Exploring Eastern Themes in Western Media

In this episode, the hosts engage in a controversial discussion that questions why Christianity fails to increase fertility rates among Asian populations. They dive deep into surprising statistics comparing fertility rates across religions in various countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, noting a stark contrast between Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, and even unaffiliated beliefs. The conversation explores hypotheses such as the challenges created by being a minority religion, the influence of Western modern values, and the aesthetics of Christianity in East Asia. They also examine how religious communities have evolved over time to match or mismatch with traditional cultures, ultimately investigating whether these cultural dynamics affect birth rates. Additional discussions touch upon unique cultural aesthetics, such as anime and other media inspired by foreign religious imagery, and intriguing projects related to improving pronatalist efforts in South Korea.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today is going to be an interesting and controversial discussion focused on the question of why doesn't Christianity work for Asians?

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: specifically when I say why doesn't it work here, I mean at increasing fertility rates. Because these numbers are going to shock you and I'm going to lead right in with the numbers. So I think a lot of people know that, okay, you're a Christian, you're a conservative Christian. You're going to have more kids if you're in a Western country, if you're in Europe, something like that.

Right. You know, this is a broadly known thing about fertility rates and it's also broadly known that Buddhism has the lowest fertility rate of all of the religious systems. Right. Right. Also

Simone Collins: like the end game of Buddhism is like, Genocidal conscious beings! Well,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, we'll

Simone Collins: get into why

Malcolm Collins: Buddhism has a low fertility rate, but I think the on the ground fertility rates of these religions may surprise you, And another thing you'll, you'll note here, surprisingly, is generally, as we've noted, if you are in [00:01:00] Europe or you are in the United States, if you are an average Catholic, you are going to have a lower fertility rate than the average Protestant at the same level of income.

Pretty dramatically lower, you can see our episode on this. But! It's the exact opposite in Asian population. So we'll also be talking about this because Catholics actually have a higher fertility rate there. So if you go to Japan, if you are a Protestant when this sample with cash, you had an average fertility rate of two, but if you were a Buddhist, you had an average fertility rate of 2.

1. Now keep in mind, this is an older sample, so the numbers are much lower now, but this is, you know, when this, this is the data I have, okay? So if you were a Buddhist in Japan, you had a higher fertility rate than if you were a Protestant. Now, if you were, if you were a Catholic, you'd be converted to a fertility rate of 2.

5. What is also interesting here is that in Japan, the no religion was two and the protestant was two. So no religion and protestant had the same fertility rate at this time in Japan. Korean, if [00:02:00] you were a protestant, you had a fertility rate of 1. 99. If you were a Buddhist, you had a fertility rate of 2.

35. That's so wild! Why? What? Yeah, and if you have no religion, it's 2. 96, so about the same as Protestant. Catholics here are actually, in Korea, are beaten by Buddhists. In Korea, the Catholic fertility rate is 2. 32, where the Buddhist is 2. 35.

Now let's go to Taiwan here, alright? In Taiwan, if you're a Protestant, you have a fertility rate of 2.

5. This is the one where they have a big jump over no religion, which is only 2. 06 when this sample was taken. Keep in mind, these are older numbers, they're way lower now. Note, these numbers are limited to women in their first marriage, and this study was published in 2016. If you are a Buddhist in Taiwan, you have a fertility rate of 2. 7 to the Protestant 2. 5. And if you are a Catholic, it's 2. 8, so slightly higher.

Now this [00:03:00] is from a different study here that is looking at these over time for various religions. Okay,

okay. So if you were a Buddhist in 1985, you had a fertility rate of 2. 71. If you were a Catholic, it was 2. 14. So much lower. If you were Protestant, it was 2. 27. So again, much lower. And if You were not affiliated. It was two point. Yeah. Yeah. 2.

Simone Collins: 47.

Malcolm Collins: So not affiliated, not affiliated in 1985. Korea beat both Catholic and Protestant.

Simone Collins: What is going on there? Could it be? Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I have a theory. I want hypotheses because then you can, you know, make me look wrong. My guess is that because Christianity is a minority religion in these countries that you [00:04:00] are narrowing your population and creating additional barriers to marriage and coupling that ultimately delay childbirth and therefore reduce lifetime fertility.

Malcolm Collins: Minority populations when they are persecuted almost always have higher fertility rates. So, I mean, there's a few instances where you like, Native Americans and stuff like that, but generally being in minority population and feeling persecuted increases your fertility rate.

Simone Collins: Because

Malcolm Collins: you, you have a reason to, like, exist, you know, this is

Simone Collins: Yeah, but, like, maybe it's just hard as a Japanese Christian woman to find a Japanese Christian husband.

Malcolm Collins: I imagine you'd have more default in common with him, but maybe, but that's, that doesn't seem to be with the data. Especially if your

Simone Collins: local Christian church does not have a really robust dating infrastructure set up, which I, I haven't, I've, I've, I've toured one Christian community in Japan in my life.

