The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Malcolm and Simone Collins. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guests, this should be an interesting convo, are Malcolm and Simone Collins. Welcome.
Malcolm: Hello, it’s wonderful to be here with you today.
Simone: Hi.
Jim: Howdy. Howdy. Why don’t you tell us the listeners just very briefly, 30 seconds, your background? Simone, why don’t you go first?
Simone: Sure. Malcolm and I are pronatalist advocates internationally. I’m running for office in Pennsylvania for State Rep. We are authors, primarily Malcolm. I edit off the Pragmatist Guide series. That’s the pragmatist’s guide to life, to relationships, to sexuality, to governance, and to crafting religion. For work, we work in private equity because none of those other things pay. But he has a graduate degree from Stanford an MBA. I have a Master’s in Technology Policy from Cambridge and we are very passionate weirdos about a variety of weird things that we talk about on our podcast-based camp. Malcolm, what did I miss?
Malcolm: Well, we’re publicly known as the elite couple breeding to save mankind. We’re those weirdos. Every time some weirdo couple goes viral for having kids, that’s probably us or telling people they need to care about fertility rates. But I’d say that our core area of focus these days is on cultural evolution and sort of trying to predict where things are going.
Jim: Yes, it sounds quite close to one of our regular guests, Robin Hansen. We’ve talked about cultural-
Malcolm: I love him. Great guy.
Jim: … evolution with him multiple times. We’ve also talked about him about the fertility crisis, et cetera. So today we’re not going to talk. I didn’t read any of your books though. In the future I’d like to read both Governance and Crafting Religion, maybe have you guys back. Those are both topics at which I have a lot of opinions about. I’ll read your book first. I won’t just spew my shit, but I think those would be fun topics to talk about if you guys are willing.
Malcolm: I can talk about that forever. We’re now getting our own religion registered with the IRS.
Jim: All right, that’s good stuff. You familiar with John Vervaeke and his concept of the religion that’s not a religion?
Malcolm: Our religion could be thought of as sort of a mirror of John Vervaeke’s where it’s attempting to solve many of the same problems except we go very hard against the mystic ideas. We’re a very anti-mystical religion and he goes very hard into the mystic ideas. One of the theories that we’ve had recently is that all of the world’s worship systems can really be broken down into one of three core religions, but which three core religion you worship, doesn’t matter what you call yourself. You can call yourself a Catholic and end up worshiping any of these three groups with the three core religious systems being polytheism, mysticism, and monotheism. For example, if you’re a Catholic and you’re worshiping saints and you believe in a Dante’s Divine Comedy like complicated heavenly cosmology and all of this stuff that’s basically polytheism. You can call it something else, but it’s functionally polytheism and I would argue that John Vervaeke’s project is really sort of the core and pure manifestation of the mystic tradition.
Jim: Cool. We’ll talk about that on another podcast, but today we’re going to talk about pronatalism and fertility rates and stuff like that. So, as most of our listeners would know, maybe not the general public, there’s a worldwide trend since when? The ’60s I guess, of gradually lowering fertility rates.
Malcolm: Actually, not since the ’60s. It’s started… And this is really interesting and it’s why everybody is sort of missing what’s happening. Lowering fertility started at the Industrial Revolution. It just started to go below replacement rate in a few countries in the ’60s.
Simone: So a lot of people sort of argue, “Oh, we saw demographic collapse start when women got educated or women left the house or women entered the workforce” when really it’s when men left the house. It was way earlier.
Jim: Interesting. Yeah, as when I think back to the family tree, you go back far enough and there’s ruts with 13 kids and stuff like that. Though my mother was from a family of nine and my father from a family of six, it wasn’t that far back that the fertility rate was still high. But yeah, I think that’s probably a good point. It’s been going on since some time a ways back. When did the first country get below fertility? Do you guys know?
Malcolm: So hold on. It gets even more interesting than that. You might not know this, but in 1930 half of the countries in Europe were below replacement rate. The fertility collapse had reached a catastrophic level when the World Wars started, and it was during the World Wars, you had this huge explosion in fertility rates, which really basically saved the world about 100 years. So it started a long time ago and it got to a critical level before then. We have an episode where we go big into why the baby boom really happened. The baby boom seems to have predominantly happened for two reasons.
If you go through all the studies, the big, big, big one was more baby surviving. That was the big thing that caused the baby boom, just changes in medical technology. And then the second big, big, big one was people have more kids when their lives have been threatened. So there was a great study on this and they’ve seen a lot of people die. So if you look, because you can get really good controls with tsunamis, I can look at a tsunami hit an area and then compare it to a culturally similar area that wasn’t hit by a tsunami, an economically similar area, and you’ll see an explosion in fertility rates where the tsunami hit.
Jim: So today, we are at a point where there are now many countries below replacement rate. In fact, in the West, most of the countries are below replacement rate, and there’s quite a few countries that are at disastrously low rates like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Greece, Italy, Spain, I think. Those romantic Spaniards, what the hell? They stick it in the wrong hole or what the fuck is going on there, right?
Malcolm: It gets crazier. So the thing that a lot of people don’t know that follow this is they know the classic countries like the ones you just listened to, but a number of new countries have entered the list and they are all in the developing world. Specifically, Latin America has gone through a fertility freefall recently. You can look at a country like for example, Argentina where the fertility rate has gone down. If you look at four-year-olds entering kindergarten in Argentina right now, there’s going to be 30% less of them than there were just four years ago. You can look at Uruguay, which went from a fertility rate of two, so almost above repopulation rate to 1.73 in just seven years. That’s off a cliff.
In fact, a number of countries in Latin America are reaching this 1.3 level, specifically Jamaica, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica with a demographer, local demographer, saying, “If you’re looking at native-born Costa Rican women, they might be below one now.” So we as America, as we try to fix this through immigration, we are ravaging these country’s economies because they’re investing in training these kids with tax dollars and then we get their economically productive years.
Jim: Interesting. Any hypotheses on why this sudden falling off a cliff have occurred recently? Think about COVID, you think about maybe a little further back, the global financial crisis. Any other hypotheses?
Malcolm: Do you have one on why it was so recent, Simone?
Simone: I think what’s going on is we’re really just starting to see the inevitable stuff that was sort of hidden playing out. So when the Titanic hit an iceberg, it wasn’t like suddenly the Titanic turned and hit an iceberg. It was heading toward that iceberg for a very long time. In fact, it was on that route. It was in the trajectory that was going to lead it to that iceberg for a very long period of time. What’s happening now is we’re just starting to see everything crumble and it looks like small things like COVID appear to be causing something that was actually caused by the Industrial Revolution. COVID actually, in some cases, led to small baby booms because more people were able to work from home, which made it easier to have kids. So it’s not the big shock that you would think. We’re just starting to see the underpinnings of our society and our governments and our economies, which were all built on the concept of basically a population-based pyramid scheme starting to falter.
Malcolm: And I want to note here because a lot of people are surprised by the Latin America and you were mentioning Spain’s low fertility rate. One of the things that’s really persistent, so there’s two things. We call it prosperity-induced fertility collapse whenever we’re talking about it because that’s what creates it. On average, in the world today, if you look at a chart of when countries fall below repopulation rate, it’s when an average person in a modern economy is making over USD 5000 per year. So basically as soon as you’ve escaped a state of desperate poverty, you fall below repopulation rate in a modern economy. And as you engage more with technology, fertility rate also falls but $5,000 a year. And so, generally, the more wealth a country has or the more wealth a group has, the lower their fertility rate’s going to be. But what’s important to note here is different cultural frameworks resist prosperity-induced fertility collapse at different rates.
The most resistant, like the OG most resistant cultural framework to fertility collapse is conservative Judaism. Conservative Judaism is insanely OP resistant to fertility collapse. The next is Protestant Christianity, conservative Protestant Christianity is very resistant to fertility collapse but not as resistant as Judaism. Then under that, you have Islam but is quite far under that. Islam is not that resistant to fertility collapse. Iran, for example, has famously been struggling with its fertility rate for ages. They created a state of national emergency like 10 years ago trying to get it up and they have gotten it up a little mostly by restricting women’s rights, they’re still below replacement rate.
And then you go below Muslims, now you’re down to Orthodox, Christians, and Catholics, which actually have bad fertility rates. Your average Catholic-majority country in Europe have a fertility rate of only 1.3. And so we should have expected that this would happen in Latin America. If you look at Catholic and Orthodox Christian fertility rates, they’re about midway in between I’d say like Muslim fertility rates and Buddhist and JN and Eastern fertility rates, which are the absolute lowest. And the Policyist traditions also are incredibly low fertility rates. So you look at Native American fertility rates in the United States and they’re only at 1.2, which is bad.
Jim: I understand atheists are at the very bottom of the stack.
Malcolm: Well, this gets interesting, so we might need to divide atheists into groups. We have the thing that we often talk about on our podcasts and when we’re talking about fertility rates because it’s critical to understand when you’re talking about where the future is heading that we call the urban monoculture, which can be thought of as a secular religion which dominates our major urban centers. And it is the lowest fertility rate culture in the world. And I think many people would call it atheist, but I don’t really call it atheist because they have ideas that go against, I would say science around things like how for example, mental health or gender works. And it’s like, “Well, where are you getting these ideas if not from data?” And it’s like, “Well, from some sort of religious understanding of reality.” And this culture is really important in fertility collapse because now it’s come to be represented by the majority of mainstream progressive views across cultures or sort of representing this urban monoculture.
