How Will Korea Survive A 94% Population Reduction? - Malcolm Collins

Korea had no future at their current fertility rate right now for every 100 Koreans there will be 5.9 great-grandchildren we are looking at a 94 population collapse over the next century why have you been in the news so much recently because I am calling out that the they think a lot of people have mentioned collapsing fertility rates before um but I I think that no one has really so consistently uh uh brought it up in a way that the people who want to ignore it have to look at the problem you know when I pointed out because I think a lot of people especially you know on the more Progressive side of the spectrum they just want to dismiss it oh the planet's better without humans or whatever but when you point out that not a single Society on Earth today except for maybe Israel we can talk about that later in the conversation has figured out how to have Prosperity gender equality and high levels of education and anywhere close to a stable population like considering we are trying our best and I think rightfully so to spread those things across the world that should be like a note like that should be like a oh this system that we think is so great and we want to be the future of human civilization doesn't seem to work at at the most basic level that seems like quite a scary uh proselytization for the future or prediction for the future if you're to say that we need to get rid of one from education equality prosperity or birth rate we just need to concede the fact of the birth rate what we need to do is we need to find new cultural Solutions we need to find a way to maintain fertility rates while having education while having gender equality and while having a high level of prosperity and there are many places we can look in the world today to begin to get inspiration for how we might do that you know I think um to understand the scale of the threat right now one of the the things I always start people with is when I started caring about this and a lot of people are like why is it that people in Silicon Valley seem to care about this so much and it's because there's a lot of VCS in Silicon Valley and VCS need to chart the economy 50 100 years in the future in the way that you know Wall Street people really don't they're looking at the economy five ten years out or whatever so because of that when I was working as a VC I happened to be working in Korea when I was working in a VC um and I kept trying to chart the future of the economy and I kept coming to the same answer is it Korea had no future at their current fertility rate right now for every 100 Koreans there will be 5.9 great-grandchildren we are looking at a 94 population collapse over the next century and when I brought this up with the other partners at my firm and I was like Hey like it just doesn't seem like there is any feasible economic future for this country they're like yeah but we pretend like that's not the case in our investments like everybody knows this but like if we accepted it then the economy stops working Society stopped working so we're just gonna ignore it basically and when I came back to the U.S it was like going back in time 20 years like I was in some sort of a sci-fi movie and getting to be this one person who saw where the future was going to go and and having to be that crazy person on the streets like no no no you guys don't understand there's countries further ahead than us on this spectrum right now okay and we know a few things we know there is no floor no country has hit a fertility collapsed floor yet we know that there is no level of advanced fertility collapse where people freak out or at least not until it's too late because you look at Korea right now and 60 of of Korean citizens are over the age of 40. so it's it's likely already too late for them to turn this this problem around so we need to turn this around before we hit that level but the truth is we probably won't and and we've got to think of solutions for when we don't turn this around but that's a different topic for later in the interview well one of the most common questions I imagine that people ask is why should anyone care about how many children another person has this is my choice you can't impose me to have kids if I don't want to have them why should two guys sat on the internet be telling the world about the dangers of not having children people can go and do other things with their lives now women are allowed to be in the workplace men can go their own way and play video games and be a sigma male as much as they want why should anyone care about how many children another person has so I I think that that's a really good point and our one of the things that people look wrong about us they're trying to increase reach the world's population or that we are trying to proselytize broadly to increase fertility rates and and neither one of those things is true if we are on the Titanic right now no matter what the Titanic hits the iceberg we are trying to one make people aware that the Titanic's about to hit an iceberg get them in Lines by the rafts the ones who want to survive start getting the rafts in the water in a calm and orderly fashion before people start panicking because that's what's going to happen and so what we promote is is trying to get I mean I know my family is going to be okay you know I I know that my cultural group is going to be okay broadly speaking um so one I know that my family you know I have eight kids and they have eight kids and you do that for 11 Generations that's more descendants than exist in the world today I often say so I don't need to worry about people like me the reason I'm so loud about this is because I'm worried about the the massive collapse in in in cultural and ethnic diversity the world is about to see um and it it will be astonishing for people uh I think in the far future that there were more than like three ethnic groups and three cultural groups or something like that if we don't solve this and so what we're trying to do is just make people aware of this because so much of the propaganda that people are consuming is telling them things are fine have less kids you're a good person if you have left kids and I know you've talked about this before on the show and it is it is astonishing and I think when we look at this Urban monoculture that is erasing all of the genuine diversity in our society uh one of its core messages is negative utilitarianism that that that uh the the the core evil thing in the world is human suffering and that human happiness just doesn't really matter or it is largely outweighed by human suffering and therefore it's better if humans don't exist and that's the end goal for the urban monoculture I think for a lot of people what do you mean when you say Urban monoculture well okay so this sort of gets down into like uh my personal politics to some extent but I think that if you look at Society right now it's largely becoming divided into two factions and there has been a major political shift around what conservative and Progressive means um the progressive is the party of this Urban monoculture which is a single sort of cultural group or virus that infects other cultural institutions and erases was whatever makes them unique and aligns all of their goals so if I talk with a progressive Muslim or a progressive Jew or a progressive Catholic um or a progressive Unitarian Universalist and I scratch beneath the surface often their morals their views on gender their views on what future they want for the world are all very very similar if I look at conservatives from each of those factions their worldviews are very different and what the conservative party seems optimizing around so where the liberal party is optimized around the goals of this monoculture so spreading the monoculture and reducing in the moment human suffering that's why they promote things like Haze you know like don't tell somebody that it's unhealthy to be fat because that can hurt their feelings in the moment even though it like obviously it's bad for them in the long term but um the conservative movements all have in a very distinct uh cultural histories which they are trying to preserve and that is often uh if I look at the conservative movement today it's an alliance of these older traditions and newer but deviant and distinct Traditions um that are trying to maintain cultural Fidelity and exist a hundred two hundred years from now um and so when I talk about the monoculture that's what I'm talking about this thing that wants to when my kids go to school say this is what correct morality is this is the way you should see the world and if your parents are telling you anything else they're deplorable and wrong is that not the case with some factions from a conservative side as well though yeah yeah I know and I I call them sleeper progressives they just want to erase all other cultures the moment they gave power but I think that right now I can form an alliance with them because our goals are aligned I think one of the really cool things that we've seen with the conservative party is you saw something like when Andrew Tate converted to Islam you know in the past a conservative icon converting to Islam a lot of people would have been wringing their hands about that but a lot of people were like you go you know at least you found some Faith at least you found some tradition and so I think what we're seeing there is more of a realization that the the big bad these days is this culture that's trying to homogenize the world interesting what would you say to the well-meaning people from the Progressive Movement that say it feels a little bit bad to be tarnished with the brush as a super virus I think that I'm you know I'm just somebody that holds liberal values I don't believe that I'm part of some destructive force within the world and and I think that there are people who genuinely um uh like within any movement you know when when the Catholic Church used to be the the iteration of this in European society and they were trying to convert everyone to their ways and the Protestant Church during their own time had periods like that in some countries um the vast majority of Protestants they're Catholics in those countries were just decent well-meaning people trying to live their lives but the ones who controlled the cultural institutions and were you know burning people at the stake and and trying to ensure that everybody fit this very narrow definition of morality set by their culture to me they were the the evil ones within those institutions and today when I talk about this this monoculture um I think that the vast majority of people who are members of it are just like like the vast majority of of of of Catholics and Protestants during periods when when those cultural groups were dominant in specific regions why is this culture so effective very interesting okay so it's evolved a lot of new tactics that have never been tried before so in our book The pragmatist guide to crafting religion what we essentially do is we argue that Humanity could be thought of as sort of an evolving firmware which is like our biology our genes but on top of that firm where there's evolving sets of software and this software today we often talk about memes as like things that infect somebody and then cause them to just turn around and infect other people but historically most romantic clusters actually augmented a person's uh sort of biological Fitness the number of surviving Offspring they had and that's how they survived that's how I mean if you look at things with a secular mindset why things like Islam and Judaism figured out stuff like hand washing literally centuries before science figured out hand washing um and you see this across these traditions for example if you look at all of the old traditions almost all of them have some arbitrary self denial holiday like lent or Ramadan or Feast of the firstborn or whatever right and and just now after throwing out all of those rich tools over the past you know 50 100 years secular society is like oh now we gotta have our juice cleanses now we gotta have our you know they're realizing oh fasting