It was kind of weird. And to my knowledge, it had absolutely no infrastructure for young couples.

Malcolm Collins: Nothing. Fascinating. So, we'll get into why that might have been the case [00:05:00] in a second. Okay. Okay. Onward. 2005. So this is a bit further forward from the 1985 sample, okay? Have things begun to change.

The not affiliated fertility rate has crashed. Remember it used to be 2. 47? Now it is 1. 40. So this is for not affiliated. But. The Buddhist fertility rate has also crashed to 1. 59. Okay. But also, the Christian fertility rate has crashed. The Catholic is still below the Buddhist at 1. 48. That is wild.

And the Protestant in, in this moment was actually above the Catholic at 1. 50. So, what? Could this be a

Simone Collins: selection thing? Like, so it could be an aesthetic thing too. Like the people Who are attracted like sort of an outsider in Asia being attracted to Catholicism is more like they're attracted to the aestheticism and maybe even the asexuality because there are big factions of Catholicism that are very asexual nuns and priests are asexual.

Could it be that there's a weird [00:06:00] selection effect taking place that like the hooks that are attracting people and the aesthetics that are attracting people are the non. I think you got part of it here,

Malcolm Collins: but not in the way that you were thinking. Okay. Okay, well, let's just lay it out here before we go to 2015.

Yeah, I'm dying for this. What else would Christianity be associated with, especially in like the 80s, to somebody in Korea or Japan?

Simone Collins: America?

Malcolm Collins: Modernization in Western values.

Simone Collins: Oh, s**t. Yeah, okay. Okay. It's just, it's just increasing the, the, the adoption curve of the, the anti natalist flag. Yeah, so

Malcolm Collins: we'll get to all that in just a second.

I want to go to 2015 because people are going to be like, okay, is this trend reversing? Because I've heard some people argue that the trend is reversing based on anecdotal data. Unfortunately, the actual data does not agree with them that strongly. If we go to 2015 for the not affiliated, It's down to 1. 13. So, [00:07:00] okay, not good. Are Buddhists above unaffiliated? Yes, they are. 1. 33. Okay? What about, what about the Catholics? How are they doing here? Are they beating the Buddhists yet? No. 1. 16.

Almost as low as the not affiliated at 1. 13. Guys, guys, guys. If you go to the Protestants here, where are they? 1. 28. So they're getting stomped by the Buddhists.

So, let's get into what some of the papers that have been going into this have been saying, because I just find these numbers fascinating. Like, is this not an interesting question? Why is Christianity lowering rather than raising fertility rates in East Asia?

Simone Collins: Right. Because, I mean, in Scott Alexander's long and fascinating blog post reviewing a book about the rise of early Christianity, his end conclusion was kind of like, well, maybe Christianity rose because the memes are just [00:08:00] better.

Like, it just imparts more fitness to people. And you and I have argued in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion that in the end, religions that spread really well impart fitness to their adherents. And fitness is in large part reflected in birth rates. So why would a a, a religion that has imparted quite a lot of fitness to adherence in, in in Europe, especially of parts of the, the Middle East not be working in Asia.

Why,

Malcolm Collins: why? Well, one of the hypotheses you put out there is they are extreme minorities that might have trouble dating because of that. So I'm gonna put on the screen putting a chart on the screen here so you can get an idea. Are these groups extreme Minorities? You might be surprised by the actual data.

So by 2015 what percent. What person is Buddhist? 14. 1%. What person is Protestant? 20. 7%. What? So [00:09:00] they should have an advantage! What is going on? What person is Catholic? 8. 5%.

Simone Collins: Okay, that shouldn't be bad.

Malcolm Collins: Now, what if you, what if you go to the past? What do you go to the past, okay? Let's go 1985 here, okay?

1 percent is Buddhist, 27. 5 percent back then for Catholics, it was 5. 9 percent and 18. 7 percent for Protestants. So, you can see the Christian groups have grown over time. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: clearly. But I guess they're growing through conversion more than birth rate.

Malcolm Collins: And Buddhism has lost like half of its participants over that period.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, could it be? Also, I think, you know what? I think what you said about this being more correlated, not with an adoption of the actual religious values, but of the aesthetics, to really hold weight, and here's why. In Japan, when I traveled through there as a teen, there were like lots of [00:10:00] Christian looking chapels.

They were just used for weddings. Like, people weren't really Christian, but you might have, like, your traditional Shinto ceremony, and then you'd, like, do photos and maybe a wedding in like, a building that was purpose built to kind of have like show weddings that looked like they were in chapels. And that it was really about the trappings of the aesthetic and the aesthetic was Western.

I mean, this was at the same time when a lot of a lot of women were dying their hair, the sort of Auburn chestnut color and, you know, dressing in. Lolita clothing that was largely, like, sort of inspired by, like, frilly European dresses. And there was sort of this idealization of westernization and riffing on it.

