So we strongly believe that the educational system is broken. It was really designed to create interchangeable cogs in the British Imperial Empire, and it worked great for Corporate America when we still needed interchangeable cogs. Now, at the age of AI, that is the last thing we need. That is what AI does. Now you need lumpy people with obsessions and really strong skill sets who are generally informed in other areas, but honestly not mediocre at everything, because that's not going to help you at all. AI is going to come in and help you with everything on that front that you might need.
Yeah, I don't think you're going to get that many, 'Oh, we won't talk to you because you talked to Malcolm and Simone.' Maybe they'll come out of the woodwork. You may have more enemies than you think. Who knows?
Oh, we've got lots of enemies, but it's more like the trolling kind. I don't know if they watch shows like this.
Yeah. Hey, listen, let me introduce you guys properly. Now that we're going live to YouTube and then of course this goes out as a podcast all sorts of places, so this is 'In Conversation with Frank Schaefer,' and I am Frank Schaefer. And my guests are Simone and Malcolm Collins. Simone and Malcolm Collins are entrepreneurs, authors of the bestselling 'The Pragmatist Guide' series. And I read one of those books today, by the way. Oh my gosh, in full, and I have a lot of notes from it to talk to you about. And in that book, it referred to all the other ones on sexuality and all sorts of stuff, but I read the first volume. So, okay, back to the introduction. Bestselling authors of 'The Pragmatist Guide' series covering life, relationship, sexuality, etc., and crafting religion, some of which you got into in the book I read, which we're going to talk about. They're advocates for pronatalism, education reform, and hard effective altruism. And by the way, I just want to mention to both of you something to dip out of my thing here, that I've had a number of pronatalist writers that I've talked to very seriously. One, I think you met, Katherine Pakaluk, who wrote 'Catholics and the Crisis of Culture.' And I actually, you can thank me for this, because I wrote to her and I said, 'What do you think of you guys?' And she wrote back and said, 'Well, I don't know much about them, but I kind of like them. They're very interesting people.' And then later found out more about it and then reintroduced us. So Katherine's a friend. You're like the fourth guest we've had on because of her. Paul Morland, who's a British demographer, wrote a book called 'Tomorrow's People.' Brad Wilcox, who wrote a book called 'Get Married.' Yeah, he's a woman author who wrote 'Boy Mom,' and another one who wrote 'What Are Children For?' So we have actually done a pronatalism series and we've had a lot of other things going on, but I have not only been talking to these people but reading their books and very interested with it. And I want to give you just a little background on myself to set this discussion up. I came at all this very differently than you all. I met Jeannie when we were 17 and 18, which is 55 years ago, and we had three kids. We would have had more, but she had a hysterectomy for medical reasons after our third. I have five grandchildren. I've been doing with Jeannie all the childcare for the youngest three who live across the street, who are now 16, 14, and 10. And I mean literally, they've never had a babysitter. Anybody, Jeannie and I, she took an early retirement. What we've been doing is caring for them. So when it comes to your pronatalism, you know, I'm someone whose life revolves around various generations of children and intergenerational connection, which I think is a very important thing. So I just want to say that in terms of your writing, I've been talking to people who have similar concerns to yours, similar concerns to me, because I'm very much on the same page with you on this. So that's a side of a disjointed introduction, but I want to get to the book itself that you wrote and make sure that I introduced this properly and then get into some things. It's called 'The Pragmatist Guide to Life: A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life's Biggest Questions.' I dug up something from one of your websites. The Pronatalist Foundation is working to find a way for prosperity, gender equality, education, and technology to coexist with stable populations. Then it talks about your work in Korea, etc., etc. Simone and Malcolm Collins have operated companies, and it talks about all the stuff you've done. And currently, you're building a new educational system designed to increase the quality and decrease the cost of gifted education. I want to talk about what that is. We are the first pronatalist organization in the world. While a few have claimed partially similar motivation, they typically use pronatalism as an instrument to other ideological or religious ends. That's something I want to talk about. We take a strict non-denominational stance. Okay, so where I want to open this up is a little off the page, but it does come directly from your book, and that is, it ties in with my background because I had a pastor missionary family that I grew up in. You describe yourself as atheist Calvinists, and of course those words leapt off the page to me, and I said, 'Okay, if nothing else, we're going to talk about that.' So who wants to dive in and tell me who your parents were, where this comes from, and let's go there first because I'm very...
