Based Camp - August 22, 2025


Why Did Only Some Countries Have A Baby Boom？


Episode Stats

Length

44 minutes

Words per Minute

172.82878

Word Count

7,755

Sentence Count

571

Misogynist Sentences

6

Hate Speech Sentences

30


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about
00:00:05.120 the post-World War II baby boom. We have done an episode of this in the past, and the thesis that
00:00:10.780 we came to in that episode was that the post-World War II baby boom was predominantly about
00:00:18.460 decreased child mortality. And this is true. A lot of it can be just pinned on the head of,
00:00:26.020 if you think about that period, if you go to the beginning of it, it was something like half of
00:00:29.540 babies died. Then at the end of it, it was something like 2% of babies died. It was pretty big.
00:00:36.500 A very big jump. It was like, you're doubling the number of babies out of nowhere. But that can't
00:00:42.580 really explain everything because it didn't happen the same amount in every country. And if it had
00:00:50.600 just been medical technology, then it would have been based on how developed a particular country
00:00:54.240 was at the time. And that's what would have led to the baby boom. And you get a little bit of that,
00:00:59.060 but not a lot of that.
00:01:00.080 And the baby boom is incredibly important to study because if you look at this graph here,
00:01:03.660 when we're talking about fertility collapse, it really started in the U.S. around 1835.
00:01:08.620 And the only persistent reversal you get of it from that time period is the baby boom. And it is a
00:01:14.460 significant reversal of it.
00:01:16.660 It appears to, when we go through, and we're going to go through now, the country that happened in the
00:01:21.020 country that didn't happen in, when you go through that list, you can begin to try to build a thesis
00:01:27.660 on what caused this. All right. So in Italy, you had no boom or a very small boom. Okay.
00:01:38.820 Okay. In Greece, you had no boom. In Portugal, you had no boom. In Spain, you had no boom. All right.
00:01:48.700 In Poland, you had no boom. In Bulgaria, you had no boom. Throughout most of the Soviet Union, you had
00:01:56.980 no boom. Estonia, no boom. Lithuania, no boom. Brazil and Latin America, no boom. Argentina, no boom.
00:02:07.240 Uruguay, no boom. India, no boom. So is this a lack of economic thriving in these countries? That's
00:02:14.040 my first intuition. Most people commenting are going to be like, well, that's because they were
00:02:17.180 struggling economically. So what's the difference? Yeah, but all of Europe was struggling economically
00:02:21.200 post-World War II. A lot of places were struggling economically post-World War II without having the
00:02:27.400 boom. Okay. So now let's go. Okay. Where do we get a boom? All right. You get a boom in the United
00:02:34.620 States. All right. You get a boom in Canada. You get a boom in the United Kingdom. Okay.
00:02:41.720 You get a boom in France. You get a very large boom in Australia. You actually get an even larger
00:02:49.640 boom. The largest of the big booms happened in New Zealand. You get a very big boom in Norway.
00:02:55.620 You get a moderate boom in Sweden, but it began before the war started. In Denmark, you have a weak
00:03:04.660 boom. In Finland, you had a significant boom. In Iceland, you had a very significant boom.
00:03:12.420 In the Netherlands, you had a weak boom. In Belgium, you had a weak boom. In Switzerland,
00:03:18.360 you had a weak boom. In Austria, you had the strongest in Europe.
00:03:24.120 Whoa, Austria. Okay.
00:03:26.780 In West Germany, you had a boom, but in East Germany, you didn't have a boom.
00:03:31.700 And in Ireland, you didn't have a boom. You also didn't have booms in... Oh, interesting. You had a
00:03:38.940 very short one in Japan, but then it disappeared. So you had a non-Western boom in Morocco.
00:03:48.360 So again, keep in mind, like economic developments and stuff like this. And you had a boom in Mongolia.
00:03:55.620 You had a boom in Turkey. Not a big one, these non-Western ones, but you had them.
00:04:02.200 Okay.
00:04:02.600 All right. So trying to build a pattern here. Initial part of the pattern, really easy to see.
00:04:08.920 Anyone who's under Soviet communist rule did not have a boom. However, I didn't mention this one.
00:04:14.760 You did get a big boom in China, but Chinese communist rule, you get a big boom. Okay.
00:04:20.920 So first note here. Second, if you were part of the allies, you get a very big boom.
00:04:27.720 Okay. So it helps if you're a winner.
00:04:30.440 Right. Well, I mean, some people like technically won by not having the war ravaged their countries,
00:04:35.880 but we're not part of the allies. So an example of this would be Ireland. Ireland didn't have a boom
00:04:41.560 and refused to join the allies. Irish bastard. What's that? McCarran. That's an Irish name.
00:04:48.760 Save the Blarney for the Killeens, Patty. What? Archer, what are you? He's the target. What?