But it wasn't full adoption of the memes. And that's something that, like, for example, Japan, and I think South Korea is also really good at this, but, like, I've always thought of Japan as being a master at this, of, like, taking foreign ideas and just Making them cooler, but also kind of abstracting them from their core values and purpose.

So the

Malcolm Collins: studies do, there's [00:11:00] a lot of studies on this because I read them. I was like, okay, what is this? Yeah, they do show that in the eighties Christian churches. We're seen as being uniquely pro things like contraception family planning many of these concepts they saw as like Western and forward.

So this is a Western

Simone Collins: thing. It's not a Christian thing.

Malcolm Collins: Right. But they saw the two as a combined entity in the eighties. Now, this has dramatically changed, if I'm going to read a passage here from one of the studies Christian churches have not kept up with recent radical transformation of the notions of sexuality, marriage, and childbearing.

For example, studies have shown association of Christian affiliation, especially with Protestant churches, with more conservative orientations in matters such as dating and sexual partnership, e. g. Lee, Joe, and Kim, 19. Or in more general social and political views, e. g. Jang 2018, Kang 2004, Kang 2012. [00:12:00] As a result, Catholicism and Protestantism, which were once the vanguard of Korean modernization, are increasingly seen as symbols of traditionalism in today's Korea.

So you can say, oh, this is, this is good, and we'll get to, in a second numbers. On how actually I'll just get to them right now. Why don't I just throw them up right now? How actually traditional are these different religious traditions? And so I'll read something about the study that was done here.

So the E. A. S. S. also contains 18 questions on individuals attitudes towards marriage in general, e. g. It is all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married. Gender roles, e. g., a husband's job is to earn money. A wife's job is to look after the home and family. Relationship inside the family, e.

g., the authority of father in a family should be respected under any circumstances. And familial piety, e. g. , children must make efforts to do something that would bring honor to their parents. On a scale from one to [00:13:00] seven, they either strongly disagreed or strongly agreed.

And so in answering questions like these, where did people of different religions come up in sort of their conservative scale, okay? And here we're going to look at Japan. Korea and Taiwan. All right. So if you were a Buddhist you would come up as quite conservative on this stuff. It was a 25. 7 percent in Korea.

It was 29. 77%. And in Taiwan, it was 25 percent for context. If you were a Catholic, you would come up. As 0. 28 percent in Japan, 11. 05 percent in Korea, and 0. 83 percent in Taiwan.

Okay, I'm

Simone Collins: realizing something here, which is when I think about sort of the inverse of this, and I think about Americans who adopted Buddhism or other Eastern religions, [00:14:00] They often have very, very low birth rates and are unmoored from their traditional cultures. And it's, they're, they're like, it's almost like a proxy for them being taken over by the urban monoculture.

And I wonder if there's some element of this where it's about being unmoored from your ancestral culture and like, Making a concerted decision to abandon it.

Malcolm Collins: Rather than just adopting our belief system with technopuritanism to work on their ancestral culture if they have a strong connection to it.

Because it might be the only way that they have out of this. . Let's, let's go to some of these other countries here. Remember, I was going through. Okay, how bad is this for? Catholicism. Let's look at Protestantism. So in Japan, where Buddhism is at 25.

7 percent very conservative attitudes, Protestants are 0. 14 percent very conservative attitudes.

Simone Collins: It really seems that adopting a foreign religion is more about rejecting your ancestral religion.

Malcolm Collins: 25. 08%

[00:15:00] Protestantism was at 3. 99%. Keep in mind, much more than Catholicism, but still, like, not that high. The only country where it's high Very interesting here is, remember how Protestantism had been in Korea for a long time? Even if we go back to the 80s, we're looking at 18 percent of the population. Well, in Korea, while Buddhists had a 29.

77 percent very traditional attitudes, Protestants had a 25. 67 percent very traditional attitudes. So, almost the same as Buddhists, whereas Catholics were only 11. 05%. Very traditional attitudes

Simone Collins: and your argument there is that at that point it had become more of a historical and traditional religion

Malcolm Collins: exactly So Christianity does work within these countries if it's been working within a community for many generations.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: keep in mind that we argue that these things co evolve together. So there's yeah One is, is adopting a new tradition a rejection of your ancestry? You know, like if you're in India and Christianity's been there [00:16:00] almost since the time of Christ and you're from the Christian community, You are rejecting your ancestry and your heritage by believing anything else.

So one is, does this disconnect you from pride and your ancestry? But then the second is, does this Did you co evolve with this? And by this, what I mean is we can see that historically, if you look at like a Korea, right, Protestants have lower fertility rates than Buddhists. And it's likely because some elements of this culture people who would have been bred out of the culture due to personality elements, like maybe being overly obsessed with aestheticism or something like that, are not bred out in Korean culture.

And so you see this lower birth rate at first, but after those people are bred out of the population, then you get a population where the software package, this Protestantism, is designed to work with this new sort of, The strain of Korean identity and culture and genetic line, which is why it's hard to just paste one [00:17:00] religion onto a group that has no connection historically to that.

