Navigating Cultural Defaults and the Quest for Meaning

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the root causes of declining fertility rates and the broader societal crisis of meaning. This thought-provoking discussion covers:

* The limitations of economic explanations for low fertility rates

* The role of hopelessness and lack of meaning in modern society

* How the "urban monoculture" contributes to increased anxiety and depression

* The dangers of religious "cargo cults" and surface-level cultural imitation

* Why traditional approaches to increasing fertility rates are failing

* The need for new social technologies and active theological conversations

* How social media distorts our perceptions of reality and success

* The importance of vitalism and finding meaning beyond self-affirmation

Whether you're concerned about demographic trends, struggling to find purpose in life, or interested in the intersection of culture and fertility, this video offers valuable insights and potential solutions for our society's deepest challenges.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I'm excited to talk with you right now! So today we are going to talk about the hope crisis as it relates to declining fertility rates, but also society more broadly.

And this was brought to me again, it's something I regularly see in a recent article in the Atlantic called the real reason people aren't having kids. It's a need that government subsidies and better family policy can't necessarily address. And this really reminds me of, we, We're talking with redeemed zoomer not too long ago, and he was saying, when you talk to boomers about.

All the sadness in this young generation right now, they'll reflexively be like, oh, it's phones. And if you talk to the media, because it's very urban monoculture, very distributed as much cash as possible. It's always all economic situations that you look at something like, oh, it's phones.

, and this is, , pretty quick to [00:01:00] disprove.

The studies on this show, generally that it does make up eight portion of the decrease in mental health in youth. But less than half. And that's the more generous studies.

For example. Amy O'Brien a lead author at Oxford university did a study of 350,000 participants. , across the U S and the UK on teen mental health, youth, and technology. And she found that a teenagers technology use or a teenagers social media use can only predict less than 1%. In the variation of their wellbeing, which is so small that it's surpassed by, for example, whether a teenager wore glasses in school.

 You can look at economic situations. They don't explain it at all.

Malcolm Collins: Like they have a correlation to well being. But if you look at the way that Americans live today versus the way we lived 100 years ago, it is very clear that people in 100 years ago lived in significantly more poverty than people today.

But the statistical [00:02:00] evidence is even more damning than that. It turns out that upper class teens actually have worse mental health than well, any other group? , a study by.

Sonia Luther at Columbia university's teacher college. Found that adolescents reared in suburban homes with an average family income of $120,000 report, higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today.

Malcolm Collins: So And so those can sort of be thrown out. And then if you talk about fertility more broadly, even some of the answers that we throw out don't really explain everything, right?

So we're often like well, you know, if you had more pride in your identity you would have higher fertility rates. And yet, I mean, does not. Russia and Ukraine have pride in their identity, right? I mean, Clearly they do to motivate these wars. And yet their fertility rates are desperately low. Or I may say well, you need a [00:03:00] strong religious system, right?

But does not Iran, a literal theocracy, have a strong religious system and strong religion in their country? And yet their fertility rates are abysmal. So what is it that, you know, when everything else that's that, that, that we want to blame this on is out the window. And I think that everyone kind of internally knows the hope crisis is real because we aren't just dealing with a fertility rate crisis.

You're also dealing with an unaliving oneself crisis. We went into not recent fairly, we've talked about it in a few episodes recently that by recent CDC statistics, if you look at high schoolers in the United States, one in 10 considered an unaliving themselves.

No, sorry. Tried to unalign themselves on any given year. And one in four girls made a plan to unalign themselves at any given year. Like, The rates are catastrophically high,

It's like American high schools have become the happening. And everyone's [00:04:00] acting like it's totally normal.

Christ, men! Amen!

Malcolm Collins: But if you look at the other countries that have fertility rate problems, like South Korea, they also have a really high unaligning oneself problem within the youthful generation.

And then you look at countries that have actually pretty, you know, robust fertility rates like Israel, the unaliving oneself rate in Israel is actually on the fairly low side.

Interestingly, in Israel, while in places like the US, the unaliving rate is going up, it's been going down in Israel.

So here I'm going to pull up a heat map by

unaliving oneself rate. And what you'll notice is, remember I was [00:05:00] like, oh like, so here I am showing a map. Now, I do not think that this explains everything.

But it does explain a little bit. Okay. So I'm saying that this is not like a a definite like, this is, this is where this is coming from, but it's definitely a big part of it. And when I talk to young people, when we're talking about the massive shift we've seen recently, and I do need to clarify how massive this shift is because a lot of people, when they believe like the UN statistics on how quickly fertility is going to fall Those statistics are so laughably wrong to give you an idea of how laughably wrong when the UN is like, Oh, we'll have a steady continuous decline in the United States that will then level off.