Before we go further, I need to clarify, because you have hinted you might have read one of two books. Did you read 'Life' or 'Crafting Religion'?
I read the first... let me just make sure I got the title right, because you guys are so prolific. I read 'The Pragmatist Guide to Life: A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life's Biggest Questions.'
Crazy of our books. Okay, I'm glad that you read the least crazy of our books. No, our writing could be seen as very much almost sort of, if you're talking about the ideological descendant, the ideological descendant of one of your children. My parents were very strict religious individuals. My parents, they didn't fully rebel exactly, but they certainly weren't religious, and I wasn't raised within a religion. And then when I began to look around at the world, I realized that it appears, at least so far as I can see, impossible to motivate stable fertility rates alongside anything close to gender equality or education or technological prosperity without what may as well be called religion. So yes, you could differentiate your culture in ways that, you know, and some people would argue that our culture is differentiated in very secular ways, but they are severe and extreme that to somebody of the dominant cultural group in our society, they would say it's a religious sort of splinter group. But I'd also point out that we also believe pretty strongly, we didn't believe this when we wrote our earlier books, this is like a new belief that we've had as we've gone back into the Bible, where I would argue that actually the Bible is a materialist monist source, which would mean that it is in most people's mind arguing for a secular worldview. Specifically, if you look at passages like Ecclesiastes 3:18-22. And so, yeah, I actually think that weirdly speaking, the Bible in the Christian tradition, if read straight, could be taken to... but this gets way into other of our teachings and I don't want to get too distracted with that.
Well, I understand, I understand that, but I want to also dip back with Simone here a second. Did you have anything in your background that gives me a clue to how we wind up calling ourselves atheist Calvinists or Calvinist atheists? Is that something to do with your background or is that kind of an intellectual position you've come to as outlined by Malcolm at this point?
Both, because we would argue that humans evolved culture and religion alongside civilization. It was kind of software that runs on top of our hardware that makes it possible for us to live in complex societies where it just wouldn't work for us to really grok what's going on otherwise. And our genetic backgrounds come from generations of people who were Calvinists, and before that probably Catholics. So yeah, I think that there are selective pressures that are created by religions and cultural traditions, and that can shape people who are descendants of those cultures and religions. And as such, a lot of Calvinist and general Christian intuitions feel very natural to us when we actually explore them in depth. But the fact that we've come to our religion from a very first principles approach is more a product of one, Malcolm just being a first principles person. There's nothing that he really takes for granted. It's just like, 'Well, why would I do this?' and then he just goes on from there. But both of us grew up in cultures, in various ways, somewhat devoid of a lot of religious tradition and devoid of strong religious faith. Especially me, I grew up in the Silicon Valley Bay Area in a very, very progressive society. My understanding of what a wedding looked like until maybe I was an older teen was people putting on masks in the woods and dancing around and doing naked sweat lodges and stuff. So I just didn't have that background.
