Shaun Newman Podcast - #384 - Malcolm Collins

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Amazon best selling author & founder of Pronatalist.org. While living in South Korea as the director of Strategy at the nation’s top-rated (by government survey) early-stage VC fund he uncovered at their current birth rate, there will be six great grandchildren for every hundred Koreans. This is tantamount to a disease wiping out 94% of the population over the next century. While Korea presents an extremist case, demographic collapse is seen all over the world. Even China’s best efforts to boost its national birth rate have failed to bring the population up to a sustainable rate. This will be a defining issue of the next generation. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

This is Brian Gitt. This is Ed Latimore. This is Danielle Smith. This is Kristen Nagel. This is Aaron Gunn. This is Vance Crow. This is Quick Dick McDick and you are listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Wednesday. Man, it has been, the week has been cruising along yesterday. Derry Cartel on the mashup. It sounded like most people enjoyed that. Yeah. And then it's been an interesting week. Been sitting down doing some interviews. Of course, we're going to get to another one today.

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methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil fuel location. For more information, visit them at Hancockpetroleum.ca.ca. He's a best-selling author and a pro-natalist. I'm talking about Malcolm Collins. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Malcolm Collins, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast.

Today, I'm joined by Malcolm Collins. So, sir, thanks for, well, first off, reach out and then hopping on. I am so excited to be here today. Yeah, well, your energy is going to carry us through. You're saying at the start, you're a little under the weather, and I don't know what. I'm going to start sipping on a coffee, I guess. The kids must have been wearing me down too, because I feel I'm like, you know, well, we'll see where we get to.

I'm sure your ability to perk a guy up will shine through. Anyways, to the person who doesn't know Malcolm Collins, let's start with who Malcolm is. And then, I mean, I'm sure we'll have no problem jumping into a bunch of different things. You want me to go? Okay, yes, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I'll get the tight version, I guess. Started my career as a neuroscientist working on brain computer interface,

so controlling electronics was your thought, similar to like Neurrelink. You may have heard of Elon Musk doing this stuff. Left that, went to Stanford for Business School, started a number of companies, then got into venture capital, private equity, then came back to the U.S. and bought a chain of travel companies called Travel Max. And then I also have written five bestseller books in the Pragmatist's series. and I run the pronatalist foundation,

and I'm starting something that's meant to replace the existing school system called the Collins Institute. Check it out at Collinsuit.org. And, yeah, just a lot of things. Honestly, it's easier for my things to just come up in conversation. Well, here, you brought up Neurrelink that you worked on something that was similar. This idea seems as BOTUS, to me, honestly, I think it seems pretty stupid, but maybe I'm wrong. You're a guy with a lot of information in there.

am I, am I the skeptic thinking merging human with computer just sounds like insane? Well, it's very doable. Like, it's not like it's wrong from a technical perspective. I actually left the field because it was advancing so slowly. And I don't know if Neurlink has actually gotten over the core challenges. The stuff they keep demonstrating doesn't look that different from the stuff we were able to do in the mid-90s. So I'm a little skeptical. I mean, the challenge has always been to keep the implanted electronics connected to the neural tissue for a long time.

It was never a problem of getting the nervous tissue to interact with the electronics or the electronics to interact with the nervous tissue. The problem is that astrocytic scars, like scar tissue made of galleal cells in your brain would form around it after a period of time, which caused a signal to need to get stronger and cause more astrocytic scar formation. So it's more an issue of can this last long term? If it could last long term, would you be like, sign me up? Like, are you like- Absolutely. However, I think that people, so there's a few problems with it. One, I think people vastly overestimate how much better their brain would be

if their thoughts could just like immediately get out into the world. One, our brain didn't really evolve to work that way. So if you just put like random electrodes into the brain, I really doubt you're going to communicate that much faster than you can with speech or through typing, which I think is one misconception. And then two, because you like you're, okay, I forgot what I was saying. Well, you're good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the other problem you have is how much will the computer be able to wear you like a puppet? And this is something that we go into detail on on one of our latest books of pragmatist guy to. crafting religion on the chapter on Sintience. So the public perception of Sintience, I think, is widely wrong. So I think that we sort of think of Sintiance as being the thing that's

driving the car of sort of our meat puppet body. But that's not really true. Sintiance is more like a compression algorithm. And by that, what I mean is if you, for example, if you're doing open brain surgery on someone and you like electro-shock a part of their brain to get them to move their hand and then you ask them, why did you do that? They will say and believe, oh, I felt like moving my hand. If you talk to a split brain precinct, this is someone who has the corpus callosum split in half, and you cover up part of their face, and then you are interacting with only half of their brain, which you can do, which is really cool. And you tell that one half of the brain was like a sheet of paper, pick up the rubits cube on the table, right? You pick up the rubits cube. And then you ask the

other half of their brain, why did you pick up the Rubik's cube? And they'll be like, oh, I've always wanted to learn how to solve one of these. And what you're seeing happening there is the sentience part of our brain makes sense of our actions and what the subconscious routines in our brain are doing after the fact. It's not in the driver's seat. And what this means, it's more like, as I said, more like a compression algorithm. But what this means from the perspective of an AI is it means if you plugged like Dolly II into somebody's brain and it was creating art and then you asked a person, did you create

that art, they would both say and believed that they had 100% created the art. And what's really interesting about this sense-making thing is that it'll get really detailed. So if you get somebody to make like a political position, like this was my political position, and then, like in a test of political positions, and then you suddenly change that political position and you say, why did you choose this political position? But it wasn't the political position they actually chose. They will go into enormous detail explaining their thought process in choosing a political. position they never really chose. So when you're explaining why you did all these things that the AI actually did, you will go into like enormous detail, which is pretty cool. But anyway, also

kind of dangerous. Also kind of dangerous? Can we just agree that sounds like horrendously dangerous? Like I to me, it's like feeding the brain propaganda and it believes it. It's like that's, our brains already do that. I think you can. I know most of the population with AI's day and the society would be much better. I think... Yeah, but is that because you could control it? Well, I mean, most people, so I mean, if the human brain is easily hackable, and then, again, something we talk a lot about in the book.

So, okay, I'll have to go back a bit here just to... So the concept of the book is that if you look at the human condition over time, we have sort of been two co-evolving things. Our firmware, which is like the pre-coded predilections we have about how we interact with the world, which is sort of like the firmware in our brain, you know, the sociological profile are the aspects that you pass onto your children. But then attached to that was our culture and our culture and our religion. And this was sort of like a co-evolving memetic package. And a lot of people think of memes today as things that like infest somebody and then they spread through getting that person to convert other people.

But historically, memes work very differently than that. Historically, most means were these sort of cultural packages, and they primarily spread by enhancing the fitness of the individual that was infected with them. So, like, religious conversion periods are actually fairly rare in history. Most religions spread by enhancing the groups that had those religions. And this is how you got things that evolved into religions long before our society got them, like, logically. Like, for example, both Judaism and Islam sort of evolved hand-washing mandates, like thousands, like, well, hundreds. of years at least before we realized the importance of handwashing at like a logical level because the groups that handwashed had more surviving offspring than the groups it didn't.

But what does this have to do is, well, some of these packages, these memetic packages recently have begun to act like super viruses. So you get super bugs in hospitals when you have like a bunch of immunocompromised people in a room together and then you have them around like a bunch of, you know, antibiotics and antifungals and stuff like that. And it provides a sort of safe environment for very, very virulent viruses and bacteria that are immune to most of our treatments to them to evolve and then spread out of there. Well, the internet and megacities acted like an environment where memetic super viruses could evolve. And the most dangerous of these, we call the the super virus. And it's public face

is mostly wokeism, but it's much more than just wokeism. And so when we talk about an AI, like hacking people's brains and reprogramming them, that's already happening. Like a huge portion of our population has had their brain completely hacked and their personality pretty much wiped and replaced. Similar to a... So how do you... So I actually, like that, to me right there actually makes a lot of sense. Okay. So then, okay, how do you reboot? I'm stealing your terms here. You're talking all this lingo.

So how do you reboot the system so that they can kind of like back up a second and be like, oh, what am I doing? Or is there no doing that? It's very difficult to do. So we saw what Elon Musk did with Twitter, right? There was an infection in Twitter, like this memetic virus had gotten really big in Twitter. And he basically had to do an exterminatus on the entire system. The reason why the virus is so good.

But how many, but fair, but how many people use Twitter? Do you know off the top of your head what the number is? Oh, God, no, I don't know. I don't mean that the virus was spreading outside of Twitter. I'm talking about Twitter as like a company. Because I know what you're saying. So there is 353 million users. And when you say must took over, there was 7,500 employees, I believe.

I'm just spitting out rough numbers here. So when you exterminate a virus out of, like everybody assumes that it's 353, million people have the virus. No, it's the 7,500 controlling how the 353 million interact. Wouldn't that be the same with the cities and everything else? Well, I mean, the virus has disproportionately targeted those in power of communication systems so that it can spread faster and further. I mean, I think Twitter is less of a problem than the education system. That's why we did call institute.org. That's why we're trying to replace secondary education in the U.S. because it has it is disproportionately targeted our means of social class accreditation in our society,

which is the university system, as well as mandated education systems. But hold on. I want to take a quick aside to talk about how the virus works and why it's so difficult. Sure, sure, sure. So historically, you can think of society as being like a collection of nodal clouds. Like every human is a node and you've got all these nodal clouds, right? And sometimes these nodal clouds overlap, but the clouds are sort of religions, companies, belief systems, et cetera, right?

So historically, the way that these Nodal Clouds worked is when a new node that wasn't on board with the message of the Nodal Cloud, the color of the Nodal Cloud, whatever you want to call it, would come into the ecosystem. To protect the ecosystem, it would just kill them. So if you had like a, if you were a majority of Protestant country

or a majority of Catholic country and a Protestant or Casolk came in, you know, they tie you to a stake and they'd burn you. And even node like organically flipped due to just like cultural evolution became a witch, you'd also just kill them. You put them on a stake and you'd burn them likely, right? And so what the virus invented, which is really interesting, well, it has a few key innovations which make it so, so, so virulent is the ability to just, people often think of of canceling, right? It's like the core tactic it uses. But it actually uses cancellation fairly rarely. It's more like a terrorism tactic. The The main tactic it does is like a covert shadow banning, where as soon as it realizes that you're an immune node, it begins to route all of the nodes around you, subtly. So it will decrease the volume that other people are hearing from you in the nodal network. You will subtly get passed over for promotions. You will subtly not be invited to important parties and stuff like that. And this is not the way networks used to work. And it's what makes it so hard to stamp out. Because as soon as you start, stamping it out, you mark yourself as an apostate, and it will do everything in its power to get rid of you. And this is what we can see happening with Musk right now, where, like, the media has just

gone, like, Berserk. Like underwear on heads banana, like trying to remove him from all other power systems he's connected to. And it's been ineffective because he's the richest person in the world. But I mean, if that was any of us, we'd be pretty screwed. yeah well yeah i mean he's the richest man in the world right like i mean you get to do whatever you kind of want to do and and they can't really uh they can't really stop you know um i mean they're trying well i mean they are going after you know his kid and his wife and stuff like that right like or not wife x but you know it was that that attack that was insane um and and they will probably see more stuff like that i mean he is an absolute

existential threat to the virus right now so when you talk the virus you're talking like a virus of ideas, yes? Yeah, a virus of ideas. Well, we actually argue in the book that it's more than that. So people sometimes liken it to a religion, and we argue that this is a misunderstanding of what it is. So in dogs, there's something called canine transmissible venereal tumors. And this is a type of cancer that is contagious.