First of all, it's like, why is it going to level off? But then second and more important right now, if you look at the expected fertility rate of women in the actual fertility rate of women. So if you ask women, you know, in the early twenties, how many kids they expect to have, and then you look at how many kids they have, it's [00:06:00] typically around.

like, I think it's like 20 percent lower. Depending on what you're looking at

This study showed it to be 25% lower.

Malcolm Collins: now, if you today ask kids their expected fertility rate, you get something like over 50 percent of young women saying they don't plan to have any kids. at all.

Sorry, it's worse than that. It's 57% of people under the age of 50.

With it being weighted towards the younger generation.

Malcolm Collins: This was not the case. Historically, if you go previous generation, our generation, I think it was like 80 percent plan to have kids.

So what we can see from this is if this pattern holds, and I love it that a lot of the data, they assume that now for this generation, the actual fertility rate is going to be above the expected fertility rate. Well For, Our generation and what we know from the past is The actual fertility

rate is almost always below the expected fertility rate, which means you're going to be seeing a [00:07:00] catastrophic crash here. But the thing is, is what is driving young women to decide that they don't want to have kids? And when I talk to people, yes, there's some like urban monoculture y like, oh, it's for the environment and stuff like that.

But I really feel like this is a just so story. Agreed. I feel like the much bigger thing is, is they just don't have hope that the future is going to be a place where they want humans living or they want humans related to them to live. And you see this very Explicitly in the Korean fertility rate when people talk to you know, people in Korea, cause I've seen lots of these interviews, a lot of them are just like, yeah, but I don't want my kid growing up in this environment.

And when you have a environment where one in 10 kids is trying to unalive themselves every year, like that obviously is a psychologically very damaging environment. Right. Yeah. And to talk about the silliness of cash incentives, I'm going to read a quote here from the Atlantic piece [00:08:00] because I thought it was actually pretty good.

Cash incentives and tax relief won't persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, or for their future children. In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children. Not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.

And then the, the God thing, another thing I'll put on the screen here, a breakdown . of religiosity by demographic

IE, you know, millennials, Gen Z zoomers, et cetera. And you'll see in gen alpha, it falls off a cliff, which in, in Gen Z to an extent, which isn't captured in the mainstream demographics.

There's a lot of people who are like, Oh, the younger generation is moving, right? Which I agree. It is moving, right. but it's not moving right. Towards the old religions, and this is a huge mistakes that a lot of religious people I know are making. They're like, Oh, all the kids are turning back to these old systems.

And it's like, no, they're not. They are moving right in like a, okay, the urban [00:09:00] monoculture doesn't work, but they don't. The vast majority don't view you guys particularly better than the urban monoculture. And the big problem that the small religious renaissance that we're having right now has is that it's like almost all male.

So the gen alpha faction that is actually like, okay, I'm going to go ortho bro, I'm going to, you know, convert to whatever they're struggling because there's not an equivalent number of females making the same switch over. And so they're not able to easily find partners and this causes a well. problem because then it solves nothing even though they might be good fathers now and they might be able to motivate a high fertility rate. They don't have a partner to marry, so they don't end up having kids. So I wonder what your thoughts are on this.

Simone Collins: How much do you think this is a, an epidemic, epidemic of hopelessness versus an epidemic of on week?

Because I, I [00:10:00] get that the unaliving element of this implies that it's more of a negative affectation aside from just a lack of feeling anything. But I also get the impression that a lot of the low fertility stems not from deep unhappiness, though maybe there's a lack of contentment that's pervasive, but rather a lack of meaning in general and a lack of desire to do anything that's not necessarily actively miserable.

Malcolm Collins: I think you have a really good point there. So, I, I think the, the, the meaning crisis as it's called is, is a really good way to look at this. And I think that you've laid this out and this was actually the core point of our first book and our shortest book, the pragmatist guide to life is helping people develop a sense of meaning without trying to push them in any one direction.

Very different than the type of people we are today. But yeah. One of the things I realized when I was writing that book is there just was no other tool like that. And I think that that is part of what led to the meaning crisis. So it used to be, if you go back to the 50s and the 60s in the United [00:11:00] States, when you went to school, they would teach you What you should live for now, it might be wrong, but they gave you a moral system then going into, they didn't just do that.

Simone Collins: They gave you a moral system. They told you how to live, how to date, how to maintain your household, how to navigate in laws, how to do all sorts of things. We shared a culture that said, here's how to deal with life. And here's also what you do. And of course that includes getting a job, you know, going to school.

I

Malcolm Collins: agree, but here I'm just specifically in this point, talking about the moral meaning.

Simone Collins: Okay. That's

Malcolm Collins: all I'm talking about here. No, No, I'm talking about your on we question and what I think it comes from.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Then in the 80s and 70s, they had like the satanic panic and stuff like that. And what this caused was because there are different religious systems in the U.

