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

1. 0:00 – 0:14

   Intro

   1. MCMalcolm Collins0:00

      ... Korea had no future. At their current fertility rate right now, for every hundred Koreans, there will be 5.9 great-grandchildren. We are looking at a 94% population collapse over the next century.

2. 0:14 – 6:40

   Why Malcolm is Always in the News

   1. CWChris Williamson0:14

      (wind blows) Why have you been in the news so much recently?

   2. MCMalcolm Collins0:17

      (laughs) Because I am calling out th- the, the emperor has no clothes right now, and I think a lot of people have mentioned collapsing fertility rates before, um, but I, I think that no one has really soaked consistently, uh, uh, brought it up in a way that the people who want to ignore it have to look at the problem. You know, when I point it out, because I think a lot of people especially, you know, on the more progressive side of the spectrum, they just wanna dismiss it. "Oh, the planet's better without humans," or whatever. But when you point out that not a single s- society on Earth today, except for maybe Israel, we can talk about that later in the conversation, has figured out how to have prosperity, gender equality, and high levels of education, and anywhere close to a stable population. Like, considering we are trying our best, and I think rightfully so, to spread those things across the world, that should be, like, a note. Like, that should be, like, a, "Oh, this system that we think is so great and we want to be the future of human civilization doesn't seem to work," at, at the most basic level.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:27

      That seems like quite a scary, uh, proselytization for the future, or prediction for the future.

   4. MCMalcolm Collins1:32

      Sure.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:32

      If you're to say that we need to get rid of one from education, equality, prosperity, or birth rate. We just need to concede the fact that the birth rate's ...

   6. MCMalcolm Collins1:44

      W- what we need to do is we need to find new cultural solutions. We need to find a way to maintain fertility rates while having education, while having gender equality, and while having a high level of prosperity, and there are many places we can look in the world today to begin to get inspiration for how we might do that. You know, I, I think, um, to understand the scale of the threat right now, one of the, the, the things I always start people with is when I started caring about this. And a lot of people are like, "Why is it that people in Silicon Valley seem to care about this so much?" And it's because there's a lot of VCs in Silicon Valley and VCs need to chart the economy 50, 100 years in the future in the way that, you know, Wall Street people really don't. They're looking at the economy five, ten years out or whatever. So because of that, when I was working as a VC, I happened to be working in Korea when I was working in a VC, um, and I kept trying to chart the future of the economy and I kept coming to the same answer, is that Korea had no future. At their current fertility rate right now, for every hundred Koreans, there will be 5.9 great-grandchildren. We are looking at a 94% population collapse over the next century. And when I brought this up with the other partners at my firm and I was like, "Hey, like, d- it just doesn't seem like there is any feasible economic future for this country." They're like, "Yeah, but we pretend like that's not the case in our investments. Like, everybody knows this, but, like, if we accepted it, then the economy stops working, society stops working, so we're just gonna ignore it basically." And when I came back to the US, it was like going back in time 20 years, like I was in some sort of a sci-fi movie and getting to be this one person who saw where the future was going to go an- and, and having to be that crazy person on the streets, like, "No, no, no. You guys don't understand. There's countries further ahead than us on this spectrum right now, okay? And we know a few things. We know there is no floor. No country has hit a, a, a fertility collapse floor yet. We know that there is no level of advanced fertility collapse where people freak out, or at least not until it's too late." 'Cause you look at Korea right now, and 60% of, uh, of Korean citizens are over the age of 40, so it's, it's likely already too late for them to turn this, this problem around. So we need to turn this around before we hit that level, but the truth is, we probably won't and, and, and we've gotta think of solutions for when we don't turn this around, but that's a different topic for later in the interview. (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson4:03

      Well, one of the most common questions I imagine that people ask is, "Why should anyone care about how many children another person has? This is my choice. You can't impose me-

   8. MCMalcolm Collins4:14

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson4:14

      ... to have kids if I don't want to have them. Why should two guys sat on the internet be telling the world about the dangers of not having children? People can go and do other things with their lives now. Women are allowed to be in the workplace. Men can go their own way and play video games and-

   10. MCMalcolm Collins4:32

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson4:32

       ... uh, be a sigma male as much as they want."

   12. MCMalcolm Collins4:34

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson4:34

       "Why should anyone care about how many children another person has?"

   14. MCMalcolm Collins4:38

       So, I, I think that that's a really good point. In our foundation, I think one of the things that people most often get wrong about us is that we are trying to increase the world's population or that we are trying to, uh, proselytize broadly to increase fertility rates and, and neither one of those things is true. If we are on the Titanic right now, no matter what, the Titanic hits the iceberg. We are trying to, one, make people aware that the Titanic's about to hit an iceberg, get them in lines by the rafts, the ones who wanna survive, start getting the rafts in the water in a calm and orderly fashion before people start panicking, because that's what's going to happen. And so what we promote is, is trying to get... I mean, I know my family's gonna be okay, you know? I, I know that my cultural group is gonna be okay. Broadly speaking, um... So one, I know that my family, you know, I have eight kids and they have eight kids and you do that for 11 generations, that's more descendants than exists in the world today, I often say. So I don't need to worry about people like me. The reason I'm so loud about this is because I'm worried about the, the massive collapse in, in, in, in cultural and ethnic diversity the world is about to see. Um, and it, it, it will be astonishing for people, uh, I think in the far future, th- that there were more than, like, three ethnic groups and three cultural groups or something like that, i- if we don't solve this. Uh, and so what we're trying to do is just make people aware of this, because so much of the propaganda that people are consuming is telling them-... things are fine. Have less kids. You're a good person if you have less kids. And I know you've talked about this before on the show, and it, it is, it is astonishing. And I think when we look at this urban monoculture that is erasing all of the genuine diversity in our society, uh, one of its core messages is negative utilitarianism. That, that, that, uh, s- the, the, the core evil thing in the world is human suffering, and that human happiness just doesn't really matter, or it is largely outweighed by human suffering, and therefore, it's better if humans don't exist. And that's the end goal for the urban monoculture, I think, for a lot of people.

   15. CWChris Williamson6:38

       What do you mean when you say, "Urban monoculture"?

3. 6:40 – 17:09

   Our Divided Society’s Two Factions

   1. CWChris Williamson6:40

   2. MCMalcolm Collins6:40

      Well, okay, so this sort of gets down to, like, uh, my personal politics to some extent. But I think that if you look at society right now, it's largely divi- becoming divided into two factions, and there has been a major political shift around what conservative and progressive means. Um, the progressive is the party of this urban monoculture, which is a single sort of cultural group or virus that infects other cultural institutions and erases what's- whatever makes them unique and aligns all of their goals. So, if I talk with a progressive Muslim or a progressive Jew or a progressive Catholic, um, or a progressive Unitarian Universalist, and I scratch beneath the surface, often their m- morals, their views on gender, their views on what future they want for the world are all very, very similar. If I look at conservatives from each of those factions, their worldviews are very different. And what the conservative party seems optimizing around... So, where the liberal party is optimizing around the goals of this monoculture, so spreading the monoculture and reducing in-the-moment human suffering, that's why they promote things like HAZE. You know, like, don't tell somebody that it's unhealthy to be fat, 'cause that could hurt their feelings in the moment, even though it, like... obviously, it's bad for them in the long term. But, um, the conservative movements all have in- i- very distinct, uh, cultural histories which they are trying to preserve. And that is often, uh... if I look at the conservative movement today, it's an alliance of these older traditions and newer but deviant and distinct traditions, um, that are trying to maintain cultural fidelity and exist 100, 200 years from now. Um, and so when I talk about the monoculture, that's what I'm talking about, this thing that wants to, when my kids go to school, say, "This is what correct morality is. This is the way you should see the world. And if your parents are telling you anything else, they're deplorable and wrong."

   3. CWChris Williamson8:26

      Is that not the case with some factions from a conservative side as well, though?

   4. MCMalcolm Collins8:30

      Yeah. Yeah, no, and I, I, I call them sleeper progressives. They just want to erase all other cultures the moment they gain power. But I think that right now, I can form an alliance with them because our goals are aligned. I think one of the really cool things that we've seen with the conservative party is you saw something like when Andrew Tate converted to Islam. You know, in the past, a conservative icon converting to Islam, a lot of people would have been wringing their hands about that. But a lot of people were like, "You go." You know, "At least you found some faith. At least you found some tradition." And so I think what we're seeing there is more of a realization that the, the big bad these days is this culture that's trying to homogenize the world.

   5. CWChris Williamson9:07

      Interesting. What would you say to the well-meaning people from the progressive movement that say it feels a little bit bad to be tarnished with the brush as a super virus? "I think that I'm, you know, I'm just somebody that holds liberal values. I don't believe that I'm part of some-"

   6. MCMalcolm Collins9:21

      No, right, and so-

   7. CWChris Williamson9:21

      ... destructive force within the world."