And so I think that where you see people coming out of this in like Korea. Let's look at the fertility rates here to see if this, this backs was what we're seeing. So if we look at the more modern fertility rates in Korea for Protestants how far is that below Buddhists? It's not as far below as it used to be.

So in 2015, Buddhists were at 1. 33. For Protestants, it was 1. 28. So really almost as high as the Buddhist rate. If we go back to 1985, was it different? Yeah, it was quite different. For Buddhists, it was 2. 71. For Protestants, it was 2. 27. So we see the gap there. Decreasing as time goes on now if we look here and keep in mind, this may not be like pure like evolutionary pressure, it may be the culture better adapts to this new environment over time, or this new population with different predilections, different ways of relating to [00:18:00] authority, like, Koreans relate to authority in a different way than people from the Western world relate to authority, and they're like, why, how would that change their relationship with God?

And it's like, oh, okay, obviously that's going to change their relationship with God. So I, I think that the, you know, if this religion has been honed for an audience that is an anti authoritarian audience like, like, suppose you have like an Appalachian more like Protestant, like a reflexively anti authoritarian population and you had a religion that was not designed but co evolved with that.

And then you put it on a pro authoritarian population. It's just not gonna thrive.

This is probably also why in these East Asian, more authoritarian cultures, Catholicism significantly outcompetes Protestantism in terms of fertility rates, because it better harmonizes with their

Just trust the guy in charge mindset.

but I wanted to go into a piece by Mercantor. Do you have any thoughts on this before we go further? [00:19:00] Mercantor, big fans of this, this guy's work, really fun, one of the first people to write on us. And he mentions us in this particular piece as well, on Korea's fertility rate.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow.

Malcolm Collins: Did he's talking about like, are they building their own quiver full movement?

Simone Collins: Quarter full is

Malcolm Collins: a Christian movement, which first caught the eye of the mainstream media with 19 kids accounting, a reality show starring the Duggar family. It was going strong until sex scandals hit the founder and the Duggars themselves.

In recent years, the American prenatalist movement has taken a techno optimist turn. It's best known representatives are Simone and Malcolm Collins, who feature frequently on news sites and TV shows. And it started. At recent pronatalist conference, they described themselves as atheists, which not really anymore, maybe in some of the earlier stuff about us.

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has fathered 11 children with 3 women, is a fertility evangelist and is not known to be religious. A couple years ago, a promoter of pronatalist values emerged in South Korea, Lee Byung chun, a missionary from Kyanto Church, a small missionary sending church in Busan, in the country's second [00:20:00] largest city.

found a new calling. He calls his campaign the 303 project. The aims of the 303 project are to encourage marriage before 30, having at least three children. So it's oh I think he maybe means here 33 project. To, to mean have kids before 30 and have at least three children. kids. I think it's really important to have kids before 30.

Lee was inspired by Eastern European and American Protestant missionaries in China who often had six or seven children. These are probably migrant Ukrainian and Russian Pentecostal or Baptist churches in the USA. Lee and his wife have four children who have already pledged that they will marry and have children early. He then started the 303 club in which couples as well as single people pledged to strive towards 303 goals or 33 goals. He frequently quotes. The biblical verse which gave the quiverful movement its name, like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth.

Blessed is the man whose [00:21:00] quiver is full of them. When I actually read that line, I was like, that's remarkably good advice from the Bible. If you notice here, it's saying children born in a man's youth, which is pointing out that for most of your life, you are not going to be able to have healthy kids. You get a short window in your youth.

to have kids. Children and childbearing are activities of youth, not activities of middle age.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: His campaign seems to be getting traction. Hundreds of searches are promoting his message and pastors and young couples have become activists. According to the newspaper cookie. Imbo pastor Lee's congregants at the Kinto church had an average of 2.

4 children last year, triple the national average. He's getting the number up, but 2. 4 ain't gonna save anyone. I mean, we we're, we're only at four now ourselves, right? Like the recent slate plea is bemoaned. How few kids we had. Why are they the pronatalists?

Simone Collins: Listen, [00:22:00] hopefully

Malcolm Collins: we haven't had a sex scandal yet.

Okay. Maybe that's why. Simone, am I going to get in trouble for, well, the sex scandals they had were from their kids. So we've got to work on that.

Simone Collins: I really am not concerned about our kids. Then you do

Malcolm Collins: not know me as a kid, especially if our kids are famous. I don't know how you get away without a sex scandal.

If you're famous on the internet and like a 17 year old horny guy

Simone Collins: I hope we will train our children. Well,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I hope so too. Maybe get some true believers out of them. However, he then here notes another thing called the Dangjing Donggil Church. Li Beizhongchang has some competition. For more than 20 years, the Dangjing Donggil Church in the country's World Southwest has provided daycare and after school childcare services at half the standard cost.

