A Look at a Very Silicon Valley Approach to Repopulation

Silicon Valley is obsessed with solutionism. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when it comes to a declining birth rate, some of the valley’s elite have a clear answer: more babies at all costs. Today on the show, we talk about the pronatalism movement and how ideas around increasing birth rates are trending among some of the valley’s biggest and wealthiest names.

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Zoë, you’re here in the actual studio today, in San Francisco.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m here, and Lauren is not, and then we’ll be switching places starting next week.

Lauren Goode: Oh, sadness. Although, we did have the quintessential San Francisco experience together, Zoë, which is that we had a burrito.

Zoë Schiffer: We ate a burrito, and I took a Waymo to eat that burrito with you. So, I really, I did it all. That was a good time.

Michael Calore: How many Cybertrucks have you seen?

Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Cybertruck.

Michael Calore: Really?

Zoë Schiffer: I don’t think so. I will say, I’ve been on a screen for 20 hours a day, even in the car on the way to various places, I’m working. So, I wouldn’t say, I haven’t been searching for the Cybertruck.

Michael Calore: I sit by the window here in the WIRED office, and when I look out the window, I look right on the Bay Bridge and I see Cybertrucks all day.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh.

Lauren Goode: It’s almost like the Cybertrucks are just reproducing in real time. They’re spawning, they’re spawning more Cybertrucks. Is this the worst lead-in ever to this episode?

Michael Calore: You know what? I will take it.

Lauren Goode: All right.

Michael Calore: I will absolutely take it.

This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we are talking about the pronatalism movement, and how the push to increase birth rates is trending among some of Silicon Valley’s biggest and wealthiest names. We’ll talk about some of the history behind pronatalism, who the big advocates are right now, and what it all points to. I’m Michael Calore, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture here at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode, I’m a senior writer at WIRED.

Zoë Schiffer: And I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s Director of Business and Industry.

Lauren Goode: So, a few weeks ago when we were talking about dating apps, I was like, oh no, you guys are going to be leaning so heavily on me because I think among us, I probably have had the most experience using dating apps, but now I feel like Mike, you and I are just going to be like, “So, Zoë, tell us what it’s like to have babies.”

Zoë Schiffer: I do feel like I’m doing my part for the population decline. I’ve had two and I will not be having anymore, thank you.

Michael Calore: And setting the scene here, Lauren and I are both child free.

Lauren Goode: And Zoë is also now one of our big bosses at WIRED. So, I would just say in a normal setting, not a podcast setting, I might not sit across from her and say, “Tell me about your experience having babies and being a parent,” but for the sake of the podcast.

Zoë Schiffer: Lauren, we bring our whole selves to work, come on.

Lauren Goode: Me too.

Zoë Schiffer: And we’re friends.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, we’re friends.

Michael Calore: Well, to start the conversation, I think we should define what pronatalism is and who are the biggest supporters right now of this movement.

Zoë Schiffer: I thought you were going to say, we’re going to define what a baby is. It’s like a small, bald human. Next question.

OK, so pronatalism at its core is an ideology that promotes people having babies. And in Silicon Valley specifically, it’s been linked to this preoccupation with population decline. The idea that people are not having enough babies to kind of replenish the population, and that it creates all sorts of economic problems down the road.

Obviously, when we think about pronatalism, the first name that comes to my mind is, drum roll, please, Elon Musk. So, he has said very clearly that population collapse due to low birthrates is a bigger risk to civilization than global warming. He’s called it, I think one of the biggest threats that humanity faces. And when we speak about someone doing their part, he has fathered 14 children. A new baby was literally just announced. The other name that comes to mind is Jeff Bezos, because he has also talked about low birthrates.

Lauren Goode: Zoë, I think you forgot to mention a pretty well-known venture capitalist these days who’s expressed some pronatalism remarks.

Zoë Schiffer: Are we talking about Balaji?

Lauren Goode: We are talking about the now Vice President of the United States.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, OK. Tell me more, tell me more.

