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

Malcolm Collins is a pronatalist, Stanford MBA graduate, venture capitalist and an author. What would the world actually look like if only the global population was only 500 million people? Given the current birth rate projections, we’re approaching a massive collapse. If you think a planet with too many people on it is bad, a planet with too few is even worse. Expect to learn why Korea is projected to experience a 94% population extinction within the next century, why so few people actually want to have kids in 2023, why a ‘super virus’ has taken over the progressive movement, whether prosperity, equality, education and fertility are incompatible with each other, whether authoritarianism could fix this problem, if there’s a moral obligation to have children, the implications of using new technology for gene-editing & birthing via artificial wombs and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Malcolm on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins Check out Malcolm's website - https://pronatalist.org/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #populationcollapse #pronatalism #economics - 00:00 Intro 00:14 Why Malcolm is Always in the News 06:40 Our Divided Society’s Two Factions 17:09 How Prosperity & Gender Equality Impact Fertility 21:30 What is Causing the Decline in Dating? 29:38 Balancing Gender Equality with the Need for Mothers 38:14 What a World in Deep Population Decline Looks Like 44:39 Movements from Fertility Extremists 53:00 Is it a Moral Obligation to Have Children? 1:04:29 How to Change the Narrative on Motherhood 1:11:12 Malcolm’s Unique Experience of Having Children 1:25:23 Explaining IVG & IVF 1:29:52 Where to Find Malcolm - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Korea had no future. At their current fertility rate right now, for every 100 Koreans, there will be 5.9 great-grandchildren. We are looking at a 94% population collapse over the next century.

• 0:13Chris Williamson?

  Why have you been in the news so much recently?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Because I am calling out that the emperor has no clothes right now. And I think a lot of people have mentioned collapsing fertility rates before. But I think that no one has really so consistently brought it up in a way that the people who want to ignore it have to look at the problem. You know, when I point it out, because I think a lot of people, especially, you know, on the more progressive side of the spectrum, they just want to dismiss it. Oh, the planet's better without humans or whatever. But when you point out that not a single society on Earth today, except for maybe Israel, we can talk about that later in the conversation, has figured out how to have prosperity,

• 1:02Speaker 00

  gender equality, and high levels of education, and anywhere close to a stable population? Like, considering we are trying our best, and I think rightfully so, to spread those things across the world, that should be like a note. Like, that should be like a, oh, this system that we think is so great and we want to be the future of human civilization doesn't seem to work at the most basic level.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  That seems like quite a scary proselytization for the future or prediction for the future. If you're to say that we need to get rid of, one, from education, equality, prosperity,

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  or birth rate, we just need to concede the fact that the birth rate...

• 1:44Speaker 00

  What we need to do is we need to find new cultural solutions. We need to find a way to maintain fertility rates while having education, while having gender equality, and while having a high level of prosperity. And there are many places we can look in the world today to begin to get inspiration for how we might do that. You know, I think to understand the scale of the threat right now, one of the things I always start people was 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, 10 years out or whatever.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  So because of that, when I was working as a VC, I happened to be working in Korea when I was working in a VC. And I kept trying to chart the future of the economy. And I kept coming to the same answer. Is that Korea had no future? At their current fertility rate right now, for every 100 Koreans, there will be 5.9 great grandchildren. We are looking at a 94% population collapse over the next century. And when I brought this up with the other partners at my firm and I was like, hey, like, it just doesn't seem like there is any feasible economic future for this country. They're like, yeah, but we pretend like that's not the case in our investments. Like, everybody knows this. But like, if we accepted it, then the economy stops working, society stops working. So we're just gonna ignore it, basically.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  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 and having to be that crazy person on the streets, like, no, no, no, you guys don't understand. There's countries further ahead than us on this spectrum right now, okay? And we know a few things. We know there is no floor. No country has hit a fertility collapse floor yet. We know that there is no level of advanced fertility collapse where people freak out, or at least not until it's too late. Because you look at Korea right now, and 60% of Korean citizens are over the age of 40. So it's likely already too late for them to turn this problem around. So we need to turn this around before we hit that level.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  But the truth is, we probably won't. And we've got to think of solutions for when we don't turn this around. But that's a different topic for later in the interview.

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of the most common questions I imagine that people ask is, why should anyone care about how many children another person has? This is my choice. You can't impose me to have kids if I don't want to have them. Why should two guys sat on the internet be telling the world about the dangers of not having children? People can go and do other things with their lives now. Women are allowed to be in the workplace. Men can go their own way and play video games and be a sigma male as much as they want. Why should anyone care about how many children another person has?

• 4:37Speaker 00

  So I think that that's a really good point. And our foundation, I think one of the things that people most often get wrong about us is that we are trying to increase the world's population or that we are trying to proselytize broadly to increase fertility rates. And neither one of those things is true. If we are on the Titanic right now, no matter what, the Titanic hits the iceberg. We are trying to, one, make people aware that the Titanic is about to hit an iceberg, get them in lines by the rafts, the ones who want to survive, start getting the rafts in the water in a calm and orderly fashion before people start panicking, because that's what's going to happen. And so what we promote is, is trying to get, I mean, I know my family is going to be okay.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  You know, I know that my cultural group is going to be okay. Broadly speaking, so one, I know that my family, you know, I have eight kids and they have eight kids and you do that for 11 generations. That's more descendants than exist in the world today, I often say. So I don't need to worry about people like me. The reason I'm so loud about this is because I'm worried about the, the massive collapse in, in, in cultural and ethnic diversity the world is about to see. And it will be astonishing for people, I think in the far future, that there were more than like three ethnic groups and three cultural groups or something like that, if we don't solve this. And so what we're trying to do is just make people aware of this because so much of the propaganda that people are consuming is telling them, things are fine, have less kids, you're

• 6:06Speaker 00

  a good person if you have less kids. And I know you've talked about this before on the show and it is, it is astonishing. And I think when we look at this urban monoculture that is erasing all of the genuine diversity in our society, one of its core messages is negative utilitarianism that, that, 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.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say urban monoculture?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Well, okay, so this sort of gets down into like, my personal politics to some extent. But I think that if you look at society right now, it's largely becoming divided into two factions. And there has been a major political shift around what conservative and progressive means. The progressive is the party of this urban monoculture, which is a single sort of cultural group or virus that infects other cultural institutions and erases whatever makes them unique and aligns all of their goals. So if I talk with a progressive Muslim or a progressive Jew or a progressive Catholic or a progressive Unitarian Universalist, and I scratch beneath the surface, often their morals, their views on gender, their views on what future they want for the world

• 7:25Speaker 00

  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 optimized around, so where the liberal party is optimized around the goals of this monoculture, so spreading the monoculture and reducing in the moment human suffering. That's why they promote things like Hays, you know, like, don't tell somebody that it's unhealthy to be fat because that could hurt their feelings in the moment, even though, like, obviously it's bad for them in the long term. But the conservative movements all have in very distinct cultural histories which they are trying to preserve. And that is often, if I look at the conservative movement today, it's an alliance of these older traditions and newer but deviant and distinct traditions

• 8:08Speaker 00

  that are trying to maintain cultural fidelity and exist 100, 200 years from now. And so when I talk about the monoculture, that's what I'm talking about. This thing that wants to, when my kids go to school, say, this is what correct morality is. This is the way you should see the world. And if your parents are telling you anything else, they're deplorable and wrong.