And it evolved, or not evolved, but first appeared in a dog in America like a thousand years ago. And that dog is long dead. But now it's like also the most prolific dog in the world, which is really interesting. But it is more akin to what canine venereal tumor is to a dog, to a religion. We argue it evolved out of Hickside Quakerism. And we draw a lot of parallels that show that it probably did evolve out of Hixite Quakerism. It was like a endlessly self-replicating branch of it. Okay, you get, did you say Hick-Syke?

Hick-Site Quakerism. It's a branch of Quakerism. So, Quakerism. Explain it to me. You were throwing things at me this morning. I tell you what, you got me perked up, Malcolm. Here we go. Let's go.

Hick-Sight Quakerism. So in the 1850s, there was a schism in the Quaker community. There were the Orthodox Quakers in the Hick-Sighton. Hickside Quakers. So the Orthodox Quaker, okay, I've got to take a few steps back here. All right. So if you're looking at the various Christian branches, they are often largely, are often differentiated by what they view as sort of the primary source of truth in the universe, right? So if you look at the reformation schism between the Protestants and the Catholics, you had one group which said truth is best determined individually, like through personal research.

another group that said, no, truth is best determined by people who have spent their entire lives studying a subject and then have been certified by a central bureaucracy. What is interesting is we see these battles over and over again. This was the same battle we had recently over COVID. And actually the two groups, the Catholics who mostly moved to the cities and the Protestants who moved to more rural areas, you actually see even their secular descendants on either sides of this battle happening again. But anyway, within the Protestant branch, there were different ways that people believed

you could independently research something. You have things like the Calvinist branch, which would do things like they thought all authority was getting between them and truths. And so in many of their meetings churches, people would just sit and read silently because a preacher telling you anything could influence your thoughts. Now, Quakers had a similar sort of a thing. They believed truth didn't come from independent research. They believe truth came from a fire of truth that existed within every individual. And so like people would like stand up randomly and talk when they felt moved to in a Quaker meeting house. very similar to like what you see happening in Occupy Wall Street meetings and stuff like that.

Anyway, so essentially their highest standard of evidence for truth was personal emotional experience, but they still held Bible and doctrine above that. Well, they had a schism in the 1850s where one group of the Orthodox Quakers said the Bible is still the highest source of evidence, but we can learn more from like personal emotional experience. The Quakers, the Hickside said, no, no, no, actually personal emotional experience of like an aggregate community, is the highest order of truth. And that's the branch that evolved into the modern supervirus. I'm beginning to understand why

religion is so bloody, difficult to understand because it's broke and fractured so many different times on different major beliefs. Yeah. And then, I mean, what you just laid out is, You know, when you get into disagreements with a lot of different people, when you boil it down to like really simple things, well, that's my personal experience.

Wow, that doesn't overrule what the group wants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you actually start to think about that. Hey, that's a scary, not a scary thought. It's a, I don't know what the thought is. This is why when you talk to people that are heavily infected with the super virus, they will use logic that will seem very confusing to you, where they will argue. that a thing is or is not true because if it was true, the world would be less fair or more difficult.

So an example here would be like they will say men and women can't have different psychological profiles on average because if they did, that would be unfair. But that's like to somebody coming from a different cultural background, that argument sounds insane. it doesn't matter if it's fair or unfair. What matters is what is statistically and evidentially true to me. I mean, that's my culture. But then again, I come from sort of the Calvinist branch.

And do you want to, how did you get, like, how do you get, Malcolm, how do you get from point A being a little baby Malcolm to sitting where you're like rattling off all this stuff? is this like something that you know at 10 years old you were taught as a young kid or is it something that you um uh i don't know just found like very enticing and started digging into it and pulling on a thread and then the thread became you know ball of yarn and you just started kept pulling and and all of a sudden you know you're sitting there where you are or how did how did you get to where you're sitting there's two answers to this question there's the true answer and then there's the narrative

answer, which is probably going to be more compelling to the listeners. So the true answer, what's the true answer? A more boring answer. Well, I'm almost, people aren't familiar with many Calvinists these days often or what the Calvinist tradition was like, but all Calvinists were pretty much like this. They were just known for like always trying to create new religions or like edit the Bible or like invent crazy stuff or like just be really passionate about really insane like eschatology stuff. And they were really common in early America. In early America, over 50% of the population was of the Calvinist branch,

which has largely been replaced with the Armenian branch today. But that was just common. They were known for being high energy. In Albion Seed, they actually talk about this a few times, that foreigners were always like, I think they invented the rocking chair just so they would never have to stop moving. But the narratively interesting branches for me to say, this is something I got into really recently and to solve a specific purpose.

When I was at VC in South Korea, so I was a director of strategy at the number one early stage VC firm out there. And so I was always looking at like, okay, what's going to happen in the future of this country? What's going to happen in the future of this country? And I looked at the data, right? You look at South Korean birth rates right now. They're at 0.7 or 0.8. So that means for every 100 South Koreans, there's going to be between like 4.3 to like 6.4 great grandchildren. So we're looking at like a 95% population collapse over the next century.

So in the next 100 years, sorry, my brain's got to sink on that just for a second. Over the next 100 years, you're going to take 100 people and they're going to be down to six. Is that what you're saying? With caveats. I mean, if we invent life extension technology, like- Sure, sure, sure. But also keep in mind that when people are like, a life-extensional fixes, I mean, don't you know that for the past five years, the lifespan of the average American has gone down? not up. So, but anyway,

some confidence, but that's what you're staring at. When you talk about staring at the data, you're going, the data shows in the next hundred years for every hundred, and I apologize, what was the country? South Korea. For every hundred South Koreans,

it would be down to somewhere between four to six. That's what you're saying. There will be that many great grandchildren. So yes, it'll be down to four or six, depending on how long generations last, everything like that. But yes, that's the gist of it. But it's actually the gist of it. worse than that. That's pretty bad, isn't it? It's way worse than that for a number of reasons. So one is,

it's worse than that because the fertility rates continuing to decline every year. And that's what really got me is coming from Korea back to the U.S. We are today where Korea was in the 90s. And I think that a lot of people, they see the fertility rate dropping, they see the fertility rate dropping, and they think there's a floor. No country in the world has hit the floor yet. has hit the post-prosperity fertility rate declined floor. And because no country has hit it, I have to believe it may not even be there. It's funny, actually, I think with the UN or something, one of the major groups that used to project future populations, they actually used replacement rate 2.1 as the floor because they thought no country would ever go below that rate of fertility.

Now, if you look at the developed world, the average fertility rate is 1.5. It's incredibly low. You look at it. I love, you know, talk with progress. Sorry, no, I just want to make sure you're rattling off tons of stats, and I just want to make sure I'm pulling it in and my brain is comprehending what you're saying. When you talk fertility rate and you use numbers like 1.5, what does that mean? That means every woman is having 1.5 children on average. So for every person in the economy, that means you have to divide that by two to get the number of people that will be in the next generation.

So a fertility rate of two means every woman is having one kid. Oh, okay. A fertility rate of two means every person is having one kid replace them. So for every woman and man, there is one kid replacing them. But the reason you use two is because it's for women, right? So you divide it by. Yeah, sorry. But what that means is so if you have a fertility rate of 0.6,

which it looks like hard progressives have right now, that means on average, for every progressive in this generation, they will have 0.3 descendants. I mean, there will be 30% of them in the next generation. I hear people celebrating. There's going to be a lot of people going, good.

Their ideologies will die with them and they'll have no... Can we put a pin in this? Because this is going to really go deeper, and I agree with you, is true. So I was just going to take it. One thing that people often miss about falling fertility rate, on a worldwide basis as they look and they go, well, you can solve this with immigration, right?

Well, here in Canada, the thing they're talking about in the, in one of the articles you sent me was the fact that Canada's going to be immigrating 500,000 people a year and that will help alleviate all this declining birth rate, etc. So it helps more than you would think. So the bad part is, is that if you're, I'm in America, right? We take most of our immigrants from South America and Central America, but as of like three years ago, two years ago, I think at this point,

All of Central America, South America and the Caribbean, like on average, fell below replacement rate. So even most developed countries have fallen below replacement rate. Even a lot of the like a cultural boogeyman to, I think, conservatives like, you know, Iran, they fell from 6.4 in the 80s to I think it's 2.3 right now. So they're slightly above replacement rate, but only barely. And that was a faster decline than happened in China during the one child policy. India's falling below replacement, right, this year likely. So, I mean, just all over there. China, they'll be at half their population.

Like, they was in, like, I forgot, like, 45 years or something. They are bone. But so just to give you an idea, because a lot of people hear this and they think it's just a developed world thing. No, really, the only countries that are above our fertility rate right now are they, like... So why is that? I mean, why is it not just one country? Why is it the world that's all embraced whatever it is? Okay, I want to go back to the thing before this on progressive disappearing because it's a really interesting thing.

I just wanted to clear that shoot first, which is just a lot of people think, oh, this is like only a developed country thing. And I put a note aside for that one. I'll make sure we'll put a note for the other one, because let's talk about progressives really quickly because this is interesting. Sure. Progressives are actually just like non-players. They're not part of the world's conversation anymore. When I'm planning out my children's future and stuff like that, like progressives don't matter because they have lost. When a person gets severe radiation poisoning, it dries the DNA inside their cells and they can't replicate anymore.

And that person won't know, like this happens before they feel the pain of the radiation poisoning, but that person is functionally dead. They don't know they're dead, but their cells can no longer replicate and they're just a dead person walking. The progressive movement is that. When you talk progressive movement and you're talking radiation, who specifically are you talking about? Well, it'll make sense. Okay. So the progressives, if you look at data on it, so there's this whole field called genopolitics. And what it is, and every parent knows this, is kids inherit some of the sociological traits of their parents.

You always see little traits of your wife or your husband and your kids and you're like, oh, that's really sweet. But we can measure this a lot. And we can measure it using like identical twins that were raised by other families and then contrast them with fraternal twins raised by other families. But we can also measure them using like giant genome databases using something called polygenic risk scores. And it turns out that the way a person votes is I think 60 to 70 percent is the current estimate genetic. So this means that if you systemically delete an entire mindset from the population, you can have a pretty fast swing in voting patterns. Specifically, the math that we did expects that we should see about a one standard deviation shift towards conservative policies within the next 75 years. And this is actually concerning to me.

