Cultural Investments and Interpersonal Dynamics

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore a controversial theory about the relationship between male oppression and high fertility rates in certain cultures. Drawing from an article titled "Oppression of Males is the Gender Oppression of the Future," they delve into:

* The surprising link between male oppression and fertility rates in religious communities

* Analysis of high-fertility cultures like the Amish, Hutterites, and Hasidic Jews

* The role of gender dynamics in maintaining cultural cohesion

* Practical applications of these ideas in modern families and religious traditions

* The concept of "tactical honesty" and its impact on relationships

* The importance of family identity and intergenerational thinking

* Personal anecdotes and reflections on implementing these concepts

This video offers a unique perspective on gender roles, cultural preservation, and the challenges of maintaining high fertility in modern society. It includes discussions that may be controversial or challenging to some viewers.

[00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I am excited to be talking to you today. I saw an article that changed my view recently. It was sent to us by a fan on the best way to structure a religious or cultural system to survive fertility collapse.

Yeah, forget Handmaid's Tale, it should be The Footman's Story! Right? Specifically, the article argues that men need to be oppressed for us to survive fertility class. I read so many articles, when I go into an article the article was titled, Oppression of Males is the Gender Oppression of the Future.

And I thought it was gonna be, you know, because it's come to us by a fan, some sort of like, men's rights thing, where it's like, oh, you know, these days males are being more oppressed than females. No, actually males need to be oppressed by a woman. A very based woman, by the way. Yeah, she sounds dreamy. Need to be oppressed For an idea of some of the other content on her blog here, her blog's called Wood from Eden.

She has stuff like, nudists in space. And then another one, the [00:01:00] mulberry question this time of year, I suppose that the foremost question on everyone mind is what to do with all of the mulberries. These are our questions. I think, I think it's the same woman who wrote a book on raising chickens.

So very, very fun, very base to thinker. And she was pointing something out. Now, the first thing is something that most of our fans know, religiosity and gender discrimination alone, like traditional gender discrimination against women does not really protect fertility rates that much. It has a small amount, but not a huge amount.

It is a specific religion and the specific nature of the discrimination, which is protective. So she writes, Here, very interestingly however, looking closer into the matter, the picture gets more complicated and more interesting. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, also in countries infamous for gender inequality.

For example, Iran has a fertility rate of 1. 7 and Saudi Arabia, 2. 2. That indicates that gender inequality [00:02:00] itself is not a magic wand to make people have more children. Also, when people from gender unequal countries immigrate to Western societies, Their fertility tends to fall very quickly. Their children often have as low or even lower fertility than the host population.

But here is where it gets wild, was the line directly after that, because I did not expect this at all. For example, Somalia has a fertility rate of around Somalian women who immigrated to Norway in the last half century had a fertility rate of 4. 5, more than any other immigrant group. The daughters of those immigrants, however, had a fertility rate of less than two. So it only takes two generations for one of these high fertility cultural groups to have it completely washed away if they move into a prosperous environment, which shows to us that the majority of their high fertility is downstream of low.

prosperity. This is why it's so important to talk about prosperity induced fertility collapse and to look for cultures that have a [00:03:00] high level of fertility despite being in prosperous environments. Then she goes on to note something very interesting.

. So she takes two sort of prototypical high fertility cultures that we'll be going over that are high fertility, even when they're in prosperous environments, specifically really three, the Amish, the Hutterites and the Hasidic Jews.

And she points out something that is shared among these communities. And there are a few shared among these communities but that are not found in other low tech high religiosity, religious denominations. Specifically she reports on an instance and you and I have experienced this as well, where she was at a port, I think in Dubai or something like that.

And she could see all the migrant laborers. And it was fascinating because it looked like this huge collection of different cultures and, and, and traditional dress styles when you looked at the women, but when you looked at the men. Everyone was dressed the same. They were all dressed like Westerners [00:04:00] in pants, jeans, and shirts and in fact, generally speaking, in Islamic countries, the only environments where Simone and I have regularly seen is, Males maintain traditional dress is when there is a strong financial incentive for them to be doing that.

Specifically, these are upper class individuals with like bureaucratic state, basically offer jobs in the UAE and Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Outside of that, it's actually pretty rare, especially when they immigrate to other countries And this is another really interesting thing. So I'm going to put pictures on the screen here, because people might not know this about Hasidic Jews.

So it was Amish, both the men and the women look different, same as Hutterites, but with Hasidic Jews, the women look very Western in the way they dress. Yes, they have specific rituals around things like wearing wigs or hats and stuff like that. But broadly speaking, they could pass for a Westerner. The men could not.

But we're going to go over because this isn't the extent of the additional [00:05:00] things being asked of men within these cultures I will note here, because people might hear about, Oh, I'm saying Ultra Orthodox Jews males have it hard.

How could you say that? They don't have to do anything but study their entire lives like, how is that hard? Women in Ultra Orthodox communities have to both make a living for the family, receive a secular education, and have and raise a lot of children, right?

The husbands only need to study. And people can say, isn't that like a kusher life? And I guess, in a way it is, but keep in mind that they have even less Freedom of what they do with their lives and women do really, if they want to attain any level of community respect. And this study lifestyle is incredibly hard.

Like you, it is, it is not. A slacker study lifestyle. It is one of intense, intense long hours and study because it is the entire dedication of their cultural system. And so if you could imagine that, like, the only [00:06:00] metric you were judged on, both as a youth and an adult. Was your knowledge of one particular subject and everyone in your culture agreed on that?

How difficultly you would be working and how stringently you would be working was in studying that subject. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the South Korean university entrance exam system. This one measurement that you have, there's one job you have. It's like the South Korean system except for a few things.

The South Korean system, when you get into college, if you did well in the first part of your life, you basically never have to work again. It never ends. It never ends with this one. That's the catch. It never ends. But two, there also isn't the sense of despair because it's a true meritocracy. You are not being judged by arbitrary examiners, but by your peers ability to judge your knowledge of a topic.

Oh, it's all so scary. So let me go further here. In other words, ultra Orthodox Jews are educating their daughters to become both mothers and [00:07:00] breadwinners and their sons to discuss religious texts throughout their teens and beyond. That way the daughters are encouraged to make closer contact with mainstream society at earlier ages than their sons.

In their early twenties, men are encouraged to spend their entire days in religious education. Meanwhile, their female peers are either educating themselves for the secular labor market, Or providing for their families who are participating in the labor market. If they are not at home, taking care of children, ultimately the men also entered the labor market and start providing for the families, but in many cases they are doing so years later than their wives.