• 8:26Chris Williamson?

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

• 8:30Speaker 00

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

• 9:07Chris Williamson?

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

• 9:23Speaker 00

  And I think that there are people who genuinely, like within any movement, you know, when the Catholic Church used to be the iteration of this in European society and they were trying to convert everyone to their ways. And the Protestant Church during their own time had a periods like that in some countries.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  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 trying to ensure that everybody fit this very narrow definition of morality set by their culture. To me, they were the evil ones within those institutions. And today, when I talk about this monoculture, I think that the vast majority of people who are members of it are just like the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants during periods when those cultural groups were dominant in specific regions.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Why is this culture so effective?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  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 can be thought of as sort of an evolving firmware, which is like our biology, our genes, but on top of that firmware, there's evolving sets of software. And this software, today, we often talk about memes as like things that infect somebody and then cause them to just turn around and infect other people. But historically, most memetic clusters actually augmented a person's sort of biological fitness, the number of surviving offspring they had, and that's how they survived. That's how, I mean, if you look at things with a secular mindset, why things like Islam and Judaism figured out stuff like hand washing, literally centuries before science figured out hand washing.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  And you see this across these traditions. For example, if you look at all of the old traditions, almost all of them have some arbitrary self-denial holiday, like Lent, or Ramadan, or Feast of the First World, or whatever, right? And just now, after throwing out all of those rituals over the past, you know, 50, 100 years, secular society's like, oh, now we gotta have our juice cleanses. Now we gotta have our, you know, they're realizing of fasting and stuff like that, right? It has positive mental effects. And so I think that if you see these 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, it is very much so. When you talk about a super bacteria or a super bug,

• 11:49Speaker 00

  they typically come up in things like hospitals, where you have a ton of people with a weakened immune system, all in a similar environment with lots of sort of viruses or bacteria that can intermingle alongside antibiotics and stuff like that. This is what was created by the internet. This is why all of this stuff started when social media happened. Essentially, you had a super-spreader environment where...

• 12:14Speaker 00

  New memetic ideas were able to test themselves against all of the world's traditions at the same time, optimize and react very quickly and become incredibly virulent while evolving strategies that had never been tried before. So one of the most effective strategies that it uses is if you look historically, if you look at cultural groups as sort of like nodal clouds that sort of overlap with each other, when you had a corrupted node within a nodal cloud or a node that looked like it was flipping, what you would do if you were a majority Protestant country or a majority Catholic country, like a Catholic came in and started preaching or a Protestant came in and started preaching, you'd burn them. You'd burn them at the stake often, right? Or if somebody just had like random cultural mutation in the same way you have like random

• 12:59Speaker 00

  genetic mutation and they believe something weird, like they were a witch, 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 organically determines when a node that looks like it might be flipping, and then it essentially shadow bans the node. It begins to disconnect 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

• 13:42Speaker 00

  this shadow banning process of the person just doesn't get a promotion if it looks like they might be immune to these ideas. They just don't, you know, their papers get published a little less, you know, certain platforms begin to favor them less within the algorithm. And that's how it has been able to maintain such control, I think, of the upper echelons of our society.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

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

• 14:20Speaker 00

  So I would say that it's not every organisation. So it specifically targets the organisations it can best use to maintain its population levels. And so those are typically organisations that are involved in education. So you're looking at the middle school system, the high school system and the college system are the organisations that it is most critical, that it maintains an absolute stranglehold over. And this again comes to fertility issues. Of the populations of the world, if there is one population that has a very low birth rate, it is this population, this urban monoculture. And because of that, the only way it can repopulate its ideological faction is through

• 15:01Speaker 00

  siphoning children from other, often more conservative cultural traditions, or in other ways, deviant cultural traditions that are for whatever reason having a lot of kids.

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Getting back to fertility, what groups are doing particularly well and particularly badly when it comes to fertility?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  This is a fascinating question. All right. So if you look in a post-prosperity environment, so a lot of people, they're like, oh, well, countries in Africa are doing really well, they have high fertility rates, or Muslim populations have high fertility rates. And it's like, well, that's irrelevant 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. And so it's a level of desperate poverty, first of all, that is often misconstrued. So you look at Latin America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, collectively as of 2019, so old news, they fell below repopulation rate. So it's really just a few of these poorest countries.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  So I really ignore any country at a high fertility. If it's a poor country, or if it's not a wealthy country, right? And so I think where you can see 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 for, uh, since 2014, they've been trying pretty much everything in their power to try to get fertility rates back above repopulation rate. And their government has a lot of control over the populace and they are not able to. They're still only at 1.7. Um, so the groups that really show resistance to this are conservative Christian groups and conservative Jewish groups. And this is why I always think it's funny when people are like, oh, you're talking about fertility rates.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  You must be about saving white people. And it's like, white conservative people are like the only people on earth who don't seem to be disappearing in, in, in the face of 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.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  Prosperity-induced fertility collapse. What is the relationship between prosperity and fertility?

• 17:15Speaker 00

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

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes, why?

• 17:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  And in many ways, families at that income level are just not like the economy isn't grabbing them as much because they don't need the economy as much. So what's really happening is if you look at our sort of free market structure, what Does is it organically determines how to reward anyone who has the probability of that it believes has a 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

• 18:49Speaker 00

  time working and generating money for this larger economic system.

• 18:53Chris Williamson?

  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 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 that you see it?

• 19:25Speaker 00

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

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay. At the beginning, you mentioned a bunch of other contributing factors, prosperity being one of them. What would the, what would the other elements?

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Gender equality and education are typically the other two.

• 19:58Chris Williamson?

  Run us through those.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Well, um, gender equality, when, when, uh, it is often specifically female education. Um, when women begin to have a choice as to what they do and can participate in the economy,

• 20:14Speaker 00

  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 at that time, they can no longer have kids. And so I think that that is why. It is not that women are choosing jobs over kids. It's that they're choosing jobs then kids and their biological clocks run out. While at the same time, and I think this is something that's really undersold when people talk about fertility collapse, is the absolute collapse of marriage markets in

• 20:59Speaker 00

  our society. It is, I saw a tweet and I couldn't agree with it more. Being in a happy marriage these days feels a bit like catching the last chopper at an arm. Because it is hard. It is hard out there to find a good partner. And we have seen a collapse of the systems that previously ensured people found a great long-term dedicated partners.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the point. It's not just about declining birth rates. It's also about declining dating. So 50% of guys aged 18 to 30 say that they are not looking for casual or long-term relationships. I mean, you know, that's an unbelievably shocking statistic to say that your natural biological inclination as a guy during the period of your life when you're going to have the highest testosterone that you're going to have is just checking out completely of either casual or long-term relationships. The same thing goes for women broadly as well, that it's just not good. So how do you fold in this decline in dating as well as children?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I mean, how do you fold it in? It's, what I just say is it's a problem. And one of the things we look at, I mean, we've written multiple books on like The Pregnant's Guide to Relationships, The Pregnant's Guide to Sexuality, looking at this problem, trying to come up with solutions to this problem. And I think that this brings us to what the real solution to this problem is in a broader context, not just dating. 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, uh, uh, 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