Unlike municipal daycare centers, they are open until 10pm. There are several in the [00:23:00] city. According to TV interviews with the pastor at Donggale Church. According to a recent news report in April 2024, the mayor of Dongji o, Sanghwan, a city of 100, 000, estimated that 12. 4 percent of all newborns are from members of the Donggale Church.

They account for the fact that Donggale had the highest TFR in the South Chejong province at 1. 03. This is the highest fertility of all of the districts of the province. Well, isn't this

Simone Collins: just the message we've been sharing that You may say, okay, well, South Korea is boned, but all you need is a small number of families with a very high fertility rate.

Theirs isn't crazy high, but still and they will just inherit the future. This is not an everyone has to get involved problem. This is an only people who make children their autistic special interest problem thing. A religious and that's why we

Malcolm Collins: all hold hands as a united team. Now keep in mind this 1.

[00:24:00] 03 number, which is the average for their province can be compared to a, at the time of this national average of 0. 72. Now he notes here, of course, 1. 03 is still abysmal. But in South Korea, anything above 1 is high. Dongil Church has inspired other Korean churches to provide budget child care for members at reduced cost by making use of church facilities, which usually stand idle during weekdays.

As Korea continues to sleepwalk towards extinction, some Korean Christian leaders are stepping up and taking action. These two initiatives are only a drop in the bucket, but they offer hope that increasing fertility rates is not impossible, even in South Korea.

Simone Collins: So. That's really encouraging. That's, that's super encouraging. That, that's also the sign that, okay, I'm taking away a couple of things. One, letting go of tradition, and especially letting go of hard culture. is the death knell to you inheriting the future. Either you can lean into your hard culture [00:25:00] and or adapt it for the present day, or you can create a new hard culture.

But to just give up and or adopt some foreign religion or culture kind of is a cop out to just be like, Well, I'm not my mainstream nation's religion. I'm this hipster version, but also like not really leaning into the ideology of it. It's just not not going to work. But what's also helpful in this is that it's really not about any failure of Christian doctrines or values here.

It's about. This wasn't really Christianity being adopted. It was traditionalism and hard culture being rejected,

Malcolm Collins: right? I disagree to an extent here. I mean, if you know Korean Christians or Taiwanese Christians, they're some of like the most devout Christians I know. Oh,

Simone Collins: performatively, yes.

Malcolm Collins: No, they believe in like young earth and stuff like that, like they're really [00:26:00] traditional.

Well, these are the immigrants to the U. S. who I've met. Now that I remember the statistics that show how non traditional they are within their own countries. Okay, I might be wrong here. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Keep in mind, the Koreans who immigrate to the U. S. have higher birth rates.

Malcolm Collins: So like,

Simone Collins: yeah, I mean, how is that super?

Malcolm Collins: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. So yeah, they're just like the true believers are the ones that I'm interacting with. And in Korea, it might be more of an aesthetic choice, as you mentioned.

Especially in a society that exists. hierarchical, I can really see the choice of, as you've mentioned, it's like, are we getting a Western marriage?

Are we getting a Korean marriage? Are we getting a Western Japanese? Many

Simone Collins: of the aesthetics of Christianity, especially in like a highly structured hierarchical culture, could probably feel very rebellious and refreshing to an outsider who just wants to reject the traditionalism. Because keep in mind, Christianity is about breaking down the hierarchy, you know, this is not about, [00:27:00] like, you know, what he Something about camels and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Well, a lot of anime has actually bemoaned that their anime like this is making it So I think this was specifically the case was evangelion but I know it's the case with some like classic anime where if you look at older classic anime, they would put Christian tropes throughout the anime of like crucifixions of savior narratives of stuff like this without overtly saying this is like Jesus, just kind of putting it in, putting it in because they thought it was like edgy and cool, like to them, but keep in mind, this is a religion about a guy who died after like being tortured and like, you know, for them, Christianity felt edgy, profane, gothy, maybe a little like, you know, you go to Christian churches and they got all that.

So they, they're seeing Christianity in this way and they're adding it to their works in maybe the way that like you know, [00:28:00] avatar, the last airbender might've added Buddhist elements to try to be like edgy and philosophical. And I've heard interviews in the past with the creators and they're like.

Yeah, if we'd known how popular this would get in the U. S., we might not have done that. Because some of these shows get really popular with like Christian groups that see them as like Narnia or something, you know, like, like, you know, that has explicit and intentional Christian narratives to push a Christian agenda.

Where they didn't mean to do that. They were just trying to be like edgy and gothy and, and, and like, just sort of like choose a foreign philosophy. Which I find pretty interesting,

Simone Collins: no, no reason behind it. Just kind of liking the aesthetics. Like there, there was that issue of a lot of cosplayers and in some Asian countries, just wearing.

Nazi uniforms because they looked cool and they had no idea like just no idea because then I don't know they've got Not I don't think

Malcolm Collins: they care as much if it's Japan. I'm gonna tell you that much They don't have the same memory of that time period that we have

Simone Collins: I was I mean, yeah There were other things happening at that time.