and stuff like that right it has positive mental effects um and so I think that that if you see these as different like evolving cultural groups this super virus evolved some very unique tactics and it is not the same thing as a historic Progressive Movement what it is is something so the reason I call it a super virus that is very much so when you talk about a super bacteria or a superbug they typically come up in things like hospitals where you have a ton of people with a weakened immune system all in a similar environment with lots of sort of viruses or bacteria that can that can intermingle alongside antibiotics and stuff like that this is what was created by the internet this is why all of this stuff started when social media happened essentially you had a super spreader environment where uh new memetic ideas were able to test themselves against all of the world's Traditions at the same time optimize and react very quickly and become incredibly virulent while uh evolving strategies that had never been tried before so one of the most effective strategies that it uses is if you look historically when if you look at cultural groups as sort of like nodal clouds that sort of overlap with each other um when you had a corrupted node within a nodal cloud or a node that looked like it was flipping what you would do if you were a majority Protestant country or majority Catholic country like a Catholic came in and started preaching or a Protestant came in and started preaching you you'd burn them you'd burn them at the stake often right um or if somebody just had like random cultural mutation in the same way you have like random genetic mutation and they believe something weird like they were a witch and you burn them right that's how you mean contained this level of cultural Fidelity what the virus does which is very interesting is it uh organically determines um when a node looks like it might be flipping and then it essentially Shadow bans the node it begins to deconnect that node's links to all of the rest of the Network's power structures and this is really powerful because what it means is the other nodes that might be allied with that node they don't react the way they would have historically when somebody was being like burned at the stake or something like that which is actually why cancellation is a fairly ineffective tactic and genuinely not used that much when contrasted with just this Shadow bending process of the person just doesn't get a promotion if it looks like they might be immune to these ideas they just don't you know their their papers get published a little less you know uh certain platforms begin to favor them less within the algorithm um and that's how it has been able to maintain such control I think of the upper echelons of our society but it's not like every organization is run by a progressive movement right there are organizations out there that seem to be a lot more open to new ideas we're seeing pushback from a variety of places to the opportunity for people to have independent uh jobs so I would say that it's not every organization so it specifically targets the organizations it can best use to maintain its population levels um and so those are typically organizations that are involved in education so you're looking at the middle school system the high school system and the college system or the organization that it is most critical that it maintains that actually Stranglehold over and this again comes to fertility issues of the populations of the world if there is one population that has a very low birth rate it is this population uh this this Urban monoculture um and uh because of that the only way it can repopulate its ideological faction is through siphoning children from other often more conservative cultural traditions are in other ways deviant cultural Traditions that are for whatever reason having a lot of kids okay getting back to fertility what groups are doing particularly well and particularly badly when it comes to fertility this is a fascinating question all right so um the the uh uh if you look in a post-prosperity environment so a lot of people they're like oh well countries in Africa are doing really well uh they have high fertility rates or Muslim populations have high fertility rates and it's like well that's irrelevant of those populations are in a country where the average salary is under five thousand dollars a year because that is where you get above replacement fertility in pretty much every country that's under five thousand a year you get above replacement every country above 5000 a year you typically get below replacement fertility um uh and so it's a level of desperate poverty first of all that is often misconstrued so you look at Latin America Central America and South America the Caribbean collectively as of 2019 so old news they follow every population rate um so it's really just a few of these these poorest countries so I really ignore any country at a high fertility um if it's a poor country or if it's not a wealthy country right and so I think where you can see is some misunderstandings that people have from that so you look at populations like Muslim populations when they enter wealthier countries their populations really crash or when the countries were there the dominant social group so you can look at Iran Iran's fertility rate fell above below replacement a long time ago and for uh since 2014 they've been trying pretty much everything in their power to try to get fertility rates back above repopulation rate and their government has a lot of control over the populace and they are not able to they're still only at 1.7 um so the groups that really show resistance to this are Conservative Christian groups and conservative Jewish groups and this is why I always think it's funny when people are like oh you're talking about fertility rates you must be about saving white people and it's like white conservative people are like the only people on Earth who don't seem to be disappearing in in the face of uh prosperity-induced fertility collapse the groups that are most at risk are the Eastern Traditions even conservative iterations of those Traditions are very bad at resisting prosperity-induced fertility collapse prosperity-induced fertility collapse what is the relationship between prosperity and fertility well as I said typically when it comes when a country earns over 5000 USD a year uh fertility begins to fall below replacement rate yes oh well so this is we can say nobody quite knows but there is some evidence as to what might be causing this what is probably causing it is the ability to engage with a modern economy um so when somebody is not engaged with the modern economy um and not valuable to the modern economy then uh the modern economy basically ignores them and they go on living the way humans have always lived in having a lot of kids this is why within developed countries so if you look at a country like the US right uh typically the less money you make the more kids you have except when you're at the very high end of the income Spectrum so uh if you're making an average of half a million dollars a year or more as a family you will be an above replacement fertility and in many ways families at that income level are just not like the economy isn't grabbing them as much because they don't need the economy as much so what's really happening is if you look at our sort of free market structure what it does is it organically determines how to reward anyone who has the probability of that it believes has the probability of being productive with just enough money to get them to spend their time being productive versus doing anything else that might have long-term benefits to the society like having kids or whatever right I mean it's very very good at doing this and then it draws them into environments like cities where it becomes even harder to have kids and where they can um anyway yeah where they can be more productive and spend more time working and generating money for this larger economic system I was gonna say it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem realistic that this could be a large behemoth evely behind the scenes working to try and get fertility rates down it seems more likely that it is a natural byproduct of a capitalist machine that wants to have workers who are available as much as possible who don't take maternity opportunity leave who are buying their clothes and taking their holidays consuming and producing and pumping money back into the system everything you're saying there and that's also what I mean when I talk about the virus I don't think any decision is made maliciously I think everybody thinks they're a good guy everyone's trying to do what they think is best for the world but sometimes um sort of a cultural evolutionary pressures can create incentive systems that lead to actions that in the long term will have consequences that I think most people would think are bad okay at the beginning you mentioned a bunch of other uh contributing factors Prosperity being one of them what would the what were the other elements gender equality and education are typically the other two run us through those well um gender equality when when uh it is often specifically female education um when women begin to have a choice as to what they do and can participate in the economy um I I don't think that it's that they're choosing not to have kids I think that that is a misunderstanding of what we're seeing in the data I think it's that they prioritize economic stability and basically having their life in order before they decide to start having kids but the way our economic system is structured people often don't really feel they have their life in order till their mid-30s or 40s or and and at that time they can no longer have kids um and so I think that that is why it is not that women are choosing jobs over kids it's that they're choosing jobs then kids and their biological clocks run out while at the same time um and I think this is something that's really undersold when people talk about fertility collapse is the absolute collapse of marriage markets in our society um it is uh I saw a tweet and I couldn't agree with it more being in a happy marriage these days uh feels a bit like catching the last Chopper at an arm um because uh it is hard it is hard out there to find a good partner and we have seen a collapse of the systems that previously insured people found a great long-term uh dedicated Partners well that's the point it's not just about declining birth rights it's also about declining dating so yeah 50 of guys aged 18 to 30 say that they are not looking for casual or long-term relationships I mean you know that that's an unbelievably shocking statistic to say that your natural biological inclination as a guy During the period of your life when you're going to have the highest testosterone that you're going to have is just checking out completely of either casual or long-term relationships the same thing goes for women broadly as well that it's just not good so how do you fold in this decline in dating as well as children I mean how do you fold it in uh it's it's what I just say this a problem and one of the things we look at I mean we've written multiple books on like the progress guided relationships the fragment is guide of sexuality looking at this problem trying to come up with solutions to this problem um and I think that this brings us to what the real solution to this problem is in a broader context not just dating um not just uh but but also fertility claps also the cultural so whenever anybody first hears about fertility collapse they often want to use it as a way to justify I think the talking points they wanted to push before it became a problem in there on on their table like as soon as they accept it's a problem then they're like oh I can use this to push things I wanted to push already so they'll say things like oh well you should do cash handouts except we know that doesn't really work you know hungry spend five percent of its GDP last year doing it and they got the fertility rate up by like 1.6 when when it's dropping like three percent year over year in a lot of places