And people will say, “Oh, the urban monoculture isn’t one cultural group.” And so I’m like, “Okay.” If I go to in the United States, a far progressive Catholic or far progressive Muslim or a far progressive Jew, and I’m like in a far progressive atheist, and I’m like, “What are your views on people’s roles in marriage? What are your views on how you should raise kids? What are your views on gender roles? What are your views on sexuality? What are your views on how we should relate to the environment? What are your views on the broader cosmology? What are your views on what it means to be a good person?” They’re going to have exactly the same answers. But if I go to conservatives of all those faiths and I ask the same question, they’re going to have radically different answers. It’s because the urban monoculture allows you to keep a nominal cultural identity so long as you completely ideologically conform.
But the urban monoculture is a new thing in terms of this unique cultural entity. Because it’s very low fertility, but it can only survive by parasitizing children from nearby more demographically healthy cultural groups or importing children from far away cultural groups where the urban monoculture hasn’t seeped yet or hasn’t seeped as far and crashed fertility rates as much. A lot of people think that this is just some phenomenon that we’ve been going through. Society always that progressives always had fewer kids and conservatives always had more kids. But if you look at the data before the 1970s, the difference in progressive and conservative fertility rates in the United States was only 0.1.
Jim: Frankly, I say let them fuck is not reproduce. That would be my take. Now the problem of course is an awful lot of our intellectual and social capital is in those groups, but there’s a reason I live in the lowest population density east of the Mississippi River, and people are always wanting me to come up to DC and meet people. I say, “I don’t do Babylon. Sorry.” I said, “I’ll meet you in Front Royal for pizza, which is about halfway. And I’ve gotten well over that whole urban woke thing, right?”
Malcolm: Yeah. There’s two problems with their group where it’s a little dangerous just to ignore them. They are going to go extinct, that’s for sure. But due to evolutionary pressures, cultural evolutionary pressures, people are most likely to deconvert from their birth culture between the ages of 13 and 23. So if they were going to convert people, the iterations of the urban monoculture that focused on converting young people were going to out-compete the iterations that didn’t. And that is why so much of the urban monoculture’s focus culturally speaking, has gone into the secondary education system and into children’s media where it has become just outrageously aggressive recently to an extent where I think most people are really scared for their children not due to any malevolent force. It’s just the iterations that targeted children out-competed the iterations that were like, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t do that. Maybe there’s some ethical concerns here.”
And then the second reason is the rise of an anti-natalist mindset was in the urban monoculture where people within the urban monoculture want to believe they’re good people. And now is this becoming increasingly clear that fertility collapse is an issue? The way that they are dealing with this is adopting a genuinely anti-natalist philosophy where when I’m in New York and hosting a dinner party, and I mentioned fertility lakes are collapsing, humanity could go extinct. And I’m sure you’ve seen this, Jim, because you hang out with the intellectual group as well. You always have the one person who’s like, “Would it really be so bad if humanity went extinct?” And then everyone else nods sagely as if he just said something really profound.
And if you were in any other culture, in human history, everyone would’ve dropped everything they were holding and stared at this guy like he had just said, “Let’s just genocide half of the population or something.” But it’s more than that. It’s insane. And it’s created this new cultural conflict that we have as a society where the conservatives are increasingly becoming this alliance of diverse conservative cultures. And then against the urban monoculture is that the urban monoculture doesn’t care about the future. And we’ve never had a culture in history. When we were fighting the Russians, at least the Russians love their children too. But now we are fighting a force that would be happy to see all of humanity go extinct.
Jim: Well, that’s an extreme view, a few of the folks, but unfortunately, it does follow from the algebra essentially. But let me flip that around a little bit and take their point, not their point of view, but another closely related point of view, which is humanity’s population has exploded since about 1700 when we had a global population of about 600 million. And each one of those 600 million consumed about a 10th as much as the average global citizen does today counting the Bangladeshis and the South Saharan African, everybody else.
So we’re working at about 120 times the impact on the earth that we were in 1700 and by some measures at least we’re over the line on sustainable elements of our biosphere. Not in every area, but in some climate being one, extinction being another, soil loss throughout the world being another, freshwater in large areas, probably not globally yet, et cetera. And so maybe there are indeed too damn many people and that we let that high R exponential go for too long and that the earth would be a lot healthier at about 2 billion than it is at 8 billion. And so a period of building down for a while may actually be extremely reasonable thing to do.
Malcolm: So the pronatalist movement is absolutely not about trying to keep the fertility rate going up forever. It’s not even about maintaining a constant world population. If we’re on the Titanic right now, and you’ve looked at the numbers as well as we have, we are hitting the iceberg no matter what at this rate, there is nothing we can do anymore to prevent serious consequences from demographic collapse and a rapidly falling global population. We are just trying to do two things. One, get people on the lifeboats and convince them that this ship is not unsinkable. And when I say this ship is not unsinkable, the ship, unfortunately, is a ship we’re all in, which is our current geopolitical and economic system that underpins global civilization at this point and was built, as Simone pointed out, on something of a population pyramid scheme. And we really don’t have a system for how this is going to work when we reach a state of constant and consistent economic decline.
And so, if you look at numbers to point out what Simone was saying, we had for all of human history, an exponentially growing number of producers and consumers, and the productivity poor producer was growing linearly. Yes, technology grew exponentially, but for about the past 200 years, the productivity of each worker was linear. And so what this means is we are going to see likely within our lifetimes a shift to a global economy that every year is shrinking on average and the way that we have taken out leverage at every layer of the economy, that’s great when things are growing on average. That is, you know this, you’ve done business deals and stuff like that, that is catastrophic if we have a shrinking on average situation. When I say leverage on everything, I mean we’ve taken out debt on our human capital, our student loans, our land, our businesses, our cities, our states, our nation states, literally everything.
It’s not just a social security problem, but then we also did it in other sneaky ways. If you look at something like New York, you can say, “Well, they’re only paying 7% of their yearly tax income to debt. That’s not a problem.” But when then you factor in unpaid payments like unpaid payments to police pension plans, unpaid payments to teachers pension plans, it actually gets up near 45%. Now, to anyone who’s familiar with debt payments and how that works, if they lose just a little bit of their tax income, and keep in mind 5% of the population there, I think is paying 94% of the taxes right now, that’s catastrophic. But then we also have this in terms of our basic infrastructure. When we were building out our suburbs, what we did is we had the developers prepay for the roads and the sewer systems and the electrical grids, and then they would be maintained by taxes, but they need to be redone every 60 years or so.
And we’re reaching that point and we just didn’t build that into our calculations. And all of this is happening and everyone’s like, “Well, I mean, you can fix this just by taxing the rich more.” And it’s like, “Well, unfortunately, that’s going to be harder going forwards because historically, if you want to tune up taxes in the United States, there is a point at which the super-rich will leave. But some companies like Google or something like that, you’re not going to just be able to pick up and move Google given all the talent it has, or Apple or something. But the new companies that are coming online, you’ve got VC friends, you’ve probably heard this as well. They’re different from companies in the past. It’s like three super smart guys in the United States, an outsourced team of maybe 30 other people, and then all the rest is AI agents.
And what that means is that these new concentrated sources of wealth are going to be super mobile and super attuned to a government being like, “Well, I’ll take what you have,” which really changes a lot of the economic game. So you have two big economic changes happening at the same time. An ultra-wealth concentration that will be created by AI at the same time as a global economic collapse. And also something to note. When we talk about a free-falling fertility rate, fertility rates intrinsically rise or decline logarithmically, it’s just the bunny problem, right? Because you’re dealing with multiples and a lot of people just aren’t good at thinking in terms of exponentials and what it really means to have a low fertility rate. So you can look at something like South Korea’s current fertility rate, which is like 0.8 around. That means for every 100 South Koreans, there’s going to be around six great-grandchildren. And people can be like, “Oh, maybe it will level off.”
Well, unfortunately, just this last year, it went down 11.5% and they’re like, “Well, maybe the governments will get serious and sink money into this.” They sent $300 billion into this. Hungary spent 5% of its GDP trying to fix this, and its fertility rate rose less than its neighbors. France had a 7% fall in its fertility rate this last year, and it spins around 4% of its GDP on pro-natalist policies. We don’t know how to fix this at this point. And then people are like, “Wait, why are you so worried? Look at the UN statistics. They don’t show a rapidly falling fertility rate.” And I’m like, “The UN has their [inaudible 00:21:03] in their butt, okay? In their tushy.” Because remember I was talking about the rapidly falling Latin American fertility rate? So Latin America in 2019 went below replacement rate. And the UN sent a team there. They’re like, “Oh, we’ll do a little demographic experiment, try to predict where they’re going to be.”
And they said, “Well, don’t worry because, in the second half of this century, they will stabilize at a fertility rate of 1.75.” I think it was almost every single country in their data set except for one. And you can read a good article on this in America’s quarterly called Latin America’s Fertility is Accelerating and No One Knows Why. Almost every of the major countries they were looking at has already just five years later fallen below the fertility rate. They said it would stabilize that the second half of this century. They are actively misleading the public in their calculations. If you ask millennials, “Do you plan to have kids?”
Around half or more depending on the data you’re looking at are saying, “I don’t plan to have kids.” That number used to be 80%. Realize fertility rate is way below expected fertility rate. In the United States, we have a fertility rate of like 1.6, but a desired fertility rate of around 2.7. If we’re now going to half of people planning to have no kids, the fertility rate’s going to fall off a cliff like no one has ever seen. And then you can look at rates of real religiosity, the number one correlator to high fertility rates. And if you look at Gen Alpha in isolation, their religiosity is logarithmically off a cliff here. Sorry, I went on a rant.