S. Many of these conservative religious systems, yes, unfortunately this problem started because of conservative religious systems and not the progressives began to say that schools couldn't teach meaning [00:12:00] because, you know, your Protestant evangelical might be afraid that the meaning being taught was a little bit too Catholic and the, the, the, the Catholic might think it was a little too Protestant evangelical and the Jew might have a problem with, you know, each of those.

And so schools were just like well, we won't. touch on questions like, why do I exist? What's the purpose of my life? Why should I keep existing? Why does humanity have value? And then you go forward to go forwards. And then it's the, the ACS in the nineties who are like, Oh, you can't teach these systems. But then if you try to teach an ACS version and the Christians are like, Oh, you can't teach these systems.

And during this whole time Intergenerationally, meaning was still being communicated to kids to some extent, but the system for that really broke down in the scaffolding and the ways that we have to think about and address these questions completely broke it down to the point we're now in society when people are looking for meaning.[00:13:00]

And if you want to understand more on how we think about this, you can look at our levels of thought video. They often look for it in an aesthetic sense. So, you know, this is really what we did a video on well, put a title card here. I forgot his name, but he was some like red pill influencer.

And I remember before like major life decisions, he'd be like, Oh, what's the most masculine decision I can make in this moment. Yeah. And to an extent, Andrew Tate does this as well with some of his philosophy. An identity

Simone Collins: based objective function.

Malcolm Collins: Was it's not even I did it. Yeah, it's like an aesthetic based objective function.

It's It's what would somebody who is and you see this on certain parts of the left as well. I think parts of the trans movement has gone in this direction where they begin to make a major life decision thinking. What decision would my gender identity maker on this? But this isn't just a gender thing, right?

Like, You'll also see this in what, what, what kind of decision would a good person make in a moment like this? Or what kind of decision would like a good crunchy hippie [00:14:00] make in a moment like this? And that these ethical systems have caught on at all shows how barren the landscape was and how unsophisticated.

the world had become in terms of how we address questions of meaning. And the first book I wrote, and I actually got it copyrighted, and I wrote it in high school never published it or anything, is titled Why Do Anything? Because that's when I had this crisis. I was like, why? Should I do anything like where is value in reality when I mean like why do anything I mean if I'm, you know, motivating going out of my house at the beginning of the morning or I'm, you know, choosing which college to get into, I need to be optimizing for something.

And I think a lot of people, they don't even think, what should I optimize for? Like they just think that that's not even a question that they're allowed to ask or when they answer it, they answer. It was very unsophisticated and unfulfilling answers. Like, you know, My own personal satisfaction. or [00:15:00] maximizing positive emotions throughout a population, even though they're just the things that led to our ancestors having the most surviving offspring, a very serendipitous thing to maximize.

So, and I think most people know how, how faulty these logical systems are, but we attempt to maximize them anyway, because they just don't have anything else. And I think that When they, a lot of people, when they realize how silly it is, they're like, but those are just the things that led to my ancestors having more babies, you know, and they don't have any good alternatives.

They don't have a framework for searching for alternatives. And then they hit this on weed that you're talking about. And so now if you're thinking about something like, okay, Should I have a child or not? Or should I go on living or not? And your life doesn't feel good, right? Like you're experiencing on mass negative emotions.

You're like, okay well, because my life is about how many positive emotions I can feel and how many positive emotions I can give my Children, then it's clearly not worth living. What's really interesting about this is that the [00:16:00] Number of positive emotions that somebody today should be feeling when you look at the, the wealth they have access to.

When I say wealth, I mean, all human knowledge at the touch of their fingers, not really having to worry about starvation, not really having to worry about, you know, many of the things that if you go 200 years ago, you know, you'd expect half your kids to die. Right? People back then, it is clear from the writings were much more mentally healthy and were much more satisfied with their lives and likely experienced actually less unhappiness than someone today.

So one, they don't have a system that can motivate them continuing to live in the current unhappiness of our culture, but two, they've adopted cultural systems that directly lead to this unhappiness. And the cultural systems lead to this unhappiness for. Two reasons one, the urban monoculture that we talk about all the time.

It's sort of is completely built around removing in the moment, negative, emotional stimuli, think of trigger [00:17:00] warnings and stuff like that, the haze movement. But of course, if you remove any in the moment, negative, emotional stimuli you're going to become incredibly sensitized to any negative stimuli, right. and then have these massive reactions to them because your body just isn't used to them. Focuses on them as the core purpose of your existence, like avoiding them as the core. So of course you're going to quickly spiral out of control the moment somebody like which should be like a non issue for a human being.

