Modern Wisdom - #640 - Malcolm Collins - Why Do So Many People Not Want To Have Children?

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Malcolm Collins is a pronatalist, Stanford MBA graduate, venture capitalist and an author. What would the world actually look like if only the global population was only 500 million people? Given the current birth rate projections, we’re approaching a massive collapse. If you think a planet with too many people on it is bad, a planet with too few is even worse. Expect to learn why Korea is projected to experience a 94% population extinction within the next century, why so few people actually want to have kids in 2023, why a ‘super virus’ has taken over the progressive movement, whether prosperity, equality, education and fertility are incompatible with each other, whether authoritarianism could fix this problem, if there’s a moral obligation to have children, the implications of using new technology for gene-editing & birthing via artificial wombs and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)  Extra Stuff: Follow Malcolm on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins Check out Malcolm's website - https://pronatalist.org/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Malcolm Collins. He's a pro-natalist, Stanford MBA graduate, venture capitalist, and an author. What would the world actually look like if the global population was only 500 million people? Given the current birthrate projections, we're approaching a massive collapse. And if you think that a planet with too many people on it is bad, a planet with too few is even worse. Expect to learn why Korea is projected to experience a 94% population extinction within the next century. Why so few people actually want to have kids in 2023? Why a super virus has taken over the progressive movement?

Whether prosperity, equality, education, and fertility are incompatible with each other, whether authoritarianism could fix the problem, if there's a moral obligation to have children, the implications of using new technology for gene editing, and birthing via artificial wombs, and much more. As you can imagine, this is a quite contested topic, and Malcolm is a quite contested topic and Malcolm is a very outspoken proponent of being concerned about this. No matter what you think, population collapses something that is a genuine risk. We know how many one year olds there are right now, which means that we know the exact upper bound on how many people can be on the planet in 80 years time. We don't know that to do with the weather. We don't know that to do with the weather, we don't know that to do with climate change,

we don't even know that to do with artificial intelligence. This is one of those looming risks in the future that we have a great degree of certainty about what is going to happen and it is a really, really big problem. Malcolm is a very, very extroverted, outgoing, energetic guy when it comes to talking about this. And I find his insights very interesting.

It's something that you need to know about. It's something that you should be having a discussion with your friends about as well. And I really, I value these conversations. I think that it's very, very important. And I hope that you take tons away from today. In other news this episode is brought to you by Marik Health. I wanted to get my blood work done a few months ago and after doing some research, Marik Health came back as the best option. And then after

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That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Malcolm Collins. Why have you been in the news so much recently? Because I am calling out that the Emperor has no clothes right now, and I think a lot of people have mentioned collapsing fertility rates before, but I think that no one has really so consistently brought it up in a way that the people who want to ignore it have to look at the problem. You know, when I point it out because I think a lot of people, especially, you know, on the more progressive side of the spectrum, they just want wanna 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 the most basic level. That seems like quite a scary 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 birthright, we just need to concede the fact that the birthright. 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 to understand the scale of the threat right now, one of the things I always start people 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 Wall Street people really don't. They're looking at the economy 5, 10 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. 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, 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. Everybody knows this. But if we accepted it, then the economy stops working, society stops working. So we're just gonna ignore it basically. And when I came back to the US,

it was like going back in time 20 years, like I was in sort of a sci-fi movie, and getting to be this one person who saw where the future was going to go, 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 collapse 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 Korean citizens are over the age of 40. So it's likely already too late

for them to turn this problem around. So we need to turn this around before we hit that level, but the truth is we probably won't 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 as sigma male as much as they want. Why should anyone care about how many children another person has?

So I think that that's a really good point. And our foundation, I think one of the things that people most often get wrong about us is that we are trying to increase the world's population or that we are trying to prostil world's population or that we are trying to prostilize broadly to increase fertility rates 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 survive, start getting the rafts in the water in a

common 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 gonna be okay You know, I know that my cultural group is gonna be okay broadly speaking 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 exists 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 massive collapse in cultural and ethnic diversity the world is about to see.