Malcolm Collins: But no, but [00:29:00] also think about like how cool like, okay, I'm making an anime And I can, you know, put characters in like preacher outfits and stuff like that. And this isn't a thing for my culture or my history. They have been much, they, they done this in really big levels that like Western studios don't anymore.

Where like they're coded as like the good guys, because for them, this is like weird and out there. And a good example of this recently. Is fire force. I don't know if you've seen anything. You should google fire force. It has some of the coolest outfits I've ever seen where it is a world that is a combination of firefighter outfits.

What? Is this the one with the ghosts that you've watched? No, it doesn't have ghosts. And catholic preacher outfits. Wait, hold on, I'm looking at it. Go, Fire Force anime.

Simone Collins: Anime.

What?

What?! Like, non firefighter! What is happening? Yeah, like, non firefighter outfit and everything, who also turned into Do they use, like, holy water when they're [00:30:00] dousing the evil demonic fires from buildings?

Why are

Speaker 3: they They create fires themselves and, like, fight other fire things. Anyway, it's awesome. I'm so confused. Like, honestly, the anime, the plot. not that strong. But the, the aesthetics are so beyond top tier that I'm like humbled by look up, look up fire force. None.

But How? He's so steadfast in his faith. He's always in prayer.

Speaker: I'll take care of him.

Speaker 3: Please, keep back

Speaker: sister, the prayer.

Speaker 2: Right, of course. Um, the flame is the soul's breath. The black smoke is the soul's breath. Ashes thou word and art. May thy soul return.

Simone Collins: And yeah, it's like this like metallic reinforced preacher's collar.

What is happening right now? The cross sword. Okay. And it

Malcolm Collins: lights on fire. Oh, well, I

Simone Collins: mean, well, it had better light on fire. Of [00:31:00] course. I love the, the barefoot. Flaming footed firefighter, because it's great to run into a burning building when you're barefoot. But his feet make flames,

Malcolm Collins: sweetheart.

Simone Collins: Well, I'm so glad they do.

Malcolm Collins: He can do, like, fly stuff. It's pretty awesome.

Simone Collins: Sorry. Yeah, the nun outfit is the best. You see what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: Like, you wouldn't get a positively coded faction in Western media being dressed like preachers, by the way, in the game world that we're building right now, so many of the positive factions are descended from religious extremists.

Like one is Catholic religious extremists. One's Mormon religious extremists. We've got Amish, we've got, you know, and, and we really go heavy into the aesthetics and the traditional stereotypes of these communities to build something awesome, because that was something that I loved. From the anime I used to watch as I always mention, one of my [00:32:00] favorite characters in old anime is Wolfwood from Trigun who's catholic preacher themed, and I just like, so cool looking, what, oh, and, and you don't get this in western media anymore.

You used to, in like the 80s, you'd get, you know, catholic vampire hunters, which I always thought looked so cool. Yeah, totally. But you you don't you know, you know, I haven't seen done which could be cool. Maybe I should work on doing this I I have not seen somebody really make Orthodox Christianity look cool?

And I don't know if it's because it's like too bedazzled, but like, there's gotta be a way to do that. Come on! There's no such

Simone Collins: thing in anime as too bedazzled. You don't know

Malcolm Collins: how you make them look cool? Okay. You gotta combine them with, and if you guys haven't seen this you should watch it, it is so much better than the new Dune.

The new Dune is like, bad. Like, I haven't even watched the second one, it's, it's

Simone Collins: Don't! It's just, why did she become a walking eye roll?

Malcolm Collins: The Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries that was made for the Sci Fi [00:33:00] Channel, it is God tier cinema because they made it like a theatrical play instead of like, like if you watch that's what we're

Simone Collins: What's his face just like?

Malcolm Collins: Show but anyway if you if you watch the aesthetics of that Frank Herbert's dune miniseries from the sci fi channel and you combine this with Eastern Orthodox outfits. Oh,

Simone Collins: so like Benny Jezzeret meets Eastern Orthodox.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, I think you could create, well to like, because what you would do is you take the Eastern Orthodox outfits, but you'd have them do the sort of like hand actions that like the guild does when they're talking to people that are like over the top, or the Bini Jesuits, like they have all of these like actions they're supposed to do that like signal stuff and you can Bini Jesuits?

Oh! Yeah, they're like secret. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: The

Malcolm Collins: secret like code talking to each other all the time while they're having a conversation. And you, and you combine, this was like the [00:34:00] swingy incense things. I don't know. Like Catholics do that too, but like the, the Eastern orthodoxy, you can get some really

Simone Collins: cool, cool stuff.

Well, I want to see an anime character who uses a swingy incense thing as a weapon, you know, like, Oh, this has gotta be a thing. There's gotta, there's gotta be a thing. It's gotta be a thing. And I'm sure that the number of times in history that one of those has been used as a weapon is not zero. Yeah. So, we can rest easy tonight.

Actually, I like that.

