Pronatalists - nutters or humanity's last hope?

Malcolm and Simone Collins have their own religion. They celebrate their own holidays. Three of their kids — five-year-old Octavian George, three-year-old Torsten Savage, and two-year-old Titan Invictus — sleep in multi-level bunk beds in the same room, while the youngest, one-year-old Industry Americus, co-sleeps with their pregnant mother. There’s a decorative sword on the windowsill, a prop left over from one of their podcast episodes about Andrew Tate. There are raspberry bushes planted outside so their kids can pick fruit on their way home from daycare. There’s a $300 bouncy castle in their living room.
Once Silicon Valley progressives who worked in tech, Malcolm and Simone upped sticks to rural Pennsylvania a couple of years ago, in their early 30s. They had become disillusioned with “the urban monoculture”. They wanted lots of babies. And they envisioned that large family — they’re hoping for 14 kids — being run like a domestic operating system, with a religion they refer to as Techno-Puritanism.
Oh, and they proselytize through a podcast called Based Camp, with over 35,000 followers.
The Collinses are a controversial couple, much profiled but little understood. Not many venture capitalists with Stanford MBAs turn to pro-natalist homesteading. And not many “new right” tradwives used to work as managing directors of a Peter Thiel-funded social club.
Simone wants to set a world record for number of live births via C-section (the current record is 11; she thinks she can get up to 14.) On their first date, Simone told Malcolm she never wanted to get married, and Malcolm told her that wouldn’t work because he was looking for a wife. They joke about how most media has painted them as “complete sociopaths”.
By their own admission, they love winding journalists up. Perhaps that’s why they’ve been accused of being everything from delusional to purveyors of eugenics. They wear hipster glasses and capes; they stan Puritans and have an 11-page marriage contract that includes a “boat clause” and a “fat clause” (invoked just once, by Simone against Malcolm when he developed a “little paunch”.) Malcolm once went viral for giving his two-year-old son an open-handed slap to the face for wobbling a table during a media interview. They scan their embryos for personality traits using polygenic risk scores. And they recently drafted a number of executive orders for the Trump White House, including one that would offer medals to mothers with six or more children (for these efforts, they were described as “people are styling themselves after the villains of a Saturday morning cartoon,” an accusation Malcolm says is “nutty”.)

Malcolm and Simone met on OkCupid, after Simone decided she'd sign up just to experience love, get her heart broken and then move on into a happily unmarried life. Malcolm, however, was looking for a wife. And by that point, Simone adds, he'd dated almost everyone in Silicon Valley (Simone Collins)
Simone and Malcolm Collins have a plan — not just for their household, but for humanity. Every domestic choice, from when the family sleeps to how they name their children, is part of a broader effort to design a cultural system that will outlast the civilization they believe is unraveling. Their other suggestions to Trump included the removal of some daycare regulations and the doubling of visas available for au pairs from abroad, so that American parents can access cheaper childcare; the removal of the marriage tax penalty; and the relaxing of car seat regulations (a research paper titled “Car Seats as Contraception” that showed lower birth rates in places with stricter child seat regulations for cars is much discussed among pronatalist communities, and quoted in Simone and Malcolm’s draft executive order.) The fact sheet that they attached to each draft includes stats about how quickly the birth rate in the U.S. is falling, and how disastrous that could be for social security and the country’s economic stability.
At home, the Collinses’ values are stitched into everything from their domestic decision-making (they chose where to live after compiling a long document detailing average earnings and house prices per state and cross-referencing them with maps showing hazard risk scores) to their school philosophy (public school is an extracurricular that you can attend if you want to, but real education happens at home.)
“We’re not trying to shelter our kids,” Simone tells me, when she explains why her five-year-old son goes to the local kindergarten. “We’re trying to inoculate them.” Mainstream culture is like a virus, she explains, and you only build up antibodies by exposure. Malcolm echoes that: “the urban monoculture” is a disease that causes mass mental illness and sterilizes its citizens, he says, and the “brand new culture” they’re building draws variously from Appalachian “redneck” history, Orthodox Judaism, and Sam Altman-style effective accelerationism.
It’s easy to read them as walking ragebait, especially in a political environment as charged as this. But scratching below the surface of what Malcolm and Simone say is surprising in itself.