Did you grow up in... I'm just curious because I know Alam is right across the bay. No, no, my sister-in-law lives in Alam, and my wife Jeannie will be flying out there as she does two or three times a year in a few weeks. So we're totally on the same page. Hey, listen, I want to jump to something that's nothing to do with your book, but because we have a friend in common in Katherine Pakaluk. In her book 'Hannah's Children,' Katherine and I have had a lot of discussions, and she's read things I've written, and I've been reading her and also some of her lectures and so forth. She makes an interesting point in that book. Out of the 50 interviews that comprise the book, with 50 women, all of whom have five or more children by choice, all of whom, with maybe a few exceptions, have PhDs, these are bright people who have decided to do this. I think Katherine told me that only one of them regards herself as completely secular. The rest, in some way, whether they're Catholics or Jews or whomever they may be, are religious. Now, Katherine and I have talked at some length about this, and she feels quite strongly not that the religion leads to pronatalism, but that it's not a coincidence that whether it's on the West Bank of Israel and the settlers there, or whether here interviewing Catholic and Jewish women who are fairly devout having more babies, that there is a connection in terms of the current pronatalist movement. And I think Paul Morland would say the same thing about 'Tomorrow's People,' that when you take the specifically religious component out, you're left with people who are not making the same choices. Now, you guys are very interesting to me because, as I said to Katherine, 'Well, you know, Simone and Malcolm seem to break that rule.' Now you're talking about being atheist Calvinists, so there's a component there, but I don't think you're having many children in the same way that you feel that this is sort of the gift from God and that, you know, why would you do anything else when this is the greatest thing you could do. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think an interesting way to talk about you guys and your books and your teaching would be to look at some of the differences between you and your friend Katherine when it comes to this one thing, because I'm very curious about that in terms of, for two reasons. First, just an intellectual curiosity, but secondly, the long-term success of the movement that you're talking about, a pronatalist movement, people having more kids. You know, does it depend on churchgoers and Jews who are on the West Bank, people very intentional communities, or is there a secular argument, genuinely a secular argument, for the points you're making in your work? I'll leave you at that.
So here, one is I was just going to build on something Simone was saying in her last answer, which I think helps understand what she means when she talks about the heritability of religious traditions. There was a study that came out recently that showed that predestination specifically is a highly heritable belief, which I think shows what she's talking about there. But then to the question that you just asked, I think that this can be broken out in a few interesting ways. Historically, people might have more kids because more kids meant more money, it meant more people on the farm, more people just into the factory. But now, every kid you have typically decreases quality of life for a lot of people. After let's say two or three kids, once you get above replacement rate, really, you know, maybe you'll get some good something for kid one, kid two, kid three, kid four, the number you need for population to stay above replacement rate. And so that means outside of increased personal quality of life, you need some exogenous motivation to have lots of kids. Now, that motivation could be logical. I can say to an individual, 'You know, if you value things like gender equality and the right to not have kids, then people who value those things need to be breeding above replacement rate, or people who value those things won't exist in the future.' But this argument is completely unmotivating, it turns out, to most secular individuals that we've engaged.
Yeah, that's not going to make anybody do anything. No one's convinced by the logic.
But what's also really interesting is I would argue that when I look at people like Katherine Pakaluk and some other people we know who are religious and have lots of kids, and I've noticed this especially with the Catholics who do this, they're not as motivated by, 'I had lots of kids because my life is about having kids for theological reasons.' It's almost like they have this aesthetic aspiration. And this aesthetic aspiration is what guides them to have a lot of kids.
See, I'm going to interrupt you there because that dovetails exactly with my personal experience. So forget all these other people, you're talking to me here. I love the phrase that you just used, 'aesthetic aspiration,' because you know, I've had ups and downs in my life, but I've had some successes, some bestsellers, and I've made some movies in Hollywood and all this. And I can honestly tell you as a 72-year-old on this road that's a little bit similar to you and Simone's in terms of some things that we would agree on. You know, I'll just give you an example. The other day, my granddaughter who's 16 wanted to leave high school a little early, and her mother happens to work at the same high school, and she asked her mom if she could call her. And her mother said to her, 'Well, Ba, that's me, Ba, Ba for grandfather, has already been to the school once for Nora's presentation this morning for the poetry reading in her class. He probably won't come down here again.' And Lucy got in the car when I went to pick her up, and she says, 'Well, mom said you might not want to come down.' And I said to mom, 'Of course he'll come.' And as far as I was concerned, that was one of the greatest affirmations of my life, because I gain more aesthetic pleasure out of a relationship with my grandchildren than I do out of all the work-related moments of joy combined. Now, I'm not saying everybody does that, but my argument for having children has absolutely nothing to do with population deficits and has everything to do with the fact that I literally feel compassion for and sorrow for people who eliminate that pleasure from their life without understanding the long-term effect on their own growth, from the point of view of a 72-year-old man who literally, you know, why would I, what would interest me at this point in the same way. So when Katherine talks about her motivation for having children in her book, it comes to a real argument for pleasure and depth and aesthetic aspiration, just what you talked about, not some chart saying here's how many people we need to replace anybody.
