In this engaging episode, Malcolm and his guest discuss various concerns raised by ambitious, upper middle-class college-educated women regarding motherhood. The conversation covers fears about losing independence, becoming less 'cool,' cognitive decline, and balancing a career with parenthood. They explore studies on cognitive changes during pregnancy, the impact of career-driven mothers on their children, and the health benefits of having children. They also dive into deep philosophical questions about societal values, the role of women, and the transformation that comes with parenthood, all while addressing fears about personal and professional identity shifts.

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Malcolm Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I'm really excited to be speaking with you today. Today. We're responding to actually a based camp listener email and comment. He basically interacts with through his friend network and through dating a lot of what he describes as upper middle class college educated women in New York City.

Who typically went to school around or near New York or upstate New York. Many of them went to elite schools and they don't want to have kids or they're nervous about having kids. And the question here is, can I effectively counter the arguments that he is getting from them pretty consistently and he outlined them, I think very well.

The arguments map very closely to what I experienced or like what I was concerned about before I met you when I was still a single. Ambitious young woman. Not that I'm not ambitious anywhere. I think I'm more ambitious now, which is. Part of the discussion here. So let's just dive right into his compiled complaints of these young, ambitious, successful women.[00:01:00 ]

I know before we

Arch: do any of them, I will be laying out my premise, which is going to be what I'm repeatedly going to go back to in this.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Arch: Because I think the questions miss the point in terms of how do you convince women to have kids or be okay with having kids?

Simone Collins: Okay.

Arch: Because many people are like, oh, if you create like one that focuses on female They're basically like make the movement illogical because I'm like, well, you can just explain to women that if they do not do this, like if people who believe that women should have a choice around having kids if those people can't find a way to motivate above reproductive populations, people who believe that won't exist in the future.

You know, women will not have these choices. If people who say, oh, women should be allowed to be educated, they're breeding well below replacement rate, then people in the future won't believe that women should be allowed to be educated. Bye. And that this argument is just completely uncompelling to this group, I think shows how very non serious that they are.

And they're like, no, come up with a way to convince me that is compelling [00:02:00 ] to, to what? Like, that makes your own life better? Like, that's not the point. It's like when people are like, tell me about how great having kids is going to make my life. It's like, well, no, having kids isn't about making your life better.

Okay. And if you think it

Malcolm Collins: does though, and so that's why I, I'm going to disagree with you on some of the

Arch: secret. That's the secret, the hidden secret. We can't let them know that the people who want to have kids just to improve the quality of their life. But I, I, I here want to say that why, how has society gotten into this place?

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, it's, it's like that, that really annoying Zen monk thing where they're like, no, you won't achieve enlightenment until you give up trying to achieve enlightenment. That's so fricking annoying, but it's also kind of true in this case.

Arch: So yeah, so I was playing in an AI scenario around the Omegaverse.

And so people who don't know, the Omegaverse is a popular online fiction used by women in a lot of like erotic artworks where like men can get pregnant and, and it's weird. It's like, [00:03:00 ] there's the two genders, males and females, but then within the two genders, there's alphas, which are like extra dominant iterations, betas, like normal humans, and then omegas, like an extra submissive iteration.

Anyway and the, this, this genre is used as a super normal stimuli. For many women around like ultra dominance in a culture. And so I wanted to explore one of these worlds. I'm like, that sounds interesting. I'm going to explore one of these worlds.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. And

Arch: what comes up in these worlds and I, I, you know, the concept of Omega rights.

Is a really big part of these worlds, right? Like, should Omegas have more rights? Why are Omegas treated as second class citizens? And yet, what I love is that these women, right, they are fantasizing about a world different from our world, where, like, some humans are born wanting to be submissive and sort of treated like second class citizens, but, like, it's a good thing because that's just how they're born.

Well, and some of them are dudes. Some of them [00:04:00 ] are dudes. So it's not just Some of them are dudes, that's what it is. It's not just a Well, you know, but the point I'm making is they have basically reinvented the concept of a male female split and then built it into a fantasy world where it's all it's not, it's

Malcolm Collins: not, it's not anti feminist because yeah,

Arch: I, but the funny thing about Omega versus is that the genders otherwise are generally equal.

That males and females are generally otherwise equal. It's just that sometimes. They're born having a pension for dominance. Sometimes they're born having a pension for submission anyway. So when I was talking to an Omega rights activists in one of these and I was saying to it, you know, they're like, well, you know, we should have all of these, these things, all of these freedoms, all of these abilities to work, all of these blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, but. You only decided that those are things of value because in this world, most of the works that are published [00:05:00 ] you know, most of the famous books in history, most of the world's philosophy was determined by alphas because they're the ones who everyone saw and heard. And this is where I realized, oh, the patriarchy created feminism in a way.

By that, what I mean is the fact that men have been the dominant gender on Earth for so long and written so many of our foundational philosophical works, so many of our foundational narrative works, so much of our foundational religious beliefs, that those things were written with an assumption that Of a male's desires and life path in mind and women, when they began to achieve freedom and the ability to act independently, instead of having some big backlog of women written literature, they could turn to instead determined what had value, like freedom and independence and [00:06:00 ] career and from male literature, literature that was written by males.

And so they didn't have a deeper philosophical well that they could mind that was female coded. Like

Malcolm Collins: what would we want to do if we had full autonomy? Right. Theoretically with like a male dominated world, we can see through male literature and actions and, and behavior under power, what they will do if they have their druthers.

But because women historically have been in this. More suppressed, more secondary, more submissive role. We don't know what they would do if left to their own devices.

Arch: Well, and they didn't build the philosophy, I guess is the way I put it. Like philosophy more broadly was built by men for other men.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

So what is the female philosophy?

Arch: Well, here's the thing. I think that women had such an unevolved and unadvanced philosophical framework to fall [00:07:00 ] into that the framework they slipped into is what we would call super soft culture. You know, the sort of pre

Malcolm Collins: evolving to the most Basal human instincts and sympathetic magic, folk religions, this is why I'm enjoying magical spells and it's not good.

Magical

Arch: thinking, you know, crystals and crystals and zodiac signs and, No, it represents the types of religious and metaphysical beliefs. A group of humans would likely independently evolve if you just left them on an island, you know, without civilization.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Arch: It's without a civilization to build on because women didn't have a civilization to build on because women historically did not write and the civilization that was given to them when, when people were like, okay, but.

And you do have some, you know, early female literature. You're like, look, y'all be satisfied if you find a man who you respect to spend your life supporting and have a bunch of kids. That's

Malcolm Collins: There's these different, there's that, there's the [00:08:00 ] You'll be happy by serving men. And then there's also the other philosophy of you'll be happy by being a man, which is also not really working out.

Arch: No, no, no. But the, the happy serving man, I mean, that's what they had to go on. And they're just like, wait, why does this look so different than what the, the male code book is, what the developed code book is. And it's very much like an Omega talking to an Alph