Techno-Puritanism for dummies​

Malcolm Collins talks like a tech CEO with a philosophy major and a Reddit tab open, jumping from Ancient Greece to redneck humor and back again without slowing down. Both ultra-Orthodox Jews and rural conservatives with truck nuts — two groups he draws inspiration from — “have something in common, even though they seem very, very differentiated from each other,” he says. That is that they “almost engineer conflict with whatever the dominant culture is for their children.” And that conflict, Malcolm believes, is key to why they have very high fertility rates and very low rates of deconversion.
“So if I'm an Orthodox Jewish kid and I'm dressed very differently from other kids, and I'm named very differently, and I have very different practices, and I go out into school, or I go out into that world and I am teased or punished for this in a way that I am not within my own community, I'm going to have a more positive relation to my community than that external community… It's the same with truck nut conservative culture, which is this culture that is almost reactively vulgar — and it's where the MAGA base is, and Trump has done a very good job of appealing to them — where they really hate almost at a pathological level being told what to do by people who think they're better than them.”
This is where Malcolm’s ancestors come from, he explains, before taking a hard left into poop jokes: “My five-year-old apparently makes lots of poop and fart jokes, like scatological humor, at school.” Isn’t that just a five-year-old thing, I ask? “Yeah,” he says, “but we got complaints. I was like, what other jokes is he supposed to make? He's not making racist jokes. I even said [to the teacher]: Within my culture, I would elevate a five-year-old doing that because scatological humor is rarely made genuinely at the expense of another child. Like: ‘Oh, you've got a diaper face.’ The other kid — his feelings aren’t hurt. But ‘oh, your haircut is bad?’ That destroys a kid.”
Nevertheless, the teacher wouldn’t budge. Not only did Malcolm’s son tell too many poop jokes, but he apparently also used “militarized” communication — like holding his two fingers in a gun shape and pretending to shoot kids on the playground. So Malcolm explained to his son: “Well, these are things you can do at home and not at school.” It sounds like a typical parenting moment. But Malcolm sees it as an opportunity to reinforce a deeper point about culture and authority. Because another parent — one who’s more happy to adhere to the mainstream culture — might just have instituted a blanket ban on Nerf guns or fart jokes, at home and at school, and that parent would then become the main enforcer of the rule.

Malcolm and Simone's oldest son, Octavian, goes to public school. He demanded to be allowed to attend kindergarten after seeing the yellow school buses driving past their house, says Simone (Simone Collins)
“Then the kid only ends up punished in their birth culture and not in the external world,” Malcolm says. “Whereas my kid, when he thinks about how my family culture is different than the culture I encountered in school, he sees it as a culture with more freedoms rather than fewer freedoms.”