Well, Frank framed it to me when we were last chatting, and I 100% agree with this and think that this is what's going on, is the religion, the aesthetic aspiration is the kindling, it gets the fire started. Because honestly, being a parent of just one kid and being a first-time parent is really hard, and pushing through that to more kids is very difficult. By the time you get to three, most people then are like, 'Oh my gosh, I get it now, kids are so amazing, like now I just want to have infinity kids.' So it's the culture of the religion, the aesthetic aspiration that gets people started through the hardest part of becoming a parent, which is really the first step. But the rest of it's carried by the children, because it's just such a meaningful and wonderful thing. But you have to, like, it honestly isn't the most fun thing in the very beginning for most.
I'd argue that there's multiple completely separate motivations that end up motivating different populations to have lots of kids. To what Frank was talking about, one of the things that we often note, though I will note that it's very hard to convince people to have a lot of kids based on this, is I point out to people, I go, 'Look, before puberty, people told you that the way you were going to see the world, the things that gave you satisfaction, the things you enjoyed, these were all going to change, because all of your ancestors had to change these things to have surviving offspring. And yet you don't expect a similar shift after you have kids.' And I think it's sort of like for many people a second puberty. And yet when you deny that, many people, in the same way that somebody before puberty is like, 'Ew, sex, gross, cooties,' etc., you're going to have a really hard time communicating to somebody who hasn't had that first kid or first few kids why there is meaning in having lots of kids. But to the point about the aesthetic aspiration of having lots of kids, I would say that that hasn't motivated us, and it hasn't motivated most high fertility communities. So what a lot of people are unfamiliar with, but it's very, very clear in the data, is not all religions, when you hold for wealth, will have kids at the same rate. Of the Judeo-Christian traditions, by far the worst at having kids are the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. Catholics, there was one study that I looked at that was looking at American-born Catholics, it was the latest data I could find on this, it found they had an average fertility rate of 1.6, which would put them below the secular fertility rate today.
Yeah, they're like Koreans. They're like Koreans at that point.
This study was done in 1997 or 1998. I was like, 'Oh my God.' The average Catholic-majority country's fertility rate in Europe is 1.3. If you look at Italy, France, and Spain, they're right there with Korea and China. You look across Latin America, they're all bottoming out. And we try to understand why are Catholic and Eastern Orthodox fertility rates so low. And what we came to, because we sort of did what we do, is we'd ask Mormons, 'Describe the Mormons with high fertility rates, describe the Mormons with low fertility rates.' We ask Jews, 'Describe the Jews.' Actually, Jews, this doesn't work on, it works for everyone but Jews. Jews are, I'm going to put them in a separate bucket. What it turns out is that people who relate to their religious rules from a deontological framing versus people who relate to their religious rules via consequentialist framing, the consequentialist framing leads to very high fertility rates, and the deontological framing leads to very low fertility rates. And typically, the only ones who are able to buck this trend within deontological framings are the people who relate to the deontological framing with an aesthetic aspiration. So if you talk to the Catholics who do have lots of kids, they typically are not the predestination, the deontological framing Catholics. They're the ones who are more about a Catholic vibe and not about specific rules. I remember talking to one Catholic about this, a very prominent Catholic pronatalist, and her husband originally converted when their child died in a miscarriage. And I was like, and she goes, 'And he found strength in the church.' And I was like, 'Why would you find strength? Do you know what the Catholic teachings on miscarriages are? Like that baby's in limbo or purgatory or something.' And she was like, 'Wait, he is?' I was like, 'You are a Catholic icon, how do you not know this?' But she's just more about the vibe of Catholicism, and that does very well with Catholics. But when you're talking about Protestant and Quiverfull families, it's very different. It's about the specifics of consequentialist outcomes.
