America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’ | Life and style

The Collinses didn’t tell me Simone was eight months pregnant when we were making plans for me to spend a Saturday with them at home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, but I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. They are the poster children of the pronatalist movement, on a mission to save humanity by having as many babies as possible.

Malcolm, 37, answers the door of their 18th-century farmhouse with four-year-old Octavian George, who is thrilled to have a visitor, bringing toy after toy to show me like an overexcited golden retriever. His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.

We begin talking in Malcolm’s office, which is also the kids’ bedroom, with a desk and a stack of bunk beds three storeys high from floor to ceiling. “Children use the room at night, I use it during the day,” Malcolm shrugs. “Why have two separate rooms?” Simone and Malcolm work together – in separate rooms – as what Simone describes as “CEOs and non-profit entrepreneurs”: they acquire businesses with investor money that they improve and eventually sell “or turn into a cash cow”, as she puts it, ploughing their earnings into their charitable foundation, which encourages people to reproduce. They plan on having a minimum of seven children.

This is not Quiverfull, the fundamentalist Christian belief that large families are a blessing from God. The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement – most recently made notorious by Sam Bankman-Fried – which uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth. This is a numbers game, focused on producing the maximum number of heirs – not to inherit assets, but genes, outlook and worldview. And it’s being advocated by some the most successful names in tech.

The world’s most famous pronatalist is father-of-11 Elon Musk. “Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming. (And I do think global warming is a major risk),” he warned in 2022. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in several reproductive technology startups, one aiming to engineer human eggs out of stem cells, another screening embryos for health outcomes. “Of course I’m going to have a big family,” Altman said the same year. “I think having a lot of kids is great.” The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (father of five) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collins’s pronatalist foundation in 2022.

The data, pronatalists fear, points to a looming crisis. As societies become more prosperous, people are having fewer children; after 200 years of overwhelming population growth, birthrates are plummeting. An average of 2.1 babies needs to be born per woman for populations to remain stable; in England and Wales the birthrate is currently 1.49, in the US it is 1.6, in China it’s 1.2. Politicians in South Korea have referred to their birthrate as a national emergency: at 0.72 (with 0.55 in the capital, Seoul) it is the lowest in the world. According to a paper published in the Lancet in March, 97% of the planet – 198 out of 204 countries – will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain their population by the end of this century. In the short term, this is creating a pension timebomb, with not enough young people to support an ageing population. If current trends continue, human civilisation itself may be at risk.

“There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,” Malcolm says simply, as Octavian climbs the bunk bed ladder. “The average Catholic majority country in Europe has a 1.3 fertility rate. You see this in some Latin American countries. That’s basically halving the population every generation. For anyone who’s familiar with compounding numbers, that’s huge.” Malcolm sees South Korea as a vision of our near future: the problem is most acute in countries that are “technophilic, pluralistic, educated, where women have rights”.

The only places where the birthrate is not falling to unsustainable levels are countries where the average citizen earns less than $5,000 (£4,000) a year, he continues. “The only way countries like ours can survive is through immigration from those very poor countries where birthrates continue to be high. You’re outsourcing the labour of childrearing to a separate group,” he says. “And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population – because you didn’t put in labour to support non-working white people – has really horrible optics.”

Since setting up the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, Simone and Malcolm have become the movement’s spokespeople. “We don’t mind being human clickbait – that’s kind of our job – so long as we get the message out before things get too bad,” Malcolm tells me.

They are being taken increasingly seriously. Together they delivered a keynote speech at the first Natal conference in Austin, Texas in December and pronatalism is beginning to be accepted as a core conservative value. “Babies are good, and a country that has children is a healthy country,” Republican senator JD Vance said in a 2021 speech to a conservative thinktank. Donald Trump agrees. “I want a baby boom!” he declared at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, adding, “You men are so lucky out there.” Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”

The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly. “Usually, they will be running a tech company or be in venture capital.” There is a wider perception that pronatalists are also largely white; Malcolm staunchly denies this, but he is aware that, in promoting the idea that our culture faces existential crisis unless we reproduce, the aims of pronatalists overlap with those of racist conspiracists who believe in the “great replacement theory” – the conviction that people of white European heritage are being demographically taken over by non-whites who have children at a faster rate.

Malcolm insists pronatalism is about pluralism. “Humanity improves through cultural evolution. For that you need cultural diversity.” But in this numbers game, the Collinses need only a few people to join them to save humanity; those who remain unconvinced will simply die out. “I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids. The point of the movement is to help those that do.”