Killing yourself for kids​

One of the things that Malcolm dislikes most about “the urban monoculture” is that it’s so pessimistic. He used to be an everyday liberal who got invited to lots of progressive New York dinner parties, he says, and then he started to realize how negative everyone was about humans as a species. He recalls someone saying, during a conversation about the environment, that it would probably be better for the world if humans died out. That was a pivotal moment for him in terms of his outlook: he realized that there was a cynical suicidality that had become normalized among his former friends. It reminds me of the famous philosophical problem with utilitarianism — that the logical endpoint of “the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people” is slitting your wrists in an ice-laden bathtub and donating your organs to five dying patients in nearby hospitals.
Yet there is also an apparent suicidality to his own, new culture. Malcolm talks with reverence about Simone’s “sacrifice” in carrying his children. “Simone is willing to undergo a huge amount of physical trauma and risk to herself in order to do this thing that we both believe is morally good,” he says. “But she doesn't even think about it that way. I look at her and I’m like, oh my God, you're such a moral paragon. You're willing to go through this, you're willing to do this. And she’s like, well, yeah, it’s just obvious. This is what I should do. And I’m like, wow.”
Considering Simone can only give birth via C-section, and every C-section birth increases the risk of scarring, hemorrhage and other serious complications to both mother and baby, I ask him if it might not be better to stop at five.
“I talked to her about this,” he says, “and I was like, how bad do the complications need to get before you stop? And she goes: If there was a robber holding one of our kids and another one holding me, and they said we're gonna shoot one of them, or we're gonna shoot your kid if you don't choose, you know what the right choice is, right? You know, I want you to choose that they shoot me and not our kid. And she goes: I hope that you can maintain the moral internal consistency and the logical internal consistency — which are things that we value as in our family — to do the same when it comes to encouraging me to have kids. I can try to talk her out of this, but I understand the moral failure in me doing so.”
It’s a surprising revelation, one that paints Simone as an ideological zealot and a literal martyr for the cause. “Maybe talk her out of killing herself with kids,” Malcolm says to me at the end of our first interview, before I speak with Simone. I tell him that’s probably not my place, but I’ll certainly discuss it.
He nods, thoughtfully. “I mean, if she dies now, we’ve collected… lots of stuff that can be used for AI training,” he adds. “So my kids will get to interact with her regardless.”
Two days later, I meet Simone for a video interview. Where Malcolm was casually styled (though at pains to let me know that he did his hair), she is striking and sartorially playful, with bright red lipstick, thick-framed glasses and a black cape (a gift from Malcolm). She juggles the first part of our conversation with putting her youngest daughter — Industry Americus (“We went with a Puritan name, like Capability Brown. Plus we were just tickled pink by having two daughters named Titan and Industry”) — down for a nap.
“You’re going to hate me, but don’t hate me,” she murmurs to the infant, as she settles her down into a bouncer and then leaves the room. I ask her if she’d like to reschedule. “Oh, no,” she replies quickly. “She has to sleep. For her development.”
Asking Simone whether she’s willing to die for the pronatalist cause is, of course, delicate. But when I get around to the question, I’m taken aback by her response.
“If someone's like: You will die, or especially: You and the baby are at risk — we're not gonna do that,” she says. “One, we obviously want to be there for our children, and two, I don't want to put an unborn child at risk… I had one really risky pregnancy and had to have a C-section really early, and had a baby in the NICU. It was all very, very scary. And yeah, I mean, I would never knowingly want to put a child in harm's way that way. I also certainly wouldn’t want to deprive my children of having two parents growing up and the support that accompanies that.” A very understandable answer, but one I wasn’t expecting. It seems Malcolm’s view of Simone — admiring to the point of mythologizing — isn’t entirely accurate.
In a later interview, which she does while preparing pasta in the family kitchen with Industry strapped to her back, Simone does tell me that she sees the unimplanted embryos they have as “unborn children” just waiting to be born.
“It is a life-or-death decision for them, whether we have them,” she says. “...To rob them of that experience is something I can’t imagine. But a lot of that has to do with our religion.” Clearly, she isn’t actually as hardline as her own religious doctrine; a streak of pragmatism runs through the ideology. But it’s true that Simone suffers for the cause in a way Malcolm simply can’t — carrying the pregnancies; undergoing the C-sections; breastfeeding; co-sleeping (Malcolm sleeps in a different bedroom and gets up at 2 a.m.); carefully preparing separate dinners for the kids, who each have different preferences and sensitivities. If their religion has a saint, it is undoubtedly Simone, and Malcolm is the prophet.

Cultural engineering for beginners​

This isn’t a family seeking to escape modern life. It’s one attempting to outdesign it. But another issue on which they appear to diverge is the amount of “designer baby” in their actual babies.
“So many people are like, you think you're genetically superior, so you are selecting among your embryos,” says Malcolm. “It's like: No, I think I'm genetically messed up. That's why I'm selecting among my embryos!” He laughs. “The person who hires an editor doesn't do it because they think that they're a God-tier writer!”
The reason he and Simone actually did IVF in the first place, he says, is because Simone’s mother died of a type of cancer that has a known genetic cause. They have simply been selecting embryos that do not have that gene — “and then the intelligence stuff and other stuff like that, that really mostly comes out in the wash. Keep in mind, we talk about it to rile people up, because I love it when things go viral, and it's not gonna go viral if you're like: We do this for cancer.”