I am a solidly conservative person, right? But the extremism of the shift from the data is concerning even to me because it's not, you can look at like when we first did this, we did a big study using a research at Mayo Clinic and a bunch of data. It's a big data post. It was like five thousand people or something to find out who's actually having kids based on their political beliefs. And it's not the average conservatives that's having these large families, right? What we thought, and this is where religion comes back in. So the big thing, why did I start obsessing over religion? So my thing originally was, okay, so religious communities are having more kids than non-religious communities.

Religiosity must be a protector of birth rates, you know, of families, right? But I was wrong. I was wrong and I was so fucking wrong. So religiosity does not correlate that much or as much as you would expect with a person staying in their birth religion. And anyone who is engaged with the skeptic community should know this. The skeptic community is what the ACS call themselves, like the new ACS movement and stuff like that. A lot of them were some of the most fervent believers and some of the most like aggressive people was in their face before deconversion. And when you engage with extremist progressives, They show this religiosity, this fire in them, that you see sometimes. So I should have known that it wasn't this heredible component of religiosity that was protecting them. What is protecting people in these healthy, now remember I describe religions as being like these software that sits on top of our firmware and makes humanity work? the people who were staying in these older, more effective traditions and able to keep these high birth rates, on average, were those who just didn't want to listen to outsiders.

And they had a population cluster, which is called the far-right authoritarian population cluster. Now, the person who named it was like a hippie progressive, and you actually see it in progressives just as much. It is the personality cluster that makes somebody either a Nazi or join Antifa. You know, same sort of personality cluster, just like I don't

like anyone who's not in my group. And that is also going to increase along with generic conservatism. And so I think most of us like old school American conservatisms who want like trucker convoy types, who want

freedom who just want other people out of our fucking business and not trying to convert our kids. And speaking of converting our kids, that's why you see the efforts to convert kids getting so strong right now. It's because the progressive movement isn't able to replace itself through birth rates, so it can only do it through taking other people's kids. But anyway, sorry, I went on a long ramble there. Well, no, I'm just sitting back. I'm just enjoying the show this morning. I feel like one of the listeners right now, I'm like, I'm trying to hold on because this one's going to be

fast and ferocious, I think. I'm sitting here and I'm going, okay, so you're saying, we're going to start with there's like a list of things that I've got written down but let's let's just go off one of the things you just said the way of person votes we were just having this discussion literally yesterday yeah the way a person votes is 60% genetics is that what you said yeah something like that yeah so is looking up on Wikipedia just look up genome politics it's like even progressives accept this they just don't talk about it like it's a mainstream known thing there's been a lot of studies on this so if you're if you're uh if you're uh if if your bloodline disappears, that way of voting just automatically, it's not like you're getting a whole, I always assume, I always assume Malcolm, and once again,

feel free to just be like that is completely not true. I always assume that like socialism, well, not, you don't have NEP, but socialism, Marxism, that type of idea is really, really lends itself to any younger generation because it sounds very utopian.

It sounds very like we're all going to be equal or it's going to be this great world, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you get a little older, especially if you start a business, I would say, or have kids, or just start to pay attention to the world. And you go, that is a terrible idea. And I just assumed it was an age thing, but that's not the case. I wish I could pull up this study right now. But it was actually a great study on that that's often cited by people, basically post-colle.

while people do become more conservative as they get older, mostly the way you vote is stable throughout your lifetime. No kidding. Post college. And there was a great study on this. I can't pull it up. Just Google it. And that was my assumption as well.

Like what you said was my assumption as well. Because I would say I was definitely, I think, a lot more progressively minded when I was younger. Was I? Maybe. I mean, I thought different things. I feel like I was. And I feel like the older I get, the more traditionalist I become. And I'm like, which is, I'm like, I'm like, I've set it on here.

I've literally been like, wait a second, am I becoming a traditionalist? Like, man, when did that happen? Because I don't want to reverse the clock. I just think some of the ideas out there are bad shit crazy. Well, I mean, if I'm talking about my own political evolution, I don't really think my view on anything has ever really changed that dramatically. I guess I used to believe a bit more that globalism was a good. idea and like technocrats for good idea and now I don't. But other than that, I feel like the

political parties have moved around me, not that I've really moved. How about, well, well, that's a thought too, actually. Well, we see it everywhere. Like, I mean, they joke here, you know, with the liberals and the conservatives. They're, they're kind of, you know, like, they're just, they're on the same side. There's nobody who's on the right side anymore. And I don't mean the right set right or bad. I mean like the actual right side. And you know, the, I was listening to Rogan and I think it was Curry this morning when I was out walking. And they were talking about how they're, you know, there's really just one party.

Like nobody cares. It's either Republican or Democrats. And sir, a few things change. But they were talking about how the people in Wall Street and all that don't really care because they're kind of speaking similar languages. I don't know if you completely agree with that or not. I actually disagree with that to some. extent. So I would say often when people are like both parties are basically the same party, often they, when they advocate for political systems that like we know don't work, like objectively,

like communism or something, or like radical libertarianism. And the both parties have a narrow constraint and that they're operating within the broad range of things that we know basically works. Now, what we argue, so we have another book that just came out to Prague, which is guided to governance. And in that book, we argue what's the core difference between a conservative and a progressive position? Because I think that sometimes the positions can seem weirdly lumped together. You know, like, why does the group that's like against abortion and like pro guns also like pro free economy and stuff like that? Like people can be like, why are they grouped the way they are? And we argue that the core difference is what their optimization functions are, what the two groups are optimizing for.

progressives are predominantly optimizing for intra-generational quality of life and individual agency. By that what I mean is they're trying to maximize the quality of life across the population within the country within that generation with the caveat that they mean like in the moment, in the momentist of moment, i.e.

there was a pack of sugar in front of them. They'd just be shoving it in their mouths, you know, while, conservatives are optimizing for intergenerational cultural health and fidelity. So remember how I talked about, you can think of cultures as like these software packages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So these often evolve physicians.

Like there's a reason why almost every long lasting culture in the world today that has been successful in like conquered its neighbors is homophobic to some extent or has like some level of homophobia. And that's because tolerating gay people within your culture lowers birth rates. And that branch typically gets stamped out. And so that's why you see this on the conservative side of the sex. I'm actually pretty pro-guessically. There's probably no reason to be against them. But that's how that position got there. Also abortion, lowers birth rates.

So you see that there. But also the reason they want less government control isn't because they're less communist minded. You know, if you look at your local, I mean, who's more communists than the Amish, right, at the local level? You look at your local evangelical community. They're doing their food drives. They're often trying to make sure that their community has their needs met, whether it is, you know, health care or food drives or anything like that. What they don't want is an external force to come in and interfere with that and interfere with the way that they're passing their culture onto their kids and interfere with their local cultural setups. And you can actually see government coming and interfering with these things can kill cultures. So this is what happened to the Shakers. So the Shakers didn't breed at all. They didn't have kids. They didn't believe in sex.

They were another branch of Quakerism. And they were actually a thriving movement in the U.S. for a long time. And they did it by having orphanages. And they actually fell apart as a movement when the state began to offer state-run orphanages as an alternative to the Shaker-run orphanages. Yeah, well, their population just disappeared overnight. Yeah, basically, like within two generations, there's like two or three of them left. I don't remember where I was.

Well, here's my next thought. And just sticking here for a second on a way of person votes is genetics and that thought process. What about the effect of rural versus urban? We literally just had a live show on it. You know, when you look at, if you just watch any major vote across, Canada or the United States and you put it up on the TV the the the for us the liberal for you guys the Democrat is always in the urban setting I mean not always but I mean the vast majority of it come in the big urban centers how much of it is is just you

vote on what affects you in that if you go work for government and government isn't sitting out in the middle of the pasture with the farmer government is sitting in some big city or the union worker or etc. They're not going to vote against things that don't benefit them. So, I mean, that is true to the extent that the sort of different tribes within our countries have collated in different areas. But we actually argue in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion that this urban versus rural divide is much older than that.

And you actually see some cultural traditions that are really specialized at urban versus rural environments. And that the urban specialized cultures, so you see a number of differences, you know, between them. Like, for example, rural cultures that are specialized in rural environments are much more likely to see dog ownership is an important part of childhood. They're much more likely to believe there's a moral mandate to protect your own family with guns and stuff like that. But they also have very different relation to institutions. So rural individual or rural cultures are much less likely to trust a large institution. to protect their family or to operate effectively,

whereas rural cultures are much more likely to trust these large institutions. And that changes a lot of how the culture engages with a system. And when you have people in, remember how we talk about the heredible nature of one's political beliefs, well, you always have some genetic variation in between generations. So if you have a conservative family and they have, you know, 10 kids, right? And three of those kids didn't have sort of the conservative sort of preset social mindset. And they drifted more towards the progressive mindset. They get drawn out of the rural communities.

They likely will move to cities to be around people more like their kind, to engage with people more like their kind. And in so doing, not only are they intrinsically going to have a lower birth rate because of the progressive sort of mind. And this is the thing. Progressivism is not evil in and of itself. It's just more infected with the supervirus. than conservatism is. And the reason it's more infected is because the supervirus uses pro-sociality to infect people, and they are more pro-social often than conservatives. E.G. the supervise says, we will remove all pain from your community, and this offering works much better on progressives who also care less about their traditions than conservatives, so they're just more apt to be infected. I do not think there are plenty of older and healthy, progressive, urban, institutions which are not infected with this mine virus.

Anyway, I guess I just rambled there. Oh, but what I was talking about is genetic concentration. So when the people from the conservative family go to this city, that concentrates and further fortifies this family in their older traditions. And you begin to see people calcify in their traditions more. The longer a population stays stable in a region. Now, us in the U.S. and Canada, we don't have this as much because Most of our populations are new to the regions,

but we will see it over time, as you see as many places where people have lived in an area for much longer. You know, you do all these studies, follow all the analytics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The old hockey player is, you know, they bring analytics into the NHL. And then the old hockey player in me is, yeah, but you can't, some things you can't quantify. And in the world, in the world, can you quantify what putting everyone,

I'm speaking to Canada right now, putting everybody in lockdowns, telling them not to socialize with people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you get the freedom convoy. How the hell do you quantify something like that coming out of the population and how it's like altered, if not tens of thousands? Well, no, for sure, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people's mindsets moving forward on what they're going to do and how they're going to approach, you know, life in general. whether we're talking anything from school to food to how they operate around, you know, their communities, their mindsets, like everything, everything that, well, I guess I just, how the hell do you quantify something like that? Well, I can give you some ideas of how we can quantify it. Yeah, I want to say quantify it, but we can predict, I think, where things are going

and what the long-term ramifications of things like the lockdown are going to be. And I think China is a good place to look for that because, they've gone much crazier with their lockdowns than anyone else has. And they're still doing lockdown like things. My read is that the reason why China is doing this, the zero COVID policy and everything like that, the reason why they have everyone with these little apps on their phones that can record who they've interacted with and everything like that. And then they can flag them as like red, like don't leave your apartment, is not actually to deal with COVID.