Right? But because you're so unused to negative emotional stimuli, you just have no system for dealing with something like that. And it really does cause this spiral and deep unhappiness. But then the second problem is just your. sort of mental receptors and way of engaging with the world gets totally fried.

I often argue that the, the way that the urban monoculture teach teaches things like how we should relate to pleasure and self affirmment is like eating a bowl of sugar every morning instead of cereal, like just literally like sitting up to a table and pulling a [00:18:00] bowl of sugar. Like this belief that Well, you know, like even the idea, for example, we did an episode recently on PrEP,

which is a drug that you really only need to need if you are regularly going to orgies and sleeping with people who you don't know well enough to know whether or not they have AIDS.

Because if you're in a marriage and you're on modern aid drugs, you will be something called you equals you, which means very low rates of transmission. So it's like really like just an orgy drug. And the government, Obamacare mandated that it's on all of our insurance plans and a ton of states in the United States like pay for it.

And so you look at something like that like, like, like orgies are a human right. In this government, which is kind of wild. They're not considered like a lifestyle choice. They are considered like a literal human right because that's why the government has to fund it. Right? Like If it was a lifestyle choice, like having a nicer house or a nicer car or something like that, then the government would be like well, you know, obviously we don't, we're not going to, you know, Upgrade you there, or I want to take a trip every year because it makes me feel better.

It's like, so why is this different from those types of things? [00:19:00] It's different because it kind of is considered a human right to these groups

These unemployed men have been having sex for several days. We're doing the only thing we can do.

We're trying to turn everyone gay so that there are no future humans. Present day America. Number one. Yeah, America.

Malcolm Collins: That we've entered this moment where going out and doing whatever makes you feel good in the moment, whatever your basal emotions are telling you to do has increasingly become seen as a human right in these groups while at the same time being affirmed for whatever you want to believe about yourself.

Has also, I'll put on screen here, because it was shared with me by one of our fans and I just found it wild. Is there is a movement right now to try to normalize being a, a Therian?

And to build surgical techniques to get people to align more with their, sorry, for people who don't know. Furries are people who go to conferences for fun and have these fursonas, which are like these pretend animal identities.

Totally cool with that. Therians are people who think that they're [00:20:00] actually those animal identities in the same way that like a trans person thinks that they're actually a different gender than the gender they were born. And, and I'm not saying that to dismiss trans people, I'm just saying that they literally would liken themselves to trans people if you asked a Therian this.

Well, that's how far this has gone at this point that they're like, yeah, we need to start developing surgeries and, and this is how you could do a muscle graph to look more like a canine and stuff.

And I'll put those images on screen because it's, it's really fascinating to me how thorough they've gone with this stuff.

If you'd like to check out this organization yourself, you can go to freedom of form.org. , and it is a. Nonprofit registered in the United States.

Having registered non-profits before. I know that that means it is definitely not a joke because it's not easy to do. I'll say to clarify our position on this stuff, 80 is night that we are, you know, anti theory and exactly. If we are anti caring. At all.

The way your identity is perceived by other people. It just shouldn't [00:21:00] be important. You should have a higher purpose in life. Then affirming a specific identity. You want to believe about yourself? Likely some sort of consequentialist action on reality. For example, saving a collapsing society, making humanity better. Giving your kids a good life. , and I, and, and what we, what we. Are so against is the normalization of focusing first and foremost, within your life on how you are perceived by the world. And how you perceive yourself because neither of those things should matter at all.

Or like, not more than like did 0.5% of an individual's mental effort.

Malcolm Collins: But when your entire life becomes about, people can be like, come on. Mainstream culture is not obsessed with being able to affirm yourself, you know, with whatever you become being constantly affirmed for whoever you happen to be. And I'm like, [00:22:00] then how common is the statement, learn to love yourself, learn to be comfortable with yourself, learn to care for yourself.

Whereas within any traditional culture, they would have said, learn to become somebody worthy of loving, you know, learn to become somebody that you can be proud of you know, not learn like manipulate your own brain into affirming yourself, whatever. But these are like mainstream. These are like, These are like, you go into like, Vanilla mom houses, right?

And you'll see these on the walls. What's your thoughts on this, Simone? Like, Of course, to me, of course, this is going to lead to a short circuiting of all these pathways and lead to constant depression and anxiety. And then because you don't have any other moral system that can pull you out of this, you're also completely directionless.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I think this is pretty self explanatory. Self explanatory and something we discuss a lot in our materials and in our podcast as well. I am going to push back on your argument that [00:23:00] instructions on how to live and norms around what is done in life isn't relevant in a conversation about meaning.

And here's why. People's explanation of meaning is often, and you've already alluded to this earlier in our conversation. A just so story resulting from someone's lifestyle choices. So you alluded to the person who that, that archetype of someone who says, I'm not having kids because the environment is, is falling apart or, or humanity is in a terrible place right now or whatever, insert excuse.