And it will be astonishing for people, I think in the far future, 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 less kids. And I know you've talked about this before on the show, and it is astonishing. And I think when we look at this urban monoculture that is erasing all of the genuine diversity in our society, one of its core messages is negativity to letarianism. 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 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. The progressive is a party of this urban monoculture, which is a single sort of cultural group or virus that infects other cultural institutions, and in races 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 or a progressive Unitarian Universalist and icecratch 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 for each of those factions, their world views are very different. And what the conservative party seems to optimize 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, hey, you know, like don't tell somebody that it's unhealthy to be fat because I could hurt their feelings in the moment, even though like obviously it's bad for them in the long term. But the conservative movements all have in very distinct cultural histories, which they are trying to preserve.

And that is often, if I look at the conservative movement today, it's an alliance of these older traditions and newer but deviant and distinct traditions that are trying to maintain cultural fidelity and exist 100, 200 years from now. 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, no, 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 was the conservative parties. 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 ringing their hands about that, but a lot of people were like, you go. You know, at least you found some face, at least you found some tradition. And so I think what we're seeing there is more of a realization that 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 just somebody that holds liberal values. I don't believe that I'm part of some destructive force within the world.

And I think that there are people who genuinely, like within any movement, you know, when the Catholic Church used to be 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 a period like that in some countries. The vast majority of Protestants, their Catholics, and 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 were burning people at the stake and trying to ensure that everybody fit this very narrow definition of morality set by their culture, to me, they were the evil ones within those institutions. And today, when I talk about this monoculture, I think that the vast majority of people

who are members of it are just like the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants during periods 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 can be thought of as sort of an evolving firmware, which is like our biology, our genes, but on top of that firmware, 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 women at clusters actually augmented a person's sort of biological fitness, the number of the media clusters actually augmented a person's 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 handwashing literally centuries before science figured out handwashing. And you see this across these traditions, for example, you look at all of the old traditions. Almost all of them have some arbitrary self-denial holiday,

like Lint or Ramadan or Feast of the First Bernard, whatever, right? And just now, after throwing out all of those rituals over the past, you know, 50, 100 years, secular societies like, oh, now we gotta have our juice cleanses. Now we gotta have our, you know, they're realizing of fasting and stuff like that, right? It has positive mental effects. And so I think 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 is that it is very much though, when you talk about a super bacteria or a super bug, 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 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 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 evolving strategies that had never been tried before. So one of the most effective strategies that it uses is if you look historically, if you

look at cultural groups as sort of like nodal clouds that sort of overlap with each other, 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 a majority Catholic country and like a Catholic team-in-the-state preaching or a Protestant team-in-the-state preaching, you'd burn them. You'd burn them at the stake, off it, right? Or if somebody just had like random cultural mutation,

and the same way you have like random genetic mutation, and they believed something weird, like they were witch, and you burn them, right? That's how you maintained this level of cultural fidelity. What the virus does, which is very interesting, is it organically determines when a node looks like it might be flipping, and then it essentially shadow bands the node.

It begins to de-connect 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 burned at the stake or something like that, which is actually why cancellation is a fairly ineffective tactic.

And genuinely not use 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 papers get published a little less. You know, there's certain platforms begin to favor them less within the algorithm. 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, the opportunity for people to have independent 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 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 are the organization that it is most Critical that it maintains an absolute strangle holdover and this again it 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, this urban monoculture. And because of that, the only way it can repopulate its ideological faction is through siphoning children from other often more conservative cultural traditions or in other ways, deviant cultural traditions that are for whatever even 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 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. 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 $5,000 a year, because that is where you get a above replacement for fertility in pretty much every country that's under $5,000 a year, you get above replacement, every country above $5,000 a year, you typically get below replacement fertility. And so it's a level of desperate poverty, first of all,

that is often misconstrued. So you look at Latin America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, collectively, as of 2019. So old news, they fell below repopulation rate. So it's really just a few of these poorest countries. So I really ignore any country at a high fertility if it's a poor country, or if it's not a wealthy country, right?

And so I think where you can see it's 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 where they are the dominant social group. So you can look at Iran. Iran's fertility rate fell above blow replacement a long time ago. And for, 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. 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 the face of prosperity and dues 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

and dues fertility collapse. Pros prosperity and use fertility collapse. Prosperity induced fertility collapse. What is the relationship between prosperity and fertility? Well, I said, typically when a country earns over 5,000 USV a year, fertility begins to fall below replacement rate. Yes, why? Oh, well, so this is, we can say as 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.