   8. MCMalcolm Collins9:23

      And, and I think that there are people who genuinely, um, uh... like within any movement. You know, when, when the Catholic Church used to be the, the iteration of this in European society, and they were trying to convert everyone to their ways, and the Protestant Church, during their own time, had periods like that in some countries, um, m- the vast majority of Protestants or Catholics in those countries were just decent, well-meaning people trying to live their lives. But the ones who controlled the cultural institutions and were, you know, burning people at the stake and, and trying to ensure that everybody fit this very narrow definition of morality set by their culture, to me, they were the, the evil ones within those institutions. And today, when I talk about this, this monoculture, um, I, I think that the vast majority of people who are members of it are just like the vast majority of, of, uh, uh, of Catholics and Protestants during periods when, when those cultural groups were dominant in specific regions.

   9. CWChris Williamson10:15

      Why is this culture so effective?

   10. MCMalcolm Collins10:18

       Very interesting. Okay, so it's evolved a lot of new tactics that had never been tried before. So, in our book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion, what we essentially do is we argue that humanity could be thought of as sort of an evolving firmware, which is like our biolo- biology or our genes. But on top of that firmware, there's evolving sets of software. And this software, today we often talk about memes as, like, things that infect somebody and then cause them to just turn around and infect other people. But historically, most memetic clusters actually augmented a person's, uh, sort of biological fitness, the number of surviving offspring they had, and that's how they survived. That's how... I mean, if you look at things with a secular mindset, why things like Islam and Judaism figured out stuff like handwashing literally centuries before science figured out handwashing. Um, and you see this across these traditions. For example, if you look at all of the old traditions, almost all of them have some arbitrary self-hedu- denial holiday, like Lent or Ramadan or Feast of the First Born, or whatever, right? And, and just now, after throwing out all of those rituals over the past, you know, 50, 100 years, secular society is like, "Oh, now we gotta have our juice cleanses. Now we gotta have our..." You know, they're, they're realizing, oh, fasting and stuff like that, right? It's, it has positive mental effects. Um, and, and so I think that, that if you see these as different, like, evolving cultural groups, this super virus evolved some very unique tactics, and it is not the same thing as the historic progressive movement. What it is is something... So, the reason I call it a super virus is it is very much so... When you talk about a super bacteria or a super bug, they typically come up in things like hospitals, where you have a ton of people with a weakened immune system all in a, a similar environment with lots of sort of viruses or bacteria that can, that can intermingle alongside antibiotics and stuff like that. This is what was created by the internet. This is why all of this stuff started when social media happened.Essentially, you had a super-spreader environment where, uh, new mimetic ideas were able to test themselves against all of the world's traditions at the same time, optimize and react very quickly, and become incredibly virulent while, uh, evolving strategies that had never been tried before. So one of the most effective strategies that it uses is if you look historically when ... If you look at cultural groups as sort of like nodal clouds that sort of overlap with each other, um, when you had a corrupted node within a, a nodal cloud or a node that looked like it was flipping, uh, what you would do if you were a majority Protestant country or majority Catholic country, like a Catholic came in and started preaching or a Protestant came in and started preaching, you, you'd burn them. You'd burn them at the stake often, right? Um, or, uh, if somebody just had, like, random cultural mutation in the same way you have, like, random genetic mutation and they believe something weird, like, they were a witch (claps hands) and you burn them, right? That's how you maintain this level of cultural fidelity. What the virus does, which is very interesting, is it, uh, organically determines, um, when a node looks like it might be flipping, and then it essentially shadow bans the node. It begins to deconnect that node's links to all of the rest of the network's power structures. And this is really powerful because what it means is the other nodes that might be allied with that node, they don't react the way they would have historically when somebody was being, like, burned at the stake or something like that, which is actually why cancellation is a fairly ineffective tactic and genuinely not used that much when contrasted with just a s- shadow-banning process, or the person just doesn't get a promotion if y- if it looks like they might be immune to these ideas. They just don't ... You know, their, their papers g- get published a little less. You know, uh, th- th- certain platforms begin to favor them less within the algorithm. Um, and that's how it has been able to maintain such control, I think, of the upper echelons of our society.

   11. CWChris Williamson14:06

       But it's not like every organization is run by a progressive movement, right? There are organizations out there that seem to be a lot more open to new ideas. We're seeing pushback from a variety of places, the, the opportunity for people to have independent, uh, jobs.

   12. MCMalcolm Collins14:21

       Yeah. So I would say that it's not every organization. So it, it specifically targets the organizations it can best use to maintain its population levels. Um, and so those are typically organizations that are involved in education. So you're looking at the middle school system, the high school system, and the college system are the organizations that it is most critical that it maintains an absolute stranglehold over. And this, again, it comes to fertility issues. Of the populations of the world, if there is one population that has a very low birth rate, it is this population, uh, this, this urban monoculture. Um, and, uh, because of that, the only way it can repopulate its ideological faction is through siphoning children from other often more conservative cultural traditions or in other ways deviant cultural traditions that are for whatever reason ha- having a lot of kids.

   13. CWChris Williamson15:10

       Okay, getting back to fertility-

   14. MCMalcolm Collins15:13

       (coughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson15:13

       ... what groups are doing particularly well and particularly badly when it comes to fertility?

   16. MCMalcolm Collins15:18

       This is a fascinating question. All right. So, um, the, the, uh, uh ... If you look in a post-prosperity environment, so a lot of people, they're like, "Oh, well, countries in Africa are doing really well. Uh, they have high fertility rates," or, "Muslim populations have high fertility rates." And it's like, well, that's irrelevant if those populations are in a country where the average salary is under $5,000 a year, because that is where you get above replacement fertility in pretty much every country that's under 5,000 a year, you get above replacement. Every country above 5,000 a year, you typically get below replacement fertility. Um, uh, and so it's a level of desperate poverty, first of all, that is often misconstrued. So you look at Latin America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, collectively as of 2019, so old news, they fell below repopulation rate. Um, so it's really just a few of, of, of th- these, these, these poorest countries. So I really ignore any country at a high fertility, um, if the, if it's a poor country or, or if it's not a wealthy country, right? And so I think where you can see is some misunderstandings that people have from that, so you look at populations like Muslim populations, when they enter wealthier countries, their populations really crash, or when the countries where they are the dominant social group. So you can look at Iran. Iran's fertility rate fell above below replacement a long time ago. And, and for, uh ... Since 2014, they've been trying pretty much everything in their power to try to get fertility rates back above repopulation rate and their government has a lot of control over the populous and they are not able to. They're still only at 1.7. Um, so the groups that really show resistance to this are conservative Christian groups and conservative Jewish groups. And this is why I always think it's funny when people are like, "Oh, you're talking about fertility rates, you must be about saving white people." And it's like w- white conservative people are, like, the only people on Earth who don't seem to be disappearing in, in, in the face of, uh, prosperity-induced fertility collapse. The groups that are most at risk are the Eastern traditions. Even conservative iterations of those traditions are very bad at resisting prosperity-induced fertility collapse.

   17. CWChris Williamson17:08

       Prosperity-induced

4. 17:09 – 21:30

   How Prosperity & Gender Equality Impact Fertility

   1. CWChris Williamson17:10

      fertility collapse. What is the relationship between prosperity and fertility? Why?

   2. MCMalcolm Collins17:15

      Well, as I said, oh ... Ty- typically when a country earns over 5,000 USD a year, uh, fertility begins to fall below replacement rate. In between-

   3. CWChris Williamson17:23

      Yes. Why?

   4. MCMalcolm Collins17:23

      Oh, well, so this is ... We can say is nobody quite knows, but there is some evidence as to what might be causing this. What is probably causing it is the ability to engage with a modern economy. Um, so when somebody is not engaged with the modern economy, um, and not valuable to the modern economy, then, uh, the modern economy basically ignores them and they go on living the way humans have always lived and having a lot of kids. This is why within developed countries, so if you look at a country like the US, right? Uh, typically, the less money you make, the more kids you have, except when you're at the very high end of the income spectrum. So, uh, if you're making an average of half a million dollars a year or more as a family, you will be at above replacement fertility. And in many ways, families at that income level are just not ... Like, the economy isn't grabbing them as much because they don't need the economy as much. So what's really happening is i- if you look at our sort of free market structure, what it does is it organically determines how to reward anyone who has the probability, uh, that it believes has the probability of being productive with just enough money to get them to spend their time being productive versus doing anything else that may have long-term benefits to the society, like having kids or whatever, right? Um, and it's very, very good at doing this. And then it draws them into environments like cities where it becomes even harder to have kids and where they can, um-... anyway, yeah, where, where they can be more productive and spend more time working and, and generating money for this larger economic system.