in the world that's really irrelevant like China 2020 dropped 20 2021 drop 13 in 2022 covet lockdowns are over it should be going up only went up 0.18 you know so uh you're just seeing a 1.6 increase for five percent of your GDP is irrelevant um so uh I know and people are often like well you could spend more what if you spend 50 of your GDP on this but if it's naturally dropping every year then you can never catch that toad if you're doing it by by spending money and it's the same with things like free child care God I would like free child care you know I plan to have seven kids or something like that uh but in the countries that offer it it does seem to help fertility a little bit like maybe like three or four percent which is a pretty good amount but it's not enough to offset the trends that we see um and then you talk to conservative groups and they're like well what we should do is uh I'm talking far conservative groups not not ones like me but but they're like we should create ethnic States basically um you know stop immigration uh have one culture one country except if you actually look at the statistics the countries in prosperous countries with the lowest fertility rates are often ethnic States you know like South Korea stuff like that you look at the countries that have been most resistant to fertility collapse in the prosperous world you're looking at countries like Israel in the US some of the most diverse countries and you can even see this with cultural groups across countries so you look at like Iran remember I mentioned Iran famously has a real big fertility country and they're basically a Shia monoculture but you look at Shia Muslims in India at similar economic levels where it's much more diverse and their fertility rates like twice what it is in Iran um so uh I I think that that's the first thing so then the second question becomes well how do you actually solve this problem right if you look around the world uh and we've already talked about it I mean the solution's sort of staring Us in the face the groups that are resistant to this are the ones that deviate in some way from the urban monoculture most of them are traditionalist religious groups um and there are some traditionalist religious groups that are more resistant to this fertility collapse than others and some that seemed like they were resistant and then all of a sudden collapsed uh Mormons are an example of this like Mormons had great fertility rates than like five or six years ago something happened and now they're probably below replacement rate um and so uh what that tells me is that the solution to this is going to come at the level of cultural experimentation both fortifying our traditional cultures to be more resistant to the new threats they're facing but also potentially inventing new cultures that work uh with with technology uh the internet new strategies that are open to us which is what my family's trying to do tell me more about that okay um yeah all right so I can go deeper into this so we have everything from like our own traditions of the family our own sort of the moral framework different ways of naming our kids different ways of dressing to an extent like we look weird to other people and a lot of people are like you guys look like freaks don't you know your kids will be weird don't you know they'll be bullied and I go you know look around the world which families which cultures are going to exist in the future it's it's ones like the Amish the Hasidic you know wherever you look they look different they dress different they name their kids different things it's because the when you call something cringe when you call something different or weird or freaky what you are saying is it differentiates from the cultural norms to which you are accustomed those cultural norms became the dominant cultural norms because they had a good immune system because they were good at dehumanizing the other and calling people freaky and stuff like that but the reality is that if you want to join this game and this is why I'm out here this is why I'm feeling I don't want I a future where it's just my kids it's a failure right where it's just my family I want as much diversity into the future as possible that's why I'm shouting this I want people to join us I want them to experiment and fortify themselves and not become overly complacent uh with their existing Traditions if their kids are being effectively peeled out by this monoculture um it's very interesting to me you know I sometimes you hear people in the rain they go why don't you just convert to like a traditional religious framework and it's because most of those Frameworks are right now on the downtrend in terms of their ability to continue a high fertility and maintain their kids I do want them to find new systems to protect themselves against that but that's that's why that's just just going to Traditions isn't the answer anymore uh the the the the virus or whatever you want to call it has gotten too good at finding kids um and so we have to find new systems and also the the just the the environment the kids are in with internet with social media uh it's so different and then with AI that they're going to face how do you keep your kid from dating an AI girlfriend when they can have a deep fake that's perfect and hot and loves them right uh you you they need to want something other than Hedonism and that's a difficult message to convey to kids if they adopt the dominant social mores today so to recap what you were talking about to do with this uh sort of almost monotheistic uh future or this this sort of monoculture future that we would end up with if birth rate decline continues for the people that might look at this and say well this is you trying to put forth you want it to be a white ethno State you want it to be more of your progeny that are out there your point is that that is the subgroup which is one of the few which are continuing to be okay at the moment we're actually going to lose genetic and racial diversity if we allow the current trends to continue because some of the groups that are reproducing with the lowest fertility rates are the ones that add to that diversity so in the future what you end up with is a very small number of different cohorts of stuff like Amish stuff like not even Mormons apparently anymore who are then Downstream going to be the ones that fill out the entire country yeah if we do nothing uh the future is really just uh conservative Christians and conservative Jews and maybe conservative Muslims um those seem to be the only groups that are just like persistently resistant to this so that's a pretty sort of uh Bland future racially from yeah and there's some groups that in the very near future like if I if I was looking at this like an ecologist right like the groups I would be probably most concerned about right now are groups like the James and the Percy who I think like a lot of Americans don't think about but they're some of the oldest most distinct cultures in the world right now and they will almost certainly have collapsed in in population by the end of the century to the point where it'll be difficult for them to carry on their Traditions um coming back to that conversation about we get prosperous we give women education they enter the job market and they have other things to do with their life what's your proposal presumably you're not saying that we need to rip women out of the workplace or education and if it is the case that we don't want people to be less prosperous and we also want to let people choose what they want to do if this is what they want to do if women don't want to to to have kids or if they don't feel like they're ready and they don't want to have kids until they are they're concerned about the living cost and the cost to bring your child into this ordering concerned about the environment they're concerned about losing their life freedom and struggling to find the right partner whatever it is they've got better things to do with all of the money that they've just found like why why shouldn't they be allowed to do that so I would say I think they should be allowed to do that and I think that real feminists today when I say a feminist I mean somebody who wants gender well I don't know if feminism is the right word people who want gender equality whatever word you want to use for wanting gender equality in 100 years in 200 years to be an option right uh you're sort of at the Crux of History right now because no group that really has it gender equality except for maybe Israel we can get to that later there's questions there whatever but um uh is anywhere close to above repopulation rate so those groups and those cultural Traditions are going to eventually disappear um and and what they will do is they will get better in the short term at taking the kids of people from these conservative Traditions but eventually I mean just just the way cultural Evolution works the conservative Traditions will build systems that have resistance to whatever technique that they're using um and and they will not be able to repopulate that way anymore um so uh if you actually care about this then you can join the grand experiment and the grand experiment is and this is something we genuinely don't know yet is it possible to have gender equality and a high fertility rate my family so like when I look at what my wife and I did um I was asked to be on this podcast the only thing here not in my choice I would have her on typically with me you know we write our books together we run our companies together is one solution to the gender equality question which is to do everything together write your books together run your companies together raise your kids together right uh but there are other solutions to this question that people can experiment with and what I love is this isn't a question of what's the most moral way to do things uh sort of the future will decide who was actually successful who was able to have a lot of kids motivate the continuation of the tradition through their children you know you get 18 years to pitch to your kids that your way of living is a good way of living and if your kids don't like that or they don't agree with that I I think we're we're blessed and that we live in a society where they can choose something else um and so uh you know I I think that we are going to have a hopefully a lot of people trying new ways of living new ways of trying to achieve gender equality like my family you know doing everything with your spouse isn't the way that gender equality is typically envisioned when people talk about it but it is a form of gender equality can liberalism last under demographic decline what about no no it's gone it's dead I mean if you talk conservative liberalism maybe like if you're talking about like traditional liberalism if you're talking about the Progressive Movement I often say it's a bit like uh if you get a certain blast of radiation right your your DNA can be scrambled your cells can no longer replicate you don't know that you're a dead man walking yet you know before you begin to feel the pain but there is nothing that can be done to save you at that point uh the fertility rate is so low is in that Community there's really nothing that can be done even if you look at the genetic level right now it's so funny you know conservatives are often like hey you're on our team why are you alerting them to the scope of the problem you know we win if we just sit back and let them disappear and it's like they're going to disappear no matter what uh if you look at the heritability of voting patterns which is around 30 to 50 um you know whether this is done with identical twin studies and stuff this is not like fringe science you can look up genopolitics on Wikipedia it's like mainstream uh uh and you look at current fertility rates in a countries like the us we should expect about a one standard deviation shift conservative in voting patterns over the next Century uh in the next 10 or 20 years we'll see a massive shift to the left because they've success as family units get atomized um uh people vote more progressively when people don't have kids they vote more