And I think that's a product of the way that they live. And the culture that they've surrounded themselves with. And if instead we were to give people the steps that lead to a life of a different type of meaning, that they would come to a conclusion that gives them that meaning. And that sometimes you have to surround people with the right [00:24:00] set and costumes and co-stars to have them as a character, have a hero's journey that's meaningful.

So, In other words I'm, I'm, I'm adopting the dress for the job you wish you had version of an objective function. And I don't think that, You're giving enough weight to the importance of showing people cultural norms that lead to healthy outcomes.

Malcolm Collins: I can agree with this, but I think one of the dangers of this way of thinking, and I was going to say reverse it, there were two reasons, is it's not just the urban monocultures problem.

Another problem is, Of the people who realize the, the disillusionment of the urban monoculture, a number of them have turned to cargo cults. And we've talked about this in regards to the tradwife phenomenon. But we should just remind you of what a cargo cult is for people who might've forgotten.

So in World War [00:25:00] II planes were active in the South Pacific and they would often give food and supplies to the people of the region while they were operational in those areas after they left, the people sort of developed an almost religion around this time in the past when there was more prosperity and they will build out of, you know, rocks and palm fronds and stuff like that.

Runways for planes to land on and then build like fake radio sets and fake antenna and talk into the fake radio sets to try to get the, the plane, do the, the words that they remember the people saying the last time they saw them and dress up with like USA written on them and do marches. And this is a cargo cult, right?

And in a way the trident light phenomenon. It is not. These people didn't like look up how did wives actually behave normatively in the 1950s? What they did is being a caricature. Yeah, they looked at we're not just a caricature. They're cargoing, copying often ads and Hollywood based media. It, it, it would be [00:26:00] as ridiculous if a hundred years from now or something, somebody was trying to live like a classic person from, you know, 2024 and they based everything off of like, Ads, right?

Like Sears ads or something like that, right? Like it's, it wasn't the way a huge portion of the population was ever really living and as such, it was never like an internally consistent way of living.

And if you're like, well, why with the media of the time motivated to manipulate people to live a lifestyle that almost no one was actually living well specifically, it was because this period of ads with right after war war, during world war II, when all the men went to war and the women started taking on lots of industrial jobs, , women really began to normalize to that. And so, , both government and big business, when the men came back to prevent a major economic catastrophe. Needed to get these women out of the [00:27:00] workplace that had just flooded it. , and so they created this image of, oh, you want to be a stay at home. Wife. That was the goal of all of these ads.

It was to

ake su

counter a trend that was already happening. They were produced like this specifically because this lifestyle was so rare.

Malcolm Collins: But we've touched on this was trad wives. The bigger problem for me is the religious cargo cults that I've been noticing popping up.

So, you know, earlier I talked about or so bros and I think for a large portion of like the or so bros it's really become a bit of a cargo cult about trying to ape the most religious looking of the Christian religions in the most religious looking way. You know, they, a lot of people, when they return to one of the traditional faith systems.

What they do is they advertise, like they, they, they search among them for the one they want by the one that aesthetically looks most to them, what their sort of pop cultural [00:28:00] memory of what a religion is supposed to look like. And so for modern 2024 pop culture You know, orthodox Christians look more Christian or more like, you know, traditional ish than other Christians.

They, They, they jumped to that, you know, without looking at the fertility rates of that community, without looking at the, which by the way, are very, very low. Without looking at, you know, okay, how many people who are joining this faith are actually getting married or achieving any sort of outcome or anything like that, it's like, if I act out this thing, I will get the benefits from this.

When historically speaking Most forms of Christianity that were in any way thriving and not in some sort of a dark age were what I call an active theological conversation that people were actively and excitedly engaging in, you know, if you look at, you know, what was happening in America during any of our great awakenings, that's what was happening, right?

We were, you know, constantly excited about what the newest religious ideas were, right? And [00:29:00] I think that they forget this in this cargo cult mindset that when these faiths, whether it's the Orthodox faiths or the Catholic faiths or one of the Protestant faiths or the Jewish faiths, has been in its moments of most thriving, that's when it was in this active conversation.

About how it was going to progress, instead of what was right and what was wrong. And I don't mean this in a progressive sense like, oh, these things don't change, like I mentioned before, when somebody says that, it's like, well, I mean, do you consider that Catholics only started believing that life began at conception with Pope Pius IX, you know, around 200 years ago.

You look at like Thomas Aquinas or Augustus Vipa, they didn't believe this. So if you hold to that Catholic belief, then you are okay with the church continuing to evolve its beliefs. And should it not continue to evolve its beliefs from here? If you are a Mormon, I mean, anyone who's actually like a Mormon and familiar with the Mormon faith must know how quickly, The active theological conversation needs to move in Mormonism.