My read is that China knows, like remember I talked. talked about China's population is about to collapse, like majorly collapse. Well, an economy can't survive when that happens. Like, you are looking at a state level collapse when that happens to understand why I'm just going to go quickly and do a little math here. So we have for a long time lived in a world where the economy was always growing, you know, because we've had an exponentially growing population and a linearly growing productivity per population. But we're about to start seeing that population flatten, decline, and then exponentially start to fall. Now, we have leveraged every part of our economy.

That means taking out debt. So this is the level of the city, the level of the state, the level of the nation. And debt is a miracle in economics because they can do something really amazing. If I am making a $10 investment, and $8 of that investment is debt, and $2 of that investment is equity, and I grow it to just a $14 investment, then I sell it. And this is what private equity companies do. This is the industry I meant, private equity. I've increased the equity portion of my investment three times, a good 300% because I have $6 left over, right?

Because the debt largely doesn't change. I mean, it only goes up like 5%. But if things shrink even a little, that now $10 investment goes down to $9, I haven't lost 10% of my equity. I've lost 50% of my equity. This is what caused the collapse of Detroit. the population declined by about 40% in a period of, I think, like 30 years or something like that. And what happened is, is that cities, you can see this in New York and stuff like that. You can look at New York.

And you're like, come on, man, not that much of New York's annual budget is going to debt. Only 7% is going to debt payments. And then it's like, hey, buddy, why don't you look at the payroll there? And you notice 30% of payroll is going just to pension plans. They took all of these expenses out when things were big. And if things start to shrink, a lot of these systems start working. So China is where they're going to have to deal with this first. And they used these lockdowns to sort of plan for the elite class to maintain their position,

despite a collapse of their economic system. And you're beginning to see this when you had like this bank run in one of the provinces where a bank lost all the money, they started to flag the people who had lost all their money as having COVID, so they couldn't then go to the protests. And this, and I think even Trudeau like mentioned something like this, like, oh, now we can use this all the time, you know, when he was talking about, I remember some quote or something like that. So what you're saying is, let me get, I think everybody in their dog knows the green red app wasn't for coat. Like, I mean, if you're on that narrative, you're missing a big chunk of what's going on. But what you're saying is they're looking at the future going, we are in trouble.

And so in order to ensure we don't have a giant uprising where they come and massacre us all, we're going to implement this so that we can control their anger. I think sometimes things like this happen without any individual consciously making the choice. I think even in China, the initial lockdowns really were motivated by COVID. I think the initial app design really was motivated by COVID. And then somebody realized, ooh, this is useful. I think that's sort of what happened in Canada in the U.S. as well. And I think when we talk about what's the future of these lockdowns,

what impact are they going to have in our society? Now the ruling class has a new thing in their toolkit that they are want to use because it is very useful if they ever feel like their grasp of power is waning. And keep in mind, they don't use this nefariously like we do. They don't want the idiots, the savages, the ruralites to come and, They don't know how to do anything, these deplorables. We have to maintain power so we can control them for their best interest. Nothing here.

Nobody thinks of the bad guy in this equation. Bill Gates ain't sitting on his billions of dollars with his fingers. Yeah, I don't think. I think he's trying to make the world a better place from his cultural perspective. And I think that cultural perspective is at odds with some of the things that I care about. And I think that actually as a society, we are good having multiple cultural perspectives. So remember how I talked about the COVID debate being oddly reminiscent of the Reformation? Well, so you can do statistics on what ended up happening to these various countries.

You know, the countries that were predominantly believed in expert authority. So these were both the Catholics and the Orthodox countries because, you know, you have a Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, everything like that. They also have this hierarchy of authority. Well, they have negatives in those countries. So you get much higher rates of corruption. You get much higher rates of much more likely to become fascists. They stay in monarchies much longer. But you get positives too. They also are much better at things like the classic Irish cop, you know. And even looking at the Supreme Court in the U.S. right now, I think it was the last Supreme Court makeup. Eight, I want to see, seven of the nine. So only two of the Supreme Court's justices weren't

raised in a Catholic family. And the two that weren't raised in a Catholic family were raised in Jewish families. There were no Protestants on the Supreme Court. This distrust of authority and of institutions makes people bad at engaging with institutions when they really need to. So I think that it's best to live in a multicultural ecosystem. And the problem that China had is it didn't have this multicultural ecosystem. When I talk about this split between experts being good at doing things and needing to decide things for yourselves, I think cultures, there isn't a correct answer. The correct answer is you need some of each viewpoint within a society. But when one grabs too much power, then you end up with problems. And I think right now, because the academic system

has become a class certifying mechanism within our society and the academic system has this absolute belief in the expert consensus method of determining what's true, that it has just consolidated power for itself in a way that's really toxic to society. at large. So where does Malcolm Collins think Western War, maybe the, you know, as long as nukes don't go off and we don't have that go down? Let's just assume that we're living in 1984 a bit where, you know, we're always at war and everything else. Where does, where does Malcolm see the next, you know, 100 years? Yeah, okay. Well, actually, I want to, I'm, I want to kind of shrink that time for him a little bit. I have a hard time thinking about 100 years.

Just in the sense that I'm 36 and I go, well, I ain't going to be 136. But the next 50 years, that puts me to 86. That puts my kids to where they've had kids and my grandkids, hopefully God willing. So I'll start making prediction. Within the next 20 years, China is going to collapse as we understand it. This is going to be the thing that really begins to set the dominoes in motion. China basically, for a billion reasons, that Peter Zahan does some great stuff on this. But more generally, it's just obvious that because of their fertility rate, they're going to collapse.

They cannot keep their current system up. Now, what does the China collapse look like? That is harder to know. Could they split into city states? I don't know. But where the collapse really matters to the rest of the world is China has done something very unique with their economy that a lot of outsiders might not really be aware of. So remember I'm talking about economies being sort of a problem. pyramid scheme today in the West, and they are to an extent. But China is more like transparently

one. And they did it with their real estate. So what China did is their economy has had multiple total crashes in a way that the U.S. economy has it. So the average Chinese citizen is actually pretty afraid of putting their money in like the stock market as we understand it because it's so controlled by the state and everything. So where they mostly put their money, 73% is in real estate. Okay. And the reason why the real estate market has never had a crash in the way they're stock market has had a crash is because when the Communist Party took over, they nationalized all the real estate in China. When they began to become more capitalist, they realized that they could sell these 99-year leases on real estate out of urban centers. So if land was classified as

urban, it could be sold on these leases. These leases, you can really think of them as irrelevant. They're probably not going to disappear. And the reason I say that is because the price of land isn't really determined by the lengths of the lease. I don't need to get into the specific of that. You can basically ignore the lease. The fact is that the city-states realize that they can make money by selling these leases. And so then what ended up happening is, so China's, it's sort of like us in that they have the individual provinces, and the provinces are sort of like our states.

And so money funnels up to the federal government, but provinces are largely in charge of spending on whatever's happening at the state level with the taxes that they collect. Well, taxes. They're really bad at collecting taxes. By some estimates, they're only collecting like 3% of the taxes they should be, which is just like non-functional. Like if you're looking historically when a government can't collect taxes, well, but anyway, how do they get their money? Well, one way that they've been getting money is by rezoning this rural real estate as urban real estate and then selling it. Well, this has been a, this is why the government of China has always needed to maintain this housing bubble.

Why the housing bubble had to stay and why they kept constructing these houses that no one was living in. And China, very interestingly, a house is actually. where it's more if it's completely unfurnished and never lived in than if it's lived in because houses are trading almost like kind of Bitcoin, like an imaginary thing that people are used to always going up, so it always goes up. And so they're trading these housing units. Well, okay, why does all this matter? Why am I going into this whole housing unit economy that they have? Because if the Chinese system collapses, they stop needing the materials to endlessly build these housing units. And this industry is what's been propping.

up most of the developed world. So if you go to many countries in the developed world, South America, et cetera, right, the developing world, you will see and you look at where the money and their economy is coming from. You'll often see like 60, 70% is coming like raw material exports. So when China falls, the developed world falls. Now, we live in a globalized world. So this then begins to impact the U.S. Now, Zion is right. The U.S. is in a uniquely good position and that as the world begins to declobalize, will be in a much better position of power, but our individual quality of lives will definitely go down.

And the whole pyramid scheme that we've built for ourselves begins to really hit the wall, I think in Europe, within like the next 30 years, because a lot of European countries are going to realize that they just can't handle this population crisis they're having. And you're going to see this in Korea as well, and likely in places like Japan. So which countries are okay,

which countries don't have as much of this population crisis? So I think surprisingly to many conservatives is actually the most diverse countries that are usually the best. So if you look at the countries that have been able to keep like everyone who's not like them out, like Korea, right, they have virtually no immigration. They have some of the lowest birth rates. The countries are the highest birth rates are countries like the U.S., France, Israel. And they are often some of the most diverse countries. So it seems like cultural diversity is a strength to some extent, at least in terms of overall fertility rates. And it's even true when people immigrates.

So when like a Korean immigrates to the U.S., their fertility rate jumps by like 50%. They go from like 0.8 to like up by 0.4. Anyway, still below our population rate, but I don't remember where it's going. Oh, wait, what's the future going to be like? Oh, yes. So this is where it all gets really interesting.

So you have the whole world economy collapsing because we're no longer living in this world where the economy grows every year on average. And the economy shrinking every year on average. So that means people need to be much more targeted in their investments. And the only investments that then makes sense is investments in technophilically oriented growing population clusters.

And that means population clusters matter a lot more. You are going to be paying attention to which groups and which cultures are able to motivate a high birth rate and technological engagement. Because not everyone who motivates a high birth rate has technological engagement. And the group that really comes out on top there is Israel. But yeah. Well, I just wanted to pull this up. Because I was like, what do I got going on here?

Sean, give me a sec. I'm trying to pull it up and it doesn't want to pull up. While you're pulling it up, I can be. Praxis is the other thing that's really worth keeping an eye on. So these guys are a bunch of like tech bros that are looking to get like an island somewhere in the Mediterranean and make it a, like a special economic zone that has some level of autonomy. And they're very pro natalist. They've contracted with us to do like the Collins Institute. Like our schooling system is going to be their schooling system.

So they may actually get an above repopulation. And if you get like a small concentration of like technophilic people that are breeding above repopulation rate, that becomes a nexus of investment. And so what I see is the future transforming into clusters, which I call havens, of high population cultural groups that are like economically engaged. Anyway, pull up what you're talking about. Well, you brought up the ghost cities. And I've heard I've heard this, but I don't know why I know. why I never just type it in and see what comes up. And the first thing that comes in is China has at least 65 million empty homes,

enough to house the population of France. It offers a glimpse in the country's massive housing market problem. And then if you scroll, you know, you just look, it's like these, I was, I don't know, my mind had built in it like, kind of like after World War II, those houses they built in the states that are all identical, you know, and, and what it is is, it's actually. giant structures that it look like high rises. And I'm sure there's more to it than just that. Anyways, yeah, like, I just, I, you know, it's funny.