Simone and Malcolm want to show me that you can raise a family according to entirely rational, data-driven principles designed to alter the course of human civilisation for the better; that you can make large families work; that you can promote pronatalism without being racist. I am the first British journalist to see what pronatalism in action looks like by visiting the Collinses in their home. When I leave them, I will be utterly lost for words.

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Every decision the Collinses make is backed by data. “Nominative determinism is a heavily studied field,” Malcolm tells me, when I ask about his children’s names. “Girls that have gender neutral names are more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees.” Names like Titan and Industry are much more than gender neutral, I say. “We wanted to give our kids strong names. We want our kids to have a strong internal locus of control,” he continues, as Octavian waves a plastic rubbish truck in front of my face.

Their home is set apart from the nearest town, down a track from a main road, near a creek. When deciding where to live, they weighed metrics on a spreadsheet, ranging from LGBTQ+ rights (which they support) to the density of Nobel laureates produced in a given area to levels of homelessness to major weather events. Then, they looked at cost. They bought this house and the one next door for $575,000; they allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

If their definition of “pointless indulgences” extends to warming a home filled with small children, how come there are so many toys? “Almost all the toys are gifts,” Malcolm says, almost apologetically. “We don’t throw out anything that gets sent to us.” Both boys have their own iPads fitted with a strap so they can wear them around their necks. Two-year-old Torsten is alone somewhere with his.

They take me upstairs. As well as having separate offices, Simone and Malcolm sleep in different bedrooms. Her office has a playpen in it, an elliptical exercise machine, and a standup desk across a treadmill, where Simone walks while she works. Does she ever stop? She smiles. “I am autistic, and I really feel uncomfortable sitting still.” Simone was diagnosed fairly recently, after Octavian was diagnosed. She and Malcolm see her autism as an asset. At the recent Natal conference in Austin, Malcolm says, “one of the big jokes was how autistic the movement was. Like a third of the people there had autism.”

There is an AR-15 assault rifle mounted on the wall of Simone’s office. She has a Beretta shotgun above the mantelpiece in her bedroom, plus bear spray, and a bow and arrow. “It’s for home defence,” Malcolm tells me. They never used to have all these weapons. “Most of that is since we started the movement – because of all the death threats.” He shrugs. “That’s just the nature of the internet these days. I’m sure Greta Thunberg gets death threats all the time, too.”

This, he says, is why they are reluctant to connect me with the many other pronatalist families he says they are in touch with, who have nothing to gain from seeking publicity. “One of our roles within the movement is to be a shield for other people,” he declares. “The vast majority of right-leaning people in Silicon Valley are pronatalist. You’re probably looking at 100,000 people or something that subscribe to our specific vision.” For a data-obsessed couple, the basis for this figure is notably woolly: he says it comes from “the size of various communities and the number of views specific things get”. But the movement doesn’t need to be huge to be effective, and it’s still relatively young; over half of the couple of hundred or so attenders at the Natal conference didn’t have children yet. “They are young, radical thinkers who are working to have children.”

Malcolm tells me about Bryan Caplan, author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, a treatise against helicopter parenting that argues that upbringing matters less than genetics in childhood development. The Collinses have embraced these ideas. “Pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting,” Malcolm says.

We come back downstairs to the living room to find Octavian distraught: he has been looking for us. Malcolm tells him to take a deep breath.

Simone shows me some decorations in the living room; they relate to the “intentionally constructed religion, technically atheist” that they have developed to provide a moral framework promoting their values for pronatalist families. Instead of Christmas, they have Future Day. “The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back with some gifts and stuff. They get more gifts when they do whatever they said they were going to do. What does Christmas teach them? Get random toys if you’re vaguely good?”

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Simone suggests we go back to Malcolm’s office. She brings in a huge basket of laundry, and sets about folding the clothes on the desk, her 16-month-old still strapped to her back. I feel an urge to take Titan from her so she can sit down, but she bats me away. “Sitting down would drive me nuts,” she says.

Malcolm beams at her. “That’s why I want to have kids with this lady.”

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Simone never wanted children. “I was going to get sterilised,” she declares. “I really wanted to make sure that I never had kids because I wanted to have a career. I wanted to run my own business – in Silicon Valley, that’s what everyone wants to do.”