And I think one of Mormonism's core challenges right [00:30:00] now is it moved from having a group of intelligent men in this active conversation to being more and more just the current prophet. The active conversation from the table, but I think I see that coming back. But I think More broadly, we have to be wary of the cargo cults of religion because when you do the cargo cults of religion and you think I just act out X, Y, and Z like, you know, the old 1950s ads, and all of a sudden the prosperity of the 1950s or the spiritual prosperity of the 1950s will come back to me, you know, you'll be sorely disappointed.

And we've seen, there's been a lot of videos of you know, trad wife to like despair pipeline and it makes a lot of sense because they, they are entering these relationships where now divorce is common and they're not fully considering this and now the guy's had five kids with him. He got all the utility he wanted from them.

They're old. They're not that attractive anymore. He's made a lot of money and he just divorces them and marries somebody younger. And they are quite [00:31:00] screwed. So like, how do you, how do you protect against stuff like this? But anyway, what are your thoughts?

Simone Collins: In general I agree, but I, I just, I think that giving those defaults to people helps to get them there.

You have to obviously, you can't just give the costume and the set and the surroundings and nothing else and assume that people are going to come to the right conclusion. But it makes a huge frickin difference.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: right now I feel like people are concluding that nothing matters because they're set up or either nothing matters or literally they're better off not living because they're set up in such a bad way where how can they help but conclude that.

We have people who think that they're never going to be able to own a house. They're never going to have a meaningful career. They're in debt. They're in a desperate situation. They can't find a partner. What else are they going to conclude? I think if we set people up for success and if we gave them better cultural [00:32:00] defaults, that people would find more meaning more easily, even right now, for example, if we just gave people.

Meaning, or if we just gave everyone the pragmatist guide to life and had everyone truly and very carefully think for themselves, what mattered. I think the problem is that people would probably come to a very nihilistic and negative utilitarian conclusion to a great extent, given where they have been placed, given the priors they've been given, given the societal defaults that they're growing up with.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, And then I guess that to me, this is why. I think a lot of people wonder why we risk our reputation on projects like techno puritanism. If you want to learn more, you can go to techno puritan. com or you can check out our track series on YouTube which is sort of a religion that we now believe, but we're also in the process Not really a religion.

It's more like a Christian denomination that we're in the process of fleshing out and building and trying to determine from going back to the original [00:33:00] text, what do we think this part actually meant? What do we think this part actually meant? And a lot of people can be like, why would you risk your reputations on something like this?

Given all of the other important stuff that you're working on, like the pronatalist advocacy. And it, the core answer is, is because I think that this is, is literally as core to the pronatalist advocacy as anything can be. As core as the Collins Institute. If we can't find or engage in an active theological conversation about how we find meaning in life like our ancestors did we are pretty screwed generationally speaking.

And people are like, why can't you just go back to one of the old traditions? And it's like the old traditions have shown more resistance to. the urban monoculture than, than other things. They have shown higher fertility rates, but they're still losing. They're still losing like, and losing hard.

There's a [00:34:00] reason why, when you look at the old religious systems, more of Gen Alpha is de converting than Gen Z, and more of Gen Z is de converting than Millennials, right? Like, You guys are on the losing side of a battle, and you're like, why don't you come join us? And it's like, Hey guys, why don't you come hang, hang out at the Alamo? Like I know we're under siege, but you know, I think I got this. It's like, no, you are, you are clearly in a bad situation right now. And I am encouraging you to. Maybe fortify differently or get out of the LMO because if the statistics continue in the way that they're moving right now you will be decimated by the time you get to the other side of this.

 What piece of advice I may commit to the audience here? Is I get the impression that people from some of these religious traditions. Think that they can instill confidence in the tradition from an outsider by denying the problems that they're facing. And. Trust me, it really does the [00:35:00] exact opposite. , the two face that are most common to do this are the Catholics and the Orthodox, , whereas was faced that don't really seem to have this problem at all.

You're looking at groups like, you know, Mormons and mainline Protestant groups. So like if I go to a Mormon and I'm like, wow, you guys have a major deconversion problem right now. They're like, yeah, we do have a major deconversion problem. And here's how we might work on it. , or, , you know, your fertility rates dropping a lot.

They're like, yeah. And here's some ideas I have for it. , but often when I go to Catholic or Orthodox groups about this, there'll be like, no, we don't, we don't, we don't have that problem. , and I'm like, well, I mean, here are the statistics. You, you do seem to have a massive. , fertility rate problem and deconversion problem.