Jim: It’s all good stuff. I’m going to push back on a couple of items here.
Malcolm: Okay.
Jim: One, the debt overhang. Regular listeners to my show know I don’t give a shit about debt because we can just wipe it out. It’s a total fiction. And the great debt Jubilee will solve that problem. And oh, by the way, it destroys no wealth whatsoever. Wealth is things like factories, human knowledge, land, buildings. Wealth is not those little scribbles in the electronic ledger. Fuck that one. We can deal with that one, no problem. The other is this idea of this mobile high-tech AI wealth. Well, one most of it, who gives a fuck if TikTok went away or Facebook? It’s just bullshit. We don’t need it. In fact, I would say its net value subtracted from human well-being and the AI revolution on the other hand is going to have some wonderful benefits, but those benefits are very easy to propagate. It’s going to be extraordinarily difficult for people to landlock the benefits that come from AI.
Think of the open-source world. It’s just slightly behind the big companies and it’s accelerating. And so I think that the financial stuff, if we’re smart and have the balls to do the big debt jubilee and the big reset, we can get out of the new tech wealth, most of it, I’d be glad if it went fuck away, right? It has no impact on anything. No one’s going to starve if TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, all that shit disappeared. In fact, I bet our global productivity go up because people will be spending less time chasing stupid ass shit and getting their dopamine drip. Same is true for games, all that-
Jim: And getting their dopamine drip. Same is true for games, all that stuff. One way makes no impact at all on humanity’s trajectory to the future, except possibly positive. So those things, I don’t care about at all. On the other hand, the pyramid scheme is real. We will have to think. We’ve assumed, for instance, this scheme of transfer payments from the working young to the retired old. Right? I just got my Social Security, so I’m picking your pockets you young folks. I waited until the last possible to my maximum age where I could file for it. But this idea of abstract adults being paid for via this abstract financial flow is extremely new. Until recently, where did old farts like me do? We live with our kids. We embarrassed the hell out of them and annoyed the hell out of them and that’s probably what we’ll go back to.
And in fact, that’s still the practice in at least the poorer of the countries around the world. And again, will the world end if I have to move back in with my daughter? No, it might annoy her, it might annoy me, but we’ll figure it out. I think that a lot of these things are grossly overstated in terms of their downsides. And humans are pretty adaptable. We’ve gone from 1700 where we we’re all living in dirt floors, no windows, sick half the time because of the smoke from our leaky fireplaces, 50% of kids dying by the age of five, to the modern world of big, dumb and happy in 300 years. We can move not back, but we can move to a different place that’s quite radically different than where we are today as adaptations to this change. That would at least be my strongly stated and weakly held pushback.
Simone: I largely agree with you on many of these points, but the more we learn, the more we see that things are just so much worse than we thought. It’s not just a matter of, “Okay, well, who’s going to pay for retirees and elderly people as they enjoy their final years?” When we created a series of guides to parents, for example, through pronatalist.org or Pronatalist nonprofit to show them, “Well, here are the resources in your state that are available to parents based on various factors.” It’s amazing and humbling how much parents at or near the poverty level can have supported and do have supported. Their kids are fed, their kids get medical care, their kids get free child care. And these are people who are quite dependent on these services now. And these are young parents and these are children. This is not just old people who are dependent on social services that will not be properly funded if we don’t figure out this pyramid scheme problem.
There’s also the fact that around 30% of the jobs in the United States that exist are either related to government employment or government funded programs. And when things like these start to fall apart and crumble in the face of demographic collapse, a lot of this, it’s not just numbers on a ledger anymore. These are jobs that are no longer being paid for. These are social services that are not being provided to people who cannot. They’re living paycheck to paycheck. They have absolutely zero bandwidth for these expenses. Most Americans at that income level cannot handle any unexpected thousand dollar expense. And keep in mind that right now, their kids’ food and daycare and medical care is being taken care of. That’s way more than a thousand dollars a month in many cases.
Jim: Well, keep worth noting, again, this is another new phenomena. You know what the federal government percentage of GDP was in 1931?
Simone: I’m sure it was something much more sustainable.
Jim: It was 3%, 3%.
Simone: Oh my gosh.
Jim: So it is certainly possible to feed your kids and live without government welfare schemes. We just have to reorder society a fair bit, but what’s wrong with that?
Simone: Yeah. Most people… I think I grew up thinking that we lived in a capitalist country and that that’s the world that we lived in. Everyone paid for their stuff and took care of their stuff. And I have realized more that we actually, on the spectrum of capitalism to socialism aren’t a very socialist nation right now. And that’s dangerous in the face of something like demographic collapse. I would love for us to transition back to where we were in the 1930s, but that is something that we have to intentionally do. And if we don’t do this, and then we hit a hard landing on demographic collapse, a lot of people are going to be in a very dire situation. A very common criticism of pronatalism and demographic collapse is, “Oh, it’s just rich capitalists are trying to get more workers. They’re just worried about their workers drying up.”
God forbid, they discover that AI is what frees the wealthy from the proletariat. Right? But what the real problem is here is that this is not a wealthy person problem. Those wealthy people are going to go disappear and create their own wealth and build their own stuff and live in their walled garden, South Africa style. And meanwhile, everyone who is the most vulnerable is going to be hit by this real freaking hard. So I’m worried.
Malcolm: And I also would elevate this idea of, we definitely are going to have some sort of economic transition that you’ve talked about to a new economic system, but the type of economic transition that it looks like we’re going to have, unless we start thinking about this seriously now, is going to be sudden and severe. And historically, those have been really bloody. We should hope that we’re able to transition our system in another way, but I mean, I don’t know if that’s something you’re concerned about or not.
Jim: I’m all in favor of guillotines. I think we do need a big reset, and the sooner, the better. This may be the trigger of it. No, I often post a picture of an 18th century pen and ink drawing of guillotines and holding heads up and things like that. So, shit happens.
Malcolm: So another thing we have to worry about with fertility collapse in the global future in the economy is fertility collapse because it affects regions and countries that are more economically productive. The effects of fertility collapse on the global economy are going to be much bigger than you would predict, than if you were just looking at the number of producers and consumers that aren’t in the economy. For example, if you look at the global economy, it’s the countries that are producing the most that are the biggest share of the world’s GDP that are going to be the biggest hit by this. But then it’s the regions within those countries that are the most hit by this. So in the United States, the regions that are going to be most hit are San Francisco and Manhattan, for example.
Jim: Good.
Malcolm: Good, but here’s the problem. I hate the urban monoculture. I see it as an existential threat to the human condition. However, it has been good at capturing the most potentially productive individuals in our society. And we did an episode-
Jim: Yeah, put them to work on shit like advertising, popular culture, law, finance, it’s all God damn big.
Simone: But it doesn’t just do that.
Jim: It’s parasitism. Now, how many clothes are made in New York anymore? Zero. How many anythings is made in San Francisco? Zero. If they all went away, we wouldn’t even notice.
Simone: I mean, to a certain extent, yes, but I think the word that Malcolm uses to describe this isn’t parasitism, it’s parasitoidism. That is to say it’s a parasitoid. It is literally killing its victim. And the problem with the urban monoculture isn’t just that it’s taking the best and the brightest, it’s that it’s taking the best and the brightest and it’s sterilizing them. So to a certain extent, it’s like, “Okay, fine. The urban monoculture is going to disappear. Who cares? That’s fine. Good riddance.” The problem is that as it burns out, it is going to select from all of its surrounding populations the most pluralistic, the most open-minded, the most non-fascistic, non-racist people. And it is going to sterilize them and it’s going to remove them from the gene pool. And then what do we end up with? We end up with a much more xenophobic, racist, non-pluralistic, all-encompassing world of people who are just not so open-minded.
And we’re just concerned about that because pluralism and a variety of different viewpoints and cultures and mindsets is what will probably diversify our mimetic portfolio enough to help us deal with unknown existential risks in the future. If we end up with a continued monoculture just a different one in the future, we’re fucked. And I don’t want that either, right? That’s not good either. So we need to find some way to not sterilize the pluralistic people who are open-minded, who are empathetic. Because the key value proposition of the urban monoculture, as messed up as it is, is it is we will take away in the moment suffering. They are catering to people who care about empathy, who care about human flourishing and well-being. And of course, it’s taking them and doing terrible things with them and not actually helping those causes, but it’s certainly getting people who are interested in those things. And I love for people who are empathetic and who care about human flourishing to exist in the future. That would be wonderful. Maybe we can figure this out.
Malcolm: To word this a little differently, what she’s saying is the urban monoculture affects the nature of the cultures it attempts to parasitize. So if you take a conservative Christian family that’s having 10 kids per generation, and every generation you mimetically sterilize five of those kids, and those five kids happen to be the most intelligent and the most productive and the most open-minded five, that’s going to have an effect on that family’s disposition going forwards. If you look at just something like IQ broadly speaking, in the developed world right now, we are seeing a 0.2 point decline in IQ every year. That means that within 75 years, we will have a one standard deviation shift down in IQ. And that means that within a hundred, and I think it was 125 years, the average American, or I think it’s the average person in the developed world, will be what is today considered intellectually disabled.