So if, if this, if we just changed the genders here I think people would be like, this is abusive toward the women. This is horrible. What do you mean? Yeah. Their whole lives in religious study. Yeah, people would say that. And this is the thing, right? Where people don't see oppression when it is facing men.

Sometimes even male activists don't see that. Yeah. Instead they're like, Oh, that's too cush for men. That was the immediate defense you came [00:08:00] to, which was interesting. To an outsider, the extreme amount of religious study Orthodox Jewish men go through seems wasteful. I think this might be a mistake.

Those graduates from religious schools succeed in producing what counts in today's cultural evolution, Children. Very interesting point here. As a side note, many of those men are doing remarkably well financially when they finally leave their religious schools and set out to work in branches like real estate and accounting.

That, if anything, should put mainstream education into question. In effect, graduates of religious education are kind of a control group that shows what happens when intelligent young men do not attend mainstream university. The success of the control group is a strong indication that much of the function of the mainstream university system is in fact, Religious, but that's another blog post.

So essentially she's claiming, and I agree with this claim, that the point of the current educational university system is not to educate, but to indoctrinate within the urban monoculture cult. Um, And the, if you go study a [00:09:00] different religion, if you go dedicate yourself entirely to a different system, you are not going to be significantly outcompeted by individuals who went through the urban monocultural system.

Now I will add some caveats to this really quickly. So one caveat here, and I've noticed this was in the Haraiti outcome, is that individuals who attempt this other mechanism of education, if they are, I'd say like, one and a half standard deviations or above average intelligence, they typically do as well or much better than people with secular educations.

But if they are below that sort of super intelligent group, they typically do much worse. Whereas below average intelligence, her righty do men specifically do really bad. And it's because you need a level of Brilliance and self starterness to be able to succeed without these handout jobs. I don't think it's that they're less capable than the people who are being indoctrinated within the secular system.

It's just that our society is run by the cult right now. [00:10:00] And for most of the bureaucratic management cash handout positions in our society, you need to show some level of personal sacrifice for the cult or they won't let you in. And so these individuals are forced to then go work at businesses that other of their more competent Haraiti brethren have created.

Another thing I note here is a lot of people can hear this and they're like, oh, well, this is religious education. It's not going to be that useful. And I think a lot of people even ourselves sometimes may over discount the role that the Haredi are going to play in the future. We'll get to the Amish in a second, but it's important to note that the Amish do not study after the age of 14, really for males, because pride is a sin.

And, and, Educating yourself too much could lead to pride. They don't defend themselves or have guns because hurting people is a sin. That the Haredi right now are pacifistic and right now specifically they don't do military service like other Jews. And right now dedicate their lives mostly to religious study does [00:11:00] not indicate that this is true in the future.

And we are already seeing shifts within this community. When I asked. A variety of people I know are people who are affiliated with the variety community. You know, where do you see changes already in this community along these lines? One already lots of groups are doing military practices and everything like that.

They don't serve in the military because they don't have to serve in the military. It's not like the Amish. There's no doctrine against serving in the military. They just think of, they could choose to be studying and praying. That's more important than serving in the military. for now. So that's what they're going to do for the safety of Israel from their perspective.

But if they were ever the majority, there would be no doctrinal problem with them engaging in military exercises and they are already looking at doing it. And I can guarantee you they would be, if you had a Israeli IDF, staffed primarily with Haredi the nature of the war that they would be carrying out would be much less [00:12:00] timid than the current IDF vision of war.

Yeah, well, you have to appreciate, I mean, to a certain extent, I don't like the free litter nature of their participation now, their pacifism now. On the other hand, I yeah, I appreciate. The practicality of it. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of practice. It was like, well, if someone else is going to pay for it and handle that, I'm not going to get involved right now.

Like obviously, and you know, this is, this is why tragedy, the common things play out. Right. I mean, well, yeah, well, I think, I think when you think of a, a military and IDF, Staffed primarily with variety, which is, you know, demographically where we're going that could also do a lot to instead of putting the Jewish population in a weaker position, put them in a stronger position because they are more likely to show the type of ruthlessness that's going to be needed in future conflicts.

In addition to that you have when people are like, yeah, but what about STEM education? What about like advanced sciences and stuff like this? This is also something that is already becoming [00:13:00] common in Hareidi communities. So historically, a lot of people may not know this. Yes. It would be shamed if you spent your spare time studying Western literature and, and, and, and you know, humanities and stuff like that, like standard hippie nonsense in these communities.

However, historically, it has always been. Medium to high status in these communities to study business and law. And a lot of them do go into business law, real estate, do stuff. And recently, and I'm not even that recently, I'm talking like past quarter century, two decades, it's become increasingly popular and respected even among senior leaders in the community.

To consider STEM study as a religious form of study. So they study STEM in the natural world as a way of studying God to aid them in their inter community debates about scripture. Which obviously has huge externalizing effects. This is a community that I would not write off. Now Amish, this is not going to happen with Amish, but we'll talk about them in [00:14:00] a second.

So that's, they're all important things to know when you're thinking of this community and where are they going to be and also how important, and I think that this is another thing where people are always like, why are you guys so like, filio semitic in what you say, like why are you generally air on the side of kindness when talking about Jewish populations why do you generally assume the best of them and it's, Because I'm not stupid, okay?

Anyone who can see where the winds are blowing and where the cards are falling, fertility collapse wise, knows that one of the largest and most powerful factions within the future of humanity is going to be Jewish. That's much outsized compared to the power they hold today just because their fertility rates are so much higher than any technologically competent group in the world.

And they're willing to defend themselves. Both of which are things that other people just aren't willing to do anymore. Which means that they are really set up well for the future that we're heading into. So, yeah, that, that is why. In addition to, I [00:15:00] just, I just not that I don't like them, but I'm just saying, like, you individuals who are picking fights with a group that seems positioned to become a major power player in the future are stupid.

Stupid in the extreme. But next, let's keep going here. Well behaved ultra orthodox boys and young men spend almost all the time they have studying. Amish young men do the opposite. They are forbidden from formal studying from the age of 14, since that might lead to pride. Instead, they work and work and work and work because making a living without electricity, cars, and burying collection of other modern machines, takes a lot of work.

Amish and ultra Orthodox Jews might not seem to have very much in common, which makes it all the more remarkable that both groups managed to produce four times more children than mainstream society. And here I would note, Amish don't just work because it's hard [00:16:00] to live without these other things.

Amish work because that is their way of worship and it is the way that they Build status within their community so Amish actually and when I engage with amish communities or mennonite communities I feel more cultural kinship with them than just about any living cultural group. I engage with Even more than jewish groups and I feel a lot of cultural kinship with jewish groups, but I feel more with amish groups And you'll see this if you watch videos I don't know if anyone's watched videos of like amish people talking they'll be like wow They sound a lot like malcolm and simone on a number of issues

She travels more than I would. I'm happy at home. My husband is very happy at home. He grew up on a farm. We live on a fruit farm. And he just likes raising fruit, and that's what he does.