And it's actually much bigger than the Mormon problem who. Our admitting this problem. And they'll be like, ah, it's not a problem in our most devout groups. Don't worry about it. And I'm like, well, I mean, Even if that's true, you know, you look at this statistical, get this statistic. Uh, the, the devoutness of your groups doesn't seem to correlate that highly with things [00:36:00] like their propensity to use plan B, even though that the direct sin was in the tradition, why aren't the more religious members using it at lower rates, , which we have a whole episode on, you can check out our Catholic fertility rate episode. , but I don't it's, it is very interesting to me how culturally different groups are and how they relate to problems.

And I really fear this, denying that the problem exists strategy. It's going to be effective in a modern era. At,

Addressing it. I guess that the assumption is like, I'm trying to figure out why these two groups, specifically the hierarchical groups, cause large bureaucracies deny their problems at a much higher frequency than other groups that I've seen. And I'm guessing it's because they have sort of a history of will live.

There is really a major problem than the upper echelons of the bureaucracy are going to recognize it. I come up with a solution and tell us what it is. And it's our job to just defend the bureaucracies honor, and we can best do that by denying that the [00:37:00] problems exist.

Malcolm Collins: Which is, which is why we're working on this project and why we risk our reputation on this. But I think also a lot of people, when they begin to engage in prenatalism, a lot of our ideas seem really stupid at first. They're like, why don't they just do cash handouts? Why don't they just try to get cheaper housing?

Why don't they just. You know, Do you know, more generic religion, right? And then anybody who actually seriously engages with the topic. And I've seen this evolution of people over time where at first they think that we're like crazy or extremists, and then they've been in the movement for like a year and they've actually personally dove into all of the other stats and they're like, Oh, I got, I get now why you came to, you need to create an alternate education system.

And you need to build social technologies of a religious variety to that are either totally new or augmented versions of our historic systems instead of just saying well, we can go back to the way we used to do things because it's clearly not working. And the cash handouts clearly aren't working in the smaller [00:38:00] apartments clearly aren't working in the, you know, i, I also think it's interesting. We should do a different episode on this, but I'd also love to hear your sauce on this. Why do you think as we become wealthier and wealthier as a society, when I say wealthier and wealthier, people like, no, look at how much this costs, look at how much this costs. And it's like, do you really think your life is harder than someone in the 1800s?

Really? Really? When we talk about that why, why has society become so much less satisfied as it's gotten so much wealthier? Do you think it's all downstream of the other things that we're talking about in this?

Simone Collins: We only know the context in which we exist. We only can really compare our lives to where we stand now.

And we normalize to where we stand. So it's, it's, I think it's not fair to expect someone to consider their situation as though they had just stepped off the lifestyle of their ancestors, if that makes sense. [00:39:00] We're just not really wired to do that. We're wired to look at where we stand vis a vis our peers, but not where we stand vis a vis our ancestors.

Malcolm Collins: You know, That is where you get in social media a bit of the, the, the downside, which is the peers that you were being shown are the peers that the most other people are looking at.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Instead of the average human, right? Which is

Malcolm Collins: the peers that are near the top of our society, which causes things like women to completely misjudge what the average male looks like, men to misjudge.

The average female looks like people to misjudge, you know, what is real expected wealth for them. What is real expected societal outcomes for them? So you might be right there. I, I, I often have people like, be like, Oh, you know, Simone is, is mid, but you guys really seem to like each other. And I'm like, okay, dude, go to an airport, look around, see how long it takes you before you find somebody who is over 30.

and anywhere near Simone's level of [00:40:00] attractiveness. No, you're like, I think death initially in the top 1 percent of attractiveness for your age range. Um, Just if you guys, isn't he the best?

Simone Collins: Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: No, because people don't judge by public spaces. No, but that's, that's very

Simone Collins: true. It's in, and it is the top, not even 1%, but like 0.

01 percent that we're really. Primarily looking at on YouTube. And of course not even that, but the top 0. 01 percent with a filter on with makeup, with the best possible camera angle, the best photo of 50. So it's not great.

Malcolm Collins: This reminds me of a little experiment I ran with Simone once where you still didn't believe me that I was like, no, that's just youth.

Like you pointed out a few people in an important, you're like, babe, or. Nearly as attractive as me. And I was like, Simone, that, that girl is like 17 or 18 years old. And you're like, nah. So then later we were at a, an event where we had to go to like a, a [00:41:00] nightclub venue for like an industry event. So we had people of all different ages and everyone going in there under age had to get an X on the back of their hand.

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: said, look around the room, Simone. And see anyone who you think is more attractive than you and she'd point people out. And then I'd walk around to an angle where I could see their hand and it was always an X. And I was like, you misunderstand how much youth, I mean, beauty. It is insane,

Simone Collins: especially in women, how much beauty is not even beauty.

It's just signs of youth. It's insane. It is completely insane.