Yeah, I have a question for you, Simone, just to jump out. And I'm going to do my little thing here about people subscribing to my YouTube channel, but when we get back, I want to talk about a passage in the book where you were fairly recently discovered that you are autistic, I think it said. I want to go in there, but let me do this first. Please subscribe right now on YouTube to 'In Conversation with Frank Schaefer' and our podcast and my Substack, it has to be said, at frankschaefer.substack.com, etc., etc. Okay, so what's that all about, Simone?
Yeah, we realized that our eldest son had a speech delay, and then later a reading delay, and decided to get him tested for autism. Lo and behold, a bunch of things that the person who evaluated him kept saying, 'Oh, this is textbook autism, clear giveaway,' I kept saying, 'No, this is normal, everyone does this.' Things like tiptoe walking and extreme sensitivity to temperatures and textures and stickiness and all sorts of other little things. Apparently, that's not a universal thing for everyone. And it led to me getting evaluated as well. And apparently, this is something that happens a lot with women, is that many autistic women never do get diagnosed in childhood because they learn how to mask a lot earlier, and then they go on to get diagnosed when their children, specifically their sons, are diagnosed.
Yeah, which is really, really interesting. Well, you know, it's interesting you bring that up because there's an exact parallel in my family history, and that is I'm severely dyslexic. All being, you know, the spelling and letters backward stuff, learned to read very late, learned about my own dyslexia when I went to Dr. Jan Schwartz, who was a... early 1980s. Oh wow. And I said to her, 'You know, maybe you could talk to me too,' because I was in British boys' boarding schools as a child from age 10 onward. Oh, as a dyslexic kid. Yes, as a dyslexic, starting in 1962. Fortunately, the first one I was in with very kind people. The second boarding school I was in, I ran away from at age 15, but that's a different story. But the fact of the matter is, I had the same thing as you, because here I was, I was actually, let me see, in that time I was in my mid-30s, and I was talking to this woman who was helping my son Francis, that my wife had dug up some expertise back in the early '80s on dyslexia when it wasn't that well documented. So he was getting really good help, and I was watching this incredible progress he made, and basically was just thinking, 'Wow, you know, I could have used this 40 years ago or 30 years ago, whenever it was.' Same sort of thing. And so I'm interested in your take on that in terms of your relationship with your son, and also just how you see the world now that you see that that's the case. Because I have two things. I had polio when I was two. I happen to believe in vaccines. I don't know, you know, get into all that. My parents forgot to vaccinate me on shipboard. My sisters got vaccinated, so I have a leg that's much shorter and all sorts of problems. And then my dyslexia went totally undiagnosed in a British boy school where it was just, you know, the whole bit. So in looking at that experience, when I saw that you had had that, I'm always interested in how you see things perhaps differently now that you know that that's a thing and that that's something you had.
It's interesting seeing how that interplays, like a diagnosis interplays also just with having kids, because both of them have a similar effect, which is broadly, 'Oh, it doesn't feel like it's all my fault anymore.' There's a lot of annoying things that I do, things that bother me, but I kind of feel like I need to do them, or things that make me really uncomfortable, and I always felt really bad about it and tried to hide it and felt like it was my fault, like I was very culpable for it. Which is kind of funny, because we are big believers in a very mechanistic universe where everything that will happen has happened and it's all happening all at once, right? But I still take personal responsibility for it all. After getting diagnosed, I'm able to give myself a little bit more grace because I'm like, 'Wait, this is textbook autism. This is very normal.' But I feel the same way because of getting to meet our children. So many of the things that make me weird, sometimes annoying, show up in them, but times 10. And then I realized, 'Wow, this was genetic, maybe times 2.'
Simone, I don't know if I'd say times 10. It maybe it feels like times 10 when it's something I...