So when somebody is not engaged with the modern economy and not valuable to the modern economy, then the modern economy basically ignores them and they go on living the way humans have always lived and having a lot of kids, This is why within developed countries, so if you look at a country like the US, right, 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 if you're making an average of half a million dollars a year or more as a family, you will be at a buffer placement 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 that it believes has the probability of being productive, was just enough money to get them to spend their time being productive versus doing anything else that may 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, anyway, yeah, where they can be more productive and to be 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, evenly 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 opportunities, who are buying their clothes and taking their holidays, consuming and producing and pumping money back into the system. Is that the one you see it? I absolutely agree with 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, sort of, 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 contributing factors prosperity being one of them What would the what would the other element gender equality and education or typically the other two run us through those

well gender equality when when when It is often specifically female education When women begin to have a choice as to what they do and can participate in the economy, 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 And and at that time they can no longer have kids 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, 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. It is, I saw a tweet and I couldn't agree with it more. Being in a happy marriage these days feels a bit like catching the last trooper at an arm. Because it is hard, it is hard out there

to find a good partner. And we have seen a collapse of the systems that previously ensured people found a great long-term dedicated partners. Well, that's the point. It's not just about declining birth rates. It's also about declining dating. So 50% of guys aged 18 to 30 say that they are not looking for casual or long-term relationships. I mean, you know, 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 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? What I just say is there's a problem. And one of the things we look at, I mean, we've written fold it in? It's what I just say is it's a problem. And one of the things we look at, I mean, we've written multiple books on like

the private sky to relationships, the private sky to sexuality, looking at this problem, trying to come up with solutions to this problem. And I think that this brings us to what the real solution to this problem is in a broader context, not just dating, not just, but also fertility collapse, 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 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 5% of its GDP last year doing it, and they got the fertility rate up by like 1.6%. When it's dropping like 3% year-over-year in a lot of places in the world, that's really irrelevant. Like, China, 2020, drop 20%. 2021, drop 13%. In 2022, COVID lockdown's over, it should be going up, only went up 0.18%.

You know, so you're just seeing a 1.6% increase for 5% of your GDP is irrelevant. And people are often like, well, you could spend more. What have you spent 50% of your GDP on this? But if it's naturally dropping every year, then you can never catch that toe if you're doing it by spending money. And it's the same with things like free childhood. God, I would like free childhood. You know, I plan to have seven kids or something like that.

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. And then you talk to conservative groups and they're like, well, what we should do is, and I'm talking to far conservative groups,

not ones like me, but they're like, well, what we should do is, and I'm talking far conservative groups, not ones like me, but they're like, we should create SNS dates basically. You know, stop immigration, have one culture, one country, except if you actually look at the statistics, the country's prosperous countries with the lowest fertility rates are often SNS dates, 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. So I think that that's the first thing. So then the second question becomes, well, how do you actually solve this problem, right?

You look around the world 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. 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. 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. And so 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 with technology, the internet, new strategies that are open to us, which is what my family is trying to do. Tell me more about that.

Okay. 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, our own sort of 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 look around the world, which families, which cultures are going to exist in the future, 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 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 yelling, I don't want a future where it's just my kids is 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 with their existing traditions if their kids are being effectively peeled out by this monoculture. It's very interesting to me. You know, I sometimes 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 why that's just going to traditions isn't the answer anymore. The virus or whatever you wanna call it has gotten too good at finding kids. And so we have to find new systems.

And also just the environment that kids are in was internet, with social media. It's so different. And then with AI that they're gonna 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? They need to want something other than hedonism,

and that's a difficult message to convey to kids if they adopt the dominant social morays today. So to recap what you were talking about to do with this, sort of almost monotheistic future, or 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 armish, 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, the future is really just conservative Christians and conservative Jews and maybe conservative Muslims. Those seem to be the only groups that are just persistently resistant to this. So that's a pretty sort of bland future, racially, from... Yeah, and there's some groups that in the very near future, like 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 Jans and the Parseys. I think like a lot of Americans don't think about, but there's some of the oldest, most distinct cultures in the world right now, and they will almost certainly have collapsed in population by the end of the century to

the point where it will be difficult for them to carry on their traditions. 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 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 of bringing a child into this while they're concerned about the environment, they're concerned about losing their life freedom, they're struggling to find the right part, no, whatever it is, they've got better things to do with all of the money that they've just found. Like, 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 feminist today, and 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 and 200