• 22:44Speaker 00

  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 a 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.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  You know, I plan to have seven kids or something like that. Uh, but in the countries that offer it, it does seem to help fertility a little bit, like maybe like three or 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 ethnic states, basically. Um, you know, stop immigration, uh, have one culture, one country. Except if you actually look at the statistics, the countries in prosperous countries with the lowest fertility rates are often ethnic states, you know, like South Korea, stuff like that. You look at the countries that have been most resistant to fertility collapse in the prosperous world, you're looking at countries like Israel in the US, some of

• 24:10Speaker 00

  the most diverse countries. And you can even see this with cultural groups across countries. So you look at like Iran, remember I mentioned Iran famously has a real big fertility country and they're basically a Shia monoculture, but you look at Shia Muslims in India at similar economic levels where it's much more diverse and their fertility 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, how do you actually solve this problem? Right? You look around the world, and we've already talked about it. I mean, the solution's sort of staring us in the face. The groups that are resistant to this are the ones that deviate in some way from the urban monoculture. Most of them are traditionalist religious groups.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  And there are some traditionalist religious groups that are more resistant to this fertility collapse than others, and some that seemed like they were resistant, and then all of a sudden collapsed. Mormons are an example of this. Like Mormons had great fertility rates. Then like five or six years ago, something happened, and now they're probably below replacement rate. And so what that tells me is that the solution to this is going to come at the level of cultural experimentation, both fortifying our traditional cultures to be more resistant to the new threats they're facing, but also potentially inventing new cultures that work with technology, the internet, new strategies that are open to us, which is what my family's trying to do.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  Tell me more about that.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Okay. Um, yeah, all right. So I can go deeper into this. So we have everything from like our own traditions of the family, our own sort of the moral framework, different ways of naming our kids, different ways of dressing to an extent, like we look weird to other people. And a lot of people are like, you guys look like freaks. Don't you know your kids will be weird? Don't you know they'll be bullied? And I go, you know, look around the world. Which families, which cultures are going to exist in the future? It's ones like the Amish, the Hasidic, you know, wherever you look, they look different. They dress different. They name their kids different things. It's because when you call something cringe, when you call something different or weird

• 26:18Speaker 00

  or freaky, what you are saying is it differentiates from the cultural norms to which you are accustomed. Those cultural norms became the dominant cultural norms because they had a good immune system, because they were good at dehumanizing the other and calling people freaky and stuff like that. But the reality is that if you want to join this game, and this is why I'm out here, this is why I'm yelling, I don't want a future where it's just my kids is a failure, right? Where it's just my family? I want as much diversity into the future as possible. That's why I'm shouting this. I want- People to join us. I want them to experiment and fortify themselves and not become overly complacent with their existing traditions if their kids are being effectively peeled out by this monoculture. It's very interesting to me. You know, I sometimes hear people on the

• 27:03Speaker 00

  right and they go, why don't you just convert to like a traditional religious framework? And it's because most of those frameworks are right now on the downtrend in terms of their ability to continue a high fertility and maintain their kids. I do want them to find new systems to protect themselves against that. But that's, that's why that's just, just going to traditions isn't the answer anymore. The, the, the virus or whatever you want to call it has gotten too good at, at finding kids. And so we have to find new systems and also the, the, just the, the environment the kids are in with internet, with social media. It's, it's so different. And then with AI that they're going to face, how do you keep your kid from dating an AI

• 27:45Speaker 00

  girlfriend? When they can have a deep fake that's perfect and hot and loves them, right? Uh, you, you, they need to want something other than hedonism. And that's a difficult message to convey to kids if they adopt the dominant social mores today.

• 27:58Chris Williamson?

  So to recap what you were talking about to do with this, uh,

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  sort of almost monotheistic 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 for, you want it to be a white ethno-state. You want it to be more of your progeny that are out there. Your point is that that is the subgroup, which is one of the few which are continuing to be okay at the moment. We're actually going to lose genetic and racial diversity if we allow the current trends to continue, because some of the groups that are reproducing with the lowest fertility rates are the ones that add to that diversity. So in the future, what you end up with is a very small number of different cohorts of stuff like

• 28:47Chris Williamson?

  Amish, stuff like not even Mormons apparently anymore, who are then downstream going to be the ones that fill out the entire country.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, if we do nothing, uh, the future is really just. Conservative Christians and conservative Jews and maybe conservative Muslims. Those seem to be the only groups that are just like persistently resistant to this.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  So that's a pretty sort of bland future racially from.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's some groups that in the very near future, like if I was looking at this like an ecologist, right, like the groups I would be probably most concerned about right now are groups like the Janes and the Parsi. 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 population by the end of the century. To the point where it'll be difficult for them to carry on their traditions.

• 29:33Chris Williamson?

  Coming back, coming back to that conversation about we get prosperous, we give women education. They enter the job market and they have other things to do with their life.

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  What's your proposal? Presumably you're not saying that we need to rip women out of the workplace or education. And if it is the case that we don't want people to be less prosperous. And we also want to let people choose what they want to do. If this is what they want to do, if women don't want to have kids. Or if they don't feel like they're ready and they don't want to have kids until they are. They're concerned about the living cost and the cost of bringing a child into this other. Concerned about the environment, they're concerned about losing their life freedom. They're 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 shouldn't they be allowed to do that?

• 30:20Speaker 00

  So I would say, I think they should be allowed to do that. And I think that real feminists today, and when I say a feminist, I mean, somebody who wants gender. Well, I don't know if feminism is the right word, people who want gender equality, whatever word you want to use for wanting gender equality. In a hundred years, in 200 years to be an option, right? You're sort of at the crux of history right now, because no group that really has it gender equality. Except for maybe Israel, we can get to that later, there's questions there, whatever. But it's anywhere close to above repopulation rate. So those groups and those cultural traditions are going to eventually disappear. And what they will do is they will get better in the short term at taking the kids of people from these conservative traditions.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  But eventually, I mean, just the way cultural evolution works. The conservative traditions will build systems that have resistance to whatever technique that they're using. And they will not be able to repopulate that way anymore. So if you actually care about this, then you can join the grand experiment. And the grand experiment is, and this is something we genuinely don't know yet. Is it possible to have gender equality and a high fertility rate? My family, so like when I look at what my wife and I did, I was asked to be on this podcast. Simone's in here, not on my choice, I would have her on typically with me. You know, we write our books together, we run our companies together. Is one solution to the gender equality question, which is to do everything together. Write your books together, run your companies together, raise your kids together, right?