progressively um but after that you're going to see a massive shift in the other direction and it's just inevitable from the statistics at this point has any country tried to fix this problem through authoritarianism and how does that work a lot have it just doesn't uh order 77 707 or something I don't know maybe I'm getting confused with Star Wars orders but they uh decided under the Communist period that they were gonna ban abortion and they thought oh this will be great um it'll it'll shoot up fertility rates and it did for a very brief period of time like two years or something like that then people found ways around it and then after the law was repealed um fertility rates crashed because fertility or having kids became associated with um uh really uh poverty often or low social status um and so uh you can look at countries like Iran that have been trying to implement things it's really funny I watched what China is implementing right now and it's like Iran tried all of this 10 years ago you guys you can just look at what happened you're gonna have to get really aggressive if you actually want to solve this and that's where I get really scared because a lot of countries what we have found is that you can dictatorially like people have tried to you know ban abortions be like what's happening in China now likely shutting down access to um uh uh uh vasectomy clinics and stuff like that um so countries can ban these things um and and then it doesn't work because it doesn't work so then what did they do then you get real handmaid's tale and that gets scary for me it was actually the piece on us and the guardian and they were like they had quoted me saying something like that and they go well that sounds like a threat and I'm like are you like do you have the mind of a child like it's like when I tell a child don't touch the stove you're gonna burn your hands they're like that sounds like a threat I'm trying to protect you here uh but there's nothing I can do you know at the end of the day the Titanic's hitting the iceberg I'm just trying to to to to prepare for what's gonna happen next but what happened next get really interesting sorry to keep talking I don't want to no keep going okay so what's really cool here is if you look historically so when I started hearing about this I was in Korea right you know 95 population collapsed it was funny to think about because the memory is so strong there of you know less than a century ago Japan coming over you know murdering in in in in Korea and China millions of people and there's this conflict there China Korea Japan you know trying to well less Korea trying to take over the other two but mostly the other two trying to take over each other you know there's there's a lot of uh history there and it's so funny that now uh any one of them could just I'm like how does Korea solve this I guess they could import people from Japan or China no you can't because their populations are collapsing any one of them could non-violently just like walk into their neighbor a hundred years from now they were able to motivate their citizens to kill people but they were not able to motivate them to have kids and this is what's so interesting it changes the game but in a really beautiful way you look at people like Putin who don't get the new world yet right the world used to be you keep out immigrants you maintain cultural integrity and when you want to spread your culture you go to other countries you kill other people you subjugate them and you force them to convert to your culture but that's not the game anymore so you look at Russia which has a desperately low fertility rate attacking their coastless cultural and like ethnic neighbors uh uh the Ukraine who also have the desperately low fertility rate both killing like an entire generation here um and they're never going to recover from this it it is it is not the game anymore the game that they're still playing you win now not through War but with love and I say love and not just sex or spamming kids because if you spam kids they're gonna breed like caged panda bears like everyone else they're going to not have any dedication to whatever weird thing about your culture caused you to have a lot of kids and they're just going to drift off into this monoculture and disappear so what you need to do is you need to have a lot of kids but you also need to do a great job raising them make them proud of your cultural group make them want to continue that cultural group and those are the people who are going to be around in the future and I'm really excited about that because that is so much better than the old system of murdering people foreign explain or illustrate what a world in deep population decline would be like yeah so the first thing and I often don't talk about you know I don't the first thing is all economies are going to collapse pretty much the Western so our economic system is sort of a pyramid scheme a lot of people know this but let's just spill it out um if you uh look historically people go as this truism if I put money on the stock market that money grows on average that has been happening because of two things the number of workers has been growing exponentially and the productivity per worker has been growing around linearly a little exponentially but mostly linearly yes technology has been growing exponentially but the productivity per worker is about linear um or at least not close to the explosion worker population that is why the economy has always been growing if the worker population in the developed world begins to collapse exponentially and people are like well why don't people in the in in in in desperately poor countries count because by definition they have small economies that's why they're poor because their economies are small so you don't need to wait for the world's population to begin to collapse for all of the developed world economies to begin to collapse so you're going to begin to see the economy shrink on average it won't be like it is now where on average things go up on average things go down when things go down on average people react very differently you don't leave your money in the stock market anymore you're going to have math withdrawals of money from the stock market and then this begins to break a bunch of other systems so you see things like Detroit okay so why did Detroit ultimately end up having the problems it was having and there's a few reasons one is our society use this miraculous cheat code called debt now I'm a private Equity VC guy I'm very familiar with debts let's just talk a little bit about how debt works and why it's such a miracle if I'm making a 10 investment and eight dollars is that in its debt and two dollars is equity and that investment grows to just twelve dollars My Equity in that investment has doubled but if it shrinks just one dollar My Equity has halved we leveraged our land our businesses leverage means took out debt against our cities our states our Nations it's not people look at like the national debt no no no no it's leverage to the hilt all the way down if things start shrinking the whole thing falls apart and yes national debt is a little different than personal debt and stuff like that but what you are beginning to go to see is essentially what we saw in Detroit so people are like oh my house will be worth lessons that's great yeah it's great if houses go down 20 maybe 50 but when people know a house is always going to decrease in price it decreases to a dollar and when a house is a dollar you know like what you saw in Detroit right um when a house is a dollar there's no reason to maintain it because houses costs a lot to maintain as anyone who is a homeowner knows you've put so much money into your house but you justify it because okay well it's an asset that I own and people stop investing in assets that way so the whole way we relate to money and the economy is going to change so endless Urban blight economy is not functioning the way that they're supposed to function so then what happens well where do people begin to invest well one is what what happens in a negative scenario so negative scenario and this is what I'm terrified of is the developed World finds a cheat code which is immigrants um what they realize is that they can cheese their collapsing populations through Mass immigration but this cheat code only works if they keep really the only country the only collection of countries that has an above repopulation rate right now which is mostly in Africa desperately poor so now you have an economic incentive a gun to the head of the entire developed world that Africa must stay in Desperate poverty so you use you use Africa almost like a breeding ground to create the future population to be pulled across into other countries yeah it's it's sick but that seems to be like when I talk to them that's like actually the going plan right now uh but I don't think it's gonna work I don't think that that plan is going to work so we can ignore it so what really happens well so that because their economies are going to collapse before they can do that sort of mass what right now you're getting a lot of immigrants but it's immigrants who want to leave and I think what a lot of people forget is a lot of people don't want to leave even when Ireland was suffering the Potato Famine what a lot of people don't know is that the landlords there was a rash of landlord murders at the time um and uh so they got scared and so they would uh sometimes I don't know how frequently offered to pay for all of their tenants to go to America on coffin ships it was horrible but at least it was the idea that's that's the way I think many people would be imported these days right so a horrible immigration but at least you know they had the option to leave during the Potato fam and during this time when people would walk into town they thought everyone was dead and then the corpses would start animating and they realized that they were just stuck like it was bad but but the majority a lot of people wanted to stay and so I think what they're going to realize is that this this trickle of immigrants that we have right now is pretty close to the max trickle of immigrants you can get and it's only just offsetting population collapse right now and when they get to the US when they get to Europe their fertility rate collapse first generation immigrants in the US only have a fertility rate of 1.7 well below repopulation rate so it's not like you could just bring immigrants and they solve the problem you need to keep importing people but anyway okay ignore all this okay so world's collecting where do you put your money if on average the economy is collapsing this is where it gets cool because we get something we haven't had in a long time individual human lives start to matter individual human cultures start to matter if you have a cultural group that has a high fertility rate and it's technophilic like they engage with technology um and even if they're technophobic but less of their technophobic that becomes the group you want to invest in that becomes a place you want to place money because that's the only place that you can be fairly sure is going to grow in aggregate in the future and that creates a totally different world economy than the one we have now and it's a very interesting World economy and so when people say like what actually is our foundation sort of doing really what we're doing is we're trying to identify those groups right now and build connections between them so that we can have a pluralistic group of thriving economies of the willing and of the Willing what I mean is the people who were willing to have kids willing to give those kids a good enough life that they wanted to stay in that culture since learning about the current trends of population collapse declining birth rates Etc I've started to view a lot of the problems that we're facing especially the cultural ways that people see dating Family Life having kids relationships with their parents uh the future of the the world through a very different lens and um there's a trend at the moment that's only recently like within the last couple of months I've started seeing come out on the internet