years to be an option, right? 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 it's anywhere close to above repopulation rate. So those groups and those cultural traditions are going to eventually disappear. 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 the way cultural evolution works, the conservative traditions will build systems that have resistance to whatever technique that they're using, and they will not be able to repopulate that way anymore. So 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 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, I was asked to be on this podcast, the moment I'm in here, not on my choice, I would have her on typically, with me, we write our books together,

we run our companies together, is one solution to the gender equality question, which is to do everything together, right? Your books together, run your companies together, run your companies together, raise your kids together, right? 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. 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 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 think we're blessed and that we live in a society

where they can choose something else. And so, I think that we are going to have 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—oh, 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, if you get a certain blast of radiation, right? 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. The fertility rate is so low, isn't that community, there's really nothing that can be done. Even if you that point. The fertility rate is so low 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. Conservatives are often like, hey, you're on our team.

Why are you alerting them to the scope of the problem? We win if we just sit back and let them disappear. It's like they're going to disappear no matter what. If you look at the heredibility of voting patterns, which is around 30 to 50 percent, you know, whether this is done with identical twin studies and stuff, this is not like French science, you can look up genopolitics on Wikipedia's like mainstream, and you look at current fertility rates in countries like the US, we should expect about a one standard deviation shift conservative in voting patterns over the next century.

In the next 10 or 20 years, we'll see a massive shift to the left because they, as family units get atomized, people vote more progressively. When people don't have kids, they vote more progressively. 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. So Romania fit, what is it, order seven, seven, seven or hundred and seven or something? I don't know. Maybe I'm getting confused with Star Wars orders. But they decided under the communist period that they were gonna ban abortion. And they thought, oh, this will be great.

It'll shoot up fertility race. And it thought, oh, this will be great. 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, fertility rates crashed because fertility or having kids became associated with really poverty often or low social status. And so you can look at countries like Iran that have been trying to implement things. It's really funny. I watch what China is implementing right now.

And it's like I ran, tried all of this 10 years ago. You guys can just look at what happened. You're gonna have to get really aggressive if you actually wanna 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, really what's happening in China now, likely shutting down access to the sector, be clinics and stuff like that. So countries can ban these things. And then it doesn't work because it doesn't work. So then what did they do? Then you get real handmade's tail and that gets scary for me. It was actually the piece on us in 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 going to burn your hands. They're like, that sounds like a threat. I'm trying to protect you here. 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 prepare for what's gonna happen next. But what happened next get really interesting. Sorry to keep talking, I don't wanna. No, keep going. Okay, so it was really cool here. If you look historically, so when I started caring about this, I was in Korea, right? You know, 95% population collapse. It was funny

to think about because the memory is so strong there, you know, less than a century ago, Japan coming over, you know, murdering in Korea and China, millions of people, and there's just 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 a lot of history there, and it's so funny that now any one of them could just, I'm like, how does Korea solve this? I guess they can 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 wanna spread your culture, you go to other countries, you kill them 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, ethnic neighbors, the Ukraine, who also has a desperately low fertility rate, both killing like an entire generation here. And they're never going to recover from this. 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 going to 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. Can you try and 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, the first thing is all 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 economy. So our economic system is sort of a pyramid scheme. A lot of people know this, but let's just spill it out. If you look historically, people go with this truism. If I put money on this 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 linear early, a little exponentially but mostly linearly. Yes, technology has been growing exponentially but the productivity per worker is about linear. Or at least not close to the explosion and worker population. That is why the economy has always been growing. If the worker population in the developed world

begins to collapse exponentially, people are like, well, why don't people in the 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's 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 uses miraculous cheat code called debt. Now, I am a private equity VC guy. I'm very familiar with debt. So 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 $8 is that in debt and $2 is equity and that investment grows to just $12, my equity in that investment has doubled. But if it shrinks just $1, my equity has halved. We leveraged our land, our businesses, leveraged means to look out debt against, our cities, our states, our nations.