• 31:51Speaker 00

  But there are other solutions to this question that people can experiment with. And what I love is this isn't a question of what's the most moral way to do things. Sort of the future will decide who was actually successful. Who was able to have a lot of kids, motivate the continuation of the tradition through their children? You 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 think we're blessed and that we live in a society where they can choose something else. And so, you know, I think that we are going to have, hopefully, a lot of people trying new ways of living, new ways of trying to achieve gender equality, like my family.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Can liberalism last under demographic decline?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no, it's gone. It's dead. I mean, if you talk conservative liberalism, maybe. Like if you're talking about like traditional liberalism, if you're talking about the progressive movement, I often say it's a bit like, if you get a certain blast of radiation, right? Your DNA can be scrambled, your cells can no longer replicate. You don't know that you're a dead man walking yet, you know, before you begin to feel the pain. But there is nothing that can be done to save you at that point. The fertility rate is so low as in that community, there's really nothing that can be done. Even if you look at the genetic level right now, it's so funny. You know, conservatives are often like, hey, you're on our team. Why are you alerting them to the scope of the problem? You know, we win if we just sit back and let them disappear. And it's like, they're going to disappear no matter what.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  If you look at the heredity of voting patterns, which is around 30 to 50%, 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. And you look at current fertility rates in countries like the US, we should expect about a one standard deviation shift conservative in voting patterns over the next century. In the next 10 or 20 years, we'll see a massive shift to the left because they've as family units get atomized, people vote more progressively. When people don't have kids, they vote more progressively. But after that, you're going to see a massive shift in the other direction, and it's just inevitable from the statistics at this point.

• 34:05Chris Williamson?

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

• 34:11Speaker 00

  A lot have. It just doesn't. So Romania, what is it? Orders 77, 707 or something? I don't know. Maybe I'm getting it confused with Star Wars orders. But they decided under the communist period that they were going to ban abortion. And they thought, oh, this will be great. It'll it'll shoot up fertility rates, and it did for a very brief period of time, like two years or something like that. Then people found ways around it. And then, after the law was repealed, fertility rates crashed because fertility or having kids became associated with really poverty often or low social status. And so you can look at countries like Iran that have been trying to implement things. It's really funny. I watched what China's implementing right now.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  And it's like Iran tried all of this 10 years ago. You guys can just look at what happened. You're going to have to get really aggressive if you actually want to solve this. And that's where I get really scared. Because a lot of countries, what we have found is that you can dictatorially, like people have tried to, you know, ban abortions. If you look at what's happening in China now, likely shutting down access to vasectomy clinics and stuff like that.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  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 there the piece on us in The Guardian. And they were like, they had quoted me saying something like that. And they go, well, that sounds like a threat. And I'm like, are you like, do you have the mind of a child? Like, it's like when I tell a child, don't touch the stove. You're gonna burn your hands. They're like, that sounds like a threat. I'm trying to protect you here. Uh, but there's nothing I can do, you know? At the end of the day, the Titanic's hitting the iceberg. I'm just trying to, to, to, to prepare for what's gonna happen next. But what happened next get really interesting. Sorry to keep talking. I don't wanna.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  No, keep going.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Okay, so it's really cool here. And 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 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

• 36:47Speaker 00

  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 coastless, cultural, like ethnic neighbors, the Ukraine, who also has a desperately low fertility rate, both killing like an entire generation here. And they're never going to recover from this.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  It is, it is not the game anymore. The game that they're still playing. You win now, not through war, but with love. And I say love and not just sex or spamming kids. Because if you spam kids, they're going to breed like caged panda bears like everyone else. They're going to not have any dedication to whatever weird thing about your culture caused you to have a lot of kids. And they're just going to drift off into this monoculture and disappear. So what you need to do is you need to have a lot of kids, but you also need to do a great job raising them. Make them proud of your cultural group. Make them want to continue that cultural group. And those are the people who are going to be around in the future. And I'm really excited about that because that is so much better than the old system of murdering people.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the first thing, and I often don't talk about, you know, I don't. The first thing is all economies are going to collapse. Pretty much the Western economy. So our economic system is sort of a pyramid scheme. A lot of people know this, but let's just spill it out.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  If you look historically, people go with this truism. If I put money on the stock market, that money grows on average. That has been happening because of two things. The number of workers has been growing exponentially and the productivity per worker has been growing around linearly. A little exponentially, but mostly linearly. Yes, technology has been growing exponentially, but the productivity per worker is about linear. 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 desperately poor countries count?" Because by definition, they have small economies. That's why they're poor, because their economies are small.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  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. Okay, so why did Detroit ultimately end up having the problems it was having? And there's a few reasons. One is our society uses this miraculous cheat code called debt. Now, I'm a private equity VC guy. I'm very familiar with debt.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  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 leveraged to the hilt all the way down. If things start shrinking, the whole thing falls apart.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  And yes, national debt is a little different than personal debt and stuff like that, but what you are beginning to see is essentially what we saw in Detroit. So people are like, "Oh, my house will be 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 $1. And when a house is $1, you know, like what you saw in Detroit, right? When a house is $1, there's no reason to maintain it, because houses cost a lot to maintain. As anyone who is a homeowner knows, you've put so much money into your house. But you justify it, because, okay, well, it's an asset that I own, and people stop investing in assets that way. So the whole way we relate to money, and the economy is 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?

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Well, one is, what happens in a negative scenario? So, negative scenario, and this is what I'm terrified of, is the developed world finds a cheat code, which is immigrants. What they realize is that they can cheese their collapsing populations through mass immigration, but this cheat code only works if they keep, really, the only country, the only collection of countries that has an above repopulation 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.

• 42:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you use, you use Africa almost like a breeding ground to create the future population to be pulled across into other countries?

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's sick. But that seems to be like, when I talk to them, that's like actually the going plan right now. 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. Right now, you're getting a lot of immigrants, but it's immigrants who want to leave. And I think what a lot of people forget is a lot of people don't want to leave. Even when Ireland was suffering the potato famine, what a lot of people don't know is that the landlords, there was a rash of landlord murders at the time. And so they got scared. And so they would, sometimes, I don't know how frequently, offer to pay for all of their tenants to go to America, on coffin ships. It was horrible, but at least it was the idea. That's, that's the way I think many people would be imported these days, right? So, horrible immigration, but at least,

• 42:57Speaker 00

  you know, they had the option to leave during the potato famine, during this time when people would walk into town, they thought everyone was dead, and then the corpses would start animating, and they realized that they were just start, like, it was bad. But, but the majority, 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. Ignore all this. Okay, so world's collapsing. Where do you put your money?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  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 is technophilic, like they engage with technology. 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 want to place money. Because that's the only place that you can be fairly sure is going to grow in aggregate in the future. And that creates a totally different world economy than the one we have now. And it's a very interesting world economy. And so when people say like, what actually is our foundation sort of doing? Really what we're doing is we're trying to identify those groups right now and build

• 44:25Speaker 00

  connections between them so that we can have a pluralistic group of thriving economies of the willing. And of the willing, what I mean is the people who were willing to have kids, willing to give those kids a good enough life that they wanted to stay in that culture.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  Since learning about the current trends of population collapse, declining birth rates, etc. I've started to view a lot of the problems that we're facing, especially the cultural ways that people see dating, family life, having kids, relationships with their parents, future of the world through a very different lens. And there's a trend at the moment that's only recently, like within the last couple of months, I've started seeing come out on the internet, which is one of men in their twenties getting vasectomies as a protest against feminists that want to be able to have free and easy sex. It's literally like a clapback. Well, you've got the pill, I'm gonna get the snip. Have you seen this?

• 45:20Speaker 00

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

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  No, what's transmancing?