   5. CWChris Williamson18:53

      I was gonna say, it doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem realistic that this could be a large behemoth, evilly behind the scenes working to try and get fertility rates down. It seems more likely that it is a natural byproduct of a capitalist machine that wants to have workers who are available as much as possible, who don't take maternity-

   6. MCMalcolm Collins19:14

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson19:14

      ... or paternity leave, who are buying their clothes and taking their holidays, consuming and producing and pumping money back into the system. Is that the way-

   8. MCMalcolm Collins19:24

      I absolutely agree with-

   9. CWChris Williamson19:25

      ... that you see it?

   10. MCMalcolm Collins19:25

       ... everything you're saying there. And that's also what I mean when I talk about the virus. I don't think any decision is made maliciously. I think everybody thinks they're a good guy. Everyone's trying to do what they think is best for the world. But sometimes, um, sort of, uh, uh, cultural evolutionary pressures can create incentive systems that lead to actions that in the long term will have consequences that I think most people would think are bad.

   11. CWChris Williamson19:48

       Okay. At the beginning, you mentioned a bunch of other, uh, contributing factors, prosperity being one of them.

   12. MCMalcolm Collins19:54

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson19:54

       What would the, what would the other elements be?

   14. MCMalcolm Collins19:56

       Gender equality and education are typically the other two.

   15. CWChris Williamson19:59

       Run us through those.

   16. MCMalcolm Collins20:00

       Well, um, gender equality, when, when, when, uh, i- it is often specifically female education, um, when women begin to have a choice as to what they do and can participate in the economy, um, I, I don't think that it's that they're choosing not to have kids. I think that that is a misunderstanding of what we're seeing in the data. I think it's that they prioritize economic stability and basically having their life in order before they decide to start having kids. But the way our economic system is structured, people often don't really feel they have their life in order till their mid-30s or 40s, and, and at that time, they can no longer have kids. Um, and so I think that that is why. It is not that women are choosing jobs over kids, it's that they're choosing jobs then kids and their biological clocks run out, while at the same time, um, and I think this is something that's really undersold when people talk about fertility collapse, is the absolute collapse of marriage markets in our society. Um, it is, uh... I saw a tweet and I couldn't agree with it more. Being in a, a happy marriage these days, uh, feels a bit like catching the last chopper outta Nam, um, because, uh, it is hard. It is hard out there to find a good partner, and, and we have seen a, a collapse of the systems that previously ensured people found, uh, uh, great, long-term, uh, dedicated partners.

   17. CWChris Williamson21:23

       Well, that's the point. It's not just about declining birth rates, it's also about declining dating. So-

   18. MCMalcolm Collins21:28

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson21:29

       ... 50%

5. 21:30 – 29:38

   What is Causing the Decline in Dating?

   1. CWChris Williamson21:30

      of guys aged 18 to 30 say that they're not looking for casual or long-term relationships. I mean, you know, that- that's an unbelievably shocking statistic to say that your natural biological inclination as a guy during the period of your life when you're going to have the highest testosterone that you're going to have is just checking out completely of either casual or long-term relationships. The same thing goes for women broadly as well, that i- it's just not good. So how do you fold in this decline in dating as well as children?

   2. MCMalcolm Collins22:03

      Well, I mean, (laughs) how do you fold it in? Uh, it's, it's, it... Wh- what I just said is it's a problem. And one of the things we look at, I mean, we've written multiple books on, like, The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships, The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality, looking at this problem, trying to come up with solutions to this problem, um, and I think that this brings us to what the real solution to this problem is in a broader context, not just dating, um, not just... Uh, but, but also fertility collapse, also the cultural. So whenever anybody first hears about fertility collapse, they often want to use it as a way to justify, I think, the talking points they wanted to push before it became a problem in their, o- o- on the, on their table. Like, as soon as they accept it's a problem, then they're like, "Oh, I can use this to push things I wanted to push already." So they'll say things like, "Oh, well, you should do cash handouts." Uh, except we know that doesn't really work. You know, Hungary spent 5% of its GDP last year doing it, and they got the fertility rate up by like 1.6%. When, when it's dropping like 3% year over year in a lot of places in the world, that's really irrelevant. Like China, 2020 dropped 20%, 2021 dropped 13%. In 2022, COVID lockdowns are over, it should be going up, only went up 0.18%. You know, so, uh, you're just seeing 1.6% increase for 5% of your GDP is irrelevant. Um, so, uh, and, and people are often like, "Well, you could spend more. What if you spent 50% of your GDP on this?" But if it's naturally dropping every year, then you can never catch that toad if you're doing it by, by spending money. And it's the same with things like free childcare. God, I would like free childcare. You know, I plan to have seven kids or something like that. Uh, but i- in the countries that offer it, it does seem to help fertility a little bit, like maybe like 3 or 4%, which is a pretty good amount, but it's not enough to offset the trends that we see. Um, and then you talk to conservative groups and they're like, "Well, what we should do is, uh..." And I'm talking far conservative groups, not, not ones like me, but, but they're like, "We should create ethnostates, basically." Um, you know, stop immigration, uh, have one culture, one country, except if you actually look at the statistics, the countries in prosperous countries with the lowest fertility rates are often ethnostates, you know, like South Korea, stuff like that. You look at the countries that have been most resistant to fertility collapse i- in the prosperous world, you're looking at countries like Israel and the US, some of the most diverse countries. And you can even see this with cultural groups across countries. So you look at like Iran, remember I mentioned Iran famously as a real big fertility country, and they're basically a Shia monoculture. But you look at Shia Muslims in India at similar economic levels where it's much more diverse and their fertility rate's like twice what it is in Iran. Um, so, uh, I, I think that, that that's the first thing. So then the second question becomes, well, who, how do you actually solve this problem, right?... if you look around the world, uh, and we've already talked about it, I mean, the solution's sort of staring us in the face, the groups that are resistant to this are the ones that deviate in some way from the urban monoculture. Most of them are traditionalist religious groups. Um, and there are some traditionalist religious groups that are more resistant to this fertility collapse than others, and some that seemed like they were resistant and then all of a sudden collapsed. Uh, Mormons are an example of this. Like, Mormons had great fertility rates, then like five or six years ago something happened and now they're probably below replacement rate. Um, and so, uh, what that tells me is that the solution to this is going to come at the level of cultural experimentation, both fortifying our traditional cultures to be more resistant to the new threats they're facing, but also potentially inventing new cultures that work, uh, with- with- with technology, uh, the internet, new strategies that are open to us, which is what my family's trying to do.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:37

      Tell me more about that.

   4. MCMalcolm Collins25:39

      Okay. Um, yeah. All right. So I can, I can go deeper into this. So we have everything from like our own traditions as a family, our own sort of, uh, w- the moral framework, different ways of naming our kids, different ways of dressing to an extent. Like, we look weird to other people. And a lot of people are like, "You guys look like freaks. Don't you know your kids will be weird? Don't you know they'll be bullied?" And I go, you know, "Look around the world. Which families, which cultures are going to exist in the future?" It's- it's- it's ones like the Amish, the Hasidic. You know, whe- wherever you look, they look different. They dress different. They name their kids different things. It's because the, when you call something cringe, when you call something different or weird or freaky, what you are saying is it differentiates from the cultural norms to which you are accustomed. Those cultural norms became the dominant cultural norms because they had a good immune system. Because they were good at dehumanizing the other and calling people freaky and stuff like that. But the reality is that if you wanna join this game, and- and this is why I'm out here, this is why I'm yelling. I don't want ... A future where it's just my kids is a failure, right? Where it's just my family. I want as much diversity into the future as possible. That's why I'm shouting this. I want people to join us. I want them to experiment and fortify themselves and not become overly complacent, uh, with their existing traditions if their kids are being effectively peeled out by this monoculture. Um, it's- it's very interesting to me. You know, I sometimes hear people in the ring, they go, "Why don't you just convert to like a traditional religious framework?" And it's because most of those frameworks are right now on the down trend in terms of their ability to continue a high fertility and maintain their kids. I do want them to, uh, find new systems to protect themselves against that, uh, but that's- that's why that's just- just going to traditions isn't the answer anymore. Uh, the- the- the- the virus or whatever you wanna call it has gotten too good at- at re- finding kids. Um, and so we have to find new systems. And also, the- the- just the- the environment that kids are in with internet, with social media, uh, it's- it's so different. And then with AI that they're gonna face, how do you keep your kid from dating an AI girlfriend when they can have a deepfake that's perfect and hot and loves them, right? Uh, you- you- they need to want something other than hedonism, and that's a difficult message to convey to kids if they adopt the dominant social mores today.