When you bring it up, I hadn't looked, I hadn't even, you know, I hadn't thought through the problem and you laying it out. I'm like, oh, yeah. Like, I mean, eventually that has to crumble. Like, I mean, you can't just, can you imagine if Canada or the United States was building ghost cities? I feel like we would be losing our minds. Would we not?

Yeah, but as I said, it's better to think of it like Bitcoin than like real estate in the U.S. They're trading like tokens. Sure, but it's built in the real world, which means the elements are going to have their way with them, which means eventually it's just like it's eroding. Oh yeah,

they're constantly tearing them down and they're building new ones in their place even before like people have moved in. It's a very interesting sort of economic cycle. Yeah That's that's Anyways I find that very interesting Okay

So China's the catalyst for everything So you yeah Well But look at what's happening with Russia Ukraine, NATO All this different parts Isn't that going to change Like couldn't that just like on a dime

Just switch everything and away you go Or you just always lean back to population and go Russia has deleted an entire ethnicity From human history their own What they are doing is insane and stupid and anyone who thinks Putin and some 4G chess guy

he is probably one of the dumbest world leaders alive today. Really? He cares a lick about the Russian people because they are already well below repopulation rate. And the Ukrainians were basically their brothers. They were very close to each other. And then delete that

population as well. That was also well below repopulation rate. We live in a world today where people have to stop focusing on dirt and start focusing on humans if you look at something, you know, throughout... Do you think, Malcolm, that's when you look at Russia invading Ukraine, what you see is a guy wanting the land and not other issues going on there? Well, no, he really wants the natural resources that are in the, whatever it's called. He wanted to prevent them from selling...

My read is that he wanted them to not sell the natural gas that they had found, which was this huge thing. And it would have really undermined Russia's economic position. And because Russia operates like a sort of more like an energy company than like a country, you know, anything that undermines their economic position is really bad. And so I see this as mostly being an economic move in the long term that he didn't expect to get as much pushback. But as soon as he did get pushback, he really needed to end things before killing an entire generation. Because Russia doesn't have the people to spare right now.

It's interesting. you know have multiple well I mean I even just heard Rogan talk about it because I listen to the Zahan interview as well and I found that interesting

because I've heard different sides of this and the one that has always made the most sense in my brain but you know you're offering a different look into it was essentially the Cuban missile crisis right

like the United States does not want Cuba to have ties to at the time it's cold war enemy And if you look at Ukraine's proximity to Russia, NATO doing what it was doing there, and some of the stories you hear out of there, you go, well, it feels like Ukraine is Russia's, or the United States is Cuba. I hope I said that right.

Yeah, but we have stuff all around Russia's border. Like, I hear what you're saying, but I don't think, I think that that's an argument that's been made. And it probably has some truth to it. You know, there are multiple truths to any situation. So that might have been motivating some people in the Kremlin. The economic concerns might have been motivating other people in the Kremlin. The question is, which thing had it not been there, would there not have been a war?

I don't know. Maybe the two issues compound on each other. I mean, I think you're absolutely right there. The U.S. did precipitate this to an extent through NATO. And I don't disagree with that position. But I think it was probably less of a motivator than the economics. You know, going back to this pro-Natalist thing, this is why I, The whole thing started with you reaching out with this.

And I was like, what on earth is this? And then you read it, you're like, okay. And certainly we've talked a little bit about population and declining birth rates and that different thing. You got to explain it to me. Because I'm pro-family. I'm pro-kids, but I guess I don't think, and maybe this is a flaw of my part of the population,

is like I think about the next, you know, if I'm realistic, the next five years. And certainly if I can extrapolate out, if I continue to live good, maybe this is where I come of it. And I want to have kids and I want to have grandkids. And so we've done our best to do that. But I've never really put it on a grand global scale. Is that kind of where your mindset is or am I getting it partially wrong? Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not really trying to keep the world population growing forever. I actually think the population collapse is completely inevitable at this point.

There is no steering the Titanic away from this ice sport anymore. I am not part of the group that's trying to steer the Titanic. I'm part of the group that's trying to ready the lifeboats so that, you know, some of us can survive past this moment. in some aspect of what we think of as modernity and modern culture and it survives. Now, I do need to make a caveat here, which we haven't gotten to yet, and I'm surprised you haven't mentioned it, but AI. AI could change everything, everything. If AI can replicate workers in an economy at scale, then the population issue becomes a non-issue

because the AI just begins replacing humans. I mean, we do have other issues that we still need to pay attention to, like the genetic shift in humanity and the changing like proclivities of humanity and that's something to think about long term. But AI could just wipe the whole population number thing off the map. Yeah, so our goal is really ready the life votes. It's find the other families that are somehow resistant to this population collapse. And our goal is to really find a diverse array of other families. One of our core concerns about the population collapse is the increasing homogenous. of the world post-collapse.

Like I actually, and you've probably heard from some other things here, I believe that multicultural, multi-ethnic ecosystems are always stronger than monocultural monoethnic ecosystems. And the world right now is moving to islands of monocultural ecosystems, and we are trying to set up the infrastructure to allow at least one multicultural ecosystem to survive. how are you going to like well i shouldn't say how are you going to do that you know like there's a different little ecosystems forming uh here in in my area just because of what's been going on uh one continues to go on since you know some people will say that you know their eyes were open 20 years

ago but certainly a lot of become open in the last two three years and so there are yeah so i would say our school is one of the core things that we're working on here. So the Collins Institute.org, we are trying to completely rethink the way secondary education, so middle school and high school works and create a secondary education system that can slot people directly into really high prestige, high paying jobs without that added cost of like the class certification university system. And, you know, we've been working with the University of Austin. They're actually a partner of ours. So they're another group, you know, working on similar things to us. And what we are trying to do is it to create a really high quality, really low-cost education system that

doesn't erase people's birth cultures. Because a core focus of the existing education system is acculturation or teaching kids morals. And what they really mean by that is acculturating kids to the predominant culture in our society. And what that does is it erases the unique aspect of their birth cultures. And I think people like me who really believe in multicultural ecosystems can sometimes seem an anathema to your progressive who claims to believe in multicultural ecosystems but doesn't really act like they do. I mean, they systematically are erasing cultures, whereas I'm trying to create a system that allows for kids to go through school while still being different, still carrying on the traditions that their family has created for them

and worldview their family has created for them, even if society sees that as deplorable. So how are you going to do that? Like, I assume by not trying to indoctrinate, but at the same time we're teaching kids. Yeah, so we do a lot of systems to do this. One of the systems we use is, so on the tests that we use in our system, we grade every question on the test against authentic assessments, which are like real world things that students can do. So like in English, like the milestone test, a student will do something like write a fan fiction and see how many five-star reviews it gets. And like that's, determines their grade. But then we look at the multiple choice questions they had answered in English up into that point and look at how much they correlated, the answers to them correlated, was the students who actually did well on the test. So the teachers aren't determining what question is true. Real world environment is. And where this matters is their partnership was

metaculous, which is a forecasting company. So they do like prediction marketplaces and stuff like that. If people are familiar with betting markets on like future events and stuff. Anyway, So we have kids when a question is politically sensitive predict future events like future political outcomes, the results of like economic changes made by politicians and stuff like this. And then we can grade the other politically sensitive questions against the student's objective ability to take in knowledge about their world and about their environment and predict future events. So these questions are not, there is no where for our ideology. to accidentally come in and influence the kids, kids are being judged by the correlation of these questions to their ability to actually determine future world of it.

That sounds really fucking confusing. I mean, I almost, I feel like there's going to be a listener going, Sean, you're dense, and I'm going to go, yes, I am dense. That is fair. You're saying you teach your math, it's fine. But as soon as there is something that has political, motivation, whether you're talking religion or into just politics of the day. Now it becomes a way of interjecting, I'm going to say algorithm, I don't know if that's the right word, but essentially

a way of modeling that the kid can interact with. Am I getting that right? So right now, they will injecting. So the questions and answers and the way that we grade our kids and the materials that we are giving our kids are often subtly, you know, you can look at your kids reading lists and stuff like that, right? Like they are meant to teach them certain things, certain ways of viewing the world, right? And we see that as a bad thing because that steers kids towards a homogenized view of the world. And we believe that kids are much better if they have, especially in a modern world economy. So let's take a step back and talk about the way the school system was really sort of invented not long like our modern school system not long after

industrialization and the concept of the replaceable part was invented and it was originally invented to sort of train um uh bureaucrat who were used in sort of british administration and in their various colonial areas right and the idea was is they were training them to be sort of interchangeable cause um so that you could broadly know anyone was like one grade can be replaced was anyone else who has that same grade, right? And then society developed more, but at society developed more, you had the next thing happen, which was the rise of the megacity. And then in the megacity, you had these large corporations and sort of skyscrapers. And they also really liked this vanilla product, where they could just judge the quality of a student from the score that the student had on

their head, but those students were still broadly interchangeable was all other students. globalization changed everything. Now, and AI changes it again in the same direction, but more, the worst thing you can be is a replaceable part. Because that replaceable part is the first thing that gets globalized. That's the first thing you develop an AI to do. The talent, what we need kids to be able to do is have extremely lumpy skill sets, extremely lumpy extremist specialization.

And that's what our school system is trying to create. create, but that's a different part of the school system that creates it. So yeah, we were saying that they interject ideology into kids, and we are trying to prevent our ideology from sleeping into kids by objectively judging. We don't create any material in our school. Every subject in our school is basically like a mastery level, like long division. And then under that, like all we do is the test. Under that is all the places where a student could learn that online,

almost like a Reddit thread, where students can then upvote the content that was most useful to them in studying for the test. And then those votes are modified by how well they did on the test. So the student has total control. Like we are not trying to inject anything into kids. That's a completely organic system. But the way we prevent manipulating kids in the questions we ask them is by correlating the questions with, I forgot what I was saying.

Oh, yes, with future market predictions. So you don't get something like, remember the Hillary elections where everyone was like, every pollster who said that Hillary could lose was like, you are dumb, you are never going to be a pollster again. You are like objectively wrong as a pollster. But no, they were objectively wrong. They had just brainwashed themselves because they had learned about politics through the lens of their ideology. We saw this again more recently was the Russia attack on Ukraine. Everyone was like, oh, this is going to be over in a week.