• 45:26Speaker 00

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

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

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

• 45:50Speaker 00

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

• 46:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, because women have got it so much easier than men do. Therefore, if I become the closest thing that I can to a woman, it's going to fix all of my problems. Okay, fair enough. Well, I mean, yeah, that, that, that is an approach and the optional elected vasectomy in your twenties thing, I think, sort of sit on the shelf next to each other for, I wouldn't have predicted this on my 2023 bingo card. But yeah, I, so just everything that I see, you know, this stophavingkids.org, who you may be familiar with, like this really serious anti-natalist movement, they

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Have you heard of the involuntary anti-natalist movement? They want to, they want to sterilize the entire population. They're like terrorists. They're, they're just scary people.

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  Wow. And what's the justification for this? I'm going to guess climate.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Oh, no. So they're really just negative utilitarians. I think most anti-natalism and for people who aren't familiar with negative utilitarianism, it's the belief that negative emotions are bad, but positive emotions aren't inherently good, or that a human life, a, a, negative emotions are more acute than positive emotions, or they're just much higher in volume.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  The best, 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

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, the involuntary

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  utilitarians.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  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 and displeasure.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and 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, declining testosterone. Who's to say there isn't something in the water? You know what I mean?

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you think that someone's purposely doing this? I don't know, man. I would hazard toward Hanlon's razor with stuff like this. Like, you know, the incentives align for people to believe that they're doing something which is sympathetic, empathetic, caring, whether it be because of the environment, whether it be, you know, I mean, the environmental thing is such an interesting argument to me, because if you think that a planet that has too many people on it is bad for the planet, wait until you see what a planet that has too few people on it is like. It is, oh, well, you know, we existed 200 years ago, there was only half a billion people or a billion people or whatever on the planet.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  The planet's been fine with this many people on before. It's like, yeah, but what's the experience of the life like for the people that are on it? What about all of the animals that you want to save? What about all of the interjections that you want to make with regards to controlling the climate, to ensuring that all of the different ecosystems that you care about continue? So I've had a lot of pushback about talking about declining birth rates and, you know, whatever you want to say, like dating sphere adjacent sometimes. Although I'm speaking to the researchers, I'm not, you know, doing a panel show with a bunch of different people screaming at them, saying that they're going to become loveless harpies in their 30s. And I know, I feel like the criticisms that people have about anybody that brings up declining birth rates, either haven't thought about the problem

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  sufficiently well, or have a really, really fucking perverse and malicious incentive. Because Anybody that sees a discussion about declining birth rates as anything other than a concern for the future of human lives that haven't yet existed, they're just not philosophically sophisticated. Yeah, I'm totally open. I'm totally open to having the discussion that maybe there is an optimal amount of population that would be great to have on the earth. I think the carrying capacity of the planet is significantly higher than where we're at at the moment. And I think that climate mastery, all the rest of it, we have a ton of work to do for a whole host of things, whether that be AI alignment, whether that be gray goo from nanotechnology, but like, pick your existential risk of choice, right? But like, fuck off, bro.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  If you think that I'm not going to talk about the most existential of existential risks individually to you. And here's the other thing. So folding this in, a lot of people will have listened to the Stephen Shore episode that I did, which was absolutely fantastic. I really love him as a demographer and a researcher in this world. And the novel and interesting insight, the really novel, interesting insight that I'm going to kind of add into my worldview with regards to this that I've learned from you today, is looking at what happens when you roll the clock forward over a longer timeline with which groups are going to continue to survive and which cultures are going to continue to survive. If it's the case that you say that

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  you care about a particular movement continuing to be pushed through the ages, because this is something that we should care about, let's say it's reducing the amount of people that are on the planet to restrict climate change. Or let's just say, let's just say that it's climate change overall, right? If you have, given the fact that political leaning is 50% heritable, if you don't have any children, who do you think is going to continue that particular philosophy that you've got? Like, you are literally making your ideology a dying breed.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  No, I couldn't agree more. And I think one of the things that I always think, you know, when you're talking about biodiversity and stuff like this, I always wondered, like, do these people like not think into the future? Right now, from what we know about our planet, humans are the only species that can seed a new biome. We are the only species that can get off planet, right? So if we seed a new biome in a million and 10 million years, it'll be just as rich as our own. We could seed thousands, hundreds of thousands of new biomes. If humanity doesn't win through this eye of the needle we're about to go through, if humanity does die off, well, I mean, everything we know about physics today says the sun will eventually expand and all life will go extinct. It's endgame. You know,

• 52:29Speaker 00

  if you care about biodiversity in the long run, humans are critical to maximizing that. Um, although I will modify one thing you said, I think that there is a logical argument for negative utilitarianism. I think there's a logical argument for getting rid of humans. I don't agree with it. These people are against my cultural group, but I don't think that they're just like completely insane either.

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 53:05Speaker 00

  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 whatever, you know, I, I, I'm not going to tell you that your morals are wrong because I think that morality is one of those things where I believe that my morals are right. But if I go around trying to police everyone else's morality, I'm just gonna have a bad time.

• 53:41Chris Williamson?

  So that's, that line in the sand is one I've been really interested in playing about with. I absolutely agree that some sort of Handmaid's Tale future where women 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.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  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? Where is the finger pointing going in the other direction? Because I don't see anybody unironically saying that women need to get out of the boardroom and get back in the bedroom to start producing more children. Like, I think that they're just saying, look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and take them with a big spoonful of salt.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with, 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 households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with 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. And that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working in the long term for human civilization, because nothing is really working right now. And so I just encourage people to, if they think, I can't be a mom and in the boardroom, I would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family, rethink the way you're structuring finding a partner. You know,

• 55:33Speaker 00

  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, maybe even recreate the London season, you know, something like that, 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 have a really low switching cost between partners, which is one of the big problems that we're dealing with right now. So with a lot of this, it's about experimenting with new social technologies and understanding that there probably are ways to have it all, much more than I think people want to accept because it requires trying new things and being called a freak by other people.

• 56:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Why, why are poorer people having more kids? If it's an issue of cost, then 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 what I'd say is it's enormously expensive. It is a massive lifestyle sacrifice. It absolutely is a lifestyle sacrifice, but is it too expensive? I think that's the real thing. Is it too expensive? Is it that you can't afford it? Or is it that you would need to like us? 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.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  And I understand that for, for families in less socially economically advantaged positions, they have to make even more sacrifices. Um, but, uh, you know, when a family decides they want a lot of kids, they do it. And I think in addition to that, this is another area. One of the projects that we worked in was Project Eureka, which was a town for like single moms that had kids and other people 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.

• 57:36Chris Williamson?