And obviously, I don’t think that this trend is going to play out all the way to that end point. There’s actually some other things that will likely happen before that, but this does have an effect on the ability of the next generation to be able to accomplish the same sorts of things that our generation accomplished. And I think something that you pointed out that’s really important is if you look at how much society has changed from the 700, not even the 1700s, early 1900s to today, it’s a completely different world. And I think when we talk about a transformation of the world’s economic and sociopolitical order, a lot of people have this assumption of that just can’t happen. And it’s like, but that’s what always happens.
Jim: Exactly. People think it can’t happen, but the amount of things that can happen is way bigger that people… And have happened. All the downsides that you gave, a lot of them are within the box of incremental thinking. Oh yeah, we’ll be fucked by the federal day, yes. We’ll be fucked by the pension over promises, yes, but those are all invented by humans and they can all be changed. Right? It is an interesting point that one of the distressing dynamics here is the sucking in of the best and brightest into parasitism. A few things pissed me off worse than seeing really smart people go into finance or law. Right?
What the fuck? Why aren’t they becoming scientists, or doctors, or the world’s greatest organic farmers, or building wonderful factories, or writing wonderful novels, doing something instead of just being parasites. But unfortunately, game A, the game where the whole world is driven by short-term money on money return, produces a vortex at a status game that sucks naive people into it and grinds them down. If that game ends, good. Think about how much less IQ you will need if you don’t have this bizarre ass game of management consulting, and Wall Street, and law firms and intellectual property lawsuits, just useless shit. That’s probably consuming 75% of our top 2% of IQ. So maybe we only need 25% of them.
Malcolm: Maybe. I also wanted to elaborate on what Simone was talking about, about the nature of the urban monoculture and how it works. Because a lot of people, when they think about what we’re talking about here, they think we’re talking about some natural evolution of what Democrats were in the ’90s. And it is a totally new cultural unit that lures people in using totally new promises and systems. So if you look at what was happening in the ’90s, while they might have been wrong-headed in how they went about it, the goal of what the Democrats were trying to achieve with some degree of equality. The urban monoculture doesn’t care about equality at all. It cares about, as Simone said, a removal of in-the-moment pain. This is why you see things like the HAES movement, the Healthy at Every Size Movement, which is trying to shut down research showing that being fat is unhealthy because yes, it might help that person overall in their life, but it causes in-the-moment emotional pain.
This is why you have the fentanyl handouts on the streets. I mean, obviously, the wealthy people are able to get their kids in treatment and it supported people who are suffering from that, but it removes in-the-moment emotional pain. This is why you have California removing testing from its school system. Wealthy kids are still going to SAT testing. That increases inequality, but removes in-the-moment emotional pain.
And this is fundamentally what trigger warnings are. Trigger warnings are saying, “I can’t deal with any negative stimuli.” We went viral once for practicing light corporal discipline with our children. The media was like, “Oh my God, how could they do this?” If you look at the most recent studies like parental punishment, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water in 2023, largely they show it’s beneficial to kids.
And what we’re seeing here and what we’re seeing in the total mental collapse of the urban monoculture is because in trying to enter this culture that says, “You will feel no pain, you will feel no negative stimuli,” you will get to do whatever you want that gives you pleasure, whatever you want to do it, and you will be affirmed for believing whatever you want to believe about yourself. People become hypersensitized to negative stimuli. And even slight negative stimuli cause depression and anxiety cascades.
The CDC, this was a few years ago, it did a poll to look at unaliving oneself rates in American high schools. And it found that one in four girls had created a plan to unalive themselves on any given year, not over the course of their childhood. If you want to talk about unaliving attempts, it was over one in 10 kids every year. This is catastrophic mental health issues. And it has made things a little bit easier for my generation.
When I was growing up, the urban monoculture looked fun. It was like, “Oh, I can live a life of austerity and discipline of industry, or I can go party and do whatever I want whenever I want.” Right? Now, kids largely, when we talk to gen alpha, they see how bad it is, the smart ones do. They’re like, “Look, I know the people who have gone far into this. They fall asleep to the sounds of their own screams and they wake up to the sounds of their own screams.” There is no happiness at the other end of this tunnel, but it is terrifying to watch the complete collapse of mental health within this community.
Jim: Yeah, that is very strange and weird thing. Though, the dynamics of my daughter, I have a daughter and I now have a four-year-old granddaughter. And I will say, my 36-year-old daughter is very aware of these things and she’s a member of something called MAMA, which is Mothers Against something or other. Basically, no screens for kids. Right?
And as we know, the Silicon Valley lords don’t let their kids have screens, at least they’re extremely limited. So we’re going to see a differential. Now, to your other point though about the Borg sucking in the talent, the big problem is those who stick with the more traditional and normal values, unfortunately tend to be the party of stupid. Right? They also believe in revealed religion, and don’t believe in evolution, and believe in UFOs and all that kind of crap [inaudible 00:39:55]. It was only 20 years ago, less than 20 years ago that Republicans no longer got a majority of those with four-year college degrees. Traditionally, the Republican Party had always been the party of the well-educated. Now, it’s much more the party of the stupid. So the potential counter to the urban monoculture is the party is stupid. How do we work that problem?
Malcolm: So I would argue that this is actually working itself out right now. So if you go to the ’90s, the Republican Party was primarily an alliance of two groups. It was a theocratic faction and a big business faction. In the ’90s, the big business guy was always like a Republican. If you were like a McKinsey guy, classic Republican. Today, I don’t even know if McKinsey would hire me because I’m publicly a Republican. That’s how far that alliance broke up. And what ended up happening is as the business left this alliance, they were no longer able to win elections anymore. And then Trump came along and he appealed to a new group. He said, “Screw the theocrats. You guys can’t win elections for me. What I’m going to do is I’m going to appeal to people who just believe the system is broken, want to burn it down and want to just create something new maybe.” That was really what he was appealing to.
And at the time, he had no elite faction that had sided with him, but something very peculiar has happened since its first election cycle, which is to say, if you go back to the ’90s, yeah, big business with solidly Republican, intergenerational wealth was often Republican. They’ve also moved far to the left. But tech entrepreneurs, they were far to the left. People who had made their own money, they were far to the left. Now, the tech entrepreneurs, they’re moving far to the right because they have seen the Trump’s core basis, not the deep south of the old Republican Party. If you actually look at voters, it’s greater Appalachia. Right? It sees the tech elite, it sees in this group. And this is what is meant by the new rights. When people talk about this new right group, it sees that they actually have an alliance with this group and that this group values much of what they value, personal grittiness, personal entrepreneurialism. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Don’t trust the government to handle things. Bureaucrats are all incompetent.
But it also sees another opportunity, which is to say, “Oh, you want to seriously change the way the government works. You want to try to recreate things. Well, have we got the tech to help with that, have we got the ambition to do that.” And I think that increasingly, one of the core differentiators between the Republican Party in the United States and the Democratic Party in the United States is a Democratic Party believes that the current bureaucracy can be iteratively improved. And the Republican Party, at least economically speaking, because it’s not really anti-socialist anymore, is more like, we think that the whole bureaucracy needs to be upended and something new needs to put in its place.
Jim: Yeah, to a degree. Though, of course, you get Trump saying, “I’m not going to touch entitlements. I’m not going to touch Social Security and Medicare.” What a lie and sack of shit. Right?
Malcolm: You can’t win an election if you touch that stuff, come on, people would be-
Jim: You have the famous third rail. Neither party has any clue. So it’s going to require something entirely new, in my view. So let’s talk about what you think are the causes of the current fertility collapse and what might be done about it.
Malcolm: So the causes are manifold. Specifically, there are biological causes. For example, if you look at current statistics on declining sperm rates, sperm rates have declined by around 50% in the last 50 years. If something else had declined by 50% in 50 years, people would be freaking out. If our arms were 50% shorter, people would… But environmentalists don’t care about it, so they just don’t look at this stuff. It’s actually predicted that by 2060, 50% of men in the developed world are going to be infertile.
Jim: Now is that tighty-whities or heated seats in cars or pseudo hormones? Any hypothesis?
Malcolm: So Simone, talk about the hormones because that’s really interesting.
Simone: Yeah. So a lot of endocrine disruptors are seen as being at fault here. These are pervasive. It’s in the air we breathe, it’s in lotions and soaps we put on our skin. Our clothing has various microplastics that are being rubbed in if you’re wearing like a poly blend or something. And then of course, our food.
Malcolm: The TIDES study.
Simone: Yes. So there’s these awesome longitudinal studies. It’s called the TIDES studies, T-I-D-E-S, that looked at the level of endocrine disruptors in the blood of pregnant women in their first trimesters, because that’s a really key developmental stage for a baby. And they found that especially for males, for little boys, and then of course, men later, a higher presence of endocrine disruptors in their bloodstream in the first trimester predicted all sorts of different changes, starting at birth with measured anogenital distance being lower.
So essentially, their taint was shorter as measured when they were born, meaning that… I mean, what starts with embryos is you start with a blank and the blank is female. And what happens with various hormones throughout pregnancy is then, the male becomes male from female. So basically, they’re becoming less male over time, and that we would expect to affect fertility. It is even affecting things like behavior. So the TIDES studies also found that as these babies grow up and became kids, post toddler stages, boys who had higher levels of first trimester endocrine disruptors had more… We’ll say, less gender dimorphic play. They weren’t playing as much like boys. They were playing more like girls. And so, who knows how much this has been affecting our existing populations and certainly will affect our future populations.