But they were all wrong. But a student at West Point or something who had said, if Russia attacks Ukraine, you know, they will definitely be bogged down and they're not going to win in a week, that would have been graded as wrong. Yet that student in the future we would know had special knowledge about everything else. They had a clearer view of reality

than the systems in power had of reality. And our system needs to pull out those views from students and make them what the other students are being graded on. That sounds fascinating. I when I when I hear that my brain immediately goes to podcasting actually right you're not looking for the vanilla guest

you're not looking for for you know somebody who who speaks the general narrative over and over and over again because that's not how you get solutions you need to we have problems in the world I think we can all agree on that and that means we have to look at it through a different lens and try and figure out different things

and, you know, I think it's, geez, was it Cassandra's? When they talk about some of the worst disasters the world has seen, there were always people who saw them coming, and they always got laughed at. And it's like, well, that's been a book now. They've written a book on those people because there's like, well, what did they see and why weren't they listened to? That's kind of what you're talking about,

just on a more scalable side. And as you find those people, you want students to model what they're doing so that you can solve, well, I mean, I guess I'm just extrapolating it out further. You can solve the problems of the world because, you know, you need to look at these and not be just construed to what the population is pushing on you. Well, I mean, to some extent, we need a mirror culture to the one that the virus has infected because the virus looks for anyone who deviates from the mainstream narrative and a racism. even if racism from positions of power and racism from things that a person could hear about, because they are a threat to the virus's spread. And the virus doesn't care of it later changes its mind. You know, if the virus canceled somebody for saying, you know,

for saying that we should be blocking flights to China and said, oh, no, this person's a racist, you know, early when the COVID was spreading. That was actually the narrative at the time. says we should block fights to China, the racist, anyone who says you should, you should wear masks isn't woke enough because masks are for doctors, of course, and they don't even work. You know, I don't know if anybody remembers when this was the thing. And then it changed its mind, but it didn't rehabilitate people. Like remember the CEO of Levi's, you know, she was in line to be CEO. She's VP of Levi's or something. And she said, hey, we're actually really hurting

like poor kids and bipot kids by shutting down their schools disproportionately. And, you know, these school shutdowns are actually a bad idea and they're not really playing out our larger objective and she got fired and now everybody knows this is true but has it gone back? Has it rehabilitated her? No, because the point was to find anybody who had the internal constitution to speak the truth and get rid of them because one of those people is always a danger to the virus. The virus only cares about spreading. It doesn't actually care and you can see this in the places that infects, you know, which the virus pretends it cares about pollution, right?

Now 7% of the big pollution island in like the middle of the ocean is just masks. Like, it doesn't care about any of this shit. Anyway, sorry. So we took a brief pause for... To let my dog in. I'm sorry, yeah. Did I hear your name of your dog as professor?

Oh, yeah, she's the professor. Cool, cool. Here, well, here, let me throw this idea at you. Because, you know, you're a guy who's staring for, far out into the abyss, into the future, and looking at possible problems and trying, you know, and seeing what they are and then sitting here going, well, the Titanic's going to hit and, you know, and I look at that and I've had similar thoughts, not to the degree and certainly not through analytics, just through experience and talking to a lot of people. And I come back to this idea of,

so, and once again, I apologize, listeners for sharing this idea for the 17th time, but I look at Malcolm, I'm curious his thoughts. So there was five of us, myself and four others, started a book club in 2018. And this book club was a group of men. It was based around being better husbands, better fathers, very idealistic. But we read books. We discussed things. We argued a lot. So when COVID came, we had already been meeting for, you know, three years and, or well, I guess two years. And there was a level of trust there. So when, you know, different things started happening, we argued about it argued about it, argue about it, argue about it. Now, fast forward to where I'm at today, and I look at, I look at some of the, you call it the, you know, the super virus, the, the mind virus. It doesn't,

whatever you want to call it. It's an ideology that is spread into every institution. It doesn't matter if you're in the smallest town to the megacities. It's there. Now, and the only difference is, is the ability for people to stand maybe up to it or to articulate their thoughts, in a way that the middle portion of the population, who doesn't really care, just wants to go on with their everyday life, they sway back and forth between who has the better argument, or who has more pressure, maybe,

or maybe who has more of the key roles. And certainly right now, the key roles are, well, we're not winning there. You know, like the Canadian government is an interesting thing to watch. It's pretty terrifying. So my thought process, and I get to speak on it here, is, is, and I only speak to men. I, you know, women, you know, I'm sure there's somebody out there who can figure that out, and I chuckle about saying that that way, but love all my women listeners.

But to men, I go like, listen, we need to form groups of men who talk and discuss things and argue it out. And diversity is a good thing. I think, you know, having, you know, over the last two years, sticking vaccinated and unvaccinated in a group is a smart thing. because they all want, for the most part, if they're willing to come into a group like that, they all approach the last couple of years for what they believe was the best for society. And the thing with this idea is,

this isn't a one-day fix. This is like if you take, in the five years that come after starting it, if you start it tomorrow, that your life can be a little better, and then you keep doing that year after year after year. In 20 years, in 25 years, what does the world start to look like if that was brought up?

And I go, my kids will have a better, we'll have a better life because of this. Because more men in this particular case will be standing and talking about values, we'll be able to articulate it in a way that the majority of people who really don't give a shit. They just want to go to their job and work and carry on and watch the ball game or the hockey game or the football game, have a couple beers. I'm being very generalistic here, but go fishing, go hunting. It doesn't matter.

They just want government out of their life. and everything else. While you want government out of your life, people eventually have to take over that government and have to start to have the same common thought process, be able to articulate it, and foster that idea. What's your thoughts on that?

Well, I mean, I think it's largely correct. However, I think it's overly optimistic to think we can solve this with an generation, but I think solving it between generations, you know, if you have a group like that, I think the key is to find ways to involve your kids. You know, create a culture, you stand for and make sure that kids understand what it means to be in that culture you stand

for and that they want to replicate it with their kids because so much of what we do we have lost the intergenerational nature of it and that's how we went at the end of the day because we have kids and the kids will stay in the cultures we create and not the culture that other people are creating well i don't know you say when and i go i think i'm beginning to understand this this little game has been playing out for thousands upon thousands of years. And there's never, it's, it's, some will call it a pendulum, some will call it whatever. And it's just, it's a game that's been playing out for the course of human history. Like, I don't know where it begins and where it ends, but it certainly is, uh, is something that, uh, has been playing out. And so,

whether you win, I just think you, you, you pull back some of the control, because, Because right now, the control in Canada is, you know, full on woke. It is full on, you know, like they just brought out the 15-minute cities. You know, there's a website now that shows across Canada, all these 15-minute cities. Once again, like, when you see Emmington is the city nearest me who's talking about it, it's like the idea behind it isn't that nefarious. Although if you look at Oxford in the UK, it certainly is, right? not allowing people to go or having to have a pass to go to other parts of the city and blah, blah, blah, free.

But the original idea, I see why it's appetizing. It's the idea as it's played out over the course of the next 50 years or maybe less, maybe less. Because I mean, with goals like 2030, 2035, 2050, you'd be a moron not to see those and start to see what they're trying to implement across a culture across countries and not see where that could lead us. Yeah. I mean, I agree. Do I have Malcolm Collins' speeches? Interesting.

I mean, I think when you talk about the game playing out for a long time, I think people look and they're like, well, we'll fix this population thing. We always fix everything. It's never as bad as people say. And I'm like, this isn't the first time an empire has collapsed. You know, Rome collapsed, ancient Greece collapsed. We've been through this cycle over and over again as a species. and even like our civilizational unit was in the species.

And I think that we can begin to look for what we can expect the collapse is going to look like. But what's cool is that a collapse can bring opportunities for groups that are expecting it. And I should be clear, when I say a collapse, I do not think we're going like road warrior style. I think it's going to be like Gaul during the collapse of the Roman Empire, right? you know, people might scuffle over positions of power more. It may become more normalized that like politicians end up getting assassinated. You're going to see stuff that you used to see in stores not show up on the shelves quite as much. Infrastructure won't be as regularly maintained.

But broadly speaking, life will go on. And what's great is we get to choose what happens next, those of us in this culture that's having kids. Hmm. That's an interesting thought. You know, I agree with you. The slow decline is what you're talking about. It's not like, I mean, certainly if war came to our doorstep, that would be one quick way to have it to change rapidly. But sitting here in North America, when you talk about store shelves not being as full, it's like, but there will still be food. I mean, unless there's an absolute catastrophic thing happened, it's this slow decline where, you know, the peak of where we're sitting. that slowly goes down and down and down and one day you wake up and you, I don't know, I don't know. It's just a slow decline. It's, but it's interesting. What I like about what you're saying is, you know, but if you stare at it, there's opportunity. You prepare for it. You work on things. You can weather any storm that comes in preparation in the good times. I had a farmer once tell me you always prepare in the good times because you know the bad times are coming. Well,

we talked early on about birth rates and a bunch of different things. And what I'd written down was, has the world embraced it? Because you mentioned a whole list of countries. And it isn't just Canada and the United States and, you know, maybe Europe and a couple of other places. You're talking about like not every country, but as a whole, the world's birth rates look like they're declining. I'm sure there's a few spots that it's not that case. But you're painting a pretty bleak picture when it comes to birth rates. Why has, why has society, like, is there anything, you can just be like, that's why. So let's be, I mean, over half the world's population lives in a country was a below

repopulation birth rate right now. And the countries that have above repopulation birth rates are generally desperately poor. This is not something they have chosen for themselves. And most of these countries would prefer, let's be clear, we're like, we're not trying to keep these countries poor or something. We believe in a cycle, right? Like these countries should develop. They should achieve prosperity.

their birth rate should drop naturally like they do everywhere else, and then we should find a way to fix the post-prosperity drop, not fix this by keeping people poor, which you can't do, like countries that do things like ban female education, you know, they see a jump in birth rate. But anyway, why aren't people freaking out about this? I really think, you know, there is this episode of Stargate SG-1, show I used to love as a kid.

It's a couple episodes with a species called the Ashen. So the Ashen, the species. They gave humans technology. that extended lifespans, additional vaccines, and stuff like that, but it also slowly sterilized the species. And they were one of the only enemies in this entire, like, 14 season thing that they just weren't able to come up with a way to beat. And the only way they beat them was by sending a message back in time,

warning about this threat. And I feel like me coming from Korea is the message being sent back in time and saying this doesn't stop. because birth rates as an issue are very sort of like an anti-meam, you would say, and that it doesn't spread very well. So if you want to talk about AI killing us all, you don't actually need to do anything. You know, you take money and then you just spend it proselytizing. You know, if you want to say the environment's going to collapse, you know, you can spend

most of your time just proselytitizing. You don't need to make for most people. Now, some people do make major lifestyle changes around that, but a lot of the advocates to it just don't. They don't do the lifestyle changes you would expect. If you are complaining about birth rate collapse, you need to make major lifestyle changes that are very costly on a day-to-day basis. So if you are already in charge of a cultural movement,

you know, it's a really sour crises to talk about or engage with. So I think that's one reason. Another reason is within the U.S. and Canada, it's been tied to, white nationalists a lot because, you know, initially they focused on birth rate collapses within their own communities and immigration and stuff like that. And so it got tied to that issue and it became sort of toxic where, I mean, I think now anyone who's looking at the statistics would be able to tell you that actually one of the groups that is most resistant to the collapse is evangelical whites. Their birth rates don't collapse as fast as other populations,

which is really fascinating. And, um, it, maybe that's part of the solution. So another thing you see is that a lot of what used to motivate birth rate, well, actually, let's go to the supervirus for a second, because this is really interesting. The supervirus fastidiously doesn't care about birth rate collapse. There have been antinatalists in the supervirus for a long time, because the supervirus is promised to everyone,

and it controls often the narrative in our society right now, is I will remove pain. It has a position that is negative utilitarian. It doesn't say I'll make you happier. it says, I will make you not uncomfortable. I will remove the things that trigger you. I will remove the things that hurt you from this social ecosystem. When you take a position of negative utilitarianism,

and you'll see this among the anti-natalists, actually humans not being born. Even humanity going extinct becomes a good thing because then there's not humans around to feel the pain. So for much of the supervirus, this could be seen as a good thing because there are less humans around to feel the pain. and if society does collapse, I mean, is it the worst thing in the world?