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

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  And 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 it just came back that people were just distracted. So what it seems is that if you are more financially enabled, there are more things that you can do with your finances, which means that you can go abroad to Bali. Why not go to Bali for two weeks? Well, if you have the kid, you can't go to Bali for two weeks. That the girl with a list thing, which you must have seen that came off TikTok, a girl printed out 350 reasons not to have a child and then printed them all on a piece of paper.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  And the reasons ranged from stuff like child is literally a parasite inside of you to can't wear my cute high heels anymore, can't do brunch on Sundays.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I want to get into this. I'm really excited. So there are, I think, two core reasons that people don't have kids within the category that you're talking about here. It's because they're optimizing for their personal happiness. Now, this can be broad satisfaction, contentment, whatever word you want to use, but it's some sort of emotional optimization, or they're optimizing for their own position within a local status hierarchy. This can be showing off to people on Twitter or whatever, you know, the trips that you're doing or the things that you're doing with your life because you think that these make you, you know, like better or higher within some 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

• 59:23Speaker 00

  a better place along some sort of framework like donating to like protecting ecology or something like that, like-

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  A lot of that loops back to status, though.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of that loops back to status. So I think what we're going to see, and this is really cool because it's going to change what it means to be human. When people, I mean, even more than the other options people have right now, when robo sexuality, I always go back to the Futurama episode about this that predicted this, when people can start dating AIs and you can have your deep fake girlfriend and stuff like that, and then eventually people will be able to go into pods and live any virtual reality lifestyle they want. When these sorts of things become possible, and they likely will within my grandkids' lifetime at least, if not our own, pretty much everyone who's 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,

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  and that is going to fundamentally change what it means to be human and likely have a pretty big impact on sort of the human sociological profile in terms of the genetic screening that's going to cause.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, it's going to nudge the genetic disposition because the only cohorts that are left are going to have a particular type of predisposition. Another time, that's going to, right, yeah, that's really, really interesting. Because, you know, we all have this, this balance between hedonic pleasure and meaning that we seek in the future. You know, it's most parents, I don't think, if you were to test them on a minute by minute basis, it's not the most pleasurable thing in the world to raise a child. Looking at some of the studies that I've seen, it's not 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

• 1:01:11Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm so excited. Well, I love what you're getting at here, which is how do you balance these two? And the really cool thing is that biologically, we're already optimized to have kids. And I think a lot of the unhappiness that comes in society today is that people forget that all of your ancestors had kids. They had sex and they had kids. They're almost all of them dead, right? 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,

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  if you look at a lot of unhappiness, they are showing people what people are sort of biologically optimized for right after they go through puberty, without people realizing that that optimization program changes as you get older. Often, there was a joke that I got in trouble for on Twitter, which is to say that, I don't know if you know Blippi, he's like a blues clues sort of character who dances around around fire trucks for kids and is like, yeah, I'm driving a fire truck. I'm playing in a dump truck. I'm playing on the 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. I mean, obviously, he probably makes a lot of money, but I mean,

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  you wouldn't actually want to live that way. And I often argue that Andrew Tate is sort of the Blippi for teenagers. 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 deadness within his eyes and he's like, yeah, I have to like please multiple women a day or they'll leave me and then I won't be able to maintain sort of the thing that I built up. And I'm like, oh my God, I can't even imagine like having to just like have a routine of constantly having sex every day so that I can at a base level maintain my economic empire. Um, but to a young boy, this sounds, oh, that's the best because humans go through a second puberty when they have kids. Your testosterone drops dramatically. You begin to gain happiness

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  from different sources and it's a deeper kind of happiness. And with young women, it's the same thing. With young women, they get told, oh, you're gonna love traveling the world. You're gonna love, at a certain point, this stuff just becomes drawl, you know? Because you were biologically programmed to want to, no, not everyone is, you know, people's biological programming is a bit different. You know, I can say that on average, human males are biologically programmed to find human females attractive, but obviously not all human males find human females attractive. 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

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  aren't video games making me happy anymore? Why aren't the things I used to do? Why does these status games not make me happy anymore? And it's because your culture used to tell you, hey, you need to move on to your next stage of life, but you don't have that culture anymore because you're in this bubble.

• 1:04:28Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

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

• 1:05:33Chris Williamson?

  It's not like we're, it's not like humans are, 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 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'm a club promoter by trade, right? I ran nightclubs for my entire career. And with that, I understand the power of trends and mimesis. And I'm just thinking, at the moment, there is a

• 1:06:12Chris Williamson?

  memetic trend about, like, motherhood's lame, or dangerous, or freedom restricting. Changing that trend technology seems something that could be quite a high-leverage opportunity.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Delta, you changed my mind on this, and I'm remembering conversations, because this is actually a debate I've had with my wife, and she's changed my mind before, but I forgot, which is, I think, well, she would argue, a core aspect of our advocacy, if we can, is to get it modeled in television shows and in other types of popular media, that having lots of kids is a high-status thing. The big fear I have- Is I'm just really afraid of people having kids because it helps their status. I would like it if it's like a yes and thing, but no matter what, when you make something a status thing, there's going to be a group of kids that are brought into the world only because of the way they augment the parent's status. And, and that means that their parents are going to be narcissists and they're gonna

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  be pretty, but, but you're right. I mean, hopefully we can move culture in a way that doesn't just target the narcissists.

• 1:07:14Chris Williamson?

  And then It's more holistic. Yeah. So we're about to get on to talking about another third rail of your 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 breeding future that we have with humans, where there are going to be particular cohorts that continue, there are going to be particular cohorts that don't, given that a good chunk of our behavior is determined by our genes, the type of people that continue to reproduce will have a particular genetic predisposition, which in the future means that we're going to nudge the entire human race's genetic predisposition in one direction.

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  Are we in the middle of a breeding experiment and are humans facing extinction?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  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. 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 going to continue that cultural group. Um, so, and there has to be, this is actually a really interesting phenomenon 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, because people within China, this is where the we are the last generation meme comes from, they're like, what, am I just

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

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

• 1:09:14Chris Williamson?

  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 burning of fossil fuels, not only are you going to increase greenhouse gases, which are going to kill all of these other animals, but the life that your child is going to have on this planet is also going to be filled with fumes and gray skies and it's going to be toxic and whatever. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the incentives-

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:10Chris Williamson?

  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 as that you're accusing everyone else of being.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Well, because I would say that I do argue that things are going to get worse, but I don't argue they're going to kill us all. I think if you look at real climate change data, it says, which I believe, the climate's going to get worse, a lot of suffering is going to happen because of it, but it's not going to kill us all. That climate message hasn't done as well as spreading as, you know, Greta Thunberg's in one of your recent podcasts, that everyone's going to be dead in five years due to the climate. AI is going to massively change what it means to be human. It could even cause some major catastrophes, but it's not going to turn us all into goo. And so I think that there is, it's right to say that we in the world have actual things to be afraid of. There's going to be actual

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  systemic shifts, but I think that's different than just apocalypticism and being like, we're all going to die, no need to think about the future, you know, Harold camping style, right?