He has a really small world. Coming out here is about as hard as he's ever been. Trying to give him fruit, give him pie. Yeah, that's right. He's good to go.

We're offline.

By ourselves, [00:17:00] we choose to live that way because We enjoy being simple and I don't know. We see a lot of dangers. We see a lot of dangers in having it.

You specifically austerity is a thing that brings austerity and hard work are in and of themselves a form of worship and that is through industry.

We just don't have the same technological prohibitions they have. But in regards to the way we relate to worship, it is very similar to Amish communities. And in addition to that, the work itself sets you apart. When I look at communities for communities I respect, I'm specifically looking towards communities that I see putting in this type of label.

Now unfortunately for the Amish, I also really respect pragmatism. So I see the way they work as being needlessly difficult at times, which is why I have slightly more respect for Mennonite communities. But within Mennonite communities, you'll see really interesting forms of cultural pragmatism that we've talked about before on the show where they will, for example [00:18:00] they'll have phones so that they can use them for like getting clients and stuff like that, but there'll be locked and they'll give the locks using special apps for Mennonites to their friends.

And their friends will be able to unlock them when they need to, but they'll have to like tell the friends what they're going to do with the phone. The phone reports what they were doing with the phone to their friends afterwards. So you get this element of social sharing. I'm like, that's a really clever cultural technology that likely leads to more like better mental health outcomes for this community.

Now here I would note empirically, and, and this is, this is now to the question of, do you have any thoughts before I go further here, Simone? No, well, I mean, I think you should also, sorry, I do, you should point out the lack of practicality among the Amish when it comes to their pacifism and their dependence, therefore, on the governing entities around them.

Oh yeah, why we just do not consider them as a mainstream player in human civilization. When we do consider Haredi Jews, too. Yeah. So the Amish live near us, right? [00:19:00] They are protected, and they don't see it this way, but it's a functional truth. They think that their land is protected by God, and that God is what keeps other people from taking their land from them.

I don't believe that. I have seen eminent domains steal their land many times. It's happening right now. They are protected by the state, they are protected by the police and the U. S. military. Because if those groups didn't exist, and my ancestors, like if you look at my ancestors and their ancestors where they scuttled in the past, the old Scotch Irish groups that lived in these areas, they were never able to move close to our territory because we would just kill them and take their land.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that That was the reality of the way these two groups thought about the world.

So specifically here, I'm talking about the cultural group that in.

The book American nations is called the greater Appalachian cultural group. Or in the book, lb and seed is called the Backwoods people cultural group.

, and the way that they saw [00:20:00] the world was. If there's a person living next to me that has a lot of stuff, and doesn't have the will to defend that stuff, then it is my moral obligation to relieve them of it

This is why there's no historically relevant, large settlements of Amish in the greater Appalachian territory. And I'll show a map right here of, , where the Amish settlements are. So you can. See that this is very much the case. Now, obviously they don't see the world like this anymore, but this is mostly because they're living under the pox de Romana at the moment. And I do not know if there are not. People. , in the United States even today who may not. Still carry remanence of this mindset. Especially if things got desperate. I E. Their kids would starve if they didn't start stealing from their neighbors. And here, I would note when you look at poverty in the United States right now, a lot of people don't realize as we go into fertility [00:21:00] collapse. A lot of the social services that are supporting both the rural and urban poor in this country are going to fall apart. And as Simone pointed out something like 89%. Of, , People, , on government services today could not handle even an unexpected thousand dollar expense.

If those services disappear, which in many cases are making up the majority of their caloric and housing needs, what do you think those people are going to do?

And how do you think we're going to keep paying for those services as population begins to collapse? But what I'm saying is, sorry, when I say the Pax Dei Romana, people don't know, the Pax Dei Romana was a piece of Rome. Many of the barbarian countries may have hated Rome, but they also realized that the reason they weren't fighting amongst each other is because they were living under Rome.

The urban monoculture has a Pax de Romana. When the United States begins to break down the developed country in the same way South Africa has, because the developed country breaking down [00:22:00] enters the state of economic development much worse than a developing country at an equal level of economic like GDP.

A great example of this is you can compare something like South Africa and, and Thailand, right? You know, they're about equal GDP, but like living in South Africa is like living in road warrior, basically. And as we begin to break down as a country they will either need to change their ways or they will be extinguished by neighboring groups.

And pacifistic communities have been extinguished many times through history. I expect them to be extinguished before they defend themselves. Unless they form some sort of synergistic relationship with a war like people. But I don't think that they would do that because they have a, quite a level of disgust towards people who defend themselves which is.

I think there are two things that we're looking at. I mean, there are more than two, but what we're looking at is one, both the Amish and Haredi Jews are interesting in that you could argue that they were oppressing men and then are more othered. [00:23:00] Their dress is more restrictive and othering and differentiated from that of the normal population, and they are more socially isolated.

You could argue than the rest of the population and they have higher birth rates and that we should be looking at that from a birth rate perspective. But we should also be aware of the fact that. Flexibility when it comes to isolation of part of your population from the rest of society is important.

If you want to maintain relevancy in the future, because the future will not necessarily protect you or provide amenities. You may be depending on now. like national security for the Haredi Jews in Israel and like sovereignty and land rights that the Amish enjoy in the United States, right? Yes. Yes.

Which is actually a really interesting point when you think about the groups that are going to survive. So when I'm looking around the world, I'm not just looking at fertility rates, like fertility rates are nice, but the groups need to generally have a few other [00:24:00] things as well. They need to have fertility rates.

They need to have a general high level of intergenerational cultural fidelity. They need to have some degree of technophilia, or at least the capacity to perform high tech stuff. I. e. AI development, AI integration physics, engineering. If you don't have that, you're not going to be able to war against people who do have those technologies.

It's like in Civ, you can't fight against somebody with half their tech tree competed if you're in like the modern age. You're just going to get stomped in two seconds. And as we, as technology develops, as you get like automated AI drone swarms, this problem becomes worse. But then in addition to that the group needs to have a level of fierceness and willingness to defend their people to the death.

And the Amish don't have that. And if you don't have that, it doesn't matter what your fertility rate is. You're not going to matter in the future. And Variety do have that. But I've got to keep going with the statistics here and why it shouldn't really work.