Simone says the family culture is supposed to be 'weird' and 'othering' but also joyful (Simone Collins)
Simone and Malcolm have a number of embryos, all of which have been sent for polygenic analysis. Some of those embryos are carrying that specific cancer gene that runs in Simone’s family; some aren’t. But they do plan to have all of them. Polygenic analysis has allowed them to rank embryo quality, but ultimately they will eventually come to embryos they know are carrying the cancer gene.
How does she square that, I ask Simone? “Having a kid with a really high risk of cancer now versus two, four, six years from now could be the difference between life and death,” she says. “We're in this insanely rapidly developing landscape in terms of medical cures. I mean, I bet if my mom, for example, got her stage four ovarian cancer diagnosis a decade later, maybe she would've survived. You know, it's one of those things where a couple years, especially now, can buy you so much time.”
The more controversial parts of polygenic analysis relate to personality type and risk assessment for things like autism, ADHD and anxiety. When it comes to their daughters, Titan and Industry, “both of them had a very favorable scores, at least among all of our embryos, with things like anxiety, inability to deal with stress, depression, brain fog,” says Simone. “And they have come out such happy, cheerful, genial children.” She knows it might be “all in their heads” and that nurture comes into it as well, but she’s still impressed. Having seen the results, she and Malcolm sent off samples of their own DNA to a company called Nebula that collates similar polygenic scores for living people.
Simone is under no impression that the technology is perfect for polygenic embryo scoring. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t [select for intelligence] in the future,” she said. “But right now, the data on it just isn’t that reliable. Like, if you’re selecting based on that you might as well use astrology. I mean, it's just not there yet.” Malcolm concurs: he can imagine a scenario in the future where one of his children might be able to select for various traits, he says, and he’d be fine with that. But right now, it’s all a bit of a crap shoot.
Having such information about your children could only be good for your parenting style, Simone believes. “Some devastating diseases like schizophrenia can be triggered by things such as high doses of cannabis,” she says, as one example. “So I think kids are much more likely to listen to you on drugs if you have a good reason. Like: Listen, I don’t care if your friend Jimmy vapes a lot of cannabis. He doesn’t have the risk of developing schizophrenia that you do. This is real. Look at your score. I think a kid’s much more likely to listen to that.”
It’s rough-and-rowdy parenting with a side of hard data. This is the strange juxtaposition inherent in the Collins’ parenting style: it’s half “back to the animal kingdom” (they decided that corporal punishment was fine after going on safari and watching a lioness discipline her cub — hence the infamous, viral slap) and half high-growth tech startup.
“We have to build systems that work when you have ten kids, right?” says Malcolm. “Because otherwise, when you get to ten kids, the whole system falls apart. So, every parenting system that we’re using, every practice we’re using, we’re thinking about: can this work if we scale it up to ten?”

Treating your family like a startup​

That low-touch culture Malcolm and Simone are building for their kids champions individuality and encourages friction, Malcolm says. And practically speaking, there’s one very good reason why you have to double down on that family culture if you’re intending to have 10-plus kids: “You need to be low-effort parents because it's unsustainable financially for most [large] families to be high-effort parents.”
Mainstream culture isn’t quite ready for what scalable parenting looks like, however: the Collinses have had CPS called on them twice. Once, they say, was because their daycare reported that the kids were always sick and were wearing secondhand clothing. The second time was because neighbors saw their children playing unattended in the yard while they periodically kept an eye through the back window. Both times, they say, an official came round, looked in their fridge, asked if they needed free diapers, and left.

Simone says the original vision for their pronatalist website was to reach out to progressive couples and to champion the idea of LGBTQ couples having more babies (Simone Collins)
As Malcolm sees it, incidents like these prove there’s just too much red tape in western society, even as we all face systemic collapse by depopulation. The people who want to have lots of kids should be empowered to homeschool, to put their kids in vehicles without car seats, and to parent a little differently to their counterparts who have just one or two kids. After all, the superprocreators are the ones who are stepping in to try and redress the balance as the country hurtles toward a massive elderly population with barely any young people of working age to pay into social security to support them. Shouldn’t we all be grateful? Or at the very least, shouldn’t we stop putting barriers in their way?
“Sometimes running this movement can feel like being a lifeboat after the Titanic sank and trying [to] rescue people from the freezing water,” he writes to me in an email after our first interview. In that analogy, he’s the one telling everyone: “Get in the boat or you are going to die,” while they reply, “Look at that, he threatened to kill me if I don’t get in the boat!” or, “Ask everyone in the boat with you if they are Nazis — I don’t want to accidentally get in a boat with people I disagree with,” or, “Hitler had a boat! I bet you’re a Nazi.” While all this back-and-forth is going on, the ship is sinking in the background — and “then the kid from 4chan flashes an OK sign and claims it's a secret sign for Nazis because he finds the whole situation hilarious.”