Because the society we've built is intrinsically evil in their minds. And they often think that society is more in line with their vision for humanity is what's going to come next. And I will tell them they are so wrong about what's coming next. I mean, it's funny. They're like, why are you trying to get women to have kids? That's like handmade tale stuff. And it's like, no, we're trying to voluntarily get women to have kids. You know what happens if women don't have kids?

You get what's going to happen in China. and this will happen in China, which is women being forced to get impregnated. And you're going to have actual hands of any tail shit if we don't solve this the ethical way. But, um, uh, well, where was I going to,

for this, for the, trying to embrace, you know, um, you're talking about different ways like, you know, you talk about climate change.

I'm like, why don't, you know, they, you're trying to spur on an idea that goes really against all of culture, which is women have the choice over their body to procreate, whether they want to or don't. And what you're saying is, yes,

but understand if you don't procreate, this is where we get to. And I'm just assuming, I just assume, that if you're in the camp of like having no kids is my choice, and it doesn't matter. Certainly, that's good. You just have to understand that the way we got to where we are is by women having children. And where I sit is, certainly,

I honestly don't care if a woman doesn't want to have a kid. Great. But I wanted marriage and I wanted, like, now having kids, I don't know how many men I've ran into that, you know, we're kind of like, eh, I don't know about having kids. And then you get into fatherhood and you're like, oh, man, this is, you know, people talk about the meaning of life.

I mean, there's nothing more meaningful. It doesn't mean it is easy because they're a date. What have we started out with this conversation? I look like a truck had hit me and I'm like, I don't know. Like today was just like, I don't know what's going on, right? And so that's a very hard thing to sell because it's so opposed by culture right now, that women should have a choice and they absolutely should. but understand that if you choose to do nothing and have none, where do we get to?

Yeah, and you should talk with my wife sometime. You know, I think a lot of what, it's, I don't think it's that women don't want to have kids. I think many of these women do want to have kids. That's why they like pretend their dogs or their kids to like masturbate this instinctual drive they have inside them, that they can't get met any other way. But the current dating market and marriage market is just, just broken. It doesn't work.

The pragmatist guide to craft to relationships. That's one of our previous books. We wrote the pregnancy relationship and pragmated sexuality. Most of them discussed this in detail

and the marketplace for finding good partners is really genuinely difficult across the board. But to what you were talking about. Second, this is something that I think people forget. Every single one of your ancestors

had a kid and most of them raised kids, right? They were the people in the community who were motivated. to do that. And we're all warned before puberty, hey, the things that make you happy are going to change, the things that drive fulfillment for you are going to change, and you're going to get all these weird urges that you didn't prepare for beforehand. But, you know, puberty exists to motivate you to have sex, which leaves to kids. And then you have this second thing that happens to you.

And it happens to you after you have your kids. And it's like a second puberty. Your entire, like, sociological profile, the things you want, the things that make you happy, the things that drive fulfillment all get rewritten in a way that makes sort of sense in the adult mind. And I do feel, and this is unfortunately offensive to some extent, that when you go through life without kids, this second system never turns on. And many of the initial systems that drove like fulfillment in you and a sense of like purpose and meaning and happiness in your life, they die in volume as you get older. And so you end up, I think, in often a much worse position. And I do wonder if this is where we get these cultural figures like Andrew Tate or something like this, right?

We're like, I look at him and I'm like, that is not a lifestyle. I would find appealing at all. But it's something that appeals to, I think, like the pre-dad mindset of like, oh, I just, you know, sleeping with a lot of women. That's a sign of status, right? Well, and tons of money and everything else. But I've said this since day, well, not maybe not day one, but pretty. close to it. You know, if the podcast ever gets to a point where it's, I don't know, mooning back, you get the point. If I lose my family and my kids, it ain't worth it. It just, it isn't worth it.

I want to be able to go home every, every night and deal and see and enjoy and coach hockey and all the things that come with parenting. And a lot of parenting is headaches because you're, you know, you got these kids that don't understand a whole lot. But if you've never had kids before, you can really tell yourself a story of how hard life is and everything else. And you can chase things like money and different things like that. You can even have, you know, I sometimes wonder, you know, like different politicians, different successful business men or women who got there because they never had a family. Or they lost their family along the way so they put all their energy into.

into what they're they were doing. And that becomes a model for society. And so then you model what they've done, not taking in all the bullshit that they don't, like all the hardships of like not having those relationships that actually make life so damn meaningful. And the thing is, is, I don't know, it isn't a quick fix.

Like it takes time. It's going to take a lot of time. but we need more models in society and I'm not saying they aren't there they're certainly there but we need more models in society that value those things so that people will model them all over again

because as they get filtered out of society you know like divorce is just like fuck man like it's huge and it's like well what comes from divorce lots of problems I'm not saying that every divorce you shouldn't ever divorce I'm not saying that families can't survive divorce,

but there's been enough studies and everything else going on what happens when that occurs. Well, it's happening on steroids right now. Well, let's, you know, I'd like to read a quote. I don't know if you know Paul Getty, you know, one of the richest men alive of his time, but, you know, before he died, he said, I hate and regret the failure of my marriages.

I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success. and you know this is the man who was hated by his kids hated by all his wives and everything like that and so you know you're right the people who do quote unquote have it all but don't have that stable caring family i think a lot of them who are honest with themselves do end up regretting it well look at how many look at how many successful people just look at all the icons of pop culture movies well i mean that is pop culture but movies music uh wherever you want to go and It doesn't matter. Athletes, et cetera. Those who, like, the one that sticks out to me right now, and I can't understand it. I'm a huge fan of Tom Brady. I'm a diehard.

So maybe there were problems there that I didn't see. And his big thing is, is, you know, I, you know, basically this is my time and I get to, you know, I want to keep playing, and I'm good enough to keep playing. And, you know, as a young kid, he struggled and found his way in the NFL became the greatest quarterback. I don't think anybody can argue that. I don't care what you have to say.

But at the end of his career, He hangs him up, then comes back for another year, he wins the Super Bowl, and now won't hang it up and is getting divorced and losing his time with his family and everything else. I'm like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? And the thing is,

is like, how many successful people are, I don't know, are lonely or whatever else because, you know, they don't value what comes with being, well, I don't know, for me, it's monogamous, right? having one partner. It's having kids.

It's investing time with those relationships so that they grow into, hopefully in 20 years they want to be around me, you know? Like, I don't know. And that's to me really healthy. And you interject those healthy things. And that allows you to hopefully deal with the problems or the pitfalls that are certainly to come in life as you move forward. Because you have people that genuinely care for you.

And I mean, money is great. But money doesn't tuck you in at night. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I mean, and this is what traditionalism is in a big extent. It's like this set of rules that have been passed down to us from our ancestors that do work pretty well. Maybe not perfectly was in a modern context for living this fulfilled life you're talking about. And you actually see it in the data.

The people who are most conservative are typically the most happy within any society. Really? Yeah. There was a study called mental health, mental illness in the left, I think it was called. It was by the spicy Emil Kerkigard. So who knows what it's accurate. But it does seem to align with the Pew Research data, with the conservative faction being the happiest since they started recording data. Hmm.

You know, it's, well, I was just listening to like listen to Peterson and Rogan again. I really enjoy the way Jordan's brain works. but you know like the idea of working on oneself so that you can be better you know and then you can work on your family and if you get a healthy family then maybe you can better the community and if you get a better community maybe you can keep moving it up like to me a healthy community around you is what we should all strive for because if you can pull that off I mean that's what 90% of your life is is living inside that community maybe 99% right and so often we get so focused on things that really don't impact us now that does doesn't mean you shouldn't look out there. I mean, you're talking about something that I'm like, holy crap, how do you convince a population to start kicking out more kids when the, when,

when you know the, the cost of doing such a thing is, is, is, I mean, it's not, it's not exactly the easiest thing to do in today's world. To have kids,

one. And then two, to like, feed, clothes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera, et cetera, is, well, I mean, it's... Oh, it's very expensive. But whatever you think that having kids is expensive, remember that fertility rate is negatively correlated with wealth. The less money you have, the more kids you have on average until you get to extreme levels of wealth.

You don't get above repopulation rate again in the U.S. until you get $500,000 to a million dollars a year in family income. So most of the people out there that are raising more kids than you have less money than you. Interesting. Why is that? Is it because we, at a certain income level, you value different things and you understand if you have more kids like, you're just like, well, all the things that I value are going out the window? I don't have a good answer for that. That's an interesting, like, back on the farm, like farming families, I'm, you know, like a hired hand costs money.

So, you know, and I'm being a little tongue and cheek, but so you had large families and large families and large families. and large families went out and did the work and, you know, many hands make any, you know, uh, burden easy to lift essentially, right? Uh, but, you know, when you think about it, if you're poor and you're sitting like you're in poverty, like you, like bringing more into the world, you'd think would be the last thing on your mind. You'd be thinking about, listen, if I can work my tail off, maybe I can get to a position where it actually makes sense. Yeah. And I think that, oh, yes, farm hands, yes. So, I mean, historically, the reason why people had lots of kids is because the number of kids you had was directly correlated with the wealth of your family. I mean, every kid was an additional worker on your farm, right? And I think people often forget how recently we left that world. I mean, wage labor as a widespread concept, even in the industrialized world, didn't really start until like the 1920s. it didn't really proliferate massively. So the idea of like the atomization of our lives of

leaving our families to go to a job is a new concept and clearly I think it's a failed concept. And one of the great things about the lockdown, one of the great things about COVID is it showed the world that we don't need to go to the office anymore. We don't we don't need to leave our houses to be productive members of society anymore, or at least many people don't. And this can allow for these models of people working with their family and working from home and not needing to leave that environment to stay. But to speak again to the farm hands, every kid used to increase your wealth, your quality of life. Today, generally, like above two kids, every kid is an additional pretty big burden on your lifestyle and very costly. So you need some exogenous motivator to do that.