   5. CWChris Williamson27:58

      So to recap what you were talking about to do with this-

   6. MCMalcolm Collins28:01

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson28:04

      ... uh, sort of almost monotheistic, uh, future or this- this sort of monoculture future that we would end up with if birth rate decline continues, for the people that might look at this and say, "Well, this is you trying to put forth, you want it to be a- a white ethno state, you want it to be more of your progeny that are out there," your point is that that is the subgroup which is one of the few which are continuing to be okay at the moment. We're actually going to lose genetic and racial diversity if we allow the current trends to continue because some-

   8. MCMalcolm Collins28:35

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson28:35

      ... of the groups that are reproducing with the lowest fertility rates are the ones that add to that diversity. So in the future, what you end up with is a very small number of different cohorts of stuff like Amish, stuff like not even Mormons apparently anymore-

   10. MCMalcolm Collins28:50

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson28:50

       ... who are then downstream going to be the ones that fill out the entire country.

   12. MCMalcolm Collins28:55

       Yeah. If we do nothing, uh, the future is really just, uh, conservative Christians and conservative Jews and maybe conservative Muslims. Um, tha- those seem to be the only groups that are just like persistently resistant to this. Um-

   13. CWChris Williamson29:07

       So that's a- a pretty sort of, uh, bland future racially from-

   14. MCMalcolm Collins29:12

       Yeah. And I ... And there's some groups that in the very near future, like if I- if I was looking at this like an ecologist, right, like the groups I would be probably most concerned about right now are groups like the Jains and the Parsee, who I think like a lot of Americans don't think about, but they're some of the oldest, most distinct cultures in the world right now. And they will almost certainly have collapsed in- in- in population by the end of the century to the point where it'll be difficult for them to carry on their traditions. Um-

   15. CWChris Williamson29:34

       So coming back, coming back to that conversation about-

   16. MCMalcolm Collins29:36

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson29:36

       ... we get prosperous,

6. 29:38 – 38:14

   Balancing Gender Equality with the Need for Mothers

   1. CWChris Williamson29:38

      we give women education, they enter the job market, and they have other things to do with their life. What's your proposal? Presumably you're not saying that we need to rip women out of the workplace or education. And if it is the case that we don't want people to be less prosperous and we also want to let people choose what they want to do, if this is what they want to do, if women don't want to- to- to have kids or if they don't feel like they're ready and they don't wanna have kids until they are, they're concerned about the living cost and the cost of bringing a child into this world, they're concerned about the environment, they're concerned about losing their life freedom and struggling to find the right partner, whatever it is, they've got better things to do with all of the money that they've just found, like why- why shouldn't they be allowed to do that?

   2. MCMalcolm Collins30:20

      So I would say, uh, w- w- I think they should be allowed to do that. And I think that real feminists today, when I say a feminist, I mean somebody who wants gender e- Well, I- I don't know if feminism is the right word. People who want gender equality, whatever word you wanna use for wanting gender equality in 100 years, in 200 years to be an option, right? Uh, you're sort of at the crux of history right now because no group-... that ha- really has it, gender equality, except for maybe Israel, we can get to that later, e- there's questions there, whatever. But, um, uh, it's anywhere close to above repopulation rate. So those groups and those cultural traditions are going to eventually disappear. Um, a- and, and, and what they will do is they will get better in the short term at taking the kids of people from these conservative traditions. But eventually, I mean, just the, just the way cultural evolution works, the conservative traditions will build systems that have resistance to whatever technique that they're using, um, and- and they will not be able to repopulate that way anymore. Um, so, uh, if you actually care about this, then you can join the grand experiment. And the grand experiment is... and this is something we genuinely don't know yet. Is it possible to have gender equality and a high fertility rate? My family... So, like, when I look at what my wife and I did, um... I was asked to be on this podcast. Simone isn't here, not of my choice. I wouldn't have her on typically with me. You know, we write our books together, we run our companies together, is one solution to the gender equality question, which is to do everything together. Write your books together, run your companies together, raise your kids together, right? Uh, but there are other solutions to this question that people can experiment with. And what I love is this isn't a question of what's the most moral way to do things. Uh, sort of the future will decide who was actually successful, who was able to have a lot of kids, motivate the continuation of the tradition through their children. You know, you get 18 years to pitch to your kids that your way of living is a good way of living, and if your kids don't like that or they don't agree with that, I- I- I think we're- we're- we're blessed in that we live in a society where they can choose something else. Um, and so, uh, you know, I- I think that we are going to have a- hopefully, a lot of people trying new ways of living, new ways of trying to achieve gender equality, like my family. You know, doing everything with your spouse isn't the way that gender equality is typically envisioned when people talk about it, but it is a form of gender equality.

   3. CWChris Williamson32:39

      Can liberalism last under demographic decline? I- what about-

   4. MCMalcolm Collins32:43

      Oh, no, no. It's gone. It's dead. I, I mean, if you talk conservative liberalism, maybe, like if you're talking about, like, traditional liberalism. If you're talking about the progressive movement, I often say it's a bit like, uh, if you get a certain blast of radiation, right? Your, your DNA can be scrambled. Your cells can no longer replicate. You don't know that you're a dead man walking yet, you know, before you begin to feel the pain. But there is nothing that can be done to save you at that point. Uh, the fertility rate is so low within that community, there's really nothing that can be done. Even if you look at the genetic level right now, it's so funny, you know, conservatives are- are often like, "Hey, you're on our team. Why are you alerting them to the scope of the problem? You know, we win if we just sit back and let them disappear." And it's like, they're gonna disappear no matter what. Uh, if you look at the heritability of voting patterns, which is around 30% to 50%, um, you know, whether... This is done with identical twin studies and stuff. This is not, like, fringe science. You can look up genopolitics on Wikipedia. It's, like, mainstream. Uh, uh, i- i- and you look at current fertility rates in countries like the US, we should expect about a one standard deviation shift conservative in voting patterns over the next century. Uh, in the next 10 or 20 years, we'll see a massive shift to the left because they've success- ... Uh, we... As family units get atomized, um, uh, people vote more progressively. When people don't have kids, they vote more progressively. Um, but after that, you're going to see a massive shift in the other direction, and it's just inevitable from the statistics at this point.

   5. CWChris Williamson34:05

      Has any country tried to fix this problem through authoritarianism, and how does that work?

   6. MCMalcolm Collins34:11

      A lot have. It just doesn't. Uh, so Romania fa- what is it? Order 77- 707 or something? I don't know. Maybe I'm getting it confused with Star Wars orders. But they, uh, decided under the communist period that they were gonna ban abortion. And they thought, "Oh, this will be great. Um, it'll, it'll shoot up fertility rates." And it did sh- for a very brief period of time, like two years or something like that. Then people found ways around it, and then after the law was repealed, um, fertility rates crashed because fertility or- or having kids became associated with, um, uh, uh, really, uh, p- poverty often or low social status. Um, and so, uh, you can look at- at countries like Iran that have been trying to implement things. It's really funny. I watched what China's implementing right now, and it's like, Iran tried all of this 10 years ago. You guys g- can just look at what happened. You're gonna have to get really aggressive if you actually wanna solve this, and that's where I get really scared. Because a lot of countries... What we have found is that you can dictatorially, like people have tried to, you know, uh, uh, ban abortions. If you look at what's happening in China now, they're likely shutting down access to, um, uh, uh, uh, vasectomy clinics and stuff like that. Um, so countries can ban these things, um, and- and then it doesn't work because it doesn't work. So then what do they do? Then you get real Handmaid's Tale, and that gets scary for me. It was actually... They had a piece on us in The Guardian and they were like... They had quoted me saying something like that and they go, "Well, that sounds like a threat." And I'm like, "Are you... Like, do you have the mind of a child?" Like, i- it's like when I tell a child, "Don't touch the stove. You're gonna burn your hand." They're like, "That sounds like a threat." I'm trying to protect you here (laughs) , uh, but there's nothing I can do. You know, I- I... At the end of the day, the Titanic's hitting the iceberg. I'm just trying to per- to- to- to prepare for what's gonna happen next. But what happened next get really interesting. Sorry to keep talking. I don't wanna...

   7. CWChris Williamson36:03

      No, keep going.