which is one of men in their 20s getting vasectomies as a protest against feminists that want to be able to have free and easy sex it's literally like a clap back where you've got the pill I'm gonna get the snip have you seen this I I I'm a fan I mean I I focus more on the transmaxing movement have you heard of that no what's transmaxing oh it's fascinating so it's a group of guys um who are not like traditional Transit that they don't have gender dysphoria they don't feel like they were born the wrong gender they're just like as a guy and as a not particularly attractive or not particularly wealthy guy I got dealt a bad hand hormone therapy is easy to get access to these days I'm going to become a woman um and uh that's what it is it is with what goal what's the goal of it the goal is to get an easier life I mean if you've been consuming a fire hose of red pill and mgtow content you know it can sound like a pretty good idea to a lot of people I think oh because women have got it so much easier than men do therefore if I become the closest thing that I can to a woman it's going to fix all of my problems okay fair enough I mean yeah that that is an approach and the optional elected vasectomy in your 20s thing I think sort of sit on the Shelf next to each other for I wouldn't have predicted this on my 2023 bingo card um but yeah so just everything that I see you know this stophavingkids.org who you may be familiar with like this really serious anti-natalist movement they they have the involuntary anti-natalist movement they wanted they want to sterilize the entire population they're like terrorists there's this they're scary people wow and what's the justification for this I'm gonna guess climate oh no uh so they're really just negative utilitarians I think most anti-natalism and um for people who aren't familiar with negative utilitarianism it's the belief that negative emotions are bad but positive emotions aren't inherently good or that a human life a a negative emotions are more acute than positive emotions or they're just much higher in volume the best uh the best the best example of this that I learned from a friend was imagine that you got to spend the rest of your life in the optimal amount of bliss maxing out your pleasure compare this to an existence where for the remainder of your life you were spent in maximum torture with as much pain as you can imagine or let's say that you did one and then did the other would one be worth the other and most people have an inclination that suffering is somehow worse than pain that you are and and then you net out after a human life the what was the what was the group that involuntary and teenagers yeah um they basically say that a human life is net suffering overall therefore it is morally reprehensible to bring any future life into this world because the net experience is one of pain and torment and displeasure yeah and I I actually suspect that when we see this Urban monoculture I've described begin to really dwindle in size and the only people who are left are the most extremist was in it we're going to begin to have to deal with terrorists on that front and that really scares me but here's the thing who's to know we aren't already dealing with terrorists on that front look at declining fertility rates around the world today biological fertility declining sperm counts de reclining testosterone who's to say there isn't something in the water you know what I mean I know that you think that someone's purposely doing this I I don't know man I would I would Hazard towards hanlon's razor with stuff like that like you know the the incentives align for people to believe that they're doing something which is sympathetic empathetic caring whether it be because of the environment whether it be you know I mean that the the environmental thing is is such an interesting argument to me because if you think that a planet that has too many people on it is bad for the planet wait until you see what a planet that has too few people on it is like it is oh well you know we existed uh 200 years ago there was only half a billion people or a billion people or whatever on the planet the planet's been fine with this many people on before it's like yeah but what's the experience of the life like for the people that are on it what about all of the animals that you want to save what about all of the interjections that you want to make with regards to controlling the climate to ensuring that all of the different ecosystems that you care about continue so I've had a lot of pushback about talking about declining birth rates and you know I'm whatever you want to say like dating sphere adjacent sometimes although I'm speaking to the researchers I'm not you know doing a panel show with a bunch of different people screaming at them saying that they're going to become Loveless harpies in their 30s um and I know I feel like the the criticisms that people have about anybody that brings up declining birth rates either haven't thought about the problem sufficiently well or have a really really [ __ ] perverse and malicious incentive because anybody that sees a discussion about declining birth rates is anything other than a concern for the future of human lives that haven't yet existed they're just not philosophically sophisticated yeah I'm totally open I'm totally open to to having the discussion that maybe um there is an optimal amount of population that would be great to have on the earth I think the carrying capacity of the planet is significantly higher than where we're at at the moment I agree and I think that climate Mastery and all the rest of it we have a ton of work to do for a whole host of things whether that be AI alignment whether that be gray goo from nanotechnology but like pick your existential risk of choice right but like [ __ ] off bro if you think that I'm not going to talk about the exit the most existential of existential risks individually to you and here's the other thing so folding this in a lot of people will have listened to the Stephen Shore episode that I did which was absolutely fantastic I really love him as a demographer and a researcher in this world and the the novel an interesting Insight the really novel interesting Insight that I'm going to kind of add into my world view with regards to this that I've learned from you today is looking at what happens when you roll the clock forward over a longer timeline with which groups are going to continue to survive and which cultures are going to continue to survive if it's the case that you say that you care about a particular movement continuing to be uh pushed Through the Ages because this is something that we should care about let's say it's reducing the amount of people that are on the planet to restrict climate change or let's just say let's just say that it's climate change overall right if you have given the fact that uh political leaning is 50 heritable if you don't have any children who do you think is going to continue that particular philosophy that you've got like you are literally making your ideology a Dying Breed yes no I I couldn't agree more and I think one of the things that I always think you know when you're talking about biodiversity and stuff like this it I always wonder like do these people like not think into the future right now from what we know about our planet humans are the only species that can seed a new biome we are the only species that can get off planet right so if we see it a new biome in a million and 10 million years it'll be just as rich as our own we could feed thousands hundreds of thousands of new biomes if Humanity doesn't win through this eye of the needle we're about to go through if Humanity does die off well I mean everything we know about physics today says the sun will eventually expand and all life will go extinct it's end game you know if you care about biodiversity in the long run humans are critical to maximizing that um although I will modify one thing you said I think that there is a logical argument for negative utilitarianism I think there's a logical argument for getting rid of if humans I don't agree with it these people are against my cultural group but I don't think that they're just like completely insane either do you think it's a moral obligation to have children then with all of this sort of folded together I think different people have different moral Frameworks they're optimizing for I think if somebody believes that their moral framework should continue to exist into the future 200 300 years into the future like gender equality or something like that and you don't have kids you have morally failed if you however are just like no it doesn't matter if my belief system dies out with me um then yeah whatever you know I I I'm not going to tell you that your morals are wrong because I think that that morality is one of those things where I believe that my morals are right but uh if I go around trying to police everyone else's morality I'm just gonna have a bad time so that's that Line in the Sand is one I've been really interested in playing about with I absolutely agree that some sort of handmaid's tale future where women uh kept in pens like cows so that they can keep the future of the population going is wrong also telling women that the only way that you can live a fulfilling life is by doing some domestic version of that also is wrong but I can't see why there isn't any sympathy out there in the world for the reverse of this situation what about all of the people who were told you don't need to have kids to have a fulfilling life that did want to become mothers that had their preferences nudged in the opposite direction break through the fertility window and then grieve for families that they never had like where is the finger pointing going in the other direction because I I don't see anybody unironically saying that women need to get out of the boardroom and get back in the bedroom to start producing more children like I think that they're just saying look maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and and take them with a big spoonful of salt yeah and I think they're familiar with things that mean my wife feel is it uh parrot households with two working parents the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents who stay at home it's a small effect but what I'm saying is is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct um and that the truth is is what is correct is whatever ends up working in in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now and so I just encourage people to if they think I can't be a mom and in the boardroom I I would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family rethink the way you're structuring finding a partner you know earlier we were talking about dating markets and one of the things that our foundation is doing because we're working to try to create and promote new types of dating apps uh maybe even recreate the London season um you know something like that but the travels between places like the Olympics where you have you know a bunch of the single people go but there's some rules that make it harder to just uh have a really low switching cost between partners which is one of the big problems that we're dealing with right now um so with a lot of this it's about experimenting with new social Technologies and understanding that there probably are ways to have it all much more than I think people want to accept because it requires trying new things and being called a freak by other people what about people that say it's too expensive to bring a child into this world well why why are poorer people having more kids if if it's an issue of cost then uh you what you should see is a line where people have more kids the more money they have but typically the line goes in the other direction within and between countries until you get to like ludicrous levels of wealth like half a million dollars a year so um what I say is it's enormously expensive it is a massive lifestyle sacrifice it absolutely is a lifestyle sacrifice but is it too expensive I think that's the real thing is it too expensive is it that you can't afford it or is it that you would