Lauren Goode: Well, JD Vance was a venture capitalist. I don’t know if he still is because I don’t think that you can be when you are also the Vice President of the United States, but he has made remarks about the Democratic Party being anti-family and anti-child and has suggested that the votes of people with children should count for more than those of non-parents. And these have been some pretty controversial statements that he’s made. So, it would be a mischaracterization to just lump him in with the tech guys that we’re talking about right now, but I think what we are going to talk about is this intersection of tech and politics and policy and culture. And JD Vance did happen to work in tech investments and now is one of the leaders of our government.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, this feels in line with his kind of childless cat lady type comments.

Michael Calore: Yeah. So broadly, when we talk about people who support pronatalism and want human beings to reproduce at higher rates, they come at it from different angles. There’s not just a capital P, pronatalism movement, there are different movements within the movement. What are some of the different sort of flavors of pronatalism?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, so the effective altruists have a stance here. It’s been kind of linked to the idea of longterm-ism, which is a set of concerns about protecting and improving future, and that there are steps we can take now to determine what that future is going to look like. So you can imagine that birth rates factor into that.

Michael Calore: Right, if you’re thinking about what the country looks like 50 years or 100 years from now, or not even the country, but the society and the planet looks like decades from now, then you have to consider how many people we’re going to have.

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly, yeah. And this is where I feel like pronatalism starts to get into thornier issues. When you’re talking about what the population should look like, it becomes less of a matter of pure numbers and can get into the almost eugenics feeling flavors of kind of trying to construct a society that looks a specific way. And often, that way is white and heteronormative.

Michael Calore: Yeah, and along class lines and along socioeconomic lines as well, right?

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. Yeah, and you can imagine that the policies that you would design would be really different if you’re focused on the family unit versus the number of babies. And so yeah, the different flavors of this kind of matter from a policy perspective too. It does also feel like, especially when we’re talking about JD Vance’s views and some of the tech elite’s views, that this has become somewhat of a right-wing issue, which is interesting because, is population decline at its core, right or left coded?

Michael Calore: It is not particularly coded one way or the other, but I think when you talk about the reasons why population decline happens, there’s not one thing you can point to. You have to point to a bunch of things that are happening economically and a bunch of things that are happening societally. Right? So, when women enter the workplace, they tend to have fewer children. When women have more control over their reproductive health, they tend to have fewer children. When countries get more affluent, there tend to be fewer children. When countries have less support systems, like they don’t invest in health care and they don’t invest in child care systems for their populace, then there are fewer children because people have more anxiety about having kids.

So, there are these things that feel like they’re progressive political issues that if we followed those policies, they would result in fewer children. And if we rolled back those policies, sort of double down on the idea of traditional marriage, of a woman’s place is not in the workplace but it’s in the home. I mean, this is saying, this is putting a lot of words into conservatives’ mouths because I’m sure there are a lot of conservative people who do not feel this way, but that is why it is traditionally right coded.

Zoë Schiffer: Got it.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, and just to double tap that, this has become politicized. This is now kind of broken down into liberals versus conservatives, but traditionally, the elites have determined in some ways whether we’re supposed to be having more babies or whether we’re supposed to be having less babies, because there have also been concerns in the past about the population bombs and the fact that we need to make fewer babies. I can’t believe we’re talking about this like talking about baking a cake, but [inaudible 00:08:29].

Michael Calore: It’s sort of baking a cake.

Lauren Goode: But it is.

Michael Calore: You put one in the oven.

Zoë Schiffer: A bun in the oven.

Lauren Goode: But a lot of times it is the elites of a society that are setting the tone. And then ultimately, when those who are considered of a lower class either start to make more babies or start to have fewer babies, there’s a little bit of the elites become appalled like, wait a second, this is supposed to apply to certain segments of society.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s also interesting because the countries that have tried to roll out policies to encourage people to have more kids have largely been unsuccessful. Japan has had a real problem with a declining birth rate, this kind of looming crisis with an aging population. And they rolled out policies to try and encourage people to have more kids, like more family-friendly type of government policies, but it hasn’t changed the kind of statistics.

Michael Calore: Well, I want to talk more about the actual crisis and how we got to this point, that we’re calling it a crisis. So, let’s take a quick break and we’ll come right back.

All right. So, let’s talk about the history of birth rates. Lauren, I know you’ve been researching this a little bit, so, can you please let us know what is actually going on with the birth rate in this country, in the United States, and elsewhere around the world?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, so when we say birth rate, I mean, I think we should just quickly define that. There are at least a couple different ways of looking at it. There’s the number of live births per 1,000 people. Some people lean on this idea of the total fertility rate, which is the average number of babies a woman or a person with a uterus will bear. And everyone seems to be pretty happy when this total fertility rate is around 2.1. So basically, if women are having two children, the population seems stable, everything seems great.