It's not people looking like the national debt. No, no, no, no. It's leveraged 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 see is essentially what we saw in Detroit. So people are like, oh, my house will be worse last. 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? When a house is a dollar, there's no reason to maintain it because houses cost a lot to maintain. As anyone who is a homeowner knows, you 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's 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 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. 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 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. Oh, 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 sick, but that seems to be like when I talk to them, that's like actually the going plan right now. But I don't think it's going to work. I don't think that that plan is going to work so we can ignore it. So what really happens? Well, so the because their economies are going to collapse before they can do that sort of mass, what 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 landlord, there was a rash of landlord murders at the time. And so they got scared. And so they would, sometimes I don't know how frequently offer to pay for all of their tenants

to go to America on coffinships It was horrible, but at least it was the idea that's that's the way I think many people would be be imported these days, right? So a horrible immigration, but at least you know, they had the option to leave during the potato famine 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 like it was bad But but the majority but 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, they're 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 classic, 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 lives start to matter. Individual human cultures start to matter. If you have a cultural group that has a high fertility rate and is technophilic like they engage with technology, and even if they're technophobic, but less so they're technophobic, that becomes a 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 what 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, et cetera, 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, the future of the world through a very different lens. And 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 the sector as a protest against feminists that want to be able to have free and easy sex. It's literally like a clap back, well you've got the pill, I'm going to get the snip. Have you seen this?

I'm a fan, I mean I focus more on the trans-maxing movement. Have you heard of that? No, what's trans-maxing? Oh, it's fascinating. So it's a group of guys who are not like traditional trans and 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. And that's what 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 migtowl 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 problem. Okay, fair enough. I mean, yeah, that, that, that is an approach and the optional elected vasectomy in your twenties 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. But yeah, I just, just everything that I see, you know, this stop having kids.org, who you may be familiar with, like this really serious anti-nate list movement.

They are there. Have you ever been the involuntary anti-natalist movement? They want to sterilize the entire population. They're like terrorists, they're just scary people. Wow, and what's the justification for this? I'm gonna guess climate. Oh, no, so they're really just negative utilitarians. I think most anti-natalism and 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, negative emotions are more acute than positive emotions. Are they're just much higher in volume? 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 would spend 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 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 in and then you net out after a human life. The what was the what was the group that involuntary and seen it less because of new

daily intelligence. Yeah, 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 actually suspect that when we see this urban monoculture, I've described, it began 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 throughout the planning testosterone. Who's to say there isn't something in the water? You know what I mean? You think that someone's purposely doing this? I don't know, man. I would hazard toward Hanlon's razor with stuff like this. Like, you know, 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 environmental thing 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 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.

So 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, whatever you wanna 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. And I know I feel like the criticisms that people have about anybody that brings up declining birth rates

either haven't thought about the problems sufficiently well or have a really, really fucking 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 having the discussion that maybe 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, 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 fuck off, bro, if you think that I'm not going to talk about 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 Steven Shaw episode that I did, which is absolutely fantastic. I really love him as a demographer and a researcher in this world. And 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 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 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 risk-rich climate change. Let's just say that it's climate change overall. If you have, given the fact that 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 done? Like you are literally making your ideology a dying breed. 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, I always wonder, like, do these people not think into the future? Right now, from what we know about our planet, humans are the only species that can see the new biome.

We are the only species that can get off planet, right? So if we see the new biome in a million and ten million years, it'll be just as rich as our own. We could see 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 in-game.

You know, if you care about biodiversity in the long run, humans are critical to maximizing that. And although I will modify one thing, you say, I think that there is a logical argument for negative utilitarianism. I think there's a logical argument for getting rid of humans. I think there's a logical argument for getting rid of a few ms. 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, then whatever. You know, I'm not going to tell you that your morals are wrong because I think that morality is one of those things where I believe that my morals are right. But if I go around trying to police everyone else's morality, I'm just going to have a bad time. So that's that line in the sand is one I've been really interested in playing about with. That line in the sand is one I've been really interested in playing about with.

I absolutely agree that some sort of handmade tale future where women are 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 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, that where is the finger pointing going in the other direction? Because 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. I think that they're just saying, look, maybe you should think about the current cultural

norms that are being pushed and take them with a big spoonful of salt. Yeah, and I think that a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with things that mean my wife feel a lot more comfortable if you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do is that parent households was two working parents, the kids actually performed better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay at home. It's a small effect.

But what I'm saying is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct, and that the truth is is what is correct is whatever ends up working 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 would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family, rethink the way you're structuring, finding a partner. 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, maybe even recreate the London season.