Defenestrated by the left​

That constant slide between deadly serious and not serious at all — simultaneously being stuck on a sinking ship and laughing at the trolling humor of a 4chan kid — is a central feature of the “new right”. That’s the way Simone and Malcolm identify themselves, but it wasn’t always this way.
“It is very much that pretty much every member of the new right used to be a Democrat until they were…disaffected,” says Simone. “...But I would still argue that, for the most part, this is a very socially progressive culture and a set of people that still accepts that some of the social agenda of the right utterly failed.” It’s “kind of frustrating,” she adds, because “we came to this movement as progressives… It wasn’t leftist but it was progressive and meant to engage progressives. And the reason why wasn't because we were like, well, this should only be for progressives, but because progressives have the lowest birth rates. Most conservative groups — I mean, OK, a lot of them have trouble, but they already have efforts underway to work on the problem. Progressive groups really don't. They're the first to tank, they're the first to go extinct. They're the panda bears who can't breed in captivity.”
Both of them refer to being hurt and surprised when they were “defenestrated” by the left.
“You look at progressives, and if you disagree on just one metric — like J. K. Rowling is the most progressive progressive on literally everything else [except trans issues] — they kick you to the curb,” says Malcolm. “That becomes unsustainable being that imperialistic as a culture, because eventually you end up losing all your key people, all your most competent people. And now we have a Trump White House where his key lieutenants are RFK Jr, JD Vance and Elon Musk, who all hated Republicans just, like, two election cycles ago. And they just all got kicked out for violating one cultural norm or another. And then they're in this new big tent.”
As Malcolm sees it, mainstream leftist culture demands that people deny the reality they see in front of their face, and that ends up making society ironically less progressive.
“The urban monoculture says: I care about diversity. And then it says: But everyone's the same. People from Africa are the same as people from Europe are the same as women are the same as men,” he says. “And we're like: No, no, no, no, no. Actually, everyone's super different… And that's actually a really good thing. Because diversity would have no value if everyone was secretly exactly the same, even if we're just talking about from a cultural perspective. And so weirdly, I think that diversity is our strength when we allow for it.”
Part of their enthusiasm for diversity has led them to designing that new religion, with its own specific holidays. They include Future Day, which happens in January and sounds like a prank: The Future Police show up, steal your toys like mischievous reverse-Santas, and leave behind “future debris” in their wake. To get your toys back, you must write a letter explaining how you’ll make the future a better place. If the case is convincing, the Future Police return your toys — plus extra.
Then there’s Lemon Week, a holiday in May that marks the beginning of springtime and involves planting lemon trees, putting up lemon-themed decorations and eating lemon curd, lemon pie, lemon chicken, and other citrus treats. Lemons are bitter, but they can be delicious in the right context — and that’s why they’re central to the holiday. Because during Lemon Week, each member of the family who's capable of doing this is supposed to engage in a concept that they find to be highly offensive.
When you’re offended by something, the Collinses believe, that’s because “something is credibly threatening your worldview.” When you feel offended, “that’s a sign to lean in” and to learn more about it. At the end of Lemon Week, each family member shares what they learned while investigating something they felt intuitively offended by. One year, Malcolm chose radical feminism.
Future Day and Lemon Week are high-concept but also unexpectedly quaint for a couple who, in Malcolm’s words, are aiming to be “low-touch, rough-and-rowdy” parents. But when Malcolm and Simone do something sentimental, it has to have an orthodoxy. Their homegrown religion — Techno-Puritanism — is based on the idea that “humans, millions of years from now, will more resemble gods than humans”. They are quick to point out that they don’t want everyone to join their religion — they’re not looking to become cult leaders. Instead, they’d rather people take ideas they like from Techno-Puritanism and develop their own, personalized cultural practices.
The ultimate aim, Malcolm says, is to have a community of people with diverse backgrounds and religions who are all united by the pronatalist cause. He envisions schools and summer camps, and teens “living in” with their boyfriend or girlfriend’s family while they’re dating (“It’s what the Puritans did,” he adds, and it worked well because it gave teens an element of independence at a time when they’re naturally seeking to separate themselves from their birth family.) Maybe, he says jovially, there might be some kind of “loose arranged marriage” scenario in the future.
Malcolm is clear that that doesn’t mean he wants blind obedience from his progeny, however. On the contrary, he wants his kids to disagree with him. He wants them to be smart, anti-authority, argumentative, free thinkers. Just not to the point that they decide to leave the culture he’s made, I ask? He smiles. “A Jewish father is going to love when his child with education and knowledge disagrees with him about what the Torah says,” he tells me. “You know, if he's like: No, line X and line Y and line Z — you haven't cross-referenced Maimonides on this recently.” That same father, bursting with pride when his son puts his Torah practice to the test during a heated discussion with his elders, is not going to be quite as thrilled if his son announces he’s leaving the religion entirely.
There’s a lot of complexity to their personal mythmaking. Even though they revel in baiting reporters and drawing attention to themselves through shock-jock tactics, then, is it not a little irritating that lots of people only know surface-level stuff about them? Malcolm doesn’t see a problem with that. The people who are actually interested in the movement will keep digging and will discover what they need to about pronatalism, he says. The people who don’t will die out within a few generations anyway, and “I don't really concern myself much with the people who are little more than evanescent statues of dust about to be blown away by the winds of time.”

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