   8. MCMalcolm Collins36:04

      Okay. So what's really cool here is if you look historically... So when I started caring about this, I was in Korea, right? You know, 95% population collapse. It was funny to think about because the memory is so strong there of, you know, less than a century ago, Japan coming over, you know, murdering in- in- in- in Korea and China, millions of people, and there's this conflict there. China, Korea, Japan, you know, trying to... well, less Korea trying to take over the other two, but mostly the other two trying to take over each other. You know, there's- there's a lot of, uh, history there, and it's so funny that now, uh, any one of them could just... I'm like, how does Korea solve this? I guess they could import people from Japan or China. No, you can't, because their populations are collapsing. Any one of them could non-violently just, like, walk into their neighbor 100 years from now-They were able to motivate their citizens to kill people, but they were not able to motivate them to have kids. And this is what's so interesting. It changes the game, but in a really beautiful way. You look at people like Putin who don't get the new world yet, right? The world used to be, you keep out immigrants, you maintain cultural integrity, and when you wanna spread your culture, you go to other countries, you kill their people, you subjugate them, and you force them to convert to your culture. But that's not the game anymore. So you look at Russia, which has a desperately low fertility rate, attacking their closest cultural and, like, ethnic neighbors, uh, uh, uh, the Ukraine, who also has a desperately low fertility rate, both killing, like, an entire generation here. Um, and th- they're never gonna recover from this. It, it, it is, it is not the game anymore, the game that they're still playing. You win now not through war, but with love. And I say love and not just sex or spamming kids, 'cause if you spam kids, they're gonna breed like caged panda bears, like everyone else. They're going to not have any dedication to whatever weird thing about your culture caused you to have a lot of kids, and they're just gonna drift off into this monoculture and disappear. So what you need to do is you need to have a lot of kids, but you also need to do a great job raising them, make them proud of your cultural group, make them want to continue that cultural group, and those are the people who are going to be around in the future. And I'm really excited about that, because that is so much better than the old system of murdering people.

   9. CWChris Williamson38:13

      Can

7. 38:14 – 44:39

   What a World in Deep Population Decline Looks Like

   1. CWChris Williamson38:14

      you try and explain or illustrate what a world in deep population decline would be like?

   2. MCMalcolm Collins38:23

      Yeah. So the first thing, and I often don't talk about, you know, I don't... The first thing is all economies are gonna collapse. Pretty much the Western eco- So our economic system is sort of a pyramid scheme. A lot of people know this, but let's just spill it out. (laughs) Um, if you, uh, look historically, people go, "Is this truism? If I put money on the stock market, that money grows on average." That has been happening because of two things. The number of workers has been growing exponentially, and the productivity per worker has been growing around linearly. A l- a little exponentially, but mostly linearly. Yes, technology has been growing exponentially, but the productivity per worker is about linear. Um, or at least not close to the explosion in worker population. That is why the economy has always been growing. If the worker population in the developed world begins to collapse exponentially, and people are like, "Well, why don't people in the, in, in, in, in desperately poor countries count?" Because by definition they have small economies. Th- that's why they're poor, because their economies are small. So you don't need to wait for the world's population to begin to collapse for all of the developed world's economies to begin to collapse. So you're gonna begin to see the economy shrink on average. It won't be like it is now where on average things go up. On average, things go down. When things go down on average, people react very differently. You don't leave your money in the stock market anymore. You're gonna have mass withdrawals of money from the stock market. And then this begins to break a bunch of other systems. So you see things like Detroit. Uh, okay, so why did Detroit ultimately end up having the problems it was having? And there's a few reasons. One is our society used this miraculous cheat code called debt. Now I, I am a private equity VC guy. I'm very familiar with debt. So let's just talk a little bit about how debt works and why it's such a miracle. If I'm making a $10 investment and $8 of that is debt, and $2 is equity, and that investment grows to just $12, my equity in that investment has doubled. But if it shrinks just $1, my equity has halved. We leveraged our land, our businesses. Leveraged means took out debt against. Our cities, our states, our nations. It's not... People look at, like, the national debt. No, no, no, no. It's leverage to the hilt all the way down. If things start shrinking, the whole thing falls apart. And yes, national debt is a little different than personal debt and stuff like that. But what you are beginning to s- go to see is essentially what we saw in Detroit. So people are like, "Oh, my house will be worth less." That's great. Yeah, it's great if houses go down 20%, maybe 50%. But when people know a house is always going to decrease in price, it decreases to a dollar. And when a house is a dollar, you know, like what you saw in Detroit, right? Um, when a house is a dollar, there's no reason to maintain it, because houses cost a lot to maintain. As anyone who is a homeowner knows, you put so much money into your house. But you justify it, because, okay, well, it's an asset that I own. And people stop investing in assets that way. So the whole way we relate to money and the economy is gonna change. So endless urban blight, economy's not functioning the way that they're supposed to function. So then what happens? Well, where do people begin to invest? Well, one is, what, what happens in a negative scenario? So negative scenario, and this is what I'm terrified of, is the developed world finds a cheat code, which is immigrants. Um, what they realize is that they can cheese their collapsing populations through mass immigration, but this cheat code only works if they keep really the only country, the only collection of countries that has an above repopulation rate right now, which is mostly in Africa, desperately poor. So now you have an economic incentive, a gun to the head of the entire developed world that Africa must stay in desperate poverty, because then

   3. CWChris Williamson42:04

      Oh, you use, you use Africa almost like a breeding ground-

   4. MCMalcolm Collins42:08

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson42:08

      ... to create the future population to be pulled across into other countries.

   6. MCMalcolm Collins42:12

      Yeah, it's, it's, it's sick. But that seems to be... Like, when I talk to them, that's, like, actually the going plan right now. Uh, but I don't think it's gonna work. I don't think that that plan's gonna work, so we can ignore it. So what really happens, well, so they... Because their economies are going to collapse before they can do that sort of mass... The, what... Right now, you're getting a lot of immigrants, but it's immigrants who want to leave. And I think what a lot of people forget is a lot of people don't want to leave. Even when Ireland was suffering the potato famine, what a lot of people don't know is that the, uh, landlords, there was a rash of landlord murders at the time. Um, and, uh, so they got scared. And so they would...... uh, sometimes, I don't know how frequently, offer to pay for all of their tenants to go to America on coffin ships. It was horrible, but at least it was the idea. That's, that's the way I think many people would be, be imported these days. Right? So, uh, horrible immigration, but at least, you know, they had the option to leave during the potato famine, during this time when people would walk into town, th- they thought everyone was dead, and then the corpses would start animating, and they realized that they were just st... Like, it was bad. But, but the majority, bl- a lot of people wanted to stay. And so I think what they're gonna realize is that this, this trickle of immigrants that we have right now is pretty close to the max trickle of immigrants you can get. And it's only just offsetting population collapse right now. And when they get to the US, when they get to Europe, their fertility rate collapsed. First-generation immigrants in the US only have a fertility rate of 1.7, well below repopulation rate. So it's not like you could just bring immigrants and they solve the problem. You need to keep importing people. But anyway, okay, (imitates static) ignore all this. Okay. So world's collapsing, where do you put your money if, on average, the economy is collapsing? This is where it gets cool because we get something we haven't had in a long time. Individual human lives start to matter. Individual human cultures start to matter. If you have a cultural group that has a high fertility rate and it's technophilic, like they engage with technology, um, and even if they're technophobic, but less so if they're technophobic, that becomes a group you want to invest in. That becomes a place you wanna place money because that's the only place that you can be fairly sure is going to grow in aggregate in the future. And that creates a totally different world economy than the one we have now. And it's a very interesting world economy. And so when people say like, "What actually is our foundation sort of doing?" really what we're doing is we're trying to identify those groups right now and build connections between them so that we can have a pluralistic group of thriving economies of the willing. And of the willing, what I mean, is that people who were willing to have kids, willing to give those kids a good enough life that they wanted to stay in that culture.

8. 44:39 – 53:00

   Movements from Fertility Extremists

   1. CWChris Williamson44:39

      Since learning about the current trends of population collapse, declining birth rates, et cetera, I've started to view a lot of the problems that we're facing, especially the cultural ways that people see dating, family life-

   2. MCMalcolm Collins44:52

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson44:52

      ... having kids, relationships with their parents, uh, future of the, the world through a very different lens. And, um, there's a, a trend at the moment that's only recently, like, within the last couple of months, I've started seeing come out on the internet, which is one of men in their 20s getting vasectomies as a protest against feminists that want to be able to have free and easy sex. It's literally like a clap back, "Well, you've got the pill, I'm gonna get the snip." Have you seen this?

   4. MCMalcolm Collins45:20

      I, I ha- I'm a fan. I, I mean, I, I focus more on the transmaxxing movement. Have you heard of that?

   5. CWChris Williamson45:25

      No. What's transmaxxing?

   6. MCMalcolm Collins45:26

      Oh, it's fascinating. So it's a group of guys, um, who are not like traditional trans, and that they don't have gender dysphoria, they don't feel like they were born the wrong gender. They're just like, "As a guy and as a not particularly attractive or not particularly wealthy guy, I got dealt a bad hand. Hormone therapy is easy to get access to these days, I'm gonna become a woman." Um, and, uh, that's what it is. It is-

   7. CWChris Williamson45:48

      With what goal? What's the goal of it?

   8. MCMalcolm Collins45:50

      The goal is to get an easier life. I mean, if you've been consuming a fire hose of red pill and MGTOW content, you know, it, it can sound like a pretty good idea to a lot of people, I think.