We've talked about this in a number of other podcasts, but I should [00:25:00] probably mention it here. If you're looking for a model of what it looks like when a developed country starts collapsing. , do not look to develop countries for a model of that look to well collapsing developed countries. A great example for one, if you want to predict what the future of the United States may look like under fertility collapse. Is South Africa, which is a great example of a collapsing developed world economy. , and you just, as an Amish group would not be able to survive in current South Africa, somebody would just come kill you and take your stuff. The countries.

Police infrastructure is not strong enough to protect a group that is systemically unwilling to protect itself. But did you have a thought here before I go further into this?

Well, I'm wondering what you think we in our religion, techno puritanism, should do to oppress men more. And We'll get to that in a second, because first we need to understand why oppressing men helps. Yeah. Okay, let's go into it. So, [00:26:00] first, by the stats, because I think this surprises people, most of these religions that quote unquote oppress women actually have a higher rate of of male defection than female defection.

If you look at something like the vast majority, and I'll put a study on here on screen that shows this, but take for example, Mormons or Hutterites, for example, both groups have a higher level of male defection than female defection. You know, this makes sense because no one wants to be the Dom because being the Dom takes so much more work.

We know that. You say that, but like, if you go to a BDSM club, it's like true, like huge arbitrage opportunity to be a good Dom. Yeah. lap up sex because there's so few of them, both males and females that are like really good at it. And so, yeah, even, even among males you know, you, you, you get a, and this is, I think something I should note while more men on average prefer to be dominant than not dominant, the percent of women that prefer a dominant partner and are heterosexual is much higher than the number of men who fall dominant.

Which means that there's always going to [00:27:00] be an over selection for, for, for women looking for that. Also, and I also think part of this is when we talk about the discrimination of women, we might be underselling how much they may not be being discriminated in these roles, and that things like being a stay at home wife can be a pretty good gig or Well, these days it's, it's a flex.

These days it's a luxury. That is not afforded to most. There's something like the variety women, right? Like I, we did an episode recently that was on the, the, the men's right movement misunderstands what women want. And I was like, what they really want is to be a service to someone who they think is passionate about what they're doing and living a meaningful life, especially when it's a domain that they don't.

Engage with as much. And that's why the right is cultural technology in the way that they focus on. This is so high utility because these women are actually living very fulfilling lives from the perspective of the way females are predominantly biologically coded. And for people recently, I was watching a show and I was like, oh, this is actually a [00:28:00] very good depiction of Of the way women actually want to relate to men instead of this typical like red pill get in the kitchen way.

Specifically the episode in question here was women prefer submissive roles in relationships that

but not in the way you think.

 In the core argument that we were making in, it was that while it is true, That many, well, obviously not all. women prefer a submissive role in a relationship that does not mean that they want to be treated. Poorly by their partners or they want their partners to predominantly . Demonstrate dominance through putting them down in what they're really looking for is just somebody with. A consistent in what individually thought through set of moral values, as well as some vision for their role in the world that they are genuinely passionate about and that they can have the opportunity to support and help with.

Which is My Hero Academia and the characters gentle, I believe it's Gentleman Criminal and Labrava. You haven't [00:29:00] seen it. I'll put a little clip on the screen of them because they're a really cute couple. But it, it does a very good job of showing the way that I think that what women mean when they say they want a quote unquote dominant partner.

They want a partner with a vision that they can assist, not. To be stomped on by somebody. At least outside of the bedroom. That's like a different thing that we talked about earlier.

And I think the gentle criminal law Brava dynamic works really well with this particular explanation.

Because it curves off some of the excuses that pointing out that girls want to be in service to a guy who has a consistent source of. Ethics that he had thought through himself, and that is trying to achieve something bigger in the world. They can hear that and think, oh, what he means is a really successful, big deal guy who everyone out there respects, but not necessarily, for example, gentle criminal is not a well-respected individual, but he is somebody with a vision that he believes in passionately and he is trying to achieve passionately. He, he [00:30:00] is somebody with his own. Aesthetic and ethical sense that he believes in 100%. And lives for, and for those reasons Looks up to him as a dominant figure in her life, but not a figure who is dominating. Her I E. Uh, abusing her or looking down on her or using her.

Oh, gentle. Yes. La Braava. Is there something I can do? Finish these fools quick so I can upload soon and have to hack your heart. You coded your love and abstract. The scream was so then, but you lit up my day like I had no meaning.

You show me the way I wouldn't expect. We have bigger plans, I'm here to acquit. I think I have fallen, but must I admit? L O V E, love. Lights, camera, action, cut. And here are my eyes, think what you want. We do it with purpose, not just for the blunt. Give me a purpose, I give you my love. The stronger it is, the stronger we are.

My quick throws are thin. Closer than a right hand, closer to your heart than a jet [00:31:00] stand. I'll be here when needed, so please need me always. Dark circles round my eyes and all I see is you engaged. You'll be famous for this, gentle, I'm just a stage hand. But I'm here to back you up and terrify those who say you can't. But I need to go further here because why? Why is it that oppressing men helps? Well, first, you see the, the, the, the first part of the hint there.

The first part of the hint is that It turns out that the audience you're really trying to keep within your religion is the men and not the women, first of all, right? Second, also, in mainstream Western society, women appear more prone to adopt the dictates of society than men. Women go to university, are de facto houses of worship at significantly higher rates than men.

Women also have adopted woke ideology, are modern religion. to a much higher degree. I think one of the main messages of Sarah Hardy's Mother Nature can be summarized into one sentence. Women get slutty when men are unreliable, which is [00:32:00] more or less what John Berger and Marcy Gutenjag say too. When men are in numerically advantageous positions, they become unreliable and women respond to men's lack of reliability through competing more intensely for men's attraction.

Think about it a bit. What Sarah Hardy and John Bigger and Marcia Gutiag are actually saying is, the males are the variable sex. Men have two reproductive strategies between which they alternate. A high investment female like reproductive strategy and a low investment strategy that reminds us of what most male mammals are up to.

Meanwhile, human females only have one reproductive strategy, very high investment. So, I need to note the studies that she's talking about here because they're actually pretty interesting studies. So it is, it is, it is well demonstrated that within college campuses, for example, the higher the portion of the student body that is female, the sluttier the females on that campus will be.

[00:33:00] The more they'll sleep around and the easier it is to get them to sleep with somebody. And the less, of course, the problem is that our entire bureaucratic world, the environments where women are disproportionately finding themselves, including the school system, is becoming hugely overwhelmingly female.

And there haven't been any real efforts to reverse this because Which leads to terrible competitive dynamics with relationships. And it leads to women beginning to code themselves in this incredibly slutty context. An act slutty, which then leads it harder to find males, blah, blah, blah. The other thing I note here is I really do think they're right about this men are the variable sex.