Simone was a “mistake baby”, the child of hippies (she has two half siblings from her father’s previous polyamorous marriage; her mother was their babysitter, she says). “I was always the black sheep in the family. They were very, ‘Go out, experiment.’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m going to stay home and do my homework.’ I did not drink until I met Malcolm when I was 24. I had only kissed one other person.”

She never wanted to get married, either, and only met Malcolm as part of another numbers game, a “very systematic campaign” to fall in love and get her heart broken so she could cross that life experience off her list. She wrote a “keyword-stuffed” dating profile on OKCupid, went on multiple dates a week – often several on the same day – and had a scoring system to determine whether anyone she met was worth a second date. Malcolm was doing something very similar, but with a different goal: he was looking for a wife.

Malcolm had a turbulent childhood that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about. He comes from a wealthy family and grew up in Dallas, but was sent to a “troubled teen” residential facility when he was 11. The only reason he can give me for being sent there was that his parents were getting divorced and were locked in a bitter custody dispute, and the judge “thought I shouldn’t be with either parent”. After that, he lived at a private boarding school, with his fees and expenses covered by a family trust. “I have no beef with my parents. My childhood was hard, but my adulthood has been easy. Can I say a parent did a bad job if I’m happy with my life today? I don’t think so.”

They dated that summer, on the condition that Malcolm would break up with Simone when he went to do his MBA at Stanford. They broke up for four months, got back together, and a little over a year after that, Malcolm proposed.

Malcolm always wanted a large family. Multiple generations of his family had as many as 15 children. He has two siblings; his younger brother, also a pronatalist, is “in a competition” with him to have as many children as possible. He told Simone about his plans on their second date, and she replied that she didn’t want to have kids ever, because she didn’t want to give up on her career. He told her she didn’t have to.

“From that point on, the agreement between us was, if we were to ever have kids, I would never have to give up anything I didn’t want to give up. And it turns out I actually like spending time with them. But Malcolm takes the kids to the doctor. Malcolm gets up in the middle of the night when the kids are crying. Malcolm puts the kids to bed at night. Our agreement is, I get infants until they are 18 months old. As soon as the next baby comes, he’s on everyone else. And he literally does everything for them. Men don’t do that.” She gazes at her husband, dreamily. “He’s so unusual.”

“Other men would, if we built new cultural standards,” says Malcolm, magnanimously.

Simone is about to have her fourth caesarean (they have to reluctantly leave about 18 months between babies so her uterus can heal). “Eventually, I’m going to go in for surgery and I’m going to start haemorrhaging, and they’re going to take it [her womb] out,” Simone sighs. “If at that point we’ve already had seven kids, that will be it.” If necessary, they will look into surrogacy, but they aren’t keen: it’s expensive and “inegalitarian”, Malcolm says.

The “number one pronatalist policy position,” he tells me, is for governments to make it easier for women to work from home and have flexible hours. The Collinses believe in childcare, but not maternity leave: Simone has never taken any. She will have the day of her C-section off “because of the drugs”, but will take work calls from hospital the day after. She tells me it’s because she’s “bored out of my mind” when she’s stuck with a newborn. In what they hope will be the beginning of political careers for both of them, Simone is running for Pennsylvania state government as a Republican. The primary is two weeks after she’s due to give birth.

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The Collinses say women’s rights will suffer unless the birthrate improves. “The only cultural groups that survive will be the ones that don’t give women a choice. And that’s a terrifying world for us,” says Malcolm, wide eyed. “People are like, ‘You’re bringing a Handmaid’s Tale into the world!’ – that’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent.”

“In China, they’ve already restricted access to vasectomies and abortions,” Simone adds.

They have “quite a beef with anti-abortion people”, says Malcolm, because it turns out that restricting abortion is actually bad for birthrates. “Romania tried this. They had a spike in fertility rates and then a quick fall.” Banning abortion gives pregnancy an image problem, he says: it makes everyone assume parents who had children young only did it because they messed up. “It makes being a parent lower-class, in the eyes of society. This is a very bad way to motivate high fertility.”

Their brand of pronatalism isn’t about trapping people into having children, or coercing the unwilling, Simone says. “Our movement is, if you want to have more kids, or you want to have kids, let’s take away all the stuff that makes it hard.”

I had thought the main thing that made it hard was that it’s now so incredibly expensive to raise children.

“No,” Malcolm says. “Not at all.”