need to like us you know we had to leave a city we moved to a rural area we changed the type of jobs we could get because of that you know we made a lot of sacrifices to do this um and I understand that for for families unless socially economically advantaged positions they have to make even more sacrifices um but uh you know when a family decides they want a lot of kids they do it and I think in addition to that this is another area one of the projects that we worked in was Project Eureka which was a town for like single moms that had kids and other people had kids and who wanted to co-raise kids because there are social Technologies we can try and I would really like to see these commune systems and stuff like that begin to pop up more because I think as an investment Prospect they were a really good long-term investment Prospect if you look at the model that I was talking about earlier the challenges of other people the reason that people say it's too expensive to bring a child into this world I don't think that they're talking about the cost on their finances I think they're talking about the cost on their freedom oh and you know it's if you look at the reasons that are given for a lot of non-dators at the moment for people that are checking out of the dating Market it's just got better things to do not wanting to lose personal freedom there's this huge huge study that was done by Pew and uh it just came back that people were just distracted so what it seems is that if you are more financially enabled there are more things that you can do with your finances which means that you can go abroad to Bali why not go to Bali for two weeks or if you have the kid you can't go to Bali for two weeks that the girl with a list thing which you must have seen that came off Tick Tock a girl printed up 350 reasons not to have a child and then printed them all on a piece of paper and the reasons range from stuff like child is literally a parasite inside of you to can't wear my cute high heels anymore can't do brunch on Sundays yeah so I want to get into this I'm really excited so there are I think two core reasons that people don't have kids within the category that you're talking about here it's because they're optimizing for their personal happiness now this can be broad satisfaction contentment whatever word you want to use but it's some sort of emotional optimization or they're optimizing for their own position within a local status hierarchy this can be showing off to people on Twitter or whatever you know the trips that you're doing or the things that you're doing with your life because you think that these make you you know like better or higher within some some group if students you're not optimizing for one of those two things typically having kids or I suppose you could say that I'm trying to make the world a better place uh along some sort of framework like donating to like protecting ecology or something like that like a lot of that leaps back to status though yeah a lot of that Loops back to status so I think what we're gonna see and this is really cool because it's Gonna Change what it means to be human when people I mean even more than the other options people have right now when Robo sexuality I always go back to the future Futurama episode about this that it predicted this when people can start dating AIS and you can have your deep fake girlfriend and stuff like that and then eventually people will be able to go into pods and live any virtual reality lifestyle they want when these sorts of things become possible and they likely will was in my grandkids lifetime at least if not our own pretty much everyone who's optimizing for status or personal pleasure is going to be cold from the gene pool and any cultural group that can't motivate people to optimize for something else is going to be removed from the system and that is going to fundamentally change what it means to be human and likely have a pretty big impact on sort of the human sociological profile in terms of the genetic screening that's going to cause it's going to nudge the genetic disposition because the only cohorts that are left are going to have a particular type of predisposition another time that's going to right yeah that's really really interesting because you know we all have this this balance between hedonic pleasure and meaning that we seek in the future you know it's most parents I don't think if you were to test them on a minute by minute basis it's not the most pleasurable thing in the world to raise a child looking at some of the studies that I've seen it's not it's not massively pleasurable but it's incredibly meaningful and you know there has to be some sort of a spectrum where on one side someone lives for a life that in retrospect they're glad they lived and on the other side someone lives a life that moment to moment they're happy that they're living and you know that spectrum between the two Am I Living For a future that's meaning or am I living for a now that's pleasure yeah well I'm so excited well I love what you're getting at here which is how do you balance these two and the really cool thing is that biologically we're already optimized to have kids and I think a lot of the unhappiness that comes in society today is that people forget that all of your ancestors had kids they had sex and they had kids or almost all of them did right um and so humans are programmed to find genuine contentment and happiness of a deeper kind and a more meaningful kind than they can get from almost anything else from continuing down the path that had led to our species being successful so far and I think when you look at a lot of influencers right now if you look at a lot of unhappiness they are showing people what people are sort of biologically optimized for right after they go through puberty without people realizing that that optimization program changes as you get older I often uh they're the joke that I got in trouble for on on Twitter which is to say that I don't know if you know blippi he's like a Blues Clues sort of character who dances around around fire trucks for kids and is like yeah I'm driving a fire truck I'm I'm playing in a dump truck I'm I'm playing on a playground you know and kids are like oh this is the perfect life before they go through puberty they see this that's what they're optimized for they're optimized for play and exploration as an adult you see this and you're like oh my God his life looks terrible um I mean obviously he probably makes a lot of money but I mean you wouldn't actually want to live that way and I often argue that that Andrew Tate is sort of the blippi for teenagers um this is what a teenage boy thinks is the ideal adult life but to an actual like grown man you see this and you can see sort of the the deadness and he's like yeah I have to like please multiple women a day or they'll leave me and then I won't be able to maintain sort of the thing that I built up and I'm like oh my God I can't even imagine like having to just like have a routine of constantly having sex every day so that I can at a base level maintain my economic Empire um and but to a young boy that sounds oh that's the best because humans go through a second puberty when they have kids your testosterone drops dramatically you begin to gain happiness from different sources and it's a deeper kind of happiness and with young women it's the same thing with young women they get told oh you're gonna love traveling the world you're going to love a certain point this stuff just becomes draw you know um because you were biologically programmed to one of them not everyone is you know people's biological programming is a bit different you know I could say that on average human males are biologically programmed to find human females attractive but obviously not all human males find human females of pressure so a few people don't go through this shift later in life but when you optimize around the things that give you happiness when you are a teenager in your whole society tells you to optimize around those things you hit middle age and you're like why doesn't anything really make me happy anymore why aren't video games making me happy anymore why aren't the the things I used to do why does these status games not make me happy anymore and it's because your culture used to tell you hey you need to move on to your next stage of life but you don't have that culture anymore because you're in this bubble going back to what you said about status yeah and how status provides a incentive for people to behave in particular ways ways that allow them to advertise their fancy trip to Bali and brunch and whatever on a on a Sunday on social media have you considered a way of reprogramming status full activities so that motherhood becomes pedestalized again I hate to say this but I think for most of the population people are like oh why don't you force them to like I talk with some people and they're like what about like Banning porn or Banning you know whatever right like would that force people to do this and it's like look or Banning Social Media right the cultural groups and people who aren't resistant to the existing pressures in this world that are sterilizing them uh unfortunately they're just kind of a lost cause what we need to do is we need to find the few groups that have found a way to make themselves resistant to this and sort of nurture them um so that they can survive through this period and then end up thriving which is why we focus on things like trying to it's it's not like we're it's not like humans are um well it depends on your view of free will I suppose but we're not exactly deterministic beings right if we're able to nudge the culture in a way to get people to change their behavior you know people I had Pete the singer on the show yesterday Peter Singer managed to impact so many people's lives through animal Liberation that wouldn't have done that without him nudging them in that way there is status that was associated with being vegan therefore people started doing it they were also bought into this philosophy that underpinned it I I'm a club promoter by trade right I run nightclubs for my entire career and with that I understand the power of Trends and mimesis and I'm just thinking at the moment there is a mimetic trend about like motherhood's lame or dangerous or Freedom restricting changing that Trend technology seems something that could be quite a high leverage opportunity yeah Delta you changed your mind on this and I'm remembering conversations because this is actually a debate I've had with my wife and she's changed my mind before but I forgot um which is I think well she would argue a core aspect of our advocacy if we can is to get it modeled in in television shows and in other types of popular media uh that having lots of kids is a high status thing um the the big fear I have is I'm just really afraid of people having kids because it helps their status I I would like it if it's like a yes and thing but no matter what when you make something a status thing there's going to be a group of kids that are brought into the world only because of the way they augment the parent's status and and that means that their parents are gonna be narcissists and they're gonna be pretty but but you're right I mean hopefully we can move culture in a way that doesn't just Target the narcissist and then it's more holistic yeah so yeah we're about to get on to talking about another third rail of your uh approach to sort of embryo screening and genetic selection and stuff but do you see it it almost like for one of a better word like a breeding experiment that we have not an experiment but a a breeding future that we have with humans where there are going to be particular cohorts that continue There are going to be particular cohorts that don't given that a good chunk of our behavior is determined by our genes the type of people that continue to reproduce will have a particular genetic predisposition which in the future means that we're going to nudge the entire human races genetic predisposition in one direction are we in the middle of a breeding experiment and are humans facing extinction I'd say it's a cultural