Culturally speaking, so many men, they come to me and they're like, well, when I'm dating, these women are so culturally different from me. Like, what am I supposed to do? And I'm like, well, one, if you started dating younger, like you're supposed to, it wouldn't be much of a problem because they adapt much faster.

And two most women adapt to the male's culture. If the male is strong and confident and have a cohesive culture and a cohesive vision and they are not [00:34:00] implementing it through some sort of deontological, because I told you to, mindset especially if they are embodying it themselves. Simone was far, far, far progressive when I met her, right?

I think that women are very comfortable changing their cultural context if either the dominant environment they're in. And this is why it gets dangerous. If your, if your wife is going out and she's not working with you the way me and my wife do, you know, she could be getting counter brainwashed at work, right?

You know, who knows? Fair point. Right. But both men and women sort of brainwashed themselves within relationships and are pretty Pre-coded to do this if you are really leaning into the relationship together. Hmm.

So express, I mean, I would also, I, I just wanna point out that one of the most common things that you and I say in terms of when demographic collapse actually started, you know, when, when the Titanic started heading toward the iceberg was when Madden left the house. It should be no surprise to us. Yeah.

That's going down that this, this male oppression theme comes up. With a very clever writer whose sub stack I [00:35:00] can't wait to like dive into if it is a sub stack. I haven't checked. Oh, that's actually a really interesting thing. People often frame it when women started getting those first jobs, factory jobs in cities as a form of emancipation.

And yet we never hear about the male emancipation of the first male job in the household. Yeah. Really came about only about 50 to 60 years before the first female jobs became common. People don't realize how recent wage labor is a common practice is. Yeah. So expressed in mathematical terms, male reproductive strategy is the variable.

Female reproductive strategy is the function of that variable. Depending on circumstances, males will adjust their reproductive strategies. Females will not do that. They will always try to coax men into investing as much as possible in their children. Their message will follow the behavior of the males, but their objective will always be the same, to obtain as much investment as possible from as genetically desirable men as possible.

That seems true to me. A woman is, the idea of like a monogamous, like fully committed man [00:36:00] is quite a good deal for women. Well, it's super rare these days, right? It's, it's rare these days and it's, it's rare throughout a lot of history, unless you're talking about specifically the Jewish, well, really just the Christian branch of the Judeo Christian tree.

You know, I would just, I want to add that it, this, the modern dynamic also uniquely ruins high quality men. In other words, male empowerment almost sterilizes high quality men because it, it it leads them to decision paralysis with women because they, they know that they can have any woman they want.

And a man who knows he can have any woman he wants is never going to want to commit. to a dedicated partner. And we have seen this with a lot of our friends, but I would note here with a caveat, and the way we will avoid this with our kids, this is the case if, and only if, they are sorting for partners and value sex.

Yeah, but that's most men in mainstream culture. I agree. But people wonder why we're so against arousal and [00:37:00] arousal based systems for choosing a partner. And it's because it really ends up screwing. Cause it's dumb guys. It's dumb. Stop being so horny. When you tell young people, look, this sex thing is no different from cocaine.

It's just cocaine. You have to do you can better get them to understand that they need to be focused on a spouse who will be a good mother and a good wife and a good worker. Well, here's the crazy thing. People intuitively know this. People in droves are shooting up with Ozempic because they even know that their choice to choose yummy foods is inherently making them sick and unhealthy and unsuccessful in life.

And so they're choosing. To suppress their appetite and their hunger. Why would people not also see the benefit in suppressing your arousal if it's leading you to make toxic decisions that prevent you from creating a family and finding greater meaning in life? Like, what on earth? But There's no [00:38:00] industry.

There's no, I guess, pharmaceutical industry supporting. Oh, honestly though, I feel like endocrine disruptors are doing a good enough job, you know, screwing around. So, that's fine. It's pacifying the quote unquote male population of gen alpha. Yeah. Just keep wearing your synthetic clothing with microplastics.

Keep, you know, microwaving your, you know, plastic container dinners and please continue to use, you know, mainstream shampoos and lotions and soaps. Go ahead. I admire you. Okay, okay. You're right, and I appreciate all the things you protect our family from, Simone. When did I say I was protecting our family from those things?

We want to suppress arousal in our house. Bring on the plastic cups, Malcolm. Yeah, yeah, they should only be pursuing partners because it's logical and pragmatic. But truly actually, no, actually speaking of this in that video where everyone was like, Oh my God, you want to get rid of arousal patterns?

And Simone afterwards to me this morning, she's like, but like, you know, it's like, they know I'm [00:39:00] asexual, right? Like I, until I met you, I had never experienced real arousal before. Like, it's not that bad. It's not this dystopia life that they believe it is. It's my life. So devoid of happiness. Do I look like, you know, I don't know.

A soulless, depressed person? Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Yeah, the whole thing there. All right. In other words, under primitive circumstances, human males oppress human females for the same reason that baboon males oppress baboon females, in order to maximize their own reproductive opportunities. Scaring a woman into being one's wife is simply a way of getting an opportunity.

Additional wife or a wife Gearing other men into giving up their wives is a well known way of getting another wife. And as I wrote about the post on my post, violent enough to stand still, this makes cooperation between men difficult. Whatever society can gather men into an army, despite these differences of opinion will win the [00:40:00] wars.

If cloistering the females makes cooperation between men easier, then that is the rational way forwards. So saying that this is why historically, like in Islamic societies, especially societies where people can take more than one wife, you know, it's very hard to motivate people to go out to war because other men will take your wives while you're gone.

As we know from like this, the tale of Bathsheba, right? Yeah. You know, this is something that happened historically frequently. If another man saw your wife walking around being all sexy they'd be like, Hey baby, I saw you on the roof. You were looking pretty fine. I could see those ankles. Why don't you come back to my place?

But if all women are all constantly covered. Then women are just traded like assets between families during marriage ceremonies. Like, Oh, we want to create a bond for our family. And nobody's really concerned about what they look like, which actually makes things work much better. Especially when you're removing mate selection choice from men because of arranged marriages and like.

At some point, however, when population increases enough for land to [00:41:00] become scarce, men will compete less over women and more over resources. I wrote about that in The Price of a Woman. Women will be increasingly irrelevant to conflicts between men, which decreases the infant's potential. the incentive to oppress them.

On the whole, classical gender oppression, where males control particular females, is a remnant from a time when females were one of the most important resources. And I actually think that's a really important point. An interesting thing that Simone asked me as well, when I read this the first time is she goes, well, Okay, if in the old society, the way they prevented conflict and created higher trust relationship between males was to hide the value of the female resource that each man controlled, right?