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Cash handouts and subsidies haven’t worked in South Korea: the government there has spent the equivalent of £226bn on incentives to improve the birthrate over 20 years. Couples have been offered everything from subsidised taxis to free housing and IVF; Korean parents of babies born this year will receive 29.6 million won – more than £17,000 – over eight years in cash payments. “It’s not about money,” Simone says.

“Within and between countries, the less money somebody has, the more kids they have. This is a very well-studied phenomenon,” adds Malcolm. “When you look at the high-fertility families in the US, they’re not particularly wealthy.”

Surely that’s because the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be in control of your fertility, I say. One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.

A generous smile spreads across Malcolm’s face. “People say this to themselves. But – speaking as someone who has a lot of wealthy friends – people just upgrade their lifestyle as they earn more money. We want to have tons of kids, but as a result of that, we’re not going to be able to send them to private school. We’re not going to be able to pay for them to go to college.” The Collinses plan to home school all their  children.

“We also don’t raise them like they’re retired millionaires, which is what many Americans do: driving them like private chauffeurs to soccer, to juggling and robotics class. We’re just not going to do that,” says Simone, still folding vests.

“When people say, ‘I can’t afford kids,’ what they mean is, ‘I cannot afford to have kids at the standards that I find to be culturally normative,” Malcolm continues.

The Collinses have had child protective services called on them before, Malcolm tells me, “because our kids were wearing used clothes, because they were sick too frequently – this was when we had them in daycare; of course they were sick all the time – and because they were seen playing outside without us being outside. It’s a locked-in, gated area that you can see from the house.” He throws his hands up. Nothing came of the visit, but it has clearly rattled them. “Pretty much all high-fertility families have had it happen to them. The government says, if you raise your kids in a cultural context that’s different from ours, that’s child abuse.”

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Simone has a history of eating disorders that have affected her fertility; she can only get pregnant through IVF. They’ve had the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and are selecting which ones to implant according to how well they score on intelligence and future health. They don’t just want a big family: they want an optimal one.

Preimplantation genetic screening is unregulated in the US. There are several companies that will test embryos for the risks of certain conditions, including the Sam Altman-backed Genomic Prediction, which the Collinses used for health scores. For what they call “the controversial stuff” they took Genomic Prediction’s data and gave it to another team of scientists who claim to be able to predict everything from how likely it is that one embryo will be happier than another one to its future predicted income. (The geneticist Adam Rutherford recently said there might be “an IQ point or two” of benefit in doing this, “the type of thing you can change by having a decent night’s sleep or a cup of coffee before doing an IQ test”.)

“Obviously, we looked at IQ,” says Malcolm. They discounted embryos with high risk factors for cancer and what Simone calls “mental health-related stuff where there’s just no good known treatments” including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, depression and anxiety. They didn’t select against autism, which they consider part of a person’s identity. They have 34 embryos left, and plan to give away the ones they don’t use; three have already gone to a lesbian couple in California.

“People do trait selection all the time when they prioritise certain kinds of spouses,” says Simone, airily. But this level of discrimination goes way beyond selecting partners, or even sperm and egg donors: they are genetically screening their descendants, and trying to ensure there will be enough of them to have a real impact on the trajectory of human evolution within several generations. How is this different from eugenics?

“It’s completely different,” says Malcolm, delighted to be asked. Eugenics is state-sponsored selective breeding to influence the dominance of certain genes, he argues. What he and Simone are doing is polygenics, using technology to give parents the choice over which traits they value most. “Different cultural groups will choose different things to optimise around. Eventually, that will lead to genuine human diversity.”

I find it hard to imagine that any parent with access to this technology wouldn’t select for intelligence or a decent future income. The Collinses tell me I couldn’t be more wrong.

“Have you talked to parents these days?” Malcolm exclaims. “‘I just want a child that’s happy and self-expressive.’”

“‘Funny and kind,’” Simone chips in. “The most common average is happiness and kindness.”

The Collinses are campaigning to make this technology free for everyone to use. Screening for health outcomes is a “no brainer” in countries like the UK where healthcare is free at the point of delivery, Simone says. “You’re producing healthier people – less expensive.” Then she breaks off, staring in horror at something she’s seen on the stairs. “Oh no! Toastie did that thing where he poops and then he takes his diaper off! Now he has poop on his hands.” She runs off to attend to Torsten.