Malcolm Collins: It just is though often. And people completely missed this. And I am very defeatist about this in an online environment because it causes people to make missed expectations, but also about their life and trips. Like, Okay, when you're, for example, judging how often you should take trips online, people are going to disproportionately post when they're taking a trip

Simone Collins: because you

Malcolm Collins: always have the trip album after the trip.

That's where you

Simone Collins: What are you going to take photos of in your day to day life that you haven't already taken a photo of. So

Malcolm Collins: And so people [00:42:00] like create these, these norms where like one of my cousins was like well, you know, your kids won't be able to go on trips because you're having so many of them. And it's like, yeah, but my ancestors didn't go on trips, you know, like, and I'm denying a human the chance to live over that.

And another thing that they'll notice, people will be like, no. Like, Housing costs so much more these days. That's why. And I'm like well, you know, you could just choose to live with other people. And they're like well, come on, you can't raise kids in an environment like that. And I was like, remember the 1800s thing I noted here?

This house was in use during the 1800s, the ones that we live in. And it had like four, Four or five different families living in it back then people used to live like sardines where I grew up historically which was with Dallas you know, I hung out with a lot of recent Hispanic immigrants and they'd often have like, Three or four related families in very small houses.

This is a cultural expectation that you have created for yourself. That doesn't really even improve your quality of [00:43:00] life. That much sharing a house with other people really doesn't negatively impact quality of life that much. I know that's a sin to say, but it really doesn't.

Simone Collins: Well, Even, and this is what really blows my mind about our lifestyle, if you're a severe introvert, I thought, I was genuinely worried that I would never get to be alone again, that our kids would never leave us alone again.

Many of our kids, not all. But many of them are extreme introverts as well who love being around their siblings, but also really love their alone time, even alone time from us, which is just so awesome. So yeah,

Malcolm Collins: dreams come true. You marry a partner who handles that stuff for you.

Simone Collins: Well, Yeah, but also both of us, I think are pretty genetically introverted.

And that means that it should not have been a surprise. It's just, to me that we would have children who tend to appreciate time alone. This is

Malcolm Collins: crazy. Appreciate time alone. [00:44:00] The finer things in life. But no, I mean there's always ways in, in the modern environment to, you know, I mean, as you know, if you look at AI these days, for example, you can live like any fantasy you want to live, right. With the chat bots and stuff like that. Yeah. You, you, you live in such a area of, I think, Stimulational wealth. That because you're making these miscalculations about what should be normative for you and what you should expect before having kids, you know, it's not happening, but yeah. This is why I think vitalism.

itself is like the vitalist movement and the pronatalist movement these days are like one to one. In terms of the people I see cheering for them and stuff like that, like Richard Anania often talks about the vitalist movement. And I'm like, yeah, and you know, also pronatalist, right? So we've got to re Kindle.

That historic vitalism and the vitalism, which motivates sacrifice in one's [00:45:00] behaviors, but also the pleasure that can come from sacrifice and austerity that I think as a culture we have forgotten.

Simone Collins: Bring back vitalism and we'll get there.

Malcolm Collins: I think we're on our way. I think we're on our way as a society. Anyway, I love you to Desimone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. And what do you want for dinner? Mm. Bye.

Malcolm Collins: You know, Do we have anything in the fridge that's like defrosted? We should probably start defrosting some lasagna and some of the curry that I made from the freezer.

I slow cooked it. Well,

Simone Collins: On Sun, we only have one more night here after tonight. So just one thing then, do you want curry or do you want lasagna? Where are we going? We're going to the Hamptons. It's not in my calendar.

Is it not? Nope. It's in your calendar. Family drive to Hampton Bay's [00:46:00] afternoon at the Hamptons.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you put it all in Hampton's family.

Simone Collins: No, this has been in here. Can I see history of creation? It doesn't show history, but no, this has been here for a while. Someone just hasn't been paying attention. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. We

Simone Collins: won't, you just can't bother to know that we're going to the ton

Malcolm Collins: s Don't worry guys, we're not paying for it ourselves. So, can you then what, what, so well, I can

Simone Collins: make you, I want curry. I can make you your curry with rice tonight. I can.

Malcolm Collins: No, why don't I finish off the soup and do some pasta with pesto?

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Bow ties? Bow ties.

Simone Collins: Or macaroni thingies with little flavor twists. You notice that they put ridges on the bottom. On the macaroni.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let's try the macaroni things this time actually.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You're a woman of sophistication and a wonderful chef. You know you cook for your husband now, right?

Simone Collins: Only because you asked me [00:47:00] to.

Malcolm Collins: Do you want me to not ask you to?

Simone Collins: No, I think our evening setup works really well. So I'm happy to do it. I appreciate you giving me time to do it tonight.

 I love you. Bye.