Malcolm: This is something if you hang out like in online circles of young people these days, especially what used to be the red pill community, if your audience is familiar with that at all, where there used to be this pickup community that was like, “Men aren’t being treated fairly. We’re not getting enough sex. This is how we can get more sex.” The way that community has transformed in gen alpha has been really interesting. Because gen alpha males just don’t have a high sex drive and they don’t feel the same like, “We’re not getting…” They’re just like, “What’s the point in interacting with women? They’re all crazy.” And we’re like, “Well, sex. You want sex, right?” And they’re like, “Eh, take it or leave it.” I’m like, “I did not feel take it or leave it when I was 18. What has happened to you people?”
Jim: You sound like an old fart already and you’re pretty young.
Malcolm: Right. Right. Well, I mean, things are changing. Humans are biologically changing.
Simone: Yes.
Malcolm: Okay. When we look at things like the explosion in trans rates and stuff like this, part of this might just be pollution. I do think that there is a social contagion faction here, but if the studies are correct, we are actually producing a generation of men that are not fully gender differentiated and we can’t avoid this stuff. It’s everywhere. It’s in the air we breathe. We need to build cultures that can work with it. So yes, one, biology. Two, economic cost. It is very inexpensive. This isn’t a problem if you’re not very wealthy in America, but if you are middle class or wealthy in America, it’s actually very expensive to have a kid, which is the interesting thing of how much the cost of raising children rises as soon as you achieve any degree of economic security in the United States.
So you have that problem as well, but again, the more wealth you have, the less kids you have until you get over half a million USD per year as a family. And so that’s really not the big problem that people want to blame it on. Living closer together seems to decrease fertility rates. So just living in a city versus having a larger house, but again, it’s not a big factor. The big, big, big factor is capitalism. Other people could be like, “Look, I’m a capitalist. I think capitalism has done great things for the world.” Right? But the problem with capitalism is it’s very bad at pricing in future goods. And so capitalism basically divides every person’s life into two segments. There is a section segment that is of immediate utility to the capitalist system, i.e., it’s producing something that people will pay for something of immediate value, hopefully productive value, and then everything else. And that everything else is the person’s leisure time, but also, the person’s family time. And family time is in part, work…
Malcolm: Also, the person’s family time and family time is in part work. It has found a way to pay organically the individuals who are of the highest utility to that capitalist system or at least that it believes are of the highest utility to it more money to not spend time on that second half of life, leisure and family. That’s why you’re not seeing kids, but also the structure of modern families has become a problem because people don’t really know what to go back to and what works.
One of the core failures of the reaction to falling fertility rates and a reaction to the urban monoculture is a lot of people forgot their ancestral traditions. They then return to these sort of cargo cults like the tradwife. Tradwifism is basically a cargo cult. If people have seen the tradwives, it’s where women try to enact what they think 1950s wives were like. They think they didn’t work. They think they stayed at home. They think that they did all this stuff for kids and it was like this was really only common in affluent American groups, not really that big in Europe, not really that big in most of the world.
It was mostly what Hollywood was selling you. Do you trust what Hollywood is selling you today? The true historic family unit, this idea of a small nuclear family where the husband is supporting both kids and a wife really was only a stable cultural phenomenon from the 1910s to the 1970s. It was a fairly short-lived experiment where in the 1970s women went to the workplace and then you had the totally atomized family. Before that, wage labor wasn’t as common and you had what was called a corporate family.
I think that the corporate family structure can be fertility stable. In the corporate family structure, the husband and the wife work together with the kids. This is the way my wife and I work, but then there’s other family structures that did work historically as well that people can try. A really powerful one I call a sword and shield model. This is what the Vikings used, but a lot of other people used it where one partner works to secure a steady income stream and then the other partner does high risk, high reward opportunities.
The wife would stay and work the farm and the husband would go, a Viking. The high risk, high reward would be probabilistic, but it could raise the family status, whereas the other one would provide subsistence. I’ve seen a lot of families that seem to be functioning using these models, but the problem is we just don’t have these. It’s like they found a bunch of ads from our time like 100 years from now and tried to recreate our culture. Obviously, it’s not working for your average middle class American.
Then, also the secondary problem is, yes, the urban monoculture is like the worst, right? The old religious systems and cultural systems that people are turning to, they were optimized not for a pre-internet era, but for a pre-industrial era. They can’t as easily work against when somebody’s like, “Oh, I’m going to go back to Orthodox Christianity and that will protect my kids.” I’m like, “But like I can show you the statistics of kids de-converting from Orthodox Christian families.” It’s stupidly high. It’s sort of like I feel like I’m here.
Our island been attacked by an industrial power of colonists with Gatling guns and three guys just tried to run over a ridge with a spear. We saw them got mowed down. I go to the guy and I go, “I don’t think that spear is going to work.” He’s like, “No, my spear is magic.” I’m like, “Well, what technology that you don’t have?” The urban monoculture does have social technology, which is specialized at taking down religious individuals’ children. Working on how do you block that, how do you update cultural frameworks to be more protective against this is something that we’re really focused on internally.
Jim: That’s great because I 100% agree that the whole tradwife thing is fucking hilarious, right? It’s just like I can see how that weird ass meme got going, but it doesn’t go anywhere. The number of women that are actually interested in doing that, you got one in 1,000 maybe, something like that. The people for whom it’s economically viable is even less probably or at least the intersect of the two. It’s just like theater basically. It’s absurd.
I also agree with you that while a lot of people are being sucked back into traditional religion as that’s sort of the official alternative to the gross materialistic culture, unfortunately a lot of contemporary Christianity, this prosperity Christianity actually promotes all the stupid ass material status games. What’s really needed, and we call it Game B in my world, is a new way of being where we are not playing the stupid ass status games.
It’s not actually all that expensive to live if you want to live like a normal person, but if you feel like you have to have your kids’ birthday parties at some fancy facility and have gift bags for all the kids and the kids have to have all the right clothes and you have to go out to the right restaurants, life can be expensive. To live let’s say the way my parents did in the ’50s, my dad was a cop and we would go out to a restaurant maybe twice a year.
A lot of our clothes we’d get secondhand from neighbors, especially as we were growing up. There was the neighborhood, lots of kids, and kids would grow. The clothes got passed down through the families. We were able to live quite well on one lower middle class salary and partially because the relative costs of things were lower, particularly housing. I think a much bigger part was the perceived need and interest in playing the status game was much lower. My mother was actually far smarter than my father, far, far smarter.
She was quickly the president of every not-for-profit thing she ever did in her life because she was just so much more competent than most people and yet she absolutely refused to ever work for money. She just said, “Why? I don’t want to do that.” Instead of living in a big house, we lived in a 1,000 square foot house. We lived great. I would suggest that a new orientation between the people status games and what it takes to live in that status game is really a key starting point for rescuing Western civilization.
The money on money return boys, I wrote an article once called Reclaiming Our Cognitive Sovereignty, which you can find on Medium. At the time I wrote this, it was, I don’t know, 2018, 2017. I did a search of all the jobs that were open, all the open job recs on Facebook, and 700 of them had the word psychology in them. I don’t think there was blatant about it anymore and I also had a friend who I guess he was the president of the third biggest slot machine company.
He said they had 120 Ph.D. psychologists on their staff, mostly from the rat training side of psychology. The money on money return engine has now developed pretty damn deep psychological insights with of course TikTok being the most extreme example of how to implant all these things in your head that you don’t actually need, but you feel unhappy if you don’t have. Tell me how you get out of that damn box.
Malcolm: Simone, can you do your rant about how kids are treated these days?
Simone: I think it’s insane just like you say how we raise kids now as though they are retired billionaires. They are being chauffeured to their various sporting events and they are being given special tutors and teachers for every little thing. They have brand new clothes and they have these birthday parties with all these favors and decorations. It is insane and nobody should be raised this way. Think about how even the most noble children were raised in the past.
Maybe their parents gave someone room and board and a very, very small salary for some full-time tutoring. That was the most they would get and mostly they were kind of abandoned down in the basement with servants all day. They were kind of ignored and left alone to kind of figure life out on their own. That was the most wealthy 1%, less than 1% of society. Now normal kids, lower middle class kids even, are expected to have something that far surpasses that experience.
It is unsustainable and completely insane. I was haranguing Malcolm yesterday saying that we needed to bring back sumptuary laws because it is just absolutely insane. In the past, when you actually look at sumptuary laws obviously many of them were about pulling rank in society and stopping poor people from trying to look like rich people, but many of the sumptuary laws also were just clearly made by fellow rich people being like, “Guys, let’s just stop. Can we just stop doing this?”
Jim: The arms race problem, as we call in the Game B world, the multipolar trap problem.
Simone: Yes.
Jim: You have to respond to the other guys move or you lose out in some strategic way.
Simone: There were literally sumptuary laws of like, “Let’s agree to not have smooth logs on our funeral pyres,” in ancient Rome. They were like, “This is just too frigging expensive,” or like-
Jim: I like that one. I like that.
Simone: “Can we please just limit the diversity of our banquet meals and the number of people we can invite because these parties are out of hand and I just can’t afford it anymore?” I feel what I was arguing yesterday to Malcolm as we were having a conversation just amongst the two of us was that I think that each culture, kind of like Mormons do, should impose its own sumptuary laws of like we just don’t buy branded things.
We don’t do birthday parties like this. We don’t do brand new clothes for kids. We do used clothes only. Mormons, for example, have general rules around you don’t go into debt unless it’s for an education, a house, or a car. We would say you don’t go into debt unless it’s literally for a used car or maybe a house, but certainly not a college education even. I mean I just feel like we totally need to have a reset on this.