experiment because that's being changed is culture and the dependent variable that we're measuring is their ability to have kids so breed but also maintain those kids within that social group um so if the kids just leave or they don't like their lifestyle as a child you know you can't just give a kid a terrible childhood that they're not going to continue that cultural group um so and there has to be this is actually a really interesting phenomenon um here review look at countries that are poorer but also have really low fertility rates typically the common thing across those countries is that there is very low amounts of hope this is why China has such a low fertility rate um because uh people within China this is where the we are the last generation meme comes from they're like what am I just having kids so the government can use them like there's no more like social Mobility here or something like this and I think it's why when you're looking at a cultural group like Jews in Israel there's such a high fertility rate as there is a high level of cultural hope within that cultural group they feel like when they have kids they're not just you know Grist for the grindstone they can move up within the culture even if they're in a low status position um so I would agree with everything you're saying and I'm really excited for this experiment I imagine that the discussions around climate are just another really pernicious sort of convincing Factor about why people shouldn't have kids not only are you contributing to the the burning of fossil fuels not only are you going to increase greenhouse gases which are going to kill all of these other animals but the life that your child is going to have on this planet is also going to be filled with fumes and gray skies and it's going to be toxic and whatever yeah yeah okay so the incentives but this is I was gonna say this is also just the latest apocalyptic cult in the U.S you know and it's not going to be the last one you know we keep having if the U.S is dotted by anything it's it's dotted by uh sort of apocalypticism um and and fears the U.S actually Jewish and Christian Traditions more generally are dotted by this um and I think the next one we're going to see is AI why would you have kids when AI is going to kill us all you know um it's just a cycle and it keeps going and you do know that there's people there's people watching this right now that are saying well what about you two you two are just saying that it's a birth rate decline apocalypse you're the same Cassandra is that you're accusing everyone else would be well because I I would say that um uh I I do argue that things are going to get worse but I don't argue they're going to kill us all I think if you look at real climate change data it says which I believe the I think it's going to get worse a lot of suffering is going to happen because of it but it's not going to kill us all that climate message hasn't done as well as spreading as you know Greta thornberg's in one of your recent podcasts everyone's going to be dead in five years due to the climate AI is going to massively change what it means to be human um it could even cause some major catastrophes but it's not going to turn us all into goo um and so I think that there is it's right to say that we in the world have actual things to be afraid of there's going to be actual systemic shifts but I think that's different than just apocalypticism and being like we're all gonna die no need to think about the future you know Harold Camping style right um okay so the millerist movement getting on to what you did with your children we've discussed what the world should do how we should move forward some of the challenges some of the reasons that people don't what is the unique process that you went through with your wife so so this is spicy um what we did is we did full genetic sequencing of our embryos and we use those genetic sequencings to inform the order in which we implanted the embryos so why did we do this well you have to do uh uh biopsies of embryos anyways often to determine if they're half late or not not everyone does this but most people do it's a normal thing you do when you're doing IVF we had to do IVF anyway because my wife uh was unable to get pregnant naturally um due to you know having depression when she was younger which caused her to develop uh anorexia which meant that she doesn't like menstruate naturally and she she actually would was trans women she often does like competition to see who has to take more hormones um to to be a a woman um and and so uh you know she she has to do all of this stuff to to have kids so I had to do IVF anyway we had to do the biopsies anyway and now is genetic screening data we could go through that and her mom died slowly of cancer and so we were able to look at that you know she suffered from major depressive disorder which also has genetic links so we were able to look at these things and say well I mean if we can choose to lower the probability that our kids have to deal with these genetic conditions um like would we lower that probability like to me people are like yeah but people will make fun of you on Twitter if you do this it's like yeah okay my kid comes to me and they're like Dad I really you know want to kill myself right now or have migraines that was another thing we selected against uh you could have selected against this and you didn't because people were gonna make fun of you on Twitter like I and this is just our cultural group so people try to connect this with Eugenics but Eugenics the definition of eugenics is very clear it's the belief that there's good and bad genes and that the good genes should be distributed maximally throughout society which is sort of the anticism We believe We believe every family every cultural unit has beliefs about good and bad genes right like our family doesn't want our kids to get cancer but that reproductive Choice should always be in the hands of individual families and individual cultural groups and that it should never be enacted if anything I would say that it's Eugenics for the government to come and tell my family the genetic choices we should make because it views sort of pure unaltered human DNA as the superior form of humanity like they're actually saying we need genetic Purity and humanity and you're tainting the genetic purity of the human species by like selecting things I don't know to me that sounds much more Eugenics than me being like I don't want my kids to get cancer and this is something many cultural groups have done over time like Orthodox Jews have to do this with taste acts some black communities have to do this with sickle cell like it's also like an anti-semitic and racist position to call this sort of genetic selection in this sort of reproductive Choice um uh uh Eugenics um so I think that that um we do support and I think now here's the thing that's the nice way to put all of this but then let's go big or go home let's be controversial here right so what happens if we really hold this position in the future well when we say our foundation's goal is to preserve and increase human diversity a lot of people miss the and increase human diversity part because as soon as families have these choices a lot of people think families are all going to choose the same thing you know like I love it people like I think everyone gonna choose like uh a white you know a buff child and it's like no no like blind families aren't going to choose like little Aryan kids or something what are you out of your mind everyone's going to choose things that optimize for their cultural Traditions value system and we're entering into this Grand experiment where some of those value systems will prove to be more efficacious than other value systems right now people are like oh you could select right here we didn't select direct you but you could theoretically select for IQ and we might do it in the future um but IQ is such a like a a bad metric because we're in the early days of this technology eventually uh IQ will be 80 different things are you optimizing for creativity are you optimizing for in the same way you don't just optimize for strengths you optimize for agility you optimize for lean muscle you optimize for like this type of muscle fiber versus this type of muscle fiber and we will see this blossoming I hope of human diversity uh uh at a level that makes our existing ethnic diversity looked right um and and subcultures will be very intolerant to this new diversity uh but I'm excited for it I'm excited for it because I think that when we have a new perspective when we have uh new ways of doing things new cultural optimization uh we get something uh more beautiful and one of the the core focuses of our foundation is trying to get the cost of this technology as low as possible and a lot of people they hear about this technology and they go oh it must cost a fortune I mean theoretically it doesn't really you're looking looking at genome sequencing which we've gotten tremendously cheap and then once the genome is sequenced um you're just comparing it to a data table so uh right now you know if you did this at the state level it would be tremendously inexpensive to do um and you know you could do this for like 50 cents a family and maybe like fifty dollars per egg that's sequenced and when you compare this to the cost of IDF that is like nothing um uh and many states are already supporting IVF like the UK like Israel um so uh to say that this technology could be widely available is not a irresponsible thing to claim at all and I'm really excited for it can you see why some people would feel uncomfortable or feel that this is a controversial technology to start using to be able to select for particular traits that a child would have yeah I mean I I see that when the problem is that it's controversial it's except in every specific instance it's controversial to your selecting that your kids don't get cancer it's controversial to your selecting that your kids don't get major depressive disorder and if you stop me and my kid ended up committing suicide are you at all to blame for that do you take any responsibility and then people are like well this technology isn't foolproof it doesn't 100 prevent those things and that's like you know one of these uh religious extremists who don't want to do blood transfusions being for their kid you know when their kids dying or something like well blood transfusion doesn't always work it's like well so what you're giving your kid a chance smoking during pregnancy doesn't always cause your child to have tons of deformities but it's probably not advised yeah and I support the cultural groups that don't want to use this they may be right in the long term you know humanity is an experiment right they may be right I may be wrong and the future will prove which group is right and wrong and we might turn out that all of these decisions we're making they don't end up making any difference right and all we're using this technology for right now is to order our eggs now suppose somebody was like oh yeah but I just want to create tons of embryos and choose the best embryos right and this is where I think you get the the genuine what do you mean sorry what do you mean when you say order your eggs oh it's the choice uh it determines the the um eggs we choose first but we still hope to use all of our embryos um not eggs embryos um but uh uh so it's not like we're saying this human gets to exist or this human doesn't get to exist because of their genes but I mean functionally eventually because my wife has a C-section with every pregnancy they're probably eventually going to take it out to some extent we are doing that um but uh I can understand like when people say every human embryo is a life and you shouldn't be playing these games that's the moral argument against what we're doing that I think holds the most water uh the way that I look at that argument is to say um well IVF generally which needs you know you need to discard some eggs off and if you're going to do IVF in any sort of economically sustainable way uh it requires you discarding embryos and it expands the human fertility window so to me from