   9. CWChris Williamson46:00

      Oh, because women have got it so much easier than men do-

   10. MCMalcolm Collins46:03

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson46:03

       ... therefore, if I become the closest thing that I can to a woman, it's going to fix all of my problem. Okay, fair enough. Well, I mean, yeah, that, that, that is an approach and the optional elected vasectomy in your 20s thing, I think, s- sort of sit on the shelf next to each other for-

   12. MCMalcolm Collins46:18

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson46:18

       I, I wouldn't have predicted this on my 2023 bingo card. Um, but yeah, I j- and so e- j- just everything that I see, you know, this stophavingkids.org, who you may be familiar with, like, this really serious anti-natalist movement. They, they have their-

   14. MCMalcolm Collins46:31

       Oh, have you heard of the involuntary anti-natalist movement?

   15. CWChris Williamson46:35

       No. (laughs)

   16. MCMalcolm Collins46:35

       They want to, they want to sterilize the entire population. They're like terrorists. They're, they're just as scary people.

   17. CWChris Williamson46:40

       Wow. And what's their justification for this? I'm gonna guess climate.

   18. MCMalcolm Collins46:44

       Oh, no. Uh, so they're really just negative utilitarians, I think most anti-natalism. And, um-

   19. CWChris Williamson46:50

       Okay.

   20. MCMalcolm Collins46:50

       ... th- for people who aren't familiar with negative utilitarianism, it's the belief that negative emotions are bad, but positive emotions aren't inherently good, or that a human life, a, a, negative emotions are more acute than positive emotions, or they're just much higher in volume. And they're-

   21. CWChris Williamson47:06

       The best, uh, the best, the best example of this that I learned from a friend was, imagine that you got to spend the rest of your life in the optimal amount of bliss, maxing out your pleasure, compare this to an existence where for the remainder of your life you were spent in maximum torture with as much pain as you can imagine, or let's say that you did one and then did the other, would one be worth the other? And most people have an inclination that suffering is somehow worse than pain that you are in. And then you net out after a human life, the, what, what was the, what was the group? The involuntary anti-natalist because of na-

   22. MCMalcolm Collins47:40

       Yeah, the involuntary anti-natalist.

   23. CWChris Williamson47:41

       ... negative utilitarians? Yeah.

   24. MCMalcolm Collins47:43

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson47:43

       Um, they, they basically say that a human life is net suffering overall, therefore, it is morally reprehensible to bring any future life into this world because the net experience is one of pain and torment, uh, and displeasure.

   26. MCMalcolm Collins47:57

       Yeah. And I, I actually suspect that when we see this urban monoculture I've described begin to really dwindle in size, and the only people who are left are the most extremist within it, we're going to begin to have to deal with terrorists on that front. And that really scares me. But here's the thing, who's to know we aren't already dealing with terrorists on that front? Look at declining fertility rates around the world today, biological fertility, declining sperm counts, der- declining testosterone, who's to say there isn't something in the water? You know what I mean? Um-

   27. CWChris Williamson48:23

       Now that you think that someone's purposefully doing this, I, I don't know, man. I, I would, I would hazard toward Hanlon's razor with stuff like this.

   28. MCMalcolm Collins48:31

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson48:31

       Like, you know, the, the incentives align for people to believe that they're doing something which is sympathetic, empathetic, uh, caring, whether it be because of the environment, whether it be... You know, I mean, that, the, the, the environmental thing is, is such an interesting argument to me-

   30. MCMalcolm Collins48:50

       Mm-hmm.
9. 53:00 – 1:04:29

   Is it a Moral Obligation to Have Children?

   1. CWChris Williamson53:00

      Do you think it's a moral obligation to have children then, with all of this sort of folded together?

   2. MCMalcolm Collins53:05

      I think different people have different moral frameworks they're optimizing for. I think if somebody believes that their moral framework should continue to exist into the future, 200, 300 years into the future, like gender equality or something like that, and you don't have kids, you have morally failed. If you, however, are just like, "No, it doesn't matter if my belief system dies out with me," um, then, I- yeah, whatever. You know? I- I- I- I'm not gonna tell you that your morals are wrong because I think that, that morality is one of those things where I believe that my morals are right. But, uh, if I go around trying to police everyone else's morality, I'm gonna, just gonna have a bad time.

   3. CWChris Williamson53:41

      So that's, uh, that line in the sand is one I've been really interested in playing about with. I absolutely agree that some sort of Handmaid's Tale future where women are kept in pens like cows so that they can keep the future of the population going is wrong. Also, telling women that the only way that you can live a fulfilling life is by doing some domestic version of that also is wrong. But I can't see why there isn't any sympathy out there in the world for the reverse of this situation. What about all of the people who were told you don't need to have kids to have a fulfilling life that did want to become mothers, that had their preferences nudged in the opposite direction, break through their fertility window and then grieve for families that they never had? Like, where is the finger-pointing going in the other direction? Because I, I don't see anybody unironically saying that women need to get out of the boardroom and get back in the bedroom to start producing more children. Like, I think that they're just saying, "Look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and, and take them with a big spoonful of salt."

   4. MCMalcolm Collins54:50

      Yeah, and I think that, um, a lot of statistics, women just aren't familiar with. S- things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable, if you look at studies, not all studies show this but a number of them do, is that, uh, parent...... households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents that stay at home. It's a small effect. But what I'm saying is, is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct, um, and that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working i- in, in the long term for human civilization, because nothing is really working right now. And so I just encourage people to, if they think, "I can't be a mom and in the boardroom," I, I, I would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family, rethink the way you're structuring finding a partner. You know, earlier we were talking about dating markets, and one of the things that our foundation is doing is we're working to try to create and promote new types of dating apps, uh, maybe even recreate The London Season, um, you know, something like that but, but that travels between places, like the Olympics, where you have, you know, a bunch of the single people go. But there's some rules that make it harder to just, uh, have a really low switching cost between partners, which is one big problems that we're dealing with right now. Um, so with a lot of this, it's about experimenting with new social technologies and understanding that there probably are ways to have it all, much more than I think people want to a- accept because it requires trying new things and being called a freak by other people.

   5. CWChris Williamson56:13

      What about people that say it's too expensive to bring a child into this world?

   6. MCMalcolm Collins56:17

      Well, (laughs) why, why are poorer people having more kids? If, if it's an issue of cost, then, uh, you... what you should see is a line where people have more kids the more money they have, but typically the line goes in the other direction within and between countries until you get to, like, ludicrous levels of wealth, like half a million dollars a year. So, um, what I say is it's enormously expensive. It is a massive lifestyle sacrifice. It absolutely is a lifestyle sacrifice. But is it too expensive? I think that's the real thing. Is it too expensive? Is it that you can't afford it? Or is it that you would need to... like us. You know, we had to leave a city. We moved to a rural area. We changed the type of jobs we could get because of that. You know, we made a lot of sacrifices to do this. Um, and I understand that for, for families in less socially, economically advantaged positions, they have to make even more sacrifices. Um, but, uh, y- you know, when a family decides they want a lot of kids, they do it. And I think in addition to that, this is another area. One of the projects that we worked in was Project Eureka, which was a town for, like, single moms that had kids and other people who had kids and who wanted to co-raise kids, because there are social technologies we can try, and I would really like to see these commune systems and stuff like that begin to pop up more. Because I think, as an investment prospect, they are a really good long-term investment prospect if you look at the model that I was talking about earlier.

   7. CWChris Williamson57:36

      The challenges of... Uh, the p- the, the reason that people say it's too expensive to bring a child into this world, I don't think that they're talking about the cost on their finances. I think they're talking about the cost on their freedom.

   8. MCMalcolm Collins57:49

      Oh, yeah. Look-

   9. CWChris Williamson57:50

      And, and it, it's... If you look at the reasons that are given for a lot of non-daters at the moment, for people that are checking out of the dating market, it's, "Just got better things to do, not wanting to lose personal freedom." There's this huge, huge study that was done by Pew and, uh, it just came back that people were just distracted. So, eh, w- what it seems is that if you are more financially enabled, there are more things that you can do with your finances, which means that you can go abroad to Bali. Why not go to Bali for two weeks? Well, if you have a kid, you can't go to Bali for two weeks. That, the girl with the list thing, which you must have seen, that came off TikTok. A girl printed out 350 reasons not to have a child and then printed them all on a piece of paper. And the, the reasons ranged from stuff like, "Child is literally a parasite inside of you," to, "Can't wear my cute high heels anymore, can't do brunch on Sundays."