We need to nuke our current standards. Yes, social media is certainly creating these new globalized standards to which everyone’s holding themselves and even those who are creating these standards that we’re all trying to emulate now aren’t actually creating those standards. They’re buying clothes and then returning them immediately. All of this is fake. Yes, it’s out of hand and we need to fix it and I think we can.
Malcolm: I want to talk a bit about some of the specific standards that he mentioned like wearing used clothes. CPS has been called on us for our kids wearing used clothes. This gets hard with the urban monoculture because they don’t allow you to let your kid walk to school anymore. They don’t allow you to do things. There was a woman in the United States who was sent to jail for having her 14 year old watch her 12 year old, like paying them to do this while she was away.
Jim: I was babysitting my younger brother when I was seven-
Malcolm: No, it’s wild.
Jim: For an hour or two, but it was perfectly normal.
Simone: No, that’s good. You want to give children responsibility. One of the reasons also why we have people who are floundering so much and failing to thrive is because we are not allowing youth to gain responsibility and to gain some hardship and build some personal sense of self-worth and independence. Benjamin Franklin was basically living the life of a 28 year old adult today at age 12. He was working full-time at his brother’s print shop, moonlighting as a contributing opinion editor like submitting letters under a false name. He was completely financially independent living like an adult would live today and he was 12 years old.
Clearly, humans, obviously I mean we’re a K-selected species and, yes, we do require a little more effort, but not the way things are now. Once someone hits 12, 13, they can do most of the stuff that an adult can. They’re not fully myelinated. Their inhibitory control isn’t fully online. I get that there are some things we should be a little bit careful about, but they can do most of those, babysitting at least. Come on, guys. A little child labor, the children yearn for the mines, right, Malcolm?
Malcolm: We built an education system that’s designed to compete with the existing education system that’s going live in about a week, but if people want to get on early, we’re letting people on already. Really we designed from the ground up trying to redesign education for our kids because this is one of the biggest problems in fertility rates, which is I send my kids to school and they have my family culture erased. I’ve put a lot of work into building a unique family culture and it gets us called weird.
There’s that, but then also we can’t afford college for 12 kids. Ben Franklin was one of 16. Also, I want to elevate something else you said there, which is you kept mentioning you can live in your parents’ house or you can have your parents live in your house. It used to be that in the United States if you go back to the 1930s, around 37% of kids were born into the parents’ household. My dad’s household, I would’ve still been living with him.
When you get to the really cheap real estate of the post-war era that’s when this cultural trend stopped and 99% of kids were born in independent households. There’s nothing to say you can’t go back to that. People are like, “Oh, look, people have fewer kids because of real estate prices.” I’m like, “Yeah, but fixing, there’s other reasons to fix real estate prices and people haven’t done it yet.” If we’re trying to fix one of two things, fixing cultural norms is actually much easier to do.
I just need to decide to not look down on my kids because they decide to stay in my house when they get their first wife. We live in a house from the 1700s. There used to be four related families living in this house, all with kids. We can do it again and I think that this comes to changing what your culture values. The most important I think cultural value to a healthy culture is valuing austerity as a sign of status, a person who can personally live with discipline and austerity.
Jim: There’s a great book I’ve given to many people called Your Money Or Your Life. If you haven’t read it, you should read it. She takes the austerity to amazing extremes, but it’s a very wonderful primer on all the shit you don’t need. When I was young I used to get all my kitchen furnishings at a place called The Gold Mine, which was a church-run secondhand shop. I furnished my first kitchen for about $13 and I still have some of that stuff amazingly.
At least I think I have one bowl left, which was one of those indestructible Chinese restaurant bowls, and it can be done. To your point, it should be valorized. I will say the three Rutt boys, me and my three brothers, we’re all multimillionaires, one of them in construction, one of them in bureaucracy, and me in business. When we get together what we talk about is what do we get cheap and how do you save 50 bucks on a Rent-A-Car, things like that? We said if we were to do a family coat of arms, our saying would be parsimonious, but never niggardly.
Simone: My God.
Malcolm: No, this is something I see with my family as well, right? There is a sign of status and this used to be understood within American culture like old waspie culture in the US that trying to show off wealth was a sign of being low status and that you would show off through your personal discipline and austerity. Yet, we get attacked in the media for this all the time. We don’t heat our house in the winter and they’re like, “Oh, my God, you layer your kids? How dare you?”
We have our kids. We built bunk beds, pretty cool setup actually in the room for them they sleep in. They’re like, “Can you believe that they stack their children like they’re in a bunker?” This is online, a really highly up voted Tweet. I’m like, “Do you have independent rooms for every one of your children?” I think here also rethinking how we think about kids, which is to say you could go out and your kids, because you’re planning to have so many, won’t get to experience things like as many vacations and stuff like that, which humans just didn’t used to do.
That’s like a new concept first of all. I’m like, “Yeah, but which vacation would a child sacrifice one of their siblings for to the kids?” Then, they’re like, “Well, that’s not the way it works.” I’m like, “No, but it actually literally is the way it works.” You don’t choose to have a child. You choose whether to have a human being who’s going to live a whole life, who’s going to go to college, who’s going to fall in love, who’s going to have a job, who’s going to talk to people and make intellectual investments in the future of the human condition.
I was recently at a family reunion and I saw some of my cousins that last I had seen as little squidge bots. I thought of them as squidge bots and now they’re college kids. I was like, “Oh, every one of my kids that they’re meeting here today one day is going to be an adult human.” For every one of them I choose not to have, that’s a human being that I’m choosing not to exist. When you start to see children this way, not just at an individual cultural level, but at a societal level, all of a sudden a lot of laws that previously made sense you realize are costing more lives than they are saving.
Here you can look at something like car seats, which you basically need until the age of 12 in many US states even though they’re not shown to be that useful after a certain age. They heavily limit how many kids can fit in the back of a car, which then act as a fertility limiter. There was a great paper on this called Car Seats As Contraceptives by Zvi Mowshowitz that really goes into this subject and it’s horrifying.
Jim: I hadn’t heard that one, but it does make sense. I think up to four car seats are actually useful. Beyond that, it’s safety theater pretty much.
Simone: Keep in mind, modern car seat regulation is such that kids are in car seats until ages eight through 12 or so.
Jim: I’m going to throw one out. This is actually a little bit back to what you were talking about earlier and this is kind of these demographic filters that are going on. Now I’m going to pull it up to the worldwide level. Even though fertility rates are crashing around the world, they seem to be crashing fastest at places that have embraced the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an almost unique thing in human history in terms of finally seeing through the bullshit of superstition, finally understanding that science is a mechanism to actually know things.
It doesn’t teach you everything. Science can be wrong. Its reach is still very limited, but it does produce actual solid useful knowledge. One of the things I’m most concerned about is that differential reproductive rates could end up with a substantially reduced percentage of the world that embraces the Enlightenment. By the way, I include now people like China as an Enlightenment power, a perverted heretical one as it turns out, but nonetheless in the Enlightenment tradition.
Marx and Engels were Enlightenment guys. On the other side, the conservatives in the West are pre-Enlightenment people mostly. They still believe in their various superstitions and still believe in bully boys and such. I think one of the worst things that’s going on is differential reproduction, including especially in the west, of the non-Enlightened folks. I think that would be something to be very careful about in a form of neonatalism.
Malcolm: When we talk about the enemies of the pro-natalist movement a lot of people assume that we think of and we mostly strategize around the urban monoculture as our primary enemy, but the urban monoculture is at the end of the day feckless. I would be scared if it was competent, but it’s not competent. It is astoundingly incompetent and it is just not a real threat. It’s eventually going to die out on its own. It’ll do some damage to the cultures around it, but it is not a longterm threat to human civilization.
However, the other group, the group we are afraid of is. Right now the urban monoculture has created something of a Pax Dei Romana of all of the cultures in the world. We don’t really go around killing each other like we used to under the dominion of the urban monoculture, but when that shield falls we may return to the warring tribes period. We call the period that humanity is traveling through right now in a lot of our works the Valley of the Lotus-Eaters, to go to that old story, which is to say the temptation that humanity is being exposed to right now is the temptation of infinite pleasure whenever you want it.
It’s a culture that says, “We’ll affirm you for whatever you want, being able to have sex whenever you want with whoever you want with zero consequences.” For our children, it will be even harder. They will have AI simulated girlfriends, wives, children. They’ll be able to go into worlds that maybe feel as free and real as our own. Being able to, I guess the word I would use is spiritually or mentally steal yourself against this is very difficult and there are two paths through the Valley of the Lotus-Eaters.
One path is to take hot irons and blind yourself to not see the temptation. This is a path, a cultural phenomenon, that has convergently evolved in many cultures around the world. This is to disengage from technology, adopt cultural practices which lower your group’s economic potential because that increases your fertility rate, and adopt an incredibly xenophobic attitude of outsiders. It’s basically seeing yourself as better than outsiders, which reduces the rate to which your children interact with outsiders and thus increases intergenerational fidelity of cultural transfer.
This has proven to be a very, very, very successful cultural strategy and we see it in some Christian groups, some Jewish groups, some Muslim groups. You see it all over the world, right? These groups, in part due to the myopic xenophobia that these groups often adopt, they believe that in the end there can only be one and either convert or die is often their mindset. That is I believe who my children will be fighting against and it will not be the psychological warfare of the urban monoculture. It will be literal warfare.
I think we’re already seeing a conflict of one of these two groups whereas the other pathway through the Valley of the Lotus-Eaters is personal spiritual discipline, personal austerity, technological engagement, and pluralism. I think we can already see conflict between two groups that represent this right now in the conflict in Israel at the moment where one of these groups is highlandering it and the other group is trying to move to some sort of technophilic, pluralistic future. Conflicts like that are going to be everywhere in the world in the generation of my children and their grandchildren.