my cultural's perspective every human I decide not to have like if somebody was like okay pick up this pin and a human doesn't exist in the future I'll decide not to have a human if you pick up this pin then I have functionally killed that human um and and so I can understand why like Catholic groups and stuff like that would look at what we're doing and say that well I think that the humanity only starts at like sperm production or at the production of an embryo and so I get that argument it's just not my cultural practice and I hope that they can at least understand the spirit with which we're doing this which is to you know maximize the number of Offspring we have and increase their quality of life if all that you're doing is playing around with the order that of the embryos that you have why does the order matter well because we likely won't be able to use all of them I mean really okay but that's the same like choosing the order is the same as discarding right yeah it's probably functionally the same but I mean again um I just don't know how I can explain to my kid oh yeah you got cancer because I decided not to do this when it was Johnny anomaly on the show about two months ago and I love the guy yeah he really he really sort of opened my eyes to this and and the most compelling argument that I heard was as soon as you concede that um let's say the testing that some Jewish groups Ashkenazi Jews I think go through uh to ensure that they don't partner up with yeah partner up with somebody that is going to give their child something that's awful uh the same thing occurs within other groups and then roll the clock forward a tiny little bit and you say if we can select to avoid really really reliably heritable cancer that is just every single woman all the way back for as long as I can research it has always had some form of cancer as soon as we can select for that to not happen you open the door to say well okay what's the difference between that and selecting for someone that's a little bit more conscientious because conscientiousness is associated with a improved outcomes in life what about somebody that's got not going to have depression what about somebody that's not going to have anxiety what about somebody that's blah blah blah like as soon as you open the door to not having something negative you also then look start to get into selecting toward uh positive traits too is there a line that gets thrown in the sand for you with regards to this no I believe every family should be able to make their own reproductive choices um and when we we talk about things like IQ absolutely right if you look at this really rough Stitch thing we have now why IQ that I hope we can break apart into a bunch of different things and get much more specific ways right now I mean this is correlated with lower rates of rape lower rates of incarceration lower rates of I mean raping other people lower rates of murdering other people like there are there are real reasons why um you know you you may select for this and I love when people are like oh that's unethical and I'm like we live in a culture today where it is normal to dope your kids with amphetamines so that they score slightly higher on standardized tests where people do these little things where they're like what would I get for two points of IQ and and yet uh the fact that you could make a selection here is is off the table but we also need to consider that eventually other species we're gonna have to do this and this is something that people just aren't talking about so if you look at okay dysgenic pressures so historically like 50 of humans died you know in childhood or early in their lifehood or something like that right um and this prevented a lot of the diseases that we see in our society today as we get better at things like C-section and keeping kids alive and stuff like that we're going to see an increasing number of heretical diseases that previously would have been selected out of humanity so you really only get two choices before every human is just a walking ball of cancer either you start selecting humans before they're born or with three choices or you start completely editing and writing humans I think maybe there you can get into even more morality or you start selecting humans after they're born or I guess you can just enter this future where everyone's like this walking cancer Golem um uh of all of these things that previously would have been selected out but our medical technology I think that the most ethical Choice there long term is probably to make these selections before uh you know the the the the cells really begin to replicate in your eyes is there anything different ethically between rolling the dice of which sperm is going to get there first with which egg at which particular time during the year's bunch of cycles and selecting let's say that you were able to do uh selection somehow that didn't involve discarding eggs because that that would be a difference as far as you're concerned is there anything different about parents going out of their way to choose the kind of Life traits person that is going to come out as opposed to just saying we roll the dice when it happens it happens and with the combination that happens is what the child is going to get well I mean we as a society have been doing this for a while I mean if you consider that sort of thing you know Eugenics then not allowing brothers and sisters to marry as Eugenics because you know the reason presumably we have those losses it leads to negative genetic outcomes um again I just go back to I'd say that reproductive Choice should always be at the level of the family and as soon as the state or an outside force says that a family can make these genetic choices and can't make these genetic choices that is the core of what Eugenics is because you were saying people born of these genetic choices are somehow genetically morbid or or or like uh uh some sort of a monstrosity and and then what do you do what they're a second class citizen I don't know I just don't think there's any way where you can begin to police families genetic choices that doesn't turn into the the most evil of eugenics do you think that there's an ethical difference between selecting embryos and going in there and actually manipulating genes and tinkering with stuff directly yeah I think in a lot of people's mind there is a difference but I think that again this should be a cultural choice um I think that every parent should have the choice to to make the it's always funny when people they say oh heliana's wife think that we're they're like genetically Superior I'm like we're the ones editing our genes like we think we are the least genetically Superior of anyone we are editing our genes jumping through the Hoops to try and make them as viable as possible yeah exactly yeah so is one final thing you know to tie the two things that we've spoken about today together a lot of people are told about the miracle that is IVF um there are some concerns I think that maybe women and men are overly reliant on it to believe that it can extend their fertility window out essentially indefinitely ivg which may actually end up doing this maybe we'll we'll see I'm a fan you want to talk about what ivg is [ __ ] it tell everybody what ivg is and tell them it tell them it in a very accessible way because Johnny taught me it and I I don't I couldn't recite it so teach it as if you're teaching it to a golden retriever ivg basically means that you can create eggs and firm for himself so it means that 2 to a kid that's biologically theirs but it also means you can do fancier things like you could have a poly couple of like 13 people and they could have a kid that is biologically owl of theirs it basically allows you to I mean in the simplest form it's just again from anyone but this is really cool because it means you know if you're older um you know you can have kids that are that are healthier and a lot of people are having kids when they're older um but then you know you combine this with artificial wombs who we're close on that technology too that completely like when we're talking about cultural changes and technological and cultural solutions to technological and cultural problems a lot of them are going to look like ivg a lot of them are going to look like artificial wounds what we may find is one of the solutions to the current collapsing birth rates is like gay the Triads or something like that right or or um poly cities or like I'm not saying that these things will work you know but uh if any of these sorts of cultural groups want to survive into the future uh they're gonna have to find ways to make uh themselves raising kids and keeping their culture alive work um and so I'm very excited to see how these Technologies expand options for people and expand the diversity of cultures that are possible because there's many more creative people than me out there who might find even more exciting ways to to raise families and increase the cultural diversity of our space just going back to the conversation about IVF for the people that haven't been through it or don't know somebody that has been through it what's the experience like it's it's painful I used to ask my wife I've seen these sharks right into the butt I don't know how she handles it and she does this as a routine we have a kid a year she wants to keep doing this for like 10 years I don't she is a tough like um but it is painful I I this this woman was a woman who worked through her first pregnancy she went to the hospital she was taking sales calls while she was having contractions back to work within five days the level of pain she felt when getting egg extractions and stuff like that was higher or not higher than pregnancy but I mean it was hard like she is not somebody who complains about pain she doesn't complain about the shots but the egg extractions they really hurt and I know that because she wouldn't she wouldn't mess around with that stuff uh so what I can say is it's a it's a painful process but if you see kids as like your mandate in life for me not having kids is the equivalent of suicide or something like that um it's just not an option for me um and I I'm glad that my wife you know I'd love if you had her on sometimes she's a she's a weird woman um but really fun um she sees things similar to I do and so it's just not even something we would consider we're gonna do everything we can and we tried to conceive naturally for like five years and it just wasn't in the cards and I think increasingly what families are going to realize is uh it's really hard to get pregnant these days humans are becoming infertile as a species we're becoming infertile and you're and when you look at things like artificial wombs they may be one of our only shots uh because when we hear when I hear women who have these complicated pregnancy when I hear stillbirths oh my God if your wife has carried a kid or you've carried a cane when you think of a baby dying in that last trimester and you know that with stuff like artificial wounds we could lower the probability of that it just breaks your heart and you would want to do anything you can to accelerate the pace of this technology Malcolm Collins ladies and gentlemen dude I I find all of this discussion a combination of harrowing inspiring and interesting uh so for the people who want to find out more about the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work where should they go so uh our book series The fragment to Sky series of pragmatist guy to crafting religion is the most relevant to this conversation it's on Amazon it's for 99 cents the ebook um Twitter account Simone H Collins um or just you know search Simona Malcolm Collins on Twitter uh we have a joint account because I hate using Twitter um and we're recently starting up our YouTube and podcast um uh we just uploaded the first episode of starting it back up today which is uh Simona Malcolm Collins based Camp um so uh we're hoping that that's fun I'd love to have you on some time if we're able to get enough followers to be worth your time Malcolm I appreciate you thank you what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace