that this was a very different kind of family set up to the normal one that you would expect walking into a house full of young kids. So Malcolm and Simone, they have four children now. When I went to see them, they had three kids and Simone was eight months pregnant. In fact, they didn't tell me that she was eight months pregnant. We were making arrangements to have the interview. were making arrangements to have the interview. But there is no kids' bedroom. There is a stack of bunk beds three stories high for the three children to sleep in, in Malcolm's office. The kids use his office at nighttime. He uses it during the day. There are many things that they have done to promote their particular brand of pronatalism. For example, they are atheists. They very much believe in science

and data and not God, but they have invented an atheist religion that they hope will kind of promote their family values. So they don't celebrate Christmas or rather Christmas as we would traditionally know it. They have something called future day. And so for future day, for example, we steal toys, a future police steal through us, of course, toys or things from their lives that cause bad behavior. Addictive devices, games, things like that, iPads, whatever. Last year, we just took all their toys. We just, yeah, all their toys disappeared because we're like, oh, let's make this really dramatic. The children have to write a contract making promises of how they're going to make the world a better place. And once they've

done that, they get some toys, they get some gifts. And if they fulfill any of those promises, they get extra gifts. And that religion is all about orientating their kids towards a value system that is dedicated to making the world a better place many years down the line. They also talked about cutting what they called pointless indulgences. Oh, yes. Yeah. Tell me about that. So they give as much money as they can to charity, they say, although it's their charities. And they do this by cutting out what Malcolm called pointless indulgences, which in his case

included, they don't heat the house in winter. So they dress up warmly, but they don't heat the house in winter. And this is a house where there was, when I was visiting, a four-year-old, a two-year-old, a 17-month-old, and a mother who was eight months pregnant. So they didn't have any central heating on. And it was cold. I was there in early March, and the tips of my fingers were going white within 20 minutes of being in that house because it was so cold. Just another thing here before we move on. How have they decided to name their children?

Their children have interesting names. They do. Their oldest child is a boy called Octavian. Then there's Torsten, who's two. And then they have two girls, Titan Invictus and the newborn Industry Americus. And I asked why they had given their children these names and was told that it's because nominative determinism is a heavily studied field. They've looked at studies that show that girls with gender neutral names are more likely to get STEM jobs, higher paying jobs. jobs, higher paying jobs. And they wanted their children to have strong names that gave like the underpinnings of their worldview. So Malcolm points to the fact that rich countries tend to have less children and people with less money tend to have more.

And what's his explanation for why he thinks that's happening? It took a while for him to actually get down to the real nub of his explanation, but he basically thinks that wealthier people are less willing to make compromises on their lifestyle in order to accommodate larger families. So then he goes on to say, my philosopher friend that it sounded like having children was a quote, consciousness expanding experience, end quote. So, you know, this guy, now that he has three kids and he has three kids now, you know,

and he's talking to his wife. Yeah, who has three kids anymore? And she's like, well, it would limit how much I can travel. Like, okay, yeah. yeah denying a human a life denying one of your kids like if you knew that kid would you be like yeah i treated you for travel because i really like going to italy like what what like it's so insane that anybody would do that but i think so it is expensive to live for example example, in a major city. And he thinks that people living in a major city, instead of saying, I want to have larger families. And that's why population rates, fertility rates are going down everywhere, that the more a society is educated, technophilic,

the more that women have rights in a society, the lower the birth rate is. And he thinks that's because there's a kind of unwillingness to make compromises now in those communities where people have prosperity. Take me through some of the examples of compromises they feel that they have made. They feel they've made tons of compromises. They are not going to be able to send their kids to fee-paying schools. They're not going to be able to afford to send their kids to college. Instead, they're going to homeschool their children. They told me they're not really going to be able to take their kids on vacation. They are going to have issues with transporting their family anywhere, because if they're going to have the seven kids minimum that they want to have, they're going to have to buy a the joy of having a large family and also the good that they would be doing in the world by having this large family and having their genes represented in the gene pool. You know, I also saw that Malcolm was arguing that relying on immigration

to keep up our populations was problematic because it, quote, outsourced the labor of child rearing. And just flesh that out for me. What do you think he meant by that? What does he mean by that? Malcolm was very keen that I came away thinking that his brand of pronatalism wasn't racist, because we know that there is a huge part of a kind of right-wing thinking that is worried about declining birth rates among people of white European descent and higher birth rates among Muslim populations, for example. And he was basically saying that if in white societies, we are relying on immigration to provide, for example, help in the care sector of the healthcare sector, looking after old people. What we're

effectively doing is relying on people from Africa to come and look after white older people. And what we need to do is implement rules that disproportionately filter for immigrants who make this country stronger, while also working to ensure that we do not memetically sterilize these individuals once we come to our country and treat them like a disposable resource, which is one of the things we're doing right now, which is really terrible. You know, because of our low fertility rates, we are taking the best and the best from Africa. We're taking the best of the best from South America. And then we are sterilizing them. He said to me that has really terrible optics, basically. But I think what he was trying to say is it is a kind of form of colonialism to try and solve the population crisis by relying on countries with higher fertility because they're poor.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. investment and industry connections. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So you mentioned he's trying to like distance himself from, you know, other movements. Like, I'm thinking the great replacement theory, right?

People who think that they need to protect the white race from, like, attempts to overthrow it from immigration. I'm laughing because this is one of about 10 stories that I know you've covered where the government shows preference to people who have shown absolute contempt for our customs, our laws, our system itself, and they're being treated better than American citizens. Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's

true. Malcolm and Simone, they have gone to events with great replacement supporters, right? Yes. I mean, there was a big NATO conference that was organized by somebody who, I mean, Malcolm admitted to me, used to be, he says, on the ethno-nationalist side. He knows that a lot of his aims overlap with a lot of the aims of a lot of great replacement theorists, but he says he's able to convert them when he shows them the data, when he shows them that data, when he shows them that Muslim populations are in decline, for example, wherever there is prosperity, and that this is in fact a trajectory that all of humankind is on. He was very confident of his

ability to convert racists, so he said. So he didn't have any concerns about sharing a platform with them because he felt that the data would sway them. Right. Okay. Another unsettling current in this is the focus on genetics, right? And so talk to me a little bit about what led Malcolm and Simone to actually select which embryos they want for children. Yeah. So they have used assisted reproduction to create their family. Simone has a history of eating disorders. She can't get pregnant naturally. So they've used IVF. They have a lot of embryos in storage and they have scored all of their embryos. They've taken them to have genetic testing, these embryos, and have scored them according to health outcomes,

how likely these embryos are to get cancer or mental health conditions, but also a whole range of other things, including IQ. And they told me future predicted income, which seems incredible that you can look at an embryo and see that. But they said the companies that they had taken their embryos to said that they could give them an indication of that. And they have a very large spreadsheet that they've used to rank their embryos and they're implanting them in order of how optimal they are according to those metrics. Just tell me a little bit more about the metrics that they're looking for, like what they're screening for. So they are screening for IQ. They are screening against, they don't want to have children who have a higher risk of anxiety

or depression or Alzheimer's or schizophrenia. Simone is autistic and Octavian, their oldest child, who's four, has been diagnosed with autism, but they are not selecting against that because they think that's part of a person's identity. And so that's not coming into their thinking. Simone said that they are screening against characteristics or conditions where there is no good known treatment or cure. But Malcolm was also very keen to say, of course, they selected for IQ and that was one of the most important things to them. So it's not just that they want a large family, they want an optimal one. They want the best family possible. one. They want the best family possible. Look, after reading your piece, you know, for all this focus on getting good genetics, you know, screening for things like IQ, what's your impression of how they're actually parenting the kids, like once they're born, to make them smarter, right? Because it's not, you know, it's not just genetics. And I don't mean to be judgmental, though I do imagine a lot of people are listening to this and they have a lot of thoughts um but you do describe the boys as being on iPads like like a lot well the boys had

iPads tied around their necks the two oldest children are four and two and they both had their own iPad and their iPads were tied around their necks and their two-year-old son I didn't meet him for the first two hours of being in the house because he was upstairs alone with his iPad. So he had two full hours of not being with his parents because he was somewhere on his own. I don't know if he was on his iPad the whole time. But yeah, I mean, this is the sort of thing that a lot of people would be wary of. But for me, the big thing was, I mean, there were lovely kids when I spoke to them. And the oldest child, Octavian, was really excited to have a visitor in the house. to them. And the oldest child, Octavian, was really excited to have a visitor in the house.

But his parents were very focused on the fact that I was there and were not paying him much attention. And that may be because I'm a journalist and they wanted to devote all of their attention to me. But there didn't seem to be tons of engagement with the children. And one thing that we know is really correlated with IQ and educational attainment is how much your parents read to you, how much your parents talk to you. Having a smart kid isn't as simple as looking at the embryo and seeing which is most likely to have high IQ. You need to actually be engaging with them and talking to them. All I can talk about is what I saw on the day. And it's quite likely that they were engaging much more with me than they were with the kids because I was there as a journalist. But there seemed to be a lot of being very happy to leave their kids to do their

own thing and do their own thing, you know, with bits of tech as well. And, you know, they're very into studies and data. And we know that there are lots of studies and data that say that, you know, you shouldn't necessarily leave your kid alone with an iPad. But I don't know what was loaded onto those iPads at the time. For all I know, it was some brain training device. You know, I know from, you know, my career as being a journalist that there are a few stories that get people riled up like parenting stories right and I think at one point they mentioned that child services had been called yes in fact they both mentioned this to me independently of each other which was interesting because it's not the sort of thing that you would imagine that

people would mention freely to a journalist but but they both brought it up. Apparently child services had been called because their kids, when they were going to daycare, had lots of colds. Their kids had been seen playing outside in the yard without anyone else there with them. Their kids are four and two and that their kids were wearing used clothes and malcolm malcolm and simone both think that um the problem is there is a kind of urban monoculture there is a set of values normative values of the right way to bring up children which is at odds with their values and at odds with pronatalist values and in fact it is that value system that's leading to population collapse and that we all think you need to bring up children in a certain way, which disincentivizes having lots of children,

that you're supposed to be a kind of helicopter parent. And they think that that's not the case, that in fact, you can have very successful children if you just leave them to do their own thing. But leaving them to do their own thing means that they're doing something that's outside normative standards. And that's why child protective services have been called on them. There is this sort of unbelievable moment in your piece that I want to talk to you about, where you go to a restaurant with Malcolm and two of the boys. And, you know, as the two-year-old rocks the table, Malcolm slaps him. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm wondering how the way he justified hitting his kid in front of a journalist compares to your perception of what happened. had knocked the table with his foot and Malcolm immediately, like a reflex, smacked him in the face in front of me. And I could hear it on my voice recorder when I played it back.

And we just went unmentioned. And then after our meal, when we were walking back to the car, he said to me, oh yeah, you'll notice that we have an unorthodox parenting style. It's based on something that Simone saw when she was traveling, when she saw how tigers rear their young. She saw tigers in the wild and that they bop their children. They a quick paw to the face in the moment when there's bad behavior, negative response in the moment we find very effective in disincentivizing behavior that we don't want to encourage. Every single long-lived culture on earth would not have convergently evolved this method of interacting with children during this

developmental stage. What is really negative and what we are against is any form of punishment where the pain is the point of the punishment. What happens during a bop? It is a light slap on the child's nose or face that is meant to shock and redirect and refocus attention. The reason we do the face is because it requires much less pain to get the same reaction than doing something like slapping the wrist. But subsequently, since my piece went viral, he's given lots of interviews about what happened. And he says that what Torsten, his two-year-old son, was doing was dangerous. You could potentially kill a small child by knocking a table over, a table full of small children. I mean, Torsten was the youngest child at that table.

And, you know, this was a potentially a life or death situation. And he had to react that way. But I was there. And what happened was when he smacked his child in the face and he had to react that way but I was there and what happened was when he smacked his child in the face he said to Torsten you've got to be nice in restaurants I love you but you've got to be nice in restaurants you know he was not um he was not saying that's really dangerous what you've done he was saying you're behaving badly in a restaurant in public and it's embarrassing and this is you know that's what happened afterwards is he continued to threaten his children saying you know if you carry on behaving like that you're going to get bopped um which is not the same thing it's not like tigers

threaten their children in the wild in order to to uh induce good behavior this was just he this was just corporal punishment basically you know it's kind of interesting in that it sounds like an emotional outburst right from someone who supposedly is following this path of rationalism and science i just wonder if you saw like other contradictions or other limits to this purely rational approach, or if you would even agree with that analysis. They told me everything was purely rational, but, and everything that they said was based in data, but you know, there is data that it's not a good idea to leave your child alone with an iPad for two hours. There's data that it's, that corporal punishment doesn't lead to good behavior. You know, I'm sure there's not a lot of data about how tigers rear their cubs,

but there's more data about how hitting your child in the face in public might not lead to positive behavioral outcomes. The thing about data is you can always pick the data that you want that backs up what you would like to be true. I mean, when I asked them how large the pro-natalism movement was, they told me that they thought at least 100,000 people subscribed to their specific vision. And when I asked where that number came from, they couldn't give me a good source. They said, oh, it's the number of views certain things get and the responses to certain things. So, I mean, this is the world in which we're living now. People think that numbers have a certain authority and you can back up anything with numbers if you're prepared to be quite liberal in your interpretation of the data and your willingness to be satisfied by a dubious data source. So you can say that you're an entirely rational, scientific-based person if you can find a study, a single study that will back up what you would like to be true. You know, another contradiction, similar to what you just said, that I found really interesting is that there's this rise of anti-natalism, right?

People who argue against having kids because they're often worried about climate change. But the Collinses, they didn't work worried about that data and that science no but the collins's are thinking many many many generations into the future and they value very much subscribe to a kind of elon musk view of the world elon musk who is himself a father of 11 it is it is expensive to have kids especially if you want to sort of give the best education and all that sort of stuff. So it's financially difficult. I say that, but then ironically, the higher someone's income... Fewer kids. Yeah.

So it doesn't totally make sense. They are working towards a time when human beings are an interplanetary species and they are thinking that we're all gonna colonize other planets and right go to mars yeah yes planet b so so just to end this conversation um and man would i love to keep keep you on the line to say this uh worldview like there's such an interesting collision of currents that we often think about as being on different sides of the political spectrum. The Collinses called their views the quote new right. Something, I mean, you talked about Elon Musk that we've heard a lot about among big tech types. And can you just flesh that out for me beyond just birth rates?

What do they hope this way of thinking will mean for the future of politics? They think of themselves as the form of conservatism that is going to exist after Trumpism is extinguished. hyper rational brand of conservative thought that encourages large families and traditional values, but also gives people freedom of choice over how they want to create their families, what the family is comprised of in terms of sexuality and how the family is created in terms of technology. They want to be very liberal on all of that. And they want to have, you know, minimal state intervention when it comes to all of that, give people as much choice as possible in how to create their families.

All right. Lots to think about there. Jenny, thank you very much for this. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.