Malcolm Collins: That'd be a great weapon for this faction. Like, to wrap it around your hand, to have like a That, oh, that'd be so cool! Yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, no, I love that as a weapon. Or like, a great

Simone Collins: weapon.

Malcolm Collins: Combine them with like, you know, monks. You have like the Shaolin thing, with like the, Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Incense thing. And then you have on the side of it, like spikes. So it's like a flaming. Oh my

Simone Collins: gosh. Yeah. You got the fire. You got the spikes. You know, red, red, hot flaming incense thing. Yeah. You know, it's in people's eyes,

Malcolm Collins: they, they they're leaving the building cause it's like burning down and they got those like over the top outfits was like the [00:35:00] swinging things.

Yeah. That, that'd be cool. Looking for post apocalyptic. And then like in an

Simone Collins: emergency, you're like exploding. Float it into a smoke bomb or something. It'll, yeah, there's just so much you can do. So much. How did we get, what did we, what did we get here?

Malcolm Collins: We were talking about how in East Asia the Christian stuff was seen as like edgy and an

Simone Collins: aesthetic.

An aesthetic flourish, right? Yeah. Sort of cool foreigner stuff.

Malcolm Collins: And I need to make their stuff cool. What else could I do that's cool? You know, you got me thinking here for the game world. You know something I haven't, I was thinking, like, what in the East hasn't been done well in Western media? Because everybody's tried the, like, Buddhist y nonsense.

I actually think that's super weak sauce to, like, include. Everyone's tried the, you know, Shinto stuff. You know what I haven't seen done? And, and a lot of old stuff did Muslim inspired. All Dune is Muslim inspired, first of all, right? Like, that's like, okay, how can we make that edgy? Sikh. Go for an over the top, like, Sikh warrior faction.

Like, the old Sikhs that [00:36:00] are You know, they, gosh, they were so cool. If you read like old accounts of them like one of the ones I remember really vividly is they were hired disproportionately to when the British were fighting Muslims, because I don't want to say that like some parts of Sikh culture were really specialized to fight against Muslim culture which was the dominant.

Alternate culture against them and was quite a martial culture within those regions. And when the British would recruit people to, to go out and fight with them, they would recruit Sikhs for a lot of the senior positions and everything like that. And there was one account where they're walking through a battlefield and one of these guys jumps up, he'd been playing dead from the, the Muslim side.

And the Sikh, like, sort of sidekick to, like, the main British general sliced his head in half. Um, Because he had, you know, they've got those giant swords on them. And Sikhs even have, like, some unique weapon types. I can't remember, but I think the, [00:37:00] the, not just do they have the knife thing, but I think the circular blades might be unique to Sikhs.

Okay, yeah, they're chakrams. So, they're not unique to Sikhs, but they're strongly associated with Sikhs. They are basically like a, a frisbee, like a modern frisbee. Like a circular thing with a hole in the center. But the whole side around it is A blade. And you hold it in your hands, like two circles, and they would fight with these up close

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: throw them like a frisbee at someone, you know, like Oddjob might have one of these.

Gosh. Come on, this is like, I haven't seen this in video games. This is cool.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It seems to be like the least practical weapon in the world because you are Yeah, there's a reason

Simone Collins: why this isn't pervasive. Okay, let's just be But that doesn't mean it's not cool.

Malcolm Collins: I think that they like, built them into their, like, big hair things, which is why they were known for them.

Simone Collins: Hmm. So the portability was favorable.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, you build it into [00:38:00] your outfits, right? You know. Love you to Desimone. This went way off the rails. What's what's in East Asia? That's cool. What could I be picking up from them? That's cool. We have a faction that is descended from Koreans, by the way that I love.

I love them. So this faction, what we did with them is one of the Korean corporations, when they started having fewer and fewer people, they decided, well, we'll just make our own people using you know, tanks that age people. So, so it's. Sort of like artificial wombs that create people at older ages because they don't want to deal with kids, you know They want to create workers but what they ended up doing was creating people who are genetically specialized for roles within the company to create sort of a a version of like The horror of, like, the worst version of a Korean life without certain proteins so they can't easily leave the company.

And the entire company is structured sort of like an ant colony with, like, casts and everything like that. And you have, like, the management cast who is created for this. You have the worker cast. But my favorite thing about this [00:39:00] world is one of the casts is the cast that does all public facing stuff.

Which is a Teen female idol cast. Um, This is all of the females. And they always have to be like signaling and they dress like in super cute outfits all the time. And so they're constantly like, if you go to like a reception desk, that's who's gonna be there. And like all the workers for like every meal, they get like shows of like Korean, like, pop diva type things.

With the understanding that they're all euthanized when they hit the age of, like, 27. Of

Simone Collins: course. Of course.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Because they're, you know, that's their purpose. And they're super okay with this. They're like, if you as a player, because I like discussing interesting philosophical concepts, if you discuss, like, isn't this horrible?

They're like, you want me to be old? Yeah, burn bright, die young. Yeah, I mean. Why would you do that to me? Um, Yeah. And if you're like, well, what if you want to be like a mom? They're like, the company makes the people and they'd make people better if they could. Because they've been adapted to not question the company.

It's like a chi, like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Horrifying, like [00:40:00] tribal thing. And I thought this was a really fun faction. That's a very fun concept. I like that. Yeah. Okay. All love you to .

Simone Collins: I love you too. You okay with Dan, Dan Als tonight?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Dan Dan works for me. Would you like

Simone Collins: me to sauté along with the ground pork peppers and, and garlic?

I'm assuming that would be a plus. Absolutely,

Malcolm Collins: yes. I would like you to sauté that along with the noodles. You are my Princess and I love you and you're perfect.

I love you too. Thank you

for being married And I am totally whipped guys for those guys using I'm too nice to someone some people come to see you too Nice to someone some people say I'm too mean I feel bad when people say I'm too mean But they say I'm too nice.

I'm like I I should be like what look at all the stuff you did for me just today

Simone Collins: What did I do for you today?

Malcolm Collins: You you

Simone Collins: got did you get the chickens? Did you give them water?

Malcolm Collins: I did go to the chickens. I did give them water and I got my hand pecked by one of them b***h. Oh, who was it? It was a, a black one in the, the, the more [00:41:00] crowded, you know, ghetto side of town.

And it went for my finger when I was pouring the water and I had to like, close the gate. I, because I wasn't able to lure them to the other side with scraps this time.

Simone Collins: Oh, I'm sorry. I should have showed you where the big scraps bowl is.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I couldn't have put them outside today anyway, because it was all muddy.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. We don't

Malcolm Collins: want them. Yeah. Yeah. From the melting snow.

Simone Collins: Well, I bet that was Chey. One of the black chickens is Chey and they're like very friendly. But I'm sorry about that. No, it's, there's this one midnight Maran that always goes for me and then it's back to me a bunch of times because she thinks my fingers little sausages.

And she's like. That the midnight

Malcolm Collins: maroon are the black ones, right? They're the ones.

Simone Collins: Oh, sorry. Yeah. I'm Talking about the green eggers. Yeah. Sorry the the the brown ones. There's a great Yeah

Che got you but

Malcolm Collins: I need to remember to do a little clip here

Speaker 5: Hey! Do you want to make a bit of money?

You see that? [00:42:00] It's made of chicken. It's actually made of chicken. You kill it, you've got free chicken. You can sell it to people. Or don't kill it. F*****g eggs come out of their arses. F*****g hell.

Simone Collins: I love them so much. They are wonderful. They're wonderful, beautiful birds.

And they're so friendly and sweet. And I want to be a better mother. That's why we lock our kids in with them

Malcolm Collins: to entertain our kids. Survive, mother f****r!

Simone Collins: But I want to make, I want to make an egg, sorry a chicken tunnel for them. I've seen all over Instagram now, chicken tunnels. So they can run around your property, protected from the eagles.

I'm okay with

Malcolm Collins: making a chicken tunnel. If you want that to be a major project, I think that'd be a lot of fun.

Simone Collins: I think it, yeah, I'm, I'm very much in favor of this so that they can explore the world.

They, they yearn, they yearn for freedom. But also, we have so many predatory

Malcolm Collins: birds. A chicken tunnel, though, is just another avenue for a fox to break in.

Simone Collins: Well, then maybe we can, it's [00:43:00] just that the, the like the hamster balls for chickens, they're really expensive. Like the good ones are 60 plus each.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're not even going to get time to have them all run around.

Simone Collins: I know each one has to take a turn and like who's time to like Switching that. There's also, we could theoretically construct a mobile coop that you can like wheel around see, it's just like a chicken wire.

Malcolm Collins: Simone, I'm going to tell you something that you may not know.

Simone Collins: They don't care. Is

Malcolm Collins: they're chickens.

They're made of chicken. Your heart is too big. Your heart is too big. It's

not too big. It is just, it is the size of a chicken, small chicken, small chicken, juvenile chicken. All

right. Have a good day. Bye.

Bye. God.

Simone Collins: You know, it really breaks my heart about the fact that like the babies laugh when you tickle their neck is I like fear that it's this [00:44:00] evolved. Trait of babies to like, look extra cute whenever someone's trying to choke them to death.

Could be. I'm like, I'm, I don't like it. I don't like it, but it's also really cute.

And, but they don't seem scared. So you try to choke our baby,

Malcolm Collins: that's what a progressive reporter is going to be

Simone Collins: like. No, I'm just trying to make her laugh. Simone frequently tries to choke child. No, I just, I tickle her. But only like when I touch her on her neck does she think it's ticklish. And, see look at how cute she's being.

Cause, you know, I don't know. You're trying to

Malcolm Collins: kill her with your murder gloves.

Simone Collins: I see

Malcolm Collins: those assassin

Simone Collins: gloves you're wearing. I'm trying to hide the, obviously, like, Completely ruined hands I have right now.