• 1:11:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so-

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  The Millerist movement.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  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 biopsies of embryos anyways, often to determine if they're haploid or not. Not everyone does this, but most people do. It's the normal thing you do when you're doing IVF. We had to do IVF anyway because my wife wasn't able to get pregnant naturally due to, you know, having depression when she was younger, which caused her to develop anorexia, which meant that she doesn't like menstruate naturally. And she, she actually with trans women, she often does like competition to see who has to take more hormones um, to, to, to be a woman.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Um, and, and so, uh, you know, she, she has to do all of this stuff to, to have kids. So I had to do IVF anyway. We had to do the biopsies anyway. And now with genetic screening data, we could go through that. And her mom died slowly of cancer. And so we were able to look at that. And, you know, she suffered from major depressive disorder, which also has genetic links. So we were able to look at these things and say, well, I mean, if we can choose to lower the probability that our kids have to deal with these genetic conditions, um, like, would we lower that probability? Like, to me, people are like, yeah, but people will make fun of you on Twitter if you do this. It's like, yeah, okay. My kid comes to me and they're like, Dad, I really, you know, want to kill myself right now or have migraines. That was another thing we selected against. Uh, you could have selected against this and you didn't because people were going to make fun of you on Twitter.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  Like, and this is just our cultural group. So people try to connect this with eugenics. But eugenics, the definition of eugenics is very clear. It's the belief that there's good and bad genes and that the good genes should be distributed maximally throughout society, which is sort of the antithesis of what we believe. We believe every family, every cultural unit has beliefs about good and bad genes, 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.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Like, 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 Orthodox Jews have to do this with Tay-Sachs. Some black communities have to do this with sickle cell. Like, it's also like an anti-Semitic and racist position to call this sort of genetic selection and this sort of reproductive choice, um, uh, eugenics. 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?

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  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 white, you know, a buff child? And it's like, 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 traditions, value system.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  And we're entering into this grand experiment where some of those value systems will prove to be more efficacious than other value systems. Right now, people are like, oh, you could select 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, IQ will be 80 different things. Are you optimizing for creativity? Are you optimizing for, in the same way, you know, you don't just optimize for strengths, you optimize for agility, you optimize for lean muscle, you optimize for, like, this type of muscle fiber versus this type of muscle fiber. And we will see this blossoming, I hope. Of human diversity at a level that makes our existing ethnic diversity look trite.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  And subcultures will be very intolerant to this new diversity. But I'm excited for it. I'm excited for it because I think that when we have new perspectives, when we have new ways of doing things, new cultural optimization, we get something more beautiful. And one of the core focuses of our foundation is trying to get the cost of this technology as low as possible. 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 we've gotten tremendously cheap. And then, once the genome is sequenced, you're just comparing it to a data table. So, right now, you know, if you did this at the state level, it would be tremendously inexpensive to do.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  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. And many states are already supporting IVF, like the UK, like Israel. So, to say that this technology could be widely available is not an irresponsible thing to claim at all, and I'm really excited for it.

• 1:16:56Chris Williamson?

  Can you see why some people would feel uncomfortable or feel that this is a controversial technology to start using, to be able to select for particular traits that a child would have?

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I see that when, the problem is that it's controversial, except in every specific instance. It's controversial to your selecting that your kids don't get cancer. It's controversial to your selecting that your kids don't get major depressive disorder. And if you stop me and my kid ended up committing suicide, are you at all to blame for that? Do you take any responsibility? And then people are like, well, this technology isn't foolproof. It doesn't 100% prevent those things. And that's like, you know, one of these religious extremists who don't want to do blood transfusions being for their kid, you know, when their kid's dying or something. Like, well, blood transfusion doesn't always work. It's like, well, so what? You're giving your kid a chance.

• 1:17:44Chris Williamson?

  I mean, smoking during pregnancy doesn't always cause your child to have tons of deformities, but it's probably not advised.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I support the cultural groups that don't want to use this. They may be right in the long term, you know? Humanity is an experiment, right? They may be right, I may be wrong, and the future will prove which group is right and wrong. And we might, might turn out that all of these decisions we're making, they don't end up making any difference, right? And all we're using this technology for right now is to order our eggs. Now suppose somebody was like, oh yeah, but I just want to create tons of embryos and choose the best embryos, right? And this is where I think you get the genuinely-

• 1:18:20Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean? Sorry, what do you mean when you say order your eggs?

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  Oh, it's the choice. It determines the eggs we choose first, but we still hope to use all of our embryos. Um, not eggs, embryos. But uh, so it's not like we're saying this human gets to exist or this human doesn't get to exist because of their genes. But I mean, functionally eventually, because my wife has a C-section with every pregnancy, they're probably eventually going to take it out to some extent, we are doing that. Um, but I can understand, like, when people say, every human embryo is a life and you shouldn't be playing these games, that's the moral argument against what we're doing that I think holds the most water. Uh, the way that I look at that argument is to say, um, well, IVF generally, which needs, you know, you need to discard some eggs off. And if you're going to do IVF in any sort of economically sustainable way, uh, it requires

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  you discarding embryos and it expands the human fertility window. So to me, from my cultural perspective, every human I decide not to have, like if somebody was like, okay, pick up this pen and a human doesn't exist in the future, I'll decide not to have a human if you pick up this pen, then I have functionally killed that human. Um, and, and so I can understand why like Catholic groups and stuff like that would look at what we're doing and say that, well, I think that humanity only starts at like sperm production or at the production of an embryo. And so I get that argument. It's just not my cultural practice and I hope that they can at least understand the spirit with which we're doing this, which is to, you know, maximize the number of offspring we have and increase their quality of life.

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  If all that you're doing is playing around with the order that of the embryos that you have, why does the order matter?

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Well, because we likely won't be able to use all of them. I mean, realistically-

• 1:19:58Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, but that's the same, like choosing the order is the same as discarding, right?

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's probably functionally the same, but I mean, uh, again, um, I just don't know how I can explain to my kid, oh yeah, you got cancer because I decided not to do this when it was-

• 1:20:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, dude, so I had Johnny Anomali on the show about two months ago and

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  I love the guy, yeah.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  He really, he really sort of opened my eyes to this and the most compelling argument that I heard was as soon as you concede that, um, let's say the testing that some Jewish groups, Ashkenazi Jews, I think, go through to ensure that they don't partner up with, yeah, partner up with somebody that is going to give their child something that's awful. Uh, the same thing occurs within other groups and then roll the clock forward a tiny little bit and you say, if we can select to avoid really, really reliably heritable cancer that is just every single woman, all the way back for as long as I can research, has always had some form of cancer. As soon as we can select for that to not happen, you open the door to say, well, okay, what's the difference

• 1:21:02Chris Williamson?

  between that and selecting for someone that's a little bit more conscientious because conscientiousness is associated with improved outcomes in life? What about somebody that's got, not going to have depression? What about somebody that's not going to have anxiety? What about somebody that's blah, blah, blah? Like, as soon as you open the door to not having something negative, you also then look, start to get into selecting toward positive traits too. Is there a line that gets drawn in the sand for you with regards to this?

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  No, I believe every family should be able to make their own reproductive choices. And when we, we talk about things like IQ, he's absolutely right. If you look at this really rough thing we have now, IQ, that I hope we can break apart into a bunch of different things and get much more specific with. Right now, I mean, this is correlated with lower rates of rape, lower rates of incarceration, lower rates of, I mean, raping other people, lower rates of murdering other people. Like, there are, there are real reasons why, um, you know, you, you may select for this. And I love when people are like, oh, that's unethical. And I'm like, we live in a culture today where it is normal to dope your kids with amphetamines so that they score slightly higher on standardized tests, where people do these little things where they're like, what would I give for two points

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  of IQ? And, and yet, uh, the fact that, that you could make a selection here is, is off the table. But we also need to consider that eventually other species, we're gonna have to do this. And this is something that people just aren't talking about. So if you look at Okay, dysgenic pressures. So historically, like 50% of humans died, you know, in childhood or early in their lifehood or something like that, right? And this prevented a lot of the diseases that we see in our society today. As we get better at things like C-section and keeping kids alive and stuff like that, we're going to see an increasing number of heritable diseases that previously would have been selected out of humanity. So you really only get two choices before every human is just a walking ball of cancer.