We need to ensure that they have the technology and the networks and the alliances to survive that world. That’s what we’re trying to build with the pro-natalist movement, sort of an alliance of different hypotheses of how to get through fertility collapse. Every culture that might get through fertility collapse has a hypothesis about how that might be done. You have absolutely identified a real phenomenon. I believe that this real phenomenon shows where our true longterm enemy is that will try to kill me or my children.
Jim: It’s an interesting problem where people who you might nominally think of as on your side are actually your worst enemies.
Malcolm: Fortunately, right now under this Pax Dei Romana if you look at what’s happening at the pro-natalist conventions, we had one last year. We’re having one again this year. It’s basically like we sit down with the heads of various groups of the pro-natalist conservative Mormons, the pro-natalist Catholics, the pro-natalist mainline Protestants, and stuff like that. It feels a bit like the Treaty of Paris where we’re sort of carving up the future. It’s like how can we find a way to work with each other because we are going to need to?
Fortunately, for us, I mean most of these groups, it’s like, “Who are these people who you’re afraid of?” For most of the conservative, slightly xenophobic groups in the United States, you can just point to the Muslims because they’re very loud and big in the Muslim community. That’s where you have the largest of this particular strategy that has been tried most purely in things like ISIS and stuff like that. They recognize that that is a longterm threat and they’ve been willing to come to-
Malcolm: … recognize that that is a long-term threat. So they’ve been willing to come together and have these discussions and try to build a way that pro-natalism can work as a cohesive movement. And so far, it’s worked really, really well with really only one exception, which is the Catholics. They are less accepting than the other groups, primarily because the pro-natalist movement is really pro things like IVF, which is difficult for them to get into, but we’re like, “Look at your fertility rates. They’re super low. 50% of you are going to be infertile by 2060. You need to adopt this technology or you’re going to go extinct. You already have one of the lowest fertility rates of all the Judeo-Christian communities.” So I hope that they change their perspective on that, but it doesn’t really matter that they don’t get along with the rest of the pro-natalist community because they’re going to go extinct anyway if they don’t change the one thing that’s preventing them from getting along with the rest of the pro-natalist community. So broadly speaking, it’s looking promising.
Jim: Interesting. The last thing here is that you guys have concocted a new religion and that you actually call it Techno-Puritanism?
Malcolm: Yeah.
Jim: Let’s spend a few minutes on that because we talked about in the pregame, our game B world is very interested in John Vervaeke’s religion that’s not a religion. We believe that, as he does, belief here by a bloody-minded atheist, but nonetheless, with the decline of the axial age religions, that really hard for sensible people to believe in Yahweh and his heirs and the signs anymore, even though lots of people do, has left a big hole that still needs to be filled and crass consumerism and the urban monoculture, while it kind of numbs you, does not actually fill that spiritual hole that the axial age religions filled with a bunch of bogus fairy tales.
But what the hell, right? It worked for a couple of thousand years, 2,500 years, Nietzsche’s killing of God or calling it out left us with crass commercialism and status games and masturbatory practices and what have you. And those aren’t really a long-term moral substitute for a well-crafted thing that looks like a religion but doesn’t have any supernatural attributes. So I’m strongly open to these kinds of things. So let’s do a nice riff here for the next 10 minutes or so and tell us what you’re up to.
Malcolm: So essentially we wanted… It seems pretty clear that for mental health reasons and stuff like that, humans co-evolved with religion and appeared to need some religious structural framework. So when we were thinking how we were going to raise our kids, I was like, “But my kids are part me. They’re going to call BS.” I was raised an atheist, but I know why my dad called BS on religion, he couldn’t get over the Noah’s Ark story. And I know that if he had tried to raise me in his religion, I would’ve called BS on the Noah’s Ark story. I would’ve said, “There’s no way they can fit.” And if they were using magic, why didn’t they say they were using magic? And if it was embryos, why not say that he was going like Jurassic Park? That would’ve been a problem for me.
So I was like, “Okay, I need to come up with something plausible for my kids.” And what we say to our kids is we say, “10 million years from now, if humans are still alive, would the humans that live 10 million years from now appear to you more like a human or a God?” And I think to most people, they’d be like, “Yeah, 10 million years from now, humans are probably going to look more like a God to me than a human.” And I’m going to say, “Well, then who’s to say that they relate to time in the way that you or I relate to time, perhaps that they’re able to subtly influence quantum events and through that reward you when you do things that make the future a better place?” And we’ve built holidays around this, like the future police holiday where the future police come and they take all our kids’ toys and then our kids have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the future a better place with one concrete thing they’re going to do that year, which sort of builds for them one, a moral system.
So if you look at Santa Claus, Santa Claus punishes naughtiness where naughtiness is just not what the parents want you to do, it’s not a real moral system. But this says goodness is defined by things that make the future better by this intergenerational sacrifice. And it also says you have agency over what the future is going to be. And we have since crafting it, I have begun to read many of the Judeo-Christian texts, and I have moved towards seeing our religion as actually a form of the Judeo-Christian religion because when I actually read the text, they didn’t say what I thought they said, they didn’t say what I had been told in Sunday school. There was a lot of stuff that seemed to me to have an aspect of the supernatural to it. When I was reading the Adam and Eve story, because at first, I was like, “Oh, Adam and Eve, I can’t believe that.” Why would God punish man for knowing what good and evil was or for wanting knowledge? That seems like a hilarious and silly thing.
But then I read the story again and I’m like, “Well, man was walking in the garden naked. So obviously because God had the knowledge of good and evil, obviously being naked wasn’t evil and is being naked in front of God and your wife evil?” Obviously not. But when he eats from the apple, he believes that being naked is evil. So what is this story really about? It’s about us creating the first rules as we created the first human settlements that are in opposition to God’s rules. These are the rules that humans create, our own belief that we know what’s true about what’s good and evil. And then I was like, “Well, then is this a story about where human civilization first came about?” So the other thing that jumped out at me at the story is it told us exactly where the Garden of Eden was.
I’d always thought growing up the Garden of Eden is like a mysterious place, we don’t know where it is. And it says no, it’s at the mouth waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Tigris and the Euphrates have the same mouth waters. We know exactly where that is. So then I just thought I’d Google where’s the earliest city that we know about on Earth? Exactly at the mouth waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. And I was like that’s weird. Could it be that this weird religion I thought I had created, these future people have trying to been guiding human civilization all this time and we just didn’t know it. So then I could look at the story of something like Jesus and I could say, well, maybe the story of Jesus is a story about how humans who are God, but not exactly God yet, we are part of this blockchain that’s going to eventually become God, but we’re not exactly God yet. And that’s why the Trinity is important, right?
The Trinity makes no freaking sense in the Christian tradition to me. It’s like why have this distinction? Why do they need to be separate but the same thing? But it makes sense if we eventually become God through intergenerational martyrdom, through martyring ourselves for the next generation. As you could say Jesus is. What Jesus is is a story about is this intergenerational martyrdom. And it makes a bunch of things about the story of Jesus makes sense to me that didn’t make sense before. Why does the temptation of Christ matter? If he knew he was God, the devil saying you can have this kingdom is like a fired employee of Microsoft trying to trade a burrito to Bill Gates for Microsoft. But if you take the temptation of Christ as being the temptation that we all face in this journey of intergenerational martyrdom, all of a sudden it makes perfect sense.
Oh, you can have all this power if only you stray from the path of intergenerational self-improvement. And so that’s sort of how we structure things. I could go deeper. Oh, how we’re different from Vervaeke’s, we also take an incredibly strong anti-mystic approach. So we argue that all of the world’s religions could really be thought of as being either polytheist mystic or monotheist. I’m not going to go that long into the polytheist faction here. But the core differentiation that’s important is the monotheist versus mystic tradition. So the mystic tradition generally believes that God is sort of the medium upon which reality is written, like a super reality, and that the goal of humanity is to rejoin this super reality and that you can get access to this super reality through entering what I would call a corrupted mental state, i.e. through drugs, through spinning, through chanting, through everything we know can cause hallucinations and suggestibility.
Then there’s the monotheist tradition which believes that the goal of humanity is ascension, i.e. improving the nature of what you are and that God is something that exists outside of man and is inconceivable. I see us both as having very similar projects, but we have taken a very strong anti-mystic route, which we would call witches. I think that this is broadly what it is. And he has gone the mystic route to create sort of a pure mystic tradition. When we guard against mysticism within our tradition, it means God only reveals things to man through logic, never through a corrupted mental state. And you should not aspire to try to join God. God has broadly told us how to model him and it’s to… Anyway, I won’t go further, but yeah.
Jim: One thing I will say to defend Vervaeke a little bit, I have spent lots of time talking to him, including 10 hours of podcasts on his meaning crisis stuff, which he is now almost as popular as his videos because it produces 50 hours of videos to 10 hours of crispy and somewhat humorous [inaudible 01:21:06] talk with Vervaeke. But Vervaeke is, if he’s a mystic, which he is, he’s a great believer in these eastern traditions, I think mostly fairly hokey, but he is also a radical anti-supernaturalist. He does not believe that meditation puts you in contact with a cosmic consciousness or with God or anything else, he just thinks that they’re good for you and that they’re good as part of building a society where people get along and have fulfilling lives.