Something like that, but the travels between places like the Olympics where you have a bunch of the single people go, but there's some rules that make it harder to just have a really low switching cost between partners, which is one of the big problems that we're dealing with right now. So it was a lot of this is 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? Why? Why are poorer people having more kids? If it's an issue of cost, then what you should see as a line,

where people have more kids than 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 what I'd 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? We had to leave a city. We moved to a rural area. We changed the type of jobs we could get because of that. We made a lot of sacrifices to do this. And I understand that for families and less socially, economically,

advantaged positions, they have to make even more sacrifices. But 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 who 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 are a really good long-term investment prospect if you

look at the model that I was talking about earlier. The challenges of, 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 think they're talking about the cost on their freedom. And if you look at the reasons that are given for a lot of non-daters 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 it just came back to people, 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? Well, 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 TikTok, a girl printed out 350 reasons not to have a child and then printed them all on a piece of paper. And the reasons ranged 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 with in 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 better or higher within some group. As soon as 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 along some sort of framework like donating to like protecting ecology or something like that. A lot of that loops back to status though. Yeah, a lot of that loops back to status. So I think what we're going to see, and this is really cool because it's going to change what it means to be human. When people, I mean, even more than the other options people have right now,

when Robo's sexuality, I always go back to the future, future, all my episode about this, that 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 called from the gene pool. In 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. And over time, that's going to, right? Yeah, that's really, really interesting. Because we all have 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 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're 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, I'm so excited. Well, I love what you're getting at here, which is how do you balance these two in the really cool thing? Is it biologically? We're already optimized to have kids. 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. They're almost all of them dead, right? 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, 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 Gram changes as you get older. I've been there was a joke that I got in trouble for on on Twitter Which is to say that I don't know if you know blipping. He's like a blues clue sort of character who dances around around fire trucks for kids And it's like yeah, I'm driving a fire truck. I'm playing in a dump truck. I'm playing on a playground, you know, and kids are like, all this is the perfect life. Before they go straight, people do. They see this. That's what they're optimized for. They're optimized for play and exploration. So an adult you see this and you're like, oh my god, his life looks parable. 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 the andriatetate is sort of the blip-ee for teenagers. This is what a teenage boy thinks is the ideal adult life. But to an actual grown man, you see this, and you can see sort of the deadness with it, 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, 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. And but to a young boy, this 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 gonna love a certain point. This stuff just becomes draw, you know? Because you were biologically programmed to want, 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 a project So if you 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 and your whole society tells you to optimize around those things happiness when you are a teenager and 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 things I used to do? Why aren't these status games not making 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 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 Sunday. On social media, have you considered a way of reprogramming statusful 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 I like, what about like banning porn or banning, you know, whatever, right?

Like with that force of 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, 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 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 not like humans are, well, it depends on you if you are free well, 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 Peter 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 brought into this philosophy that underpinned it. 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 promoter by trade, right? I run nightclubs for my entire career. I'm with that, I understand the power of trends and mimesis. I'm just thinking, at the moment, there is a memetic trend about, like,

motherhoods lame or dangerous or freedom restricting, changing that trend technology seems something that could be quite a high leverage opportunity. Yeah, Delta, you changed my mind on this, and I'm remembering conversations, because this is actually a debate I've had with my wife, and she you changed my 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. Which is, I think,

well, she would argue a core aspect of our advocacy, if we can, is to get it modeled in television shows and in other types of popular media that having lots of kids is a high-status thing. The big fear I have is, I'm just really afraid of people having kids because it helps their status. 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 that means their parents are going to be narcissists and they're going to be pretty, but you're right. I mean, hopefully we can move culture in a way that doesn't just target the narcissist in that. It's more holistic. Yeah. We're about to get on to talking about another third rail of your approach to embryos screening and genetic selection and stuff.

But do you see it almost like, for one of a better word, like a breeding experiment that we have, not an experiment, but a breeding future that we have with humans. What are there 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 race's 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 the independent factor that's being changed is culture, and the dependent variable that we 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. 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 and they're not going to continue that cultural group. So and there has to be this is actually a really interesting phenomenon 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 because 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 at Israel, they're 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, grits for the grindstone. They can move up within the culture or even if they're in a low status position. 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 panicious sort of convincing factor about why people shouldn't have kids. Not only are you contributing to 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, yeah, yeah. Okay, so the incentive. But this is, I was going to say,

this is also just the latest apocalyptic cult in the US. You know, it's not going to be the last one, you know. We keep having, if the US is dotted by anything, it's dotted by sort of apocalypticism and fears. The US actually, Jewish and Christian traditions more generally are dotted by this. And I think the next one we're gonna see is AI. Why would you have kids when AI is gonna kill us all? You know, it's just a cycle and it keeps going. And you do know that there's people watching this right now that is saying, well, what about you two? You two are just saying

that it's the birth rate decline apocalypse. You're the same Cassandra is that you're accusing everyone else of me. Well, because I would say that 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 climate is 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 and one of your recent podcastes, that 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.