And that's why, you know, we call it crafting religion, right? For most people, that motivator, is religion. And I don't think that the secular world has found a solution for how to motivate that yet. And that's crazy. Because for me, it wasn't, you know, at one kid, I was like, all right, we always said we're going to have to and adopt too.

That was our plan. We had her first, and I'm like, I think I'm done. Because the shock of having your first is, there's nothing that can prepare you for that. There's absolutely nothing. I don't care how many books you read. I don't care how many dogs you think are, are similar to having a kid.

Nothing can prepare you for that. And so then you go through this like, well, we went through this like, for us, it was about six, seven months. And then all of a sudden, you're like, actually I think I could have another kid. It's a really, it just kind of hits you. You're just like, I think we could actually have a second kid.

All right. You want to, okay, yep. And then you have a second kid. And then I went through it on steroids all over again. I am done. I'm not, we're not looking at adoption. We're not doing nothing. I am done.

And then I think this period is just a touch longer. And for us, we had kids 14 months apart. So you got two little infants that are, you know, like, I mean, not very independent, I would say. And then there's this moment all over again. Like, I just, it's funny to me when I think about it. Because all of a sudden, you know, you're just like, yeah, we actually, you want to have a third? I think we could have a third. All right.

And, you know, not to get in the adoption side of things, but that didn't work out. So we had a third. And the crazy thing was for us, at least Malcolm, is our third. We had some complications. And that really ended the talks of ever having anymore. But it's funny, I thought I would have been like at three, I am done. And now I joke with my wife all the time. Like, you know, if we didn't have the complications, we'd be having a fourth.

Like, I know we would because I get so much enjoyment out of how they interact and everything else in the house. Like, it's just this weird thing that I think. parents understand, I think. Yeah. But maybe I'm just the oddball because I just like, I don't know. I would have never thought that six, well, Shea's turned seven this year. So seven years ago, I would have been, I'm not so sure. Six years ago, I would have said one kid is enough.

And it's funny now. And I don't think that's religious motivation at all for me. Me, it's like personal experience. I was just like, this is a ton of fun. It's a ton of work. And there's days where I show up and I'm going to interview Malcolm. I look like I've been hit by a truck. But overall, I mean, it's been a ton of fun.

Oh, I couldn't agree more. And, you know, I think one thing you mentioned there, which is really interesting, when you talk about other parents getting it, like, I definitely get it. And I think most other parents who have stable marriages do get it. Now, I think when a parent doesn't have a stable marriage, the thing that biologically changes in your brain that makes you like a dad instead of a guy may not happen every time. And that may be where we get some of this aberrant behavior that doesn't make sense to us.

but I sometimes feel like the difference between men and women after they have kids and before they have kids, it's probably about as big as the psychological difference between men and women, period. It's almost like there's four genders. There's men and women before having kids and there's men and women post having kids. And what it means, and I'm sure you see this in your men's groups, you know, to be a man as a dad is very different than what it meant to be a man. before you were. Yeah. And I would say, you said a dad instead of a guy.

And I think that's a choice. I think, when I think about that, I'm like, I was, for, for, I don't know how many months, I was still a guy when we had our first kid. And then it's like a choice. You have to embrace certain things. You have to choose certain things, which ultimately makes you a better human being, in my opinion. But I think it's a choice instead of just. it happening.

Yeah, no, and it was the same with me was my first. I remember I had the first and I was like, I thought everything was going to change or I was going to feel different, but it's exactly the same that there's always been. I don't know if I really like change totally until like my second kid was like four months old or something, you know, and then it was like, oh, you know, now you've got a family and not like a kid. A question for you.

To switch subjects here, just similar, but different. In one of the articles I read, and I'd seen Peterson talk about this, in Hungary, women with four or more children are exempt from paying income tax for life. Do you think this, when you talk about population going down, and I go, well, can't just people just, can't you just have more kids like, and all of a sudden it changes? When you see Hungary do exactly that, I mean, have one more kid, and my wife never plays income tax for life.

I'm like, geez, that I feel like a lot of women would be like, that's not a bad idea. Spend around 5% of its GDP last year on trying to increase its fertility rate. And it got the fertility rate up by about 1.6%, which is like nothing. China, to give you, to put that number in context, year over year last year to this year, China's been trying to get their birth rate up. Their fertility rate fell by about 13%.

So Hungary spent a lot of money on this and it hasn't done much good. In fact, most of these government programs that are about payouts to parents, they've done great studies on this. The few studies that show, um, that show, uh, you know, a positive effect typically have these really big uncertainty windows and the ones of the narrower uncertainty windows show almost no effect. So it doesn't really seem to be effective. I'd love it if it was. I'd love to be paid by the government. What a great thing to advocate for. Give me money. I want money. But it doesn't actually seem to motivate birth rates, like when you look at the statistics. What does is typically cultural changes. And, you know, I think one of the key, like when we push for policy changes,

it's mostly about loosening restrictions instead of increasing restrictions. And there's so many little restrictions. Like one of the big policies, daycares shouldn't be able to reject kids for being sick because you basically can't have a two-parent working household if your daycare can choose to reject a kid for being sick whenever they want. Car seats. That's another huge thing. The links we use car seats is longer than probably we should actually be using car seats. And they basically cap the number of kids you can have at the number of car seats you can fit in your car. There's a CPS has gotten really aggressive. You know, you constantly hear about parents having CPS, like take their kids away or come see them because the kid is what, walking to school.

Like normal stuff if you have a large family. So I think it's often about decreasing the number of regulations and decreasing the state mandated efforts to sort of homogenize our kids, that will do the most to increase birth rates. But I'm never going to complain if the government gives tax breaks to people who have kids. Well, it's just interesting to see a country basically listen to a man like Malcolm and go, yeah, you're absolutely right. Let's try and incentivize our population going up. And, you know, like obviously I'm going off your stats.

it hasn't worked to what they'd hoped or at least yet well so countries that do have had success like albania had a pretty big bump i think it was like five percent maybe or something and that was because the patron that was an orthodox country um the patriarch uh offered to be like the godfather to all the kids born was in like this time period um and it caused a jump in birth rate it's it's actually really hard to get what do you mean the patriarch what do you what do you mean there they offer to my understanding is i think it's an orth and i think it's albana i could be wrong it's an a country. It's one of the countries where you have like Russian Orthodox Church, you have the Albanian Orthodox Church, which has a patriarch at the top of it. But what was I going to say? Yeah. So it's,

it's really hard. It's not like, and this is what China is realizing, right? For a long time, they were able to force people to keep their birth rate down. But now they're doing everything they can. I don't know if you've heard, but like, vasectomy clinics are like getting shut down across China, none of the big hospitals are offering the procedure anymore. And they're learning. It's really hard to motivate someone to have a kid when you've created a culture in which having kids is it normalized. Yeah, that's...

Well, I mean, that's why you come back to models, right? Like, I mean, like healthy models for people to want to be a part of. Because when you have kids, you give up a lot of yourself. Like you, you know, it isn't as just easy to go out and, you know, your week, I don't know, once upon a time I live for the weekend. I think a lot of us do. You go to school and then you look forward to the weekend. You work a Monday to Friday job. You look forward to the weekend.

So you live for the weekend. And when you have kids, it's not like all of a sudden in your weekend, you put your feet up. It's like, no, you've still got things to do and places to go and people to see. But you need healthy models. Healthy models show what life can be like. in China. I can't speak to it because I've never been. But you think if you instilled in a culture one kid or less,

anyone who's got more than one kid in there, their lifestyle has changed immensely. And we all know that from having, if you have just one and then you have multiple, your lifestyle changes drastically because of the time commitment and the ability to just, you know, even it sounds weird, but just to leave one kid, you know, like to find a babysitter for one child to three children

or to take three children and have them have a sleepover or anything with friends or anything that. All that changes. All of it just goes out the way. It's not nearly as simple. Well, I mean, I think what people, we're talking about like three kids, but, but I mean, in truth, this problem within cultural groups doesn't get solved at the level of the people who are having three kids. It gets solved at the level of the people having like six or seven kids. So just to do the math really quickly, if you have a cultural group, when I say a cultural group, I mean like a broad sociological profile. So think to your friend group at any listener, right? And a third of that group isn't having kids, okay? Or let's say a quarter of the group isn't having kids.

And about a half of the group is having two kids. Then that means, or you could say a third of the group hasn't having kids, and a third of the group is having two kids, however you want to split it. Then that final third or quarter for that population to stay stable has to have over four kids. And we have created a culture in which it is very hard to have over four kids. Fertility rates staying flat. This doesn't happen by convincing people who are going to have no kids to have a kid or convincing the people have two kids to have three kids. It's convinced by the people who are okay with having as many kids as possible

to really have as many kids as possible. And that requires systemic changes in the way our culture works. because, you know, I often talk to my progressive friends about this, and they'll be like, oh, it's child abuse to raise that many kids. Like, you can't possibly pay enough attention to them. And it's like, you know, Benjamin Franklin was one of 16. Like, this used to be normal. We have created a culture. And cultures grow, like the supervisors grow. Any dominant pop culture grows because it shames people who are aberrations to that culture. And so that culture, it's not just neutral to people with big families. It actively shames you.

and it actively goes out of its way to make your life harder with stuff like CPS or stuff like isn't that child abuse to have 10 kids you know and it's like what come on man this has been this has been an interesting chat

before I let you get out of here we always do the crude master final question I feel like I have part of your answer on this but either way T's words if you're going to stand behind a cause then stand behind it absolutely what's one thing Malcolm stands behind I stand behind, and this is actually a cause that I stand behind absolutely with my school.

And it's a weird cause for a lot of people, but I think it's one that we need to get back to. It's the school's job is not to teach a kid morals. It's not to teach a kid a culture or to acculturate a kid. It's to prepare a kid for the work world. A kid's morals, traditions, that should be taught to them by their family. and when you, and then Canada, this should be especially acute with the history and the horrors of the residential school system,

school systems are not for erasing a kid's cultural background, and that's something I stand for, absolutely. Well, I've appreciated this. You know, it's a subject that I don't, well, you're the first guest to ever grace the podcast to talk about it, so we'll see where it goes, but either way, I've really enjoyed it. It's been an interesting morning.

I joked at the start of the, you know, a couple hours ago. I'm like, man, I need to be parked up. Well, you've certainly done it. Yes, please, if people want to find your books. Where can they find? Guys, we've got them on relationships, sexuality, governance, all sorts of different topics. But this is the one that was mostly the topic of this conversation. Sure.

But, you know, if you want to, you can always chat with my wife. She got lots of other things we talk about, like relationships and stuff, which is something that came up here. Sure. Well, I appreciate it, Malcolm. I say this at the end all the time, it seems like lately, but I don't know where the paths go, but eventually I'm sure they will cross again. I appreciate it you hopping on this morning. And if we get to chat again or whether it's with your wife or however it comes about, look forward to it. Oh, me too. You're a spectacular guy.