Speaking of which, just, you know, because I'm so interested in your ideas and everything else, I've been jumping around here as if we're just sitting on a plane and sharing a cup of coffee. This isn't a... I'm not doing a very good job at interviewing you because I have a lot of quotes from the book, but I need to go there. And that is, just to tell people who may not be familiar with you, because I didn't do this in the introduction, how many children you have presently and just sort of a very short, encapsulated version of your own approach to that, whether it's the aesthetic that we were talking about with Malcolm a moment ago, or whether you come at this from a sort of, 'Hey, you know, people who have their shit together should populate the Earth, and otherwise there's going to be nobody out there like us,' because it can't just all be really West Bank settlers and Katherine Pakaluk. I mean, you know, there need to be more diversity here. I'm being a little facetious, but get, you know, Simone, Malcolm, you know, how many kids you have, how many you think you will, what's this all about in terms of you personally, what motivated you to do this aside from what's on the page in your books, because what we write, you know, I've always said as soon as I put it down on paper, in a way it dies, because we're much more complex than anything we can write, and we change our opinions. People ask me about my book, you know, 'Why I'm an atheist who believes in God,' and I'm saying, 'Yeah, but that was 12 years ago, you know, let's talk about what I'm thinking now.' I mean, you know, as you get older, particularly, you look back over your non-fiction work and you're just saying, 'Shit, did I write that?' Whereas novels are better, because if it's a good story, then it's a good story now. But talk about your journey a little bit in personal terms and how you got to where you're at. How many kids do you have, how many, you know, is it ideology, is it because you enjoy them, is it a mixture? What, and I'm sure you both have different ways of looking at it.
I mean, for me, it's heavily ideological and based on their impact on reality. I mean, I may have had kids anyway, but the reason I'm having kids now is because of the, and the reason I'm raising them the way I am, which is highly divergent from the way other people might, is based on the outcome of that childbearing. But I'd let Simone tie this all together.
Yeah, like we kind of explained earlier, and what I think is a universal thing among people who have a lot of kids, almost universal at least, is it starts out ideological and ends up because you just love the kids so much. But what makes us different from that typical couple is, one, we started relatively late. We didn't marry until we were like 27, 28 years old, which is on the later end for high fertility couples. We didn't start trying until maybe a year later, and then we immediately hit fertility problems because of health issues that I had when I was younger. I can't have kids without IVF, which is another huge thing. I mean, most couples when they realize that, it's like, 'Well, maybe at best we'll have one kid, maybe two if we're lucky.' And instead...
And how many do you have now through IVF?
Now we have four kids. We're right now trying for five, and we're kind of like teetering on, are we going... the oldest of the four is five, so we do about one a year.
Yeah, and we originally were like, 'Okay, let's aim for at least seven.' And honestly, after reading 'Hannah's Children,' I'm like, 'Okay, at least 10, 12, 14.'
But Simone, you're having these kids through IVF, but you're carrying them. This is...
And that brings up a point, Malcolm. You know, I've done a lot of writing on this myself in my memoirs and other things, and children and family. And one of, you know, we'll talk some more at other times, but you know, I'm very much into this. But there's a basic unfairness there, because of course Jeannie fortunately is into having children, and we would have had more if she hadn't had a big medical issue where she had to have a hysterectomy, basically save her life. But that said, obviously, you know, when I watched forceps delivery with our third child after 36 hours of labor, and then she, you know, and this I've written about this, so these aren't inappropriate things to say, Jeannie doesn't have any problem with this, and you know, after bleeding on and off for a year and winding up at the Mayo Clinic, you know, this was a long journey that really made me very aware of the fact that men and women's bodies are not the same at all, and that women have been dealt a tough hand. That, of course, a lot of this has to do with, in terms of mortality rates of women pre-20th century, you know, and of course child mortality was the same, things change. But it just, you know, part of this discussion is that the theory is one thing, and then the practicality is of not just putting women at risk, but, you know, this, we're not on the same... we're not on the same...