It could even cause the major catastrophes, but it's not gonna turn us all into goo. 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, herald camping style, right? 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? What is the unique process that you went through with your wife? So this is spicy. What we did is we did full genetic sequencing of our embryos, and we use those genetic sequences to inform the order in which we implanted the embryos.

So why did we do this? Well, you have to do biopsies of embryos anyways, often to determine if they're half-liter, not everyone does this, but most people do. It's the normal thing to do biopsies of embryos anyways, often to determine if they're half-later, not not everyone does this, but most people do. It's the normal thing you do when you're doing IVF. We had to do IVF anyway because my wife was unable to get pregnant naturally due to, you know, having depression when she was younger, which calls her to develop anorexia, which meant that she doesn't like, mistrate naturally, and she actually would, with trans women, she often doesn't like a competition to see who has to take more hormones to be at one.

She has to do all of this stuff to have kids. So I had to do IVF anyway. We had to do the biocies 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, and she suffered from major depressive disorder, which also has genetic links. So we were able to look at that. And 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,

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. I have migraines. I was another thing we selected against. You could have selected against this and you didn't because people were going to make funny you on Twitter. Like,

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 antithesis of what we believe. We believe every family, every cultural unit has beliefs about good and bad genes, like our family, the other one,

are kids to get cancers. But that reproductive choice should always be in the hands of individual families, in 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 in humanity, and you're tainting the genetic purity of the human species by selecting things. I don't know. To me, that sounds much more eugenic. The knee being like, I don't want my kids to get cancer. And this is something many cultural groups have done

over time. Orthodox Jews have to do this with tastesacks. Some black communities have to do this with sickle cell. It's also an anti-semitic and racist position to call this sort of genetic selection and this sort of reproductive choice, eugenics. So I think that 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 bigger, 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 going to choose like a I said everyone gonna choose a buff child and it's like, no, my families aren't gonna choose little Aryan kids. They're like, what are you out of your mind?

Everyone's going to choose things that optimize for their cultural traditions, value system. 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 for IQ We didn't select for IQ, but you could theoretically select for IQ and we might do it in the future But IQ is such a like a bad metric because we're in the early days of this technology Eventually IQ will be 80 different things. Are you optimizing for creativity? Are you optimizing for in the same way? And 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 at a level that makes our existing ethnic diversity look right. And subcultures will be very intolerant to this new diversity, but I'm excited for it. I'm excited for it because I think that when we have new perspectives, when we have new

ways of doing things, a new cultural optimization, we get something more beautiful. And one of the core focuses of our foundation is trying to get the cost of this technology as low as possible. A lot of people hear about this technology and they go, oh, it must cost a fortune. I mean, theoretically, it doesn't really. You're looking at genome sequencing, which we've gotten tremendously cheap. Once the genome is sequenced, you're just comparing it to a data table. So right now, if you did this at the state level, it would be tremendously inexpensive to do. And you could do this for like 50 cents a family

and maybe like $50 per egg that sequenced and when you compare this to the cost of IVF, that is like nothing. And many states are already supporting IVF, like the UK, like Israel. So 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 see that when the problem is that it's controversial 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 to present 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 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. When that's- 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.

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 are making they don't end up making any difference. And all we're using this technology for Reno 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 genuinely. What do you mean, sorry, what do you mean when you say all to your eggs? Oh, it's the choice. It determines the eggs we choose first, but we still hope to use all of our embryos.

Not eggs, embryos. But 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 gonna take it out to some extent we are doing that. But 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. The way that I look at that argument is to say, 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, it requires you discarding embryos, and it expands the human fertility window. So to me, from my cultural 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. 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 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 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 of the embryos that 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 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... Right, 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, 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. Well, I did.