Zoë Schiffer: Got it, OK, so it’s a little different than the kind of joke that in the Bay Area, that the ultimate status symbol these days is three kids in a Rivian. The happy place is a little less than that.

Lauren Goode: What was I saying earlier about the elites? But yes, that’s a pretty good one. I hadn’t heard that before.

Michael Calore: No shade at all if you’re listening to this in your Rivian right now.

Zoë Schiffer: No, absolutely not. We’re—

Lauren Goode: Yeah, that’s right. Rivians are pretty—

Michael Calore: You’re cool.

Lauren Goode: I went for my first ride in a Rivian recently, and I was like, this is pretty nice. But, yeah.

Michael Calore: You’re cool, don’t worry. We think you’re cool.

Lauren Goode: So, as of around 2023, we’ve been in something that has been referred to as the birth dearth, which means that there are approximately 1.62 children born per woman, when the ideal replacement rate is once again 2.1. But we’ve been in this birth dearth now since the late 1980s. So, this is not a new thing, but it is part of the new conversations that we’re having now.

Michael Calore: So, we’re all hyper aware of the conversation around pronatalism right now, because politicians and cultural influencers are always talking about the declining birth rate and their messaging around what the ideal family looks like. But the period of time in this country from the 1950s to the 1970s was a different kind of moment for birth rates as well. What happened then?

Lauren Goode: This is the part of the podcast where we get into a little bit of a therapy session about the baby boomers, which I think are all of our parents, right? So everyone knows the term baby boomer and the baby boom. This happened from the late-1940s to the late-1960s, and prior to the baby boom, it was a boom because before that, fertility rates had been down. So, around the 1930s, the fertility rate was around two children per woman. During the baby boom, that fertility rate shot up, nearly doubled to nearly four children per woman.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, and those levels haven’t actually been seen since the beginning of the 20th century. So, what happened after the baby boom in the late-1960s is that everyone got really concerned with overpopulation, right? There were books and panels and talks and podcasts and Instagram stories. I’m just kidding, those didn’t exist then, but the influencers of that time. People were panicking about this idea that the world’s resources were going to be depleted, and we basically couldn’t meet the need of this overwhelming population.

So, that was around the time that China started rolling out one-child policies. People started using birth control more. There were even forced sterilizations in some countries. And so, there was low fertility rates in the 1930s and ’40s, there was a boom, then there was an overreaction to that.

Zoë Schiffer: And an overcorrection, it sounds like.

Lauren Goode: That’s correct, and an overcorrection to that as well.

Zoë Schiffer: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, the issues with overpopulation to me feel a lot more tangible than the issues with declining birth rates. But I get that if you throw far enough in the future, both of these things can be problematic.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Is population decline a concern around the world? Is everybody as worried about it as JD Vance and Silicon Valley?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, no, this is a concern beyond just the western world, beyond the US. Global fertility rates are declining too, it’s almost universal. And that’s partly because of the reasons you mentioned before, Mike, where in developing countries, women are becoming educated or they’re staying in the workforce, or where there’s generally greater wealth, people have fewer babies. But there’s also this factor of instability. We’ve just been through a pandemic, there’s climate change. Now we have concerns about a destabilized government that may further slash social services. I guess if there’s any learning we can take from the 1930s and ’40s, the era before the baby boom, maybe it’s, don’t start wars and dismantle society.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, so in summary, it sounds like population decline, as Elon Musk has said, is actually a problem, both in the United States and around the world. But the question of what to do about it differs, depending on who you ask.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Michael Calore: And how big the problem is also depends on who you ask.

Lauren Goode: Yep.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, OK.

Lauren Goode: Right.

Michael Calore: So, what are the concerns? Why do the pronatalists among us feel as though we should be having more children?

Lauren Goode: Well, they want to maintain population levels, clearly. I mean, they just want to support economic growth. They want to preserve national identities. They want to make sure that we have a strong military, they want to make sure that we’re growing as a nation, essentially. People look at it as a direct correlation to things like prosperity as a nation and GDP, effectively. What are we able to produce as a society?