I'm going to push back a little here, actually. I'm going to say I think it's better for me to push back, Malcolm, because... okay, great, you push back yourself on that. Go ahead, push back. So, I mean, at least historically, women died in childbirth at around the same rate that men died in battle, and we have to keep in mind, like, everyone has their strengths, but also everyone is subject to a lot of risk in other ways. Now, you look at the world, and I mean, a lot of this is a dynamic at play that's stopping fertility entirely, but as you can see through rates of educational attainment and people's ease of getting jobs, women have it a lot easier in so many ways. Like, God help you if you're a white man in the United States trying to get a job. Obviously, things are changing with the new Trump administration a little bit, but like, we have been told, and our friends have been told, and our family, like younger family members who are just graduating college have been told, like, 'You know, we can't hire any white guys right now.' Like, just literally, we can never say this legally, but like, secretly behind the scenes, like, we literally cannot do this anymore, either because it's a bad look or literally there are quotas. So I would say that in general, like, men have it hard. Men have a really hard time finding partners. Men are subject to a great deal of hardship, and they also have much less of a safety net. Whereas right now, if you're sort of an uncoupled, unmarried woman, you can sort of be a nun to the state, kind of married to the state, and really expect to be supported between food stamps, whether or not you have a kid, and everything else that's available. So, like, 94% of people on food stamps are women or something. It's a ridiculously high number. So I say that everything's tradeoffs, but I don't... if I wanted an easier life, I would definitely choose to be a woman. If I wanted a more meaningful life, I would definitely choose to be a man. But I would, you know, it's there are... how do you unpack that?
If you wanted a more meaningful life, you choose to be a man?
Because men are high-risk, high-reward sex. That is sort of what they... I mean, in general, it seems like sex evolved as a means of populating very high fitness mutations into a population.
Let me go to something else, Malcolm, that I want to get to. You know, not in the spirit of pushing back or anything, but I just felt that it was interesting again in the way you see things, and then Simone's experience with autism and in the present tense as opposed to the past, and having kids and so forth and so on. Do you guys, I mean, your kids are pretty young, and my kids are all grown, and my first grandchild who married just got married, and I performed the ceremony in France two summers ago. Congratulations. They've got a place, and he's in regenerative farming, and they're very interesting people, and she's a software manager and a consultant, and they're doing great. But you know, my vision is sort of generational now, and I'm into grandchildren, and my grandchildren are old enough to get married, so that puts... that's what happens when you get pregnant at 17 and 18, speaking of fertility and fashion. But as the years have gone by, obviously, my wife and I have grown and changed over things, and I see how to be a father or grandfather differently than I did when I was your age with younger children, or actually, by the time I was your age, I had, you know, we were started younger, so that's not an age thing, it's an experience thing. And I think a lot of people who come to parenting older figure because they know more in other areas of life, say, than a teenage couple, the parenting experience is still a big learning curve. So when I see an older woman who's waited till she's 40 to have that one child, she doesn't know too much more shit than I did when I was 18 with the little girl, because the parenting skill is nothing they're going to teach you anywhere. So I'm wondering if you both want to talk about that journey and whether you are different in the way you approach, say, parenting. In other words, Malcolm is more intentional and that, you know, on the ideological side, you know, maybe you're coming at it from a more aesthetic thing in terms of your own household. I'm just wondering how that divvies up. Not fishing for anything here, I just wonder if you have different points of view or you feel you're on the same page when it comes to how you're learning to do this or what.
We definitely have different styles. Malcolm is way more... I mean, we came into this from a very socially progressive standpoint of one, like, kids don't really need two parents, two, like, it doesn't matter if it's a mom or a dad in a household, like, I don't care, it shouldn't matter. We've discovered that we do have very masculine and feminine ways of raising kids, even though...
Also, this means that gay couples bring to the table as well. I think that there are plenty of even straight male-female couples where the man brings the feminine energy and the woman brings the masculine energy. But we have found that for sure, like, I'm the nurturing one that does the meals and the bathing and the hugs, and a lot the fun one who does all the play. And back on that, someone we know from research that the oxytocin released with males and females playing with kids is quite different. Women get it when they are comforting kids, and men get it when they play with kids, which is going to lead to different behavior, which you may not see mirrored in gay couples. I understand the point you're making, but...
Continue. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously true, but I still think that the way that people view themselves and their identities does shape their behavior as well. And that you can get a dopamine hit by fulfilling an aspect of how you want to see yourself just as much as you can get a dopamine hit from some kind of instinctual behavior with a child. So it's complicated. But I want to get into something you said in your book here, which has some bearing on this. I forget where this is in the book. Where is it in the book? Maybe... anyway. 'What is your objective function?' is the single most important question in your life. Your answer to this question will be used to judge the fidelity of every...