   10. MCMalcolm Collins58:43

       Yeah. So I want to get into this. I'm really excited. So there are, I think, two core reasons that people don't have kids within the category that you're talking about here. It's because they're optimizing for their personal happiness. Now, this can be broad satisfaction, contentment, whatever word you want to use, but it's some sort of emotional optimization, or they're optimizing for their own position within a local status hierarchy. This can be showing off to people on Twitter or whatever, you know, the trips that you're doing or the things that you're doing with your life because you think that these make you, I don't know, like, better or higher within some, some group. As soon as you're not optimizing for one of those two things, typically having kids... Or I suppose you could say that, "I'm trying to make the world a better place," uh, along some sort of framework like donating to, like, protecting ecology or something like that, like-

   11. CWChris Williamson59:31

       A lot of that loops back to status, though.

   12. MCMalcolm Collins59:33

       Yeah, a lot of that loops back to status. So, I think what we're gonna see... And this is really cool because it's gonna change what it means to be human. When people... I mean, even more than the other options people have right now, when robosexuality... I always go back to the Future- Futurama episode about this, that, that it predicted this. When people can start dating AIs and you can have your deepfake girlfriend and stuff like that, and then eventually people will be able to go into pods and live any virtual reality lifestyle they want. When these sorts of things become possible, and they likely will within my grandkids' lifetime, at least, if not our own, pretty much everyone who's o- optimizing for status or personal pleasure is going to be culled from the gene pool. And any cultural group that can't motivate people to optimize for something else is going to be removed from the system, and that is going to fundamentally change what it means to be human and likely have a pretty big impact on sort of the human sociological profile in terms of the genetic screening that's gonna cause.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:00:28

       Mm. It's gonna nudge the genetic disposition because the only cohorts that are left are going to have a particular type of predisposition-

   14. MCMalcolm Collins1:00:38

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:00:38

       ... and over time, that's gonna... Right? Yeah, that's really, really interesting because, you know, we all have this, this balance between hedonic pleasure and meaning that we seek in the future. You know, it's mo- most parents, I don't think, if you were to test them on a minute by minute basis, it's not the most pleasurable thing in the world to raise a child. Looking at some of the, the studies that I've seen, it's not, it's not massively pleasurable but it's incredibly meaningful. And, you know-There has to be some sort of a spectrum where on one side someone lives for a life that, in retrospect, they're glad they lived. And on the other side, someone lives a life that moment to moment they're happy that they're living. And, you know, that spectrum between the two, am I living for a future that's meaning or am I living for a now that's pleasure?

   16. MCMalcolm Collins1:01:20

       Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited. Well, I love what you're getting at here, which is how do you balance these two? And the really cool thing is that biologically, we're already optimized to have kids. And I think a lot of the unhappiness that comes in society today is that people forget that all of your ancestors had kids. (laughs) They had sex and they had kids, or almost all of them did, right? Um, and so humans are programmed to find genuine contentment and happiness of a deeper kind and a more meaningful kind than they can get from almost anything else, from continuing down the path that had led to our species being successful so far. And I think when you look at a lot of influencers right now, if you look at a lot of unhappiness, they are showing people what people are sort of biologically optimized for right after they go through puberty without people realizing that that optimization pro-gram changes as you get older. Often, uh, there was a joke that I got in trouble for on, on, on Twitter, which is to say that, I don't know if you know Blippi. He's like a Blues Clues sort of character who dances around, around firetrucks for kids and is like, "Yeah, I'm driving a firetruck. I'm, I'm playing in a dump truck. I'm, I'm playing on a playground." You know, and kids are like, "Oh, this is the perfect life," before they go through puberty. They see this. That's what they're optimized for. They're optimized for play and exploration. As an adult, you see this and you're like, "Oh my God, his life looks terrible." Um, I mean, obviously he probably makes a lot of money, but I mean, you wouldn't actually wanna live that way. And I often argue that, that Andrew Tate is sort of the Blippi for teenagers. Um, this is what a teenage boy thinks is the ideal adult life. But to an actual, like, grown man you see this and you can see sort of the, the deadness within, that's inside him. He's like, "Yeah, I have to, like, please multiple women a day or they'll leave me and then I won't be able to maintain sort of the thing that I built up." And I'm like, "Oh my God, I can't even imagine, like, having to just, like, have a routine of constantly having sex every day so that I can, at a base level, maintain my economic empire." Um, and, but to a young boy that sounds, "Oh, that's the best," because humans go through a second puberty when they have kids. Your testosterone drops dramatically. You begin to gain happiness from different sources, and it's a deeper kind of happiness. And then with young women it's the same thing. With young women they get told, "Oh, you're gonna love traveling the world. You're gonna love..." At a certain point this stuff just becomes droll, you know. Um, because you were biologically programmed to want... Now, not everyone is. You know, people's biological programming is a bit different. You know, I could say that on average human males are biologically programmed to find human females attractive. But obviously not all human males find human females attractive, so a few people don't go through this shift later in life. But when you optimize around the things that give you happiness when you were a teenager and your whole society tells you to optimize around those things, you hit middle age and you're like, "Why doesn't anything really make me happy anymore? Why aren't video games making me happy anymore? Why aren't the, the things I used to do, why does these status games not make me happy anymore?" And it's because your culture used to tell you, "Hey, you need to move on to your next stage of life," but you don't have that culture anymore 'cause you're in this bubble.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:04:28

       Going

10. 1:04:29 – 1:11:12

    How to Change the Narrative on Motherhood

    1. CWChris Williamson1:04:29

       back to what you said about status-

    2. MCMalcolm Collins1:04:32

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:04:32

       ... and how status provides a incentive for people to behave in particular ways, ways that allow them to advertise their fancy trip to Bali and brunch and whatever on a, on a Sunday on social media. Have you considered a way of reprogramming status full activities so that motherhood becomes pedestalized again?

    4. MCMalcolm Collins1:04:56

       I hate to say this, but I think for most of the population people are like, "Oh, why don't you force them to?" Like I, I talk with some people and they're like, "Well, what about like banning porn or banning, you know, whatever," right? Like, would that force people to do this? And it's like, look, or, or banning social media, right? The cultural groups and people who aren't resistant to the existing pressures in this world that are sterilizing them, uh, unfortunately they're just kind of a lost cause. What we need to do is we need to find the few groups that have found a way to make themselves resistant to this and sort of nurture them, um, so that they can survive through this period and then end up thriving, which is why we focus on things like trying to-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:05:33

       No, but it's, it's not like we're... It's not like humans are, um, well, it depends on your view of free will, I suppose, but we're not exactly deterministic beings, right? If we're able to nudge the culture in a way to get people to change their behavior, you know, people... I had Peter Singer-

    6. MCMalcolm Collins1:05:47

       Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:05:47

       ... on the show yesterday. Peter Singer managed to impact so many people's lives through animal liberation that wouldn't have done that without him nudging them in that way. There is status that was associated with being vegan, therefore people started doing it. They were also bought into this philosophy that underpinned it. I, I'm a club promoter by trade, right? I ran nightclubs for my entire career.

    8. MCMalcolm Collins1:06:06

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:06:06

       And with that I understand the power of trends and mimesis. And I'm just thinking at the moment there is a mimetic trend about, like, motherhood is lame or dangerous or freedom-restricting. Changing that trend technology seems something that could be quite a, a high leverage opportunity.

    10. MCMalcolm Collins1:06:24

        Yeah. Delta, you changed my mind on this, and I'm remembering conversations 'cause this is actually a debate I've had with my wife, and she's changed my mind before but I forgot. Um, which is, I think a cor- well, she would argue a core aspect of our advocacy, if we can, is to get it modeled in, in, in television shows and in other types of popular media, uh, that having lots of kids is a high status thing. Um, the, the big fear I have is I'm, I'm just really afraid of people having kids because it helps their status. I, I would like it if it's like a yes and thing-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:06:56

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    12. MCMalcolm Collins1:06:56

        ... but no matter what, when you make something a status thing, there's going to be a group of kids that are brought into the world only because of the way they augment the parents' status.... and, and that means that their parents are going to be narcissists, and they're gonna be pretty ... But, but you're right. I mean, hopefully we can move culture in a way that doesn't just target the narcissist, and that-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:07:15

        That's more holistic, yeah. So-

    14. MCMalcolm Collins1:07:16

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:07:17

        ... I ... We- we're about to get onto talking about another third rail of y- your a- approach to sort of embryo screening and genetic selection and stuff. But do you see it almost like, for want of a better word, like a breeding experiment that we have? Not an experiment, but a, a, a breeding future that we have with humans where there are going to be particular cohorts that continue, there are going to be particular cohorts that don't? Given that a good chunk of our behavior is determined by our genes, the type of people that continue to reproduce will have-

    16. MCMalcolm Collins1:07:49

        Mm-hmm.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:07:50

        ... a particular genetic predisposition, which in the future means that we're going to nudge the entire human race's genetic predisposition in one direction. Are we in the middle of a breeding experiment, and are humans facing extinction?