So I had Johnny and Omelie 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 the most compelling argument that I heard was as soon as you concede that, let's say, the testing that some Jewish groups, Ashkenazi Jews, I think, go through to ensure that they don't partner up with somebody that is going to give their child something that's awful. 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 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 improved outcomes in life What about somebody that's got not gonna have depression? What about somebody that's not gonna 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 Positive traits too. Is there a line that gets drawn in the sand for you with regards to this?

No, I believe every family should be able to make their own reproductive choices with traits too. Is there a line that gets drawn in the sand for you with regards to this? No, I believe every family should be able to make their own reproductive choices. And when we talk about things like IQ, he's absolutely right. If you look at this really rusted thing we have now, 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 real reasons why 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 give for two points of IQ?

And yet, the fact that you could make a selection here is off the table, but we also need to consider that eventually other species, we're going to have to do this. And this is something that people just aren't talking about. So if you look at, okay, disgenic pressures. So historically, like 50% of humans died, you know, in childhood or early in their life hood or something like that, right? 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 heredible 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 real 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 column 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 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 years, bunch of cycles and selecting? Let's say that you were able to do selection somehow that didn't involve discarding eggs because 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 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 that leads to negative genetic outcomes. to negative genetic outcomes. Again, I just go back to 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 you, Gen X, is. Because you are saying people born of these genetic choices are somehow genetically morbid

or like some sort of monstrosity. 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 family's genetic choices that doesn't turn into 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. I think that every parent should have the choice to make the, it's always funny when people, they say, oh, helium is whites think that 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. You're picking through the hoops to try and make them as viable as possible. Yeah, exactly.

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. There are some concerns I think that maybe women and men are overly reliant on it to believe that it can extend a fertility window out essentially indefinitely. IVG, which may actually end up doing this, maybe we'll see. I have a fan. You want to talk about what IVG is? Fuck 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 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 sperm from any human cell. So it means that two gay people could have a kid that's biologically theirs. But it also means you can do fancier things. You could have a poly couple of like 13 people, and they could have a kid that is biologically

out of theirs. It basically allows you to, I mean, in the simplest form, it's just egg and sperm for anyone. But this is really cool because it means, you know, if you're older, you know, you can have kids that are healthier healthier and a lot of people are having kids when they're older. But then, you know, you combine this with artificial wounds, who we're close on

that technology too. That completely, like when we're talking about cultural changes in technological and cultural solutions to technological and cultural problems, a lot of them are gonna look like IBG, a lot of them are gonna look like artificial wounds. What we may find is one of the solutions to the current collapsing birth rates is like gay triads or something like that, right? Or, or, um, the poly cities. Or like, I'm not saying that these things will work, you know, but, uh, if, if any of these sorts of cultural groups want to

survive into the future, uh, they're're gonna have to find ways to make themselves raising kids and keeping their culture alive work. 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 raise families and increase the cultural diversity of our species. 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 painful. You should ask my wife, I've seen these shots 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, but in it, it is painful.

I, 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 was in five days. The level of pain she felt when getting egg extractions and stuff like that was higher. We're not higher than pregnancy, but I mean it was hot and you're 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. So what I can say is it's a painful process, but if you see kids as like your mandate in life for me not having kids as the equivalent of suicide or something like that, it's just not an option for me. And I'm glad that my wife, you know, I love if you had her on sometimes, she's a weird woman, but really fun. She's seeing similar to I do, and so it's just not even

something we would consider. We're going to 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 it's really hard to get pregnant these days. Humans are becoming infertile. As a species, we're becoming infertile. And when you look at things like artificial wombs,

they may be one of our only shocks, because when I hear women the species we're becoming infertile. And when you look at things like artificial wounds, they may be one of our only shots because when I hear women who have these complicated pregnancy, when I hear stillbursts, oh my God, if your wife is carried a kid or you've carried a kid, when you think of a baby dying in that last trimester, and you know that with stuff like artificial wounds, we can 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 find all of this discussion, a combination of harrowing, inspiring, and interesting. 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 our book series, The Private Disguise Three, The Private Disguise Crafting Religion is the most relevant to this conversation. It's on Amazon. It's for $0.99. See book, Twitter account, Simone H. Collins, or just search Simone Malcolm Collins on Twitter. We have a joint account because I hate using Twitter.

And we're recently starting up our YouTube and podcast. We just uploaded the first episode of Starting It Back Up Today, which is the Simone Malcolm Collins based camp. So 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 worse your time. Malcolm, I appreciate you. Thank you. Offends, get offends