There’s also a factor here where in some cultures it’s pretty standard for younger people, younger generations, even if they’re no longer young, to care for their aging or elderly parents. People are now living into their 70s and 80s, and when you have fewer kids or no kids, then it reasons that your potential caretakers go away as you get older. And I think that’s part of the tension here too, is that people are having fewer babies, same time, boomers and let’s assume Gen X’ers are going to be living longer. We’re all going to be living longer. Who’s going to take care of people as they get older and need legitimate care? But at the same time, social services may not exist to support that either. It’s a genuine problem, and so I could see how if you’re just thinking about it purely from a pure reasoning or logical perspective, you would be like, well, we just need to have more babies then, because as people get older, we need more people to take care of the elderly.

Michael Calore: That’s why we have AI humanoid robots.

Lauren Goode: Right, yeah, that’s definitely going to make everything better, I think.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t want to derail us too much, but it does feel like there’s this emphasis on, who will do the caretaking in future generations? And yet, caretaking work, at least in the United States, is some of the least valued work in our society. It’s either very low paid or unpaid. And ideally, I think there are a lot of experts who would say if that is an important factor, then the government should show that by actually compensating people adequately for that type of work.

Lauren Goode: I think you’re totally right, and I think that says something about the way that we look at labor now, and in particular Silicon Valley. Because as we all know from covering this world, there tends to be this kind of obsession with solutionism in Silicon Valley. And what that sometimes translates to is dehumanizing the humans in the workforce and just thinking about them as workers or laborers. And so when you’re thinking about in pronatalism, well, we need more people to fuel our economic growth. What’s the most obvious solution? What’s the low-hanging fruit? Let’s make more babies, right?

But I do think it’s also, pronatalism is inextricably linked with so many other factors of our society. The New Yorker was writing about this recently, and there was this one sentence that jumped out at me talking about how fertility is such a significant decision that any individual is going to make, but it’s not just like this one decision. They wrote, “A theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything. It’s gender, it’s money, politics, culture, evolution.” I would add religion to that list. And right now, we’re in this moment where Democrats and I believe rightfully, are emphasizing bodily autonomy on the heels of Roe v. Wade being overturned and abortion rights being seriously threatened or eliminated entirely. And meanwhile, Republicans keep stressing a more traditional, and in some instances outdated idea of the family unit. And there’s this element of control around all of this.

Michael Calore: Silicon Valley is very good at thinking up tech-based solutions to problems. And I mean, there’s a lot of very, very good data for the population trends, right? Governments and NGOs have been tracking it for decades. And I feel like when you put reams of data in front of somebody who is in founder mode, they’re going to start thinking of every tech-based solution that they can. And that’s going to spin off a whole bunch of ideas, it’s going to affect the culture around them in their friend group and their peer group.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, you can see why this is an attractive idea for the tech elite, because it is, it’s a big humanity level problem that has a lot of different factors at play. And the idea that you could come in and armed with enough data, solve it with an app. That’s kind of core Silicon Valley.

Lauren Goode: Totally, yeah. And Silicon Valley really embraces the idea of optimization too, always be optimizing, which can apply to child-rearing as well. There’s so much expectation on parents these days, it seems. Of course, people are going to try to optimize parenting. On the other hand, people have been having babies for millennia and without being rich. It’s just, how much love and care can you provide for a child, right? And I think people do still want to believe in that, and yet they feel that’s insurmountable because of our lack of economic stability.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m just snapping.

Michael Calore: Let’s snap our way into a break. We’ll be right back.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So on the surface, the idea seems to be, more babies. We need to have more babies, babies, babies, babies. But in practice, this kind of looks like something beyond just making more babies. It seems to be more babies of a certain kind, a sort of selective pronatalism.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, there’s been a lot of investment in this area. It kind of dovetails into the longevity stuff that we talked about in an earlier episode. People like Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos and even Peter Thiel, have invested in a number of biotech or longevity type companies. Sam Altman, for example, is invested in a company that’s trying to see if it can grow human egg cells from blood cells. So, there are a bunch of different efforts to try and influence how people are able to have babies. And then Lauren, I know you’ve done a fair amount of research on what types of babies and what traits you can select for.

Lauren Goode: So we actually ran a story in WIRED last year, written by Jason Kehe, it was one of our big interviews, and he interviewed the founder of this interesting company called Orchid, and the woman’s name is Noor Siddiqui. Orchid is one of these technologies that allows people to screen for truly debilitating conditions or diseases at the embryo phase of IVF. So typically, embryos are screened before they’re transferred to someone’s body to make sure that there are no genetic abnormalities and that there’s some likelihood that this would result in a successful live birth. And so this company, Orchid, takes that a step further during the screening process. They screen for all sorts of things. But when you get into this idea of we’re screening for all of these things, it’s a slippery slope. At what point do you start screening for intelligence or athletic ability? And at what point is the E word a dirty word here? I don’t think so. At what point are you doing, is it eugenics?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think Elon Musk and Grimes used Orchid for one of their pregnancies. It’s interesting because it’s a more extreme example of a question that almost every parent has, which is, how much screening do I want to do? It’s a question that you’re asked when you’re pregnant and you have to decide, do I want to just see if me and my partner are carriers for any of the same things? Do I want to do no testing? I’ve had friends that decided not to because for them it wasn’t going to make a difference either way. And yeah, but we’re in this interesting era where the number of things that you can test for go, like you said, Lauren, far beyond just genetic abnormalities.

Lauren Goode: What’s fascinating about this too, is that the people who now go this route, they sometimes choose which gender they want to try to have first, because the embryos are identified as male or female. And then some families kind of strategize around it. If they have embryos frozen on ice waiting, they’ll go, well, we sort of wanted to have a girl first, and so we’ll do this, or whatnot. And that’s fairly normalized now.

Zoë Schiffer: Totally.

Lauren Goode: Right? That idea. And so as this technology advances, and maybe this is getting a little bit off topic, but it is taking it a step further. So as it goes a step further, at what point does it cross over into a territory where if someone is just screening for, we want to make sure we’re having not only the healthiest but the smartest and the children with the most potential, and really kind of designing this hyper elite society in a way that just feels dangerous.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It makes me think of this line from Chloe Cooper Jones’ book, Easy Beauty, where she talked about the assumption that certain characteristics will lead to a better life. Like if a baby is born with better “traits,” that they will be happier and have a better life is, that’s a big assumption. There’s no reason to believe that that would lead to a better life down the road.

Lauren Goode: Well, I think what you’re tapping into is, it’s like, what is the definition of better, right?

Michael Calore: And that’s something that we can’t ignore when we talk about this because there’s so much tremendous ego involved with people who want to have a lot of children because they’re saying like, “Hey, I’m a smart and really good person, and the world is lucky to have me here because I’m making the world better. We should have more of me.”

Zoë Schiffer: Right, I mean, that to me feels very Elon Musk coded, not to bring it all back to him, but—and I know this point has been made a lot, but it really does piss me off when someone says, talks a lot about how we should all be having more babies. And then in the case of Elon, is actively stripping away parental leave policies at his various companies. It just seems like the point is to care about the baby until they’re born or the parent until they’ve had the baby, and then kind of leave them to fend for themselves, which is so problematic.

Lauren Goode: Zoë, if I may ask you. When you were going from, you had one child and now you have a second, when you were thinking about the concept of more babies or having more children, were there factors in your mind like how much leave you might get at work or schools in your area or things like that, that were actually affecting your near term thinking about it?

Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, no, that’s just not how my brain works. I was really purely focused on the kind of idea of the family that I wanted. Wanting my first child to have a sibling, wanting to really experience having a baby again, the joy that brings, the fulfillment that that brings. Once my second was born, of course, those things were very on my mind because suddenly I was back at work trying to manage two kids, and the social safety net or the absence of that net was very apparent to me. So, I understand why people think that way, it’s just, yeah, not how my brain works.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. One of our colleagues once said to me when I was asking how their return from parental leave was, they said something really interesting that has rattled in my brain ever since, which is, “So it turns out the only way to have a kid is to have a kid.”

Michael Calore: That’s poetry.

Lauren Goode: And so I guess, yeah, there’s part of you that just has to jump and take the leap. And if you just think about all of those other factors, then you’ll psych yourself out of literally doing anything in your life. But that is not to downplay the very real concerns and economic realities and social instability that a lot of people feel.