Malcolm wants to impress upon me that pronatalists care about ethnic diversity: east Asians and Muslim communities have seen their fertility rates plummet in the face of growing prosperity. Still, the Collinses are very happy to share a platform with white racists. Last year’s big pronatalist conference was organised by Kevin Dolan, who “used to be much more on the ethnonationalist side of things,” Malcolm concedes. Proponents of the great replacement theory attended, but they were outnumbered by the “autistic, nerdy” pronatalists, he says. “People are like, ‘Why do you allow the racists to come to your events?’ and I’m like, ‘Because we convert them.’ It’s actually really easy when you show them the data.”

We have been talking for hours now. We all need something to eat. Malcolm offers to take me and the boys out; Simone wants to stay home with Titan.

“Are you open to Thai food?” he asks. “There’s a place called Tai Me Up, which is fantastic.” Will Octavian and Torsten like Thai food? Malcolm scoffs. “I will give them a white rice, stick ’em with their iPads, they’ll be fine.”

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In the car on the way to the restaurant, Malcolm tells me how much he doesn’t like babies. “Objectively, they are trying and they are aggravating. They are gross. This little bomb that goes off crying in this big explosion of poo and mucus every 30, 40 minutes. And it doesn’t have a personality, really. But once the kid enters the goof patrol, as we call it, I love them to death. They’re amazing. They’re so happy. They’re so full of life.”

Large families mean short-term sacrifices, Malcolm says. They will soon have to sell this Ford Explorer and buy a bus. Holidays will be pretty much impossible. “But if someone was to ask me, which of your kids would you trade for more vacations …” He shakes his head. “The kids who I haven’t had yet, they are just as precious to me as the kids I already have.”

We arrive at Tai Me Up. The boys don’t want to be on their iPads; they are excited to be sitting on a banquette, at a table with a plastic orchid, drinking water through a straw. Malcolm tries to load some YouTube videos as the waitress takes our order.

How useful has Elon Musk been to their movement? “Fantastic,” Malcolm replies. “I mean – the most powerful, most wealthy person in the world advocating for your cause helps a lot. Within this time period, he’s our version of being the king, or something. He’s to an extent disconnected from –”

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Torsten whimpers. “In a restaurant, you gotta be nice,” Malcolm says. “I love you but you gotta be nice in restaurants. No, Toastie. You’re going to get bopped if you do that.”

“Hey. Can you help me with the iPad?” Octavian says, handing it to his father. None of this is remarkable to any of them. Torsten soon stops whimpering.

Smacking is not illegal in Pennsylvania. But the way Malcolm has done it – so casually, so openly, and to such a young child – leaves me speechless.

Malcolm picks up where he left off. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support,” he continues. “Our politics are very aligned.” Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children, follows Simone on X.

The meal passes in a bit of a blur. Malcolm tells me about how pronatalism and space travel are intricately linked (“we don’t just want to create a sustainable civilisation here, we want it to expand outwards to the stars”); how his branch of effective altruism considers the suffering of humans today to be “pretty irrelevant” because the suffering of billions of future humans could be eliminated if they succeed in creating a “technophilic, interplanetary” species. Torsten and Octavian climb down from the banquette and run around the restaurant, and every so often, Malcolm threatens them – “If you go to the door again, Torsten, you’re getting bopped” – before loading new cartoons.

For someone dedicated to helping people have as many babies as possible, Malcolm doesn’t seem to like children very much.

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Maybe he noticed how appalled I was when he hit Torsten. On the way back to the farmhouse, Malcolm tells me that he and Simone have developed a parenting style based on something she observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment, which they find very effective with their own kids. “I was just giving you the context so you don’t think I’m abusive or something,” he says.

For the Collinses, humanity will survive if we all decide to be a little less precious about our children; if we are prepared to take a financial hit and change our lifestyles to accommodate more of them; if we all adjust our expectations and attitudes. They insist they are prepared to accept everyone willing to make those adjustments into their movement – even self-proclaimed white nationalists – in order to save human civilisation.

Unlike the Collinses, my thoughts aren’t focused on generations far into the future. I’m thinking only as far as the next one, and how Malcolm’s children are going to feel about his project when they are old enough to realise what they are part of.

What does he think they will make of it? “What a failure I would be if my kids hold my exact value system!” he replies. “My kids are going to be like me, but better. They would probably think that I was well-meaning, saw some real issues, probably exaggerated some of the consequences, but that it was necessary in the moment, to make the right political changes.”

Before I leave them, I ask Simone the same question. “If we are wrong, we want someone to be right,” she says. Then she smiles. “The more kids you have, the more likely you are to have kids that get it right somewhere.”