How do people do that in the age of, you know, Capitalism, right? And I was like, well, that is why pretty much or many of the major cultural revolutions in the post industrial capitalist era happened in areas that were predominantly Calvinist, because [00:42:00] Calvinism has your solution to that. It is the wealth version of covering your wife in, drapes and everything like that and that the early Puritan and other Calvinist groups believed that allowing anyone else to see your wealth or to show off with your wealth, even so far as giving to charity publicly, was incredibly sinful and prideful.

And this is something you were supposed to hide. As much as you could. And this is where the famous old book on capitalism that argues that it came from communities because they believed that, okay, you, you, God shows you how much favors you pay, how much money you make, but he's giving you that money at the test.

And if you spend it on yourself, that's a sin. You spend it on art. That's a sin. If you give it to your church, you can give a little to your church, but remember, The churches cannot use any art, or gold, or organs, or pageantry. Which means the church really doesn't need that [00:43:00] much money. Or, you could give it to charity, but no you can't do that, because that would be prideful.

So what do you do with it? You reinvest it in your company. And no one else was really reinvesting, or had Come up with this idea of money has no value other than to grow the company for God to further prove to me my favor. And that led to this loop that unfortunately burned itself out for reasons we get to in other videos.

Like where did the Puritans go? Yeah, I feel like your perception that the protection of modern assets led to Calvinism is overly optimistic and that what we're seeing today in reality is this obsession we see among wealthy people with privacy, where they're like, I don't post anything to social media.

And here's the thing. This is totally different. Really? Completely and totally different. So I'm sorry. I, I, I hang out in wealthy culture. It was in current American wealthy culture within my generation when I was growing up, it was considered gauche to show off. Yeah. Particularly within old money families.

We'll do another video on why most of [00:44:00] the old money families fell apart because they did fall apart within this last generation. I can just quickly explain why it happened. The core reason it happened is I grew up with lots of like around lots of like kids. Who all expected to take over their family's companies and their families sort of expected them to take over their family's companies because that is what had happened for four or five generations.

What they didn't realize is that boards exist now. And none of the board, because this is what they weren't as common. Well, yeah, these, these companies became less privately held and more held by other investors and boards are publicly traded, et cetera, too. Yeah. And so, little junior. Can't just take over anymore unless he's got, you know, a Stanford or Harvard degree.

You know, you, you and he's performing well, it's not even, that's not even enough. Right. Yeah. And they thought they could, another thing I should note here is a lot of people are like my views are really off because, you know, I have intergenerational wealth. I should note, I can code switch into blue blood society, but my family does not have [00:45:00] intergenerational wealth and has not had intergenerational wealth.

For generations, so for example, my dad made a lot of money, but I didn't inherit any money from him I didn't inherit. I got like maybe like 30k when my mom died Like I don't know if that's what you consider intergenerational wealth and people will be like well Then your dad must have inherited money.

My dad so didn't inherit money His granddad actually took out millions of dollars of debt in his name without his permission. That is how in the hole he started his life. And I, I was always raised believing and my family always raised every generation believing that you're never going to inherit anything.

You're not supposed to inherit anything. And so I wasn't surprised when I learned I wasn't going to inherit anything. It wasn't like a big like, oh, okay. Yeah, because I've been told that since I was a little kid. So There are different ways that you can relate to intergenerational wealth, and I did have advantages knowing how to code switch growing up around those people and having my college paid for, which are all very, very big [00:46:00] things.

But I, I, I point out, you know, they didn't even pay for, for example, Simone's college. I paid for that, right? Like, so going forward, so sorry, I just need to. to, to explain to you. So right. There's been a shift in wealthy culture in our society where you had the old money when I was growing up, which still played a big part in like aristocratic American society.

And they found big spending very gauche but they had ways to signal wealth to each other. So there was still wealth status signaling, but they did it. Stealth wealth. Stealth wealth. Yes. But they did it in a different way. The modern and not stealth wealth. Like what trended when succession was out, by the way.

Yeah, the modern super wealthy communities, which we also have connections to make no effort at all to hide their wealth. Why is it then that, to your question. Some of them care about privacy. The answer to that is very, very obvious. Talk about it on another episode, which is worth going into a little bit here they try to hide their wealth [00:47:00] Simone, because when you have all the money in the world, when you're in billionaire club and you can do whatever you want, the core thing of value in our existing society, because the way a billionaire can live in our society really is like 10 percent better than the way somebody was like, I don't know, a million dollars a year can live or somebody was like half a million dollars a year can live.

It's marginally better. I'm probably even half a million is where you start to see like extreme diminishing marginal returns. Yeah. So where do they actually gain power? It is through controlling attention and controlling attention can mean either directing additional attention to you or directing it away from you or ensuring that when attention is on you, it is the type of attention you want on you.

This is why the wealthiest person in the world spent a big chunk of his money buying one of the largest social media platforms as largely a vanity project. This is why you're seeing this, Simone. They do it, they hide themselves on social media as a flex. [00:48:00] They scrub themselves from you as a flex.

Because it's expensive and hard to do that. But, the point I was making here was, is that if you look historically within these old Puritan and Calvinist traditions, it would have been seen as intrinsically low class to look well. You needed to always look as if you were constantly living in a state of deprivation.

This is really elevated and shown this culture very well in Scrooge, where it shows in the, in the Scrooge Christmas Carol. If you read it, it says, He ate gruel every day. He didn't fully heat his house. He only had one servant. He very, very, very dedicated living an extremely austere lifestyle. And in it, he also, he never donated to charity.

Because again, that was a traditional Calvinist thing. And Ebenezer was considered one of the most, it's, it's like, Jew y McJew face as a Calvinist name. I don't know, it'd be called like, somebody be called like Eliezer Greenfield or something. Like, it's, [00:49:00] it's a very Calvinist y name. So much so that Ebenezer?

Yeah, having a relative with the name Ebenezer is considered a Puritan spotting checklist thing. So really he was just like a, I, I call it a corrective grape fantasy of the Calvinist cultural tradition around the way you should relate to money. But To go further here, Simone why is it that we need to oppress men?

Well, and how would we, in our family religion, design male oppression? Since we're going to be intentional about everything. That way females take over important parts of society. Meanwhile, we are subservient to men in one important area, reproduction.

In theory, women can have children without fathers present. Technically, we can use men as firm donors and raise children cooperatively. A bit like female herd animals, mammals do. The problem is we don't seem to have that mindset. The female mind doesn't revolve mainly around raising children. It revolves [00:50:00] at least equally much around moments and love.

As long as our mental worlds and our social instincts revolve around men, We will be prisoners of men. No matter how much we take over society, powered by our superior adaptability, as long as we adapt to them, the men will somehow rule us anyhow. But the problem is, is that the men aren't ruling right now, right?