Zoë Schiffer: For sure.

Lauren Goode: I mean, we’re in a privileged western world, we just have to blanket statement this entire episode.

Michael Calore: Fully.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, so Lauren, that makes me think about, I mean, and this might be simplistic, but when we’re talking about concerns with a declining population or declining population rate, to me, a natural solution would be increased immigration. And yet we are having a very contentious discussion in the country and in Silicon Valley about that very issue. And while Silicon Valley has historically been pro-immigration, we’re seeing more and more that it’s a very specific type of immigrant with specialized skillset that is being welcome to the country, while a lot of other people are being either pushed out or barred from entering in the first place.

Michael Calore: Yeah, and there is a correlation, like what we talked about earlier with regards to the factors in a society that lead to it having a declining birth rate. Economic prosperity is one of them, so as your country becomes more prosperous, then your birth rates go down. But also as your country becomes more prosperous, then you attract more people into the country through immigration. So, that’s something that we’re seeing a lot in the United States. People come to the United States to have a better life.

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Michael Calore: Right? OK, so are there any final thoughts?

Zoë Schiffer: My very personal final thought is just that having a baby for any reason outside of the fact that you just really want to have a baby, is a really foreign thing to me. I don’t want to put judgment on anyone, but that just seems totally crazy.

Michael Calore: But it’s for the good of humanity.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s such a personal thing. I don’t know if the good of humanity is going to get you through the very long nights where you’re not sleeping. I’m sorry. It’s so wonderful, but it’s also so hard. I think you really need to want to do it. What’s your final thought?

Lauren Goode: My final thought is a little bit more of a question to put back on you guys, which is, do you think that this messaging that we’re hearing now from members of government and from our technocratic elite, “Do you think this is going to work?” Will it be effective? Will we see a baby boom? Will the fertility rate go up?

Michael Calore: I think the reasons for a baby boom are so complex and out of our short-term control, that we won’t see big effects for a long time.

Zoë Schiffer: I think if we see a change in the fertility rate, it’ll be because we’re taking away people’s access to contraception or abortion, and not because Elon Musk and JD Vance are telling us to have more babies. That’s my take.

Michael Calore: I have a final thought that maybe will allow us to end on a brighter note.

Zoë Schiffer: Please.

Michael Calore: Which is the fact that all of this attention that Silicon Valley is paying to fertility stuff and women’s reproductive health in general is a good thing, because there’s a science-based mindset now to fertility and longevity in Silicon Valley, and I think that’s a good thing. I think we can all agree that the state of women’s fertility treatments and gadgets and various technological solutions to women’s reproductive health have been bad for a very long time, and that is changing. And I think the reason it’s changing is because there’s all this investment in science and personal technology.

You can buy a smartwatch that tracks your cycles now, right? You can buy sensors that you put on your body that measure your basal temperature. And all of these things that are accessible to more people now in order to give them technological solutions to have kids if they want to have kids.

Zoë Schiffer: You could buy a ring, which we won’t mention by name until they sponsor the podcast. No, I think that’s really well said, Mike.

Michael Calore: Thanks.

Lauren Goode: OK. I have one pushback to that, Mike, which is, you’re correct that it’s great that all of these consumer tools are available to people, and the more advanced assistive reproductive technology is getting more advanced. That’s all great. These things need to be designed very thoughtfully by a diverse group of people, including some people who have experienced pregnancy and other issues surrounding pregnancy. And they need to have truly, truly in today’s day and age, have privacy in mind. That is of the utmost importance.

Zoë Schiffer: And you know what I want? I want a better app that tells you the size of your baby week to week, because it’s all like, your baby is the size of romaine lettuce. And I’m like, there’s very different sizes of romaine. That doesn’t tell me anything, this is crazy. All those apps suck.

Michael Calore: Plus we live in California, our romaine lettuces are huge.

Zoë Schiffer: They’re huge, yeah.

Michael Calore: [inaudible 00:30:19].

Zoë Schiffer: There’s no way [inaudible 00:30:21].

Michael Calore: Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you’d like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, baby name suggestions, or suggestions for the show, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

Today’s show is produced by Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode, Daniel Roman fact checked this episode. Jordan Bell is our Executive Producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s Global Editorial Director, and Chris Bannon is our Head of Global Audio.