And I’ve reconfirm this with him as recently as six months ago in a private conversation that he does not believe any superstitious or supernatural claptrap. Now, I do personally think he overestimates the value of some of this eastern hoo-ha, but I do want to make sure that people don’t go away thinking Vervaeke is actually into the supernatural because he very definitely isn’t.
Malcolm: Yeah, I should further clarify. He’s a mystic but not a supernaturalist mystic. In the same way that we are like religious extremists, but not supernatural religious extremists. Here’s a question. If you had been raised in a tradition like this, do you think you would’ve left it growing up?
Jim: No. Well, let me think about this. I was raised a Catholic and after spending two weeks in the library during the summer break between sixth and seventh grade and reading all about the world’s religions, I concluded they were all faults and were invented by humans for the purposes of controlling other humans. And today, I would say I would have a little bit more of an evolutionary spin on that, is that they evolved such that some of them were actually just concocted, but others kind of evolved their way to being control mechanisms.
So I would always be suspicious of any religion that was trying to control me and control other people. And of course, at that point, I was reading vociferously in science books and had been for about three years including college level science books and such. And so I said, “We don’t need all this superstitious horseshit to explain the world. We actually know a moderate amount about the world. We’re learning more very rapidly, so don’t need that.” If something I could stick with, if I were who I had been at that age, would be something that was explicitly not supernatural, did not claim to explain the material world, but was essentially an ethical system that we had some reason to believe made sense towards, to your point, making the future a better place.
Malcolm: Well, so something you might find fun that I didn’t mention about it is we have this system called the index. And the way this works is we tell our kids we keep a recording of all of our practices as does anyone else in the religion who wants to marry into it or something like that, all the practices you were raised with and then the outcomes of those practices and you add to this and you pass it on to the next generation.
And the idea is because we believe in intergenerational improvement and intergenerational revelation, the idea is that our kids are not tasked with following our religion exactly, they are tasked with trying to create a version of it that’s better than whatever we came up with as judged by their own children judging their childhood or judging the way their childhood affected them as adults because they’re going to be judged through this intergenerational chain. Because what we’re trying to do is in the same way that capitalism utilizes human greed to keep people productive, we try to utilize useful rebellion and thinking you’re better than your parents to keep them in the system as sort of a competitive mechanism. We’ll see if it works.
Jim: I like that, though Robin Hansen would warn that you’re going to get a lot of cultural drift and a lot of it will be towards the bad. Then the good thing about religion is it has got a higher viscosity so that it’s less amenable to crazy ass shit like the urban monoculture. Traditional religion does resist that. And so I’d be a little concerned about dialing the viscosity down too much. It’s an interesting design question, how much viscosity should your religion have with respect to intergenerational transfer? But I do like that aspect of it.
Malcolm: This is what we would say to that. So if you look across the religions, because this is an interesting question, why are Catholic fertility rates crashing? It appears because if you’re looking at Catholic or Mormon groups, they’ve had some problems with fertility recently as well, that the more deontological a group approaches its religion, the lower its fertility rate is in a modern context. Whereas the more consequentialist, actually trying to have an active conversation every generation about what’s actually true, the higher their fertility rates are going to be. And I think that this is actually the core thing that’s changed in the era of social media is that the deontological system stopped working. The other thing I wanted to touch on was your view of what religion is. We talk a lot about this in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, but what we argue is religions should be thought of as something different from a general meme, as Hawkins would call it.
We call them cultivars, which is to say it’s a special type of meme that primarily spreads itself by augmenting the fitness of the individual it has affected. And by fitness I mean biological fitness. So if you look at religions, this is how religions figured out things like hand washing literally centuries before science did because the groups that practiced that had more surviving offspring. But it’s also why most religions if you look at any widely practiced, widely spread religion in the world will have prohibitions against things like gay sex because it lowers fertility rates and leads to disease, which may cause some negative externalities in modern times and stuff like that. But it’s how one of the things that we really know in terms of augmenting individual fitness is that every long-lived religious tradition in the world that has been successful has some arbitrary self-denial ritual, whether it’s Lent or Ramadan or Feast of the Firstborn. And now we know that this was likely strengthening the pathways in our prefrontal cortex that are meant to inhibit snowballing thoughts.
And we run the math in our book that basically shows that religions don’t actually spread through conversions that much. They mostly spread through augmenting the fitness of the individuals they have infected, which makes them very different from general memes. And it’s why us as humans, as a co-evolving layer, we had sort of this evolving software layer, which was our religious layer and then we had the hardware, and the religious layer could evolve faster than the hardware. And because of that, it made a bunch of adaptions. And when we ripped it out, it was very much like a Chesterton’s fence where we didn’t realize the full psychological consequences of doing that. It was part of our body. It was like we had been integrated, it was a cybernetic thing, like we were a Borg person and somebody just ripped out the Borg eye and part of the person’s brain started falling out, that was integrated, man. Anyway.
Jim: Speaking of which, a book I really like, I’m going to have to reach out to this guy, maybe get him on my podcast, that you would find I think very interesting, it’s called The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries by Rodney Stark. And he takes a almost purely demographic perspective about the roles of women, the ban on birth control and abortion, much greater mutual care during plagues and stuff. And he’s a quantitative sociologist and he basically says, “300 years, here’s the math. 40% increase every decade. Pure math. 30% of the Roman Empire was Christian by the time it tipped with Constantine and so it was inevitable.” It’s actually extremely interesting.
His day job is he is a professor of the propagation of cults. And so he knows, has all kinds of data on how crackpot religious cults propagate and decline. And he also confirms it in that case too and in Mormonism as well. Exterior conversion is small, but it’s important. And he quotes something from somebody he knows high up in the Mormon church that says they estimate about one in a thousand of the people that the kids that knock on doors all the time peddling Mormonism talk to will convert, maybe less. But once you get a convert, the propagation through their social network is outrageously effective, maybe as high as 20%.
Malcolm: That’s really interesting. Yeah. We suspect that in Mormonism, the core purpose of a mission, that the core time when people deconvert is that young age. And different cultures have taken different solutions to it, like your teenage years. And Mormonism basically takes the time when somebody is most likely to deconvert and they remove them from all other groups that could be influencing them, they put them next to a Mormon that’s basically watching them 24/7. It’s basically meant to prevent deconversion during the period of highest deconversion. The problem is it works very poorly in an age of internet and cell phones and that’s why the Mormon Church is seeing such a flood out right now.
Whereas the opposite of the Mormon strategy is the Rumspringa, the Amish strategy, which is to say, “Okay, we’re going to kick you out into the English world, the world of debauchery, and you can choose that or your lifestyle back home.” And it appears that the best strategies against the urban monoculture are the strategies that hang kids out in front of the urban monoculture and are like, “See what it does. You don’t want this, come back,” instead of to protect them from encountering it. And so yeah, I try to do that.
Another thing I’d note that you were talking about, the rise of Christianity, is often people will be like, “Well, you just need to go back to the old ways, civilization, we might be heading into a dark age now,” and I think we probably could be heading into a dark age, we’ve kind of been due for one. And I’m like, “Yeah, but what happened during the last dark age?” If you look at when the Roman Empire was collapsing, you had sort of two spiritual paths. You had one group of people who said we need to go back to the way things used to be, which was the mystery cults. And the mystery cults absolutely exploded near the decline of the Roman Empire, at the beginning of that. And then you had another group, which was like this theologically active, very weird, very new group that was coming up with a new way of doing things and having all these councils. And that was a group that became the modern Christians.
And so I think theological evolution is part of the Abrahamic tradition, and it’s something that I think we can continue to do without betraying that tradition. Then a lot of people, they’ll be like, Catholics will come to me and they’ll be like, “Well, come on. We’ve always done things the same way.” And I’ve been like, “No, you haven’t. Your belief that life begins at conception was created by Pope Pius IX. That was 200 years ago. That was the guy who did the great castration, ripping the penises off of all the statues. That was the guy who wrote the syllabus of eras demanding a Catholic caliphate. That was not exactly the height of your church’s history, but it was an evolution in your church’s practices.” If you go to Thomas Aquinas or you go to Augustine of Hippo, they didn’t believe that life began at conception. They believed that it began around 90 days after conception.
And so your religion has evolved, and if you are holding to that tradition, well then you must believe that it can evolve again, that this evolution is a continuous process. So I think that it’s also important to not just throw out all traditions, but understand that even trapped within the Christian tradition, we see an amber of evolution happens. So you can look at the staff of Moses, that people had started to worship in the temple. This was a staff he used for that snake miracle and it had found its way to the temple and people had started to worship it. And then later in the book, you heard that it had to be broken because it had been worshiped in the temple and that was a form of idolatry, but it had been in the temple for 500 years or so at that point. Antiquity is not a sign, even within the Christian tradition, that God approves of something. So I’ve got to build a theological basis for why we’re a denomination here and not just a radical invented thing.
Jim: All right. Okay. Well, this has been an extraordinarily interesting high energy conversation.
Malcolm: Yeah.
Jim: Go forth and breed successfully. It is a numbers game because as we talked about with Robin Hansen, if current trends were to continue for 300 years, which of course they won’t, 300 years, quarter of the world’s population will be Amish, a quarter of the populations will be Hasidic Jews and the other half will be a mixture of this and that.
Malcolm: No, no, no, no, no. In 300 years it’ll be us. If we have eight kids and they have eight kids and we do that for just 11 generations, we’ll have more descendants than there are humans on Earth today. Fertility collapse is the most tractable problem in the world, you just got to decide to play ball.
Jim: Alrighty. This has been a whole lot.