So they're not able to take on this role, because when they don't know how to like men. And then to the urban monoculture creates really bad cultural practices. So here is the core point that she's making. Men leave cultures more easily than women. High investment strategies appear to keep men in cultures longer.

And or women in cultures longer. Why are we not doing more high in, in investment strategies for men? And so I went to someone, I was like, Simone, what can I wear like 24 seven? That's gonna ingratiate you as me. That would make you happiest to be married to me because I believe I have a religious duty, I believe all men do to determine their wives [00:51:00] fantasies and do everything they can to help them LARP that fantasy so long as it isn't too sinful and indulgent.

You know, so long as it's not distracting us from our industry or our worship, then that's fine. Whatever LARP you want to live, I'm doing it for you. And so I was like, I wore a three piece suit 24 seven, like fully tailored. You find that, I know you find it attractive. No, I mean, yeah, no. Three piece suits and well tailored formal wear are the lingerie version for, for women of what men can wear.

But I think just the, the level of discipline that would make the most sense in a household like ours, especially a pronatalist household where there's lots of kids and messes is just to be. Nicely dressed in practical clothes. I like the polo shirts and jeans that you wear. But to always be nicely dressed in clean clothes that are, you know, well maintained, that, you know, with, with hair that is not messy.

But don't differentiate me from society so we won't get the differential benefit. Yeah, I don't, I think the more [00:52:00] important element is the othering to you, personally. And the fact that, You have a restricted wardrobe. Like you can't just choose to wear anything. It's always going to be a specific set of clothes.

People are aware of how my wardrobe rules work and how our religious rules work around dress. I am only allowed to wear three outfits for three different levels of what's the word here? Formalness. Because I'm never supposed to like Social occasions. Yeah, social occasions. So I have one outfit, which is a black polo and jeans and yellow boots and a yellow belt.

I have one outfit, which is slightly more formal. It's, it's jeans, nicer shoes, black belt, and vest, and tie. And long sleeve shirt. So a Texas tux, basically. A Texas tux, really. And then the, the last one is a three piece suit. And You also have a, a formal tuxedo, which, you know, most men in, in Western societies need.

But it's your tuxedo from St. Andrews so Yes, it's a tuxedo, yeah. It seems a little s**t, that, that thing. It has, like, holes in it, but that's fine. [00:53:00] Whatever. People shouldn't be making me wear a damn tuxedo anyway. It's gauche. But, you know, look, the point I'm making is I, I have only one outfit, like a cartoon character.

When I open my wardrobe, basically just one outfit is what I have access to. And that outfit. Now what that outfit is for an individual from a religious perspective is fairly rare. Open for us. Like we should think that you should have one consistent and only outfit that differs based on level of formality.

However it can be whatever your family thinks is right for you but it shouldn't contain any element of designer brand where Equally or lower expensive non designer brand would be more durable or you know, nice to wear. Yeah, like don't wear the North Face puffer when you could get an Amazon Basics puffer.

That's just as good. And literally All of my clothes, by the way, are Amazon Basics. This is an Amazon Basics shirt. I wear Amazon Basics jeans. Everything's Amazon Basics. But then the second thing is, is that I wear the same outfits as our male children and our [00:54:00] female children all wear proximates of what Simone wears.

Which is Black dresses. Yeah. Which is really interesting. If they're not dressing like Malcolm. Yeah. So well, sometimes the female children also dress like me and this does other us really significantly in both media and in public to the extent where we were in Telluride recently walking around and we kept getting pulled over on the street by people who were gonna be like, Oh, you're the yellow boots family.

It would happen like multiple times in between blocks. Well, it was interesting too, is one of the comments that people had, if they weren't just complimenting us. Was they were saying like, where are her boots? Indicating our little Indy right here, who is not wearing yellow boots. People are like, they like it so much that it bothers them that not the complete family.

Is in yellow boots, despite the fact that she's, she can't crawl yet. She can barely roll over, let alone walk. So there's no reason to get little yellow booties for her. People would love that though. Wouldn't they? Yeah. I'll see how small they get. Get a little [00:55:00] yellow socks or for her or something. Oh yeah.

So. That is so well, yeah, like we don't have specific religious rules and, and I think people would immediately recognize, like, if this became a large tradition, people would immediately be like, oh, it's the people who always dress like their children. Because even in like hard religious cultures, it's actually fairly rare for the adults to dress like their children.

So like, for example, in Haredi communities, the adults don't dress like their children. In Amish communities, the adults don't dress like their children. Yeah. And there's, there's, they can dress a little similarly, but I would just say that Anyone who exists even vaguely on social media understands the impact of a family dressing similarly that you know, people are buying all your kids.

So the reason we do it is because every kid, we can just move them between ages and it's all the same clothes. That's very sustainable. Yeah. And you can just have a basket. We have a basket for each kid. That is full of their uniform, essentially. And with your eyes closed, you can just pull out from each kid's [00:56:00] basket, a shirt and pants or a dress, and it's just going to work.

So there is no And the baskets automatically rotate as the kids get older, because it's just the last year's stuff, right? Yeah, you're just switching over a year, which is so easy and nice. I'm so glad we moved to the basket system. It is amazing. I would say the only area. Oh, this is a fun thing for parents who are implementing this.

The only area where we use different colored stuff is for socks. So that it's easy to tell which sock is which size. Yeah. Size of the different color. Yeah. Cause that's really annoying. You know, use that to just. Pull by matching pajamas. for Christmas to take family photos because they have such a big impact.

You could have that same impact on people to be just as noticeable, just as, as, as remarkable. If you all just dressed the same way, even when it's in something as mundane as a black polo and jeans, which is like, you know, kind of cartoonishly plain clothing. And I think that's another element of it, Malcolm, is you're like, Oh, you know, I need to be wearing something weirder.

But that is inherently austere. It is the [00:57:00] sackcloth of the modern era, the Amazon basics. Yes. So it's, you know, but it is different from peasant wear. Like whenever we walk around target or Walmart or something, and I like, look at the clothing and how it just looks so much like now I can't unsee it.

Like all the synthetic fabrics, the printed shirts, the, this, these, like the whole Like disposable clothing thing. Once you start to recognize that you can't unsee it and you can't unsee that it's like peasant clothes. Like people are literally wearing rags that fall apart after a couple of washes. I think it's a seven days on average, seven washes.

Yeah. Okay. So if you look at speaking of Why would we do this as like a religious system? There's two reasons. One is obviously the utility and the cost savings of running things this way and the time savings in terms of my personal thought or anyone's personal thought. But two, it allows for personal customization.