    18. MCMalcolm Collins1:08:01

        I, I'd say it's a cultural experiment, because the independent factor that's being changed is culture. And the dependent variable that we're measuring is their ability to have kids, so breed, but also maintain those kids within that social group. Um, so if the kids just leave or they don't like their lifestyle as a child, you know, you can't just give a kid a terrible childhood or they're not gonna continue that cultural group. Um, so, uh, and there has to be ... This is actually a really interesting phenomenon, um, here, where if you look at countries that are poorer but also have really low fertility rates, typically the common thing across those countries is that there is very low amounts of hope. This is why China has such a low fertility rate, um, because, uh, people within China, this is where the "We are the last generation" meme comes from. They're like, "What? Am I just having kids so the government can use them?" Like, there's no more, like, social mobility here or something like this. And I think it's why when you're looking at a cultural group like Jews in Israel there's such a high fertility rate is there is a high level of cultural hope within that cultural group. They feel like when they have kids, they're not just, you know, grist for the grindstone.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:09:04

        Mm.

    20. MCMalcolm Collins1:09:04

        They, they can move up within the culture even if they're in a, a low-status position. Um, so I would agree with everything you're saying, and I'm really excited for this experiment.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:09:14

        I imagine that the discussions around climate are just another really pernicious sort of convincing factor about why people shouldn't have kids. Not only are you contributing to the, the burning of fossil fuels, not only are you going to increase greenhouse gases which are going to kill all of these other animals, but the life that your child is going to have on this planet is also going to be filled with fumes and gray skies, and it's going to be toxic and whatever.

    22. MCMalcolm Collins1:09:41

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:09:42

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so the incentives-

    24. MCMalcolm Collins1:09:43

        But, but this is ... I was gonna say, this is also just the latest apocalyptic cult in the US, you know? And, and it's not gonna be the last one, you know? We, we keep having ... Uh, if the US is dotted by anything, it's, it's dotted by, uh, sort of apocalypticism, um, and, and, and fears. Th- the US actually ... Jewish and Christian traditions more generally are dotted by this. Um, and I think the next one we're gonna see is AI. Why would you have kids when AI is gonna kill us all? You know, um, it, it's just a cycle, and it keeps going. And, and-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:10:10

        You do know that there's people, there's people watching this right now that are saying, "Well, what about you two? You two are just saying that it's the birth rate decline apocalypse." You're the same Cassandra-

    26. MCMalcolm Collins1:10:18

        Well-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:10:18

        ... as that you're accusing everyone else of being.

    28. MCMalcolm Collins1:10:20

        Well, because I, I would say that, um, uh, I, I, I do argue that things are going to get worse, but I don't argue they're gonna kill us all. I think if you look at real climate change data, it says ... which I believe. The climate's gonna get worse. A lot of suffering is gonna happen because of it, but it's not gonna kill us all. That climate message hasn't done as well as spreading as, you know, Greta Thunberg's in one of your recent podcasts is that everyone's gonna be dead in five years due to the climate. AI is going to massively change what it means to be human. Um, it, it could even cause some major catastrophes. But it's not gonna turn us all into goo. Um, and so I think that there is ... It, it's right to say that we in the world have actual things to be afraid of. There's going to be actual systemic shifts. But I think that's different than just apocalypticism and being like, "We're all gonna die. No need to think about the future." You know, Harold Camping style, right? Um-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:11:11

        Oh.

11. 1:11:12 – 1:25:23

    Malcolm’s Unique Experience of Having Children

    1. CWChris Williamson1:11:12

       Okay, so-

    2. MCMalcolm Collins1:11:13

       The Millerist movement.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:11:14

       Getting onto what you did with your children. We've discussed what the world should do, how we should move forward, some of the challenges, some of the reasons that people don't. What is the unique process that you went through with your wife?

    4. MCMalcolm Collins1:11:29

       So, this is spicy. Um, what we did is we did full genetic sequencing of our embryos, and we used those genetic sequencings to inform the order in which we implanted the embryos. So, why did we do this? Well, you have to do, uh, uh, biopsies of embryos anyways often to determine if they're half alive or not. Not everyone does this, but most people do. It's a normal thing you do when you're doing IVF. We had to do IVF anyway because my wife, uh, was unable to get pregnant naturally, um, due to, you know, having depression when she was younger, which caused her to develop, uh, anorexia, which meant that she doesn't, like, menstruate naturally, and she, she actually would ... With trans women, she often does a, like, competition to see who has to take more hormones, um, to, to, to be, uh, (laughs) a, a woman. Um, and, and so, uh, eh, you know, she, she has to do all of this stuff to, to have kids. So we had to do IVF anyway. We had to do the biopsies anyway. And now with genetic screening data, we can go through that. And her mom died slowly of cancer, and so we were able to look at that. And, you know, she suffered from major depressive disorder, which also has genetic links, so we were able to look at these things and say, well, I mean, if we can choose to lower the probability that our kids have to deal with these genetic conditions, um, like, w- would we lower that probability? Like, uh, to me, people are like, "Yeah, but people will make fun of you on Twitter if you do this." It's like, yeah, okay. My kid comes to me, and they're like, "Dad, I really, you know, wanna kill myself right now," or, "I have migraines." That was another thing we selected against. Uh, you could've selected against this and you didn't 'cause people were gonna make fun of you on Twitter? Like, a- a- and this is just our cultural group. So people try to connect this with eugenics, but eugenics, the definition of eugenics is very clear. It's the belief that there's good and bad genes and that the good genes should be distributed maximally throughout society, which is sort of the antithesis of what we believe. We believe every family, every cultural unit has beliefs about good and bad genes, right? Like, our family doesn't want our kids to get cancers. But-... that reproductive choice should always be in the hands of individual families and individual cultural groups, and that it should never be enacted. If anything, I would say that it's eugenics for the government to come and tell my family the genetic choices we should make, because it views sort of pure, unaltered human DNA as the superior form of humanity. Like, th- they're actually saying we need genetic purity in humanity, and you're tainting the genetic purity of the human species by, like, selecting things. I don't know, to me that sounds much more eugenics-y than me being like, "I don't want my kids to get cancer." And this is something many cultural groups have done over time. Like, uh, Orthodox Jews had to do this with Tay-Sachs. Some Black communities had to do this with sickle cell. Like, it's, it's also like an antisemitic and racist position to call this sort of genetic selection and this sort of reproductive choice, um, uh, uh, eugenics. Um, so I think that, that, um, we do support... And I think... Now, here's the thing. That's the nice way to put all of this, but then let's go big or go home. Let's be controversial here, right? So, what happens if we really hold this position in the future? Well, when we say our foundation's goal is to preserve and increase human diversity, a lot of people miss the "and increase human diversity" part, because as soon as families have these choices, a lot of people think families are all gonna choose the same thing. You know, like, I love it, people are like, "Isn't everyone gonna choose, like, a, a, a, a, a white, you know, a, a buff child?" And it's like, no! No, no! Like, Black families aren't gonna choose, like, little Aryan kids or something. What are you, out of your mind? Everyone's going to choose things that optimize for their cultural tradition's value system, and we're entering into this grand experiment where some of those value systems will prove to be more efficacious than other value systems. Right now, people are like, "Oh, you can select for IQ." We didn't select for IQ, but you could theoretically select for IQ, and we might do it in the future. Um, but IQ is such a, like a, a bad metric because we're in the early days of this technology. Eventually, uh, IQ will be 80 different things. Are you optimizing for creativity? Are you optimizing for... In the same way, you know, that you don't just optimize for strengths, you optimize for agility, you optimize for lean muscle, you optimize for, like, this type of muscle fiber versus this type of muscle fiber. And we will see this blossoming, I hope, of human diversity, uh, uh, at a level that makes our existing ethnic diversity look trite. Um, and, and, and subcultures will be very intolerant to this new diversity, uh, but I'm excited for it. I'm excited for it because I think that when we have new perspectives, when we have, uh, new ways of doing things and new cultural optimization, uh, we get something, uh, more beautiful. And one of the, the core focuses of our foundation is trying to get the cost of this technology as low as possible. And a lot of people, they hear about this technology and they go, "Oh, it must cost a fortune." I mean, theoretically, it doesn't, really. You're looking at genome sequencing, which it, we've gotten tremendously cheap. And then once the genome is sequenced, um, you're just comparing it to a data table. So, uh, right now, you know, if you did this at the state level, it would be tremendously inexpensive to do. Um, and, you know, you could do this for, like, 50 cents a family and maybe, like, $50 per egg that's sequenced. And when you compare this to the cost of IVF, that is, like, nothing. Um, uh, and many states are already supporting IVF, like the UK, like Israel. Um, so, uh, to say that this technology could be widely available is not a, a irresponsible thing to claim at all, and I'm really excited for it.

Episode duration: 1:30:55