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Either you start selecting humans before they're born, or three choices, or you start completely editing and writing humans, I think maybe there you can get into even more morality, or you start selecting humans after they're born, or I guess you can just enter this future where everyone's like this walking cancer golem of all of these things that previously would have been selected out, but our medical technology. I think that the most ethical choice there, long term, is probably to make these selections before, you know, the cells really begin to replicate.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  In your eyes, is there anything different ethically between rolling the dice of which sperm is going to get there first with which egg at which particular time during the years, bunch of cycles, and selecting? Let's say that you were able to do a selection somehow that didn't involve discarding eggs, because that would be a difference. As far as you're concerned, is there anything different about parents going out of their way to choose the kind of life, traits, person that is going to come out, as opposed to just saying, "We roll the dice, when it happens, it happens," and with the combination that happens is what the child is going to get?

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, we as a society have been doing this for a while. I mean, if you consider that sort of thing, you know, eugenics, then not allowing brothers and sisters to marry is eugenics. Because, you know, the reason presumably we have those losses, it leads to negative genetic outcomes. Again, I just go back to, I'd say that reproductive choice should always be at the level of the family. And as soon as the state or an outside force says that a family can make these genetic choices and can't make these genetic choices, that is the core of what eugenics is. Because you are saying people born of these genetic choices are somehow genetically morbid, or like a...

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Some sort of a monstrosity. And then what do you do? What? They're a second-class citizen? I don't know. I just don't think that there's any way where you can begin to police families' genetic choices that doesn't turn into the the most evil of eugenics.

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that there's an ethical difference between selecting embryos and going in there and actually manipulating genes and tinkering with stuff directly?

• 1:25:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think in a lot of people's mind, there is a difference. But I think that, again, this should be a cultural choice.

• 1:25:20Speaker 00

  I think that every parent should have the choice to to make the it's always funny when people they say, oh, he and his wife think that they're like genetically superior. I'm like, we're the ones editing our genes. Like, we think we are the least genetically superior of anyone. We are editing our genes.

• 1:25:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm jumping through the hoops to try and make them as viable as possible. Yeah, exactly. So here's one final thing, you know, to tie the two things that we've spoken about today together. A lot of people are told about the miracle that is IVF.

• 1:25:52Chris Williamson?

  There are some concerns, I think, that maybe women and men are overly reliant on it to believe that it can extend their fertility window out essentially indefinitely. IVG, which may actually end up doing this, maybe we'll we'll see.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  I'm a fan.

• 1:26:07Chris Williamson?

  You want you want some?

• 1:26:07Speaker 00

  You want to talk about what IVG is?

• 1:26:09Chris Williamson?

  Fuck it. Tell everybody what IVG is and tell them it. Tell them it in a very accessible way because Johnny taught me it and I don't I couldn't recite it. So teach it as if you're teaching it to a golden retriever.

• 1:26:19Speaker 00

  IVG basically means that you can create eggs and sperm from any human cell. So it means that two gay people could have a kid that's biologically theirs. But it also means you can do fancier things, like you could have a polycouple of like 13 people and they could have a kid that is biologically all of theirs. It basically allows you to I mean, in the simplest form, it's just egg and sperm from anyone. But this is really cool because it means, you know, if you're older, you know, you can have kids that are that are healthier. And a lot of people are having kids when they're older. But then, you know, you combine this with artificial wombs, who we're close on that technology, too, that completely like when we're talking about cultural changes and technological and cultural

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  solutions to technological and cultural problems, a lot of them are going to look like IVG. A lot of them are going to look like artificial wombs. What we may find is one of the solutions to the current collapsing birth rates is like. Gay the triads or something like that, right? Or, or, um, the poly cities or like, I'm not saying that these things will work, you know, but, uh, if, if any of these sorts of cultural groups want to survive into the future, uh, they're going to have to find ways to make, uh, themselves raising kids and keeping their culture alive work. Um, and so I'm very excited to see how these technologies expand options for people and expand the diversity of cultures that are possible because there's many more creative

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  people than me out there who might find even more exciting ways to, to, to raise families and, and increase the cultural diversity of our species.

• 1:27:55Chris Williamson?

  Just going back to the conversation about IVF, for the people that haven't been through it or don't know somebody that has been through it, what's the experience like?

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  It's painful. I usually ask my wife, I've seen these shots right into the butt. I don't know how she handles it and she does this as a routine. We have a kid a year. She wants to keep doing this for like 10 years. I don't, she is a tough, like, um, but it is painful. I, I, this, this woman was a woman who worked through her first pregnancy. She went to the hospital. She was taking sales calls while she was having contractions. Back to work was in five days. The level of pain she felt when getting egg extractions and stuff like that was higher or not higher than pregnancy, but I mean, it was hard. She is not somebody who complains about pain. She doesn't complain about the shots, but the egg extractions, they really hurt. And I know that because she wouldn't, she wouldn't mess around with that stuff.

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  Uh, so what I can say is it's a, it's a painful process, but if you see kids as like your mandate in life, for me not having kids is the equivalent of suicide or something like that. Um, it's just not an option for me. Um, and I, I'm glad that my wife, you know, I'd love if you had her on sometime. She's a, she's a weird woman, um, but really fun. Um, she sees things similar to I do. And so it's just not even something we would consider. We're going to do everything we can and we tried. To conceive naturally for like five years and it just wasn't in the cards. And I think increasingly what families are going to realize is it's really hard to get pregnant these days. Humans are becoming infertile. As a species, we're becoming infertile. And you're and when

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  you look at things like artificial wombs, they may be one of our only shots. Because when we hear when I hear women who have these complicated pregnancy, when I hear stillbirth, oh, my God, if your wife has carried a kid or you've carried a kid, when you think of a baby dying in that last trimester, and you know that with stuff like artificial wombs, we can lower the probability of that, it just breaks your heart and you would want to do anything you can to accelerate the pace of this technology.

• 1:29:51Chris Williamson?

  Malcolm Collins, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I find all of this discussion a combination of harrowing, inspiring, and interesting. So for the people who want to find out more about the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work, where should they go?

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  So our book series, The Pregnant Sky Series, The Pregnant Sky to Craft and Religion, is the most relevant to this conversation. It's on Amazon. It's for 99 cents, the ebook. Twitter account, Simone H. Collins, or just, you know, search Simone Malcolm Collins on Twitter. We have a joint account because I hate using Twitter. And we're recently starting up our YouTube and podcasts. We just uploaded the first episode of Starting It Back Up today, which is Simone Malcolm Collins Based Camp. So we're hoping that that's fun. I'd love to have you on sometime if we're able to get enough followers to be worth your time.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  Malcolm, I appreciate you. Thank you.