So each family gets to do it. But three, it reminds the family that they are a unit. And they are like you are a part of the family, right? Like you [00:58:00] are not an individual, really. You live in service to your family and you are a part of that family. And finally, the family is an intergenerational unit.

When I talk with my son about what he's gonna be when he grows up, you know, he's gonna be like, Mom, I'm gonna be a daddy, like you, and then I'm gonna find a mommy, like Maddie. And I, and I think when you look at how much a personality is heredible, when you look at, you know, all of this, it just seems really clear, like, humans are an intergenerational entity.

And drawing focus to that through the way individuals dress. And I will note here that we won't have a ban on our kids wearing different clothes if they want to. They just need to buy them themselves. Yeah. What the family offers them is the basics. This is what they get to wear for free. And if they make money beyond that and want to buy clothing.

Yeah, anything beyond that is up to them. Yeah. Which is great. That's good for them. I would say. So, you know, clothing is just one pretty small. How else are you going to oppress me? You really like how? Well, and I think what, what ultimately you've highlighted is that it isn't oppression. [00:59:00] It's buying and it's investment.

It's, it's really given giving people the opportunity to put roots down and, and most cultures these days, even, you know, inherited religious cultures. Yeah. Don't give people the opportunity to put roots down and the urban monoculture misinterprets all these opportunities to dive deep into a religion as oppression, when really they're just investment opportunities.

So I think the bigger question is, you know, what are the investment opportunities? And I think that is, you know, family businesses is a really big one, making those pervasive in our culture and having them start really early. Like I want our kids to start family businesses super, super early our boys and our girls, but I think it would make our boys more invested in our culture.

When your livelihood becomes intertwined with your religion and culture, you know, things change. And that, I mean, many, many religions have done this the opposite way, right? By disempowering. Their members from an educational standpoint but you could also make people dependent on [01:00:00] your culture economically by being so empowering that they want to stay within it to maintain their lifestyle and livelihood.

I'd also note here, a concept that we've talked about that is more othering for men than women is tactical honesty. Oh, not more othering. It's more costly. for men than women, because when women practice tactical honesty, I eat like being totally transparent about what their goals are with an individual.

There's much more motivation for men to take advantage of them than there is for women to take advantage of men. By that, what I mean is men get huge bonuses from signaling that they're interested in longer term relationships and they're really interested in, or that they're interested in other types of relationships.

Men are more incentivized to lie because women are more likely to have sex with them if they signal long term commitment. So I think that men have an additional responsibility within our culture to double down on tactical honesty, especially in discussions of relationship and business transactions.

Yeah. Because that is also othering to your point, which is great. Yeah. Well, and in friendships, this means focus on a question you should be frequently asking the people that you're interacting [01:01:00] with is what Are your major problems right now? What are your major bottlenecks? And where can I help? Yeah, basically, am I useful to you?

And are you useful to me? And if that is not mutual, we should not be talking right now. Yeah. I love people are always like, Malcolm, you're so ruthless in friendships. Why do you even save humanity if you don't like them? And I'm like, well, I've got my wife, you know? Why would I, why, why would I waste time talking to anyone?

Who's not her, you know? And then if it's not with her, my kids, like why bother making a friend? Eww. What if they touch me? Oh my gosh. What's wrong? I love you. I love you too. Speaking of which I can't remember any time now. So how are you going to oppress me more? I just feel like so unoppressed in our relationship.

Again, I, I think in the end it's not oppression. I think it is. It's empowerment. It's giving status and it's giving opportunities to invest. And that's what you're ultimately looking at when you see these levels of [01:02:00] oppression, you're right. And I just realized what it is. We see. The difference in the individuals in these communities by the way they dress.

But what's actually being preserved is the status hierarchy system's unique structure. When Muslim males meet with other Muslim males, and I have seen this before, Their status hierarchy is sorted in huge part based on their wealth and the things they have as it is by mainstream society. But among the Haredi Jews, it's based on their level of religious education.

Among the Amish is based on their level of personal industry and labor. And so that's what we need to maintain industry above all, and unflappable happiness. You cannot, happiness is a choice. It does not help the people around you to signal any other emotional state. [01:03:00] Now you can keep talking while I go get Octavian to chat with you.

Okay, I'll interview Octavian. He will be devastated if we do not, if we do not ask him his questions.

Octavian, buddy. Be very careful here. Here, sit here. I need to interview you, okay? Oh, you're wearing just your undershirt now. You're outside of our dress style. Why is he in his undershirt? Anyway, go give me a hint. I'll interview him. Do you like your yellow boots? Yes. Why do you wear yellow boots? I'm taking them off now because I'm in the house. You know why I'm taking it off? Why? Because no shoes belong in houses. That's right, buddy. Good job. And, Octavian, what are you going to do when you grow up?

Be just like a dad and I'll I'll be silly. You'll be silly? No, I will not! So, what are you going to be when you grow up? Be nice and I will [01:04:00] go many times. I'll go to kindergarten many times. If I'm big and I'm at kindergarten, people will know I'm Octavian. That's the plan. That's, that's more short term than we had in mind, but that's okay. Okay. Daddy and I were talking, Octavian, and we decided that it's really important that boys have to work very hard to become strong.

What do you think you should do to make your life hard so you can get really, really strong? That

when I get really strong, I'll be able to carry heavy things. Also big too. And even, and even that big wagon right there. Okay, so you'll carry heavy things. Are there other difficult things? Tricky, difficult, hard things you can do to become strong? Nothing's so strong. [01:05:00] Nothing is too strong for me. Nothing, nothing's too difficult for you?

No. Is it your job to do difficult things? Hard things. Yes. Yes. Do you like, do you like the outfits that you wear, your yellow boots and your jeans and your black shirt? Yes. Well, it still Halloween. It's gonna be Halloween soon, my buddy. And what are you going to be for Halloween? I'm gonna be for Halloween.

It's a spooky ghost. A spooky ghost. It's gonna be so fun, right? Yes. Yeah, I'm excited for that too.

A wife. You know, I know I always know I always know that, I always know that ghosts are not abysmal. Ghosts are not abysmal. Ghosts are not [01:06:00] invisible. No, they're not well, but Octavian, there is a type of ghost called a Poltergeist that is invisible and makes things move around.

 It's the Wi Fi connected now. How is this gonna get connected? How is this gonna be connected?? ? Do you want a big pizza for dinner? Yes, a big pizza. Okay. I'll get so mad at you guys. Okay. I won't give you baby pizzas. I will give you a big pizza.

Okay. Malcolm, what do you want? Do you want me to start thawing out the lasagna for you? Yeah, I already ate today.

I love you, Malcolm. I'll be down in a sec. Okay.

Oh my god.