00:04:54.280 Yeah. I just remembered from the dossier. You know what, Patty? Hang on.
00:04:59.000 Lana, shut up. God. So where did you get access power?
00:05:04.120 Ireland? And Ireland was not an access power.
00:05:08.920 Are you sure? They were neutral. Oh, that's right.
00:05:13.960 Oh yeah. Whereas France got pommeled. It was not pretty, but.
00:05:19.800 Right. And it's not just the countries that were personally like, like hit by the effects of the
00:05:25.640 war because the North America and Canada and New Zealand and Australia, where you saw booms many
00:05:32.280 times bigger than the European booms, they were not actually like, they didn't see all the devastation.
00:05:37.080 So we've talked about, if you have a tsunami in an area, you'll have a higher fertility rate after
00:05:41.160 the tsunami than in surrounding areas. So like mass death can cause fertility growth. Maybe it triggered
00:05:47.000 something in these men's heads that they were at war and they saw all this. Maybe, maybe. So we'll
00:05:52.280 get to that. But then you've got other countries that maybe make less sense. Okay. Um, I also think
00:05:58.200 that things like, if I remember like Morocco, can you check this on AI was weekly allied with the
00:06:03.560 allies in World War II. So that could explain their boom, but not all allies have a boom. India doesn't
00:06:09.480 have a boom. Okay. So, so we've got to look, okay, what, what does India have in common with
00:06:16.360 the Soviet Union? And yeah. So Morocco was under French colonial rule and part of the French
00:06:21.480 protectorate. So yeah.
00:06:23.320 Yes. That could explain a weak boom. Then you, you have a weak boom in Switzerland as well. So,
00:06:28.920 so in Europe didn't participate. Right. But you could say, well, what about the access powers?
00:06:36.360 You had a big boom in a few of them. You had a very big boom in Austria, which was an access power.
00:06:42.680 And you had a very big boom in Western Germany, but not Eastern Germany.
00:06:47.640 So check something for me. Austria was not under communist rule, right? Also was Turkey under
00:06:53.560 communist rule? Can you ask any of this? Because I don't remember these ones, but like, why is Turkey
00:06:58.920 seeing a boom? Also ask, was Turkey an access or allied power? I don't remember that one.
00:07:03.080 In World War I, Turkey was access because they were under the Ottomans.
00:07:06.680 We're asking about post-World War II though, weren't we?
00:07:09.480 Yeah. So, so ask in World War II, which side was Turkey on? And did Austria see direct
00:07:17.400 fighting in its territory? Because I don't remember much.
00:07:21.640 Yeah. I thought Austria was just sort of taken by Germany.
00:07:26.040 It willingly joined if I remember. Turkey remained officially neutral for most of World War II,
00:07:31.480 and it had diplomatic and economic relations with both access and allied partners. But in February
00:07:39.000 1945, Turkey declared war on Germany and Japan as a symbolic gesture to secure a seat in the United
00:07:44.600 Nations, but it did not engage in any significant military action. So it was, it was looking out for
00:07:52.280 number one. No, I remember Austria being quite enthusiastic about joining Germany.
00:07:56.440 I said Turkey.
00:07:57.800 Yeah. And I said, and you earlier, you said Austria did not experience significant
00:08:01.320 fighting on its soil during World War II. After the Anschluss in 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi
00:08:06.760 Germany and became part of the Third Reich. Can you ask how enthusiastic, because Hitler was Austrian,
00:08:12.760 right? So I don't know if I would be that upset being Austrian and joining the, the,
00:08:18.200 like, I wouldn't have seen it as a wound to national pride.
00:08:22.760 Yeah. Maybe I've watched The Sound of Music too many times. So I'm, I'm, I'm too affiliated with
00:08:32.520 just like one family's approach to it. A notable portion of Austria welcomed the Anschluss. Many saw
00:08:39.160 it as fulfillment of a pan-German nationalism, uniting German speaking people. Yeah.
00:08:44.440 So it was mixed, but an enthusiasm appears to have been a little varied. So there, there was some
00:08:52.040 coercion, there was some pragmatism, but there were some people who were stoked about it. It seems.
00:08:58.520 And so if we, if we go through these countries and we're trying to, to fill this out, I can,
00:09:05.240 I can draw another, I'm actually going to see, do you note the other big thing that seems to cause
00:09:09.720 fertility booms or that seems to be the differentiator between the countries that had it
00:09:12.840 in the countries that didn't. It's, I'll just give it to you. Yeah. A distinct sense of national
00:09:19.560 identity. So, and not just national identity, but with us versus them propaganda. So if you look at
00:09:29.720 West Germany. A little bit of xenophobia, are you saying like even that far?
00:09:33.880 Yes. If you look at West Germany versus East Germany, very famously, the United States was
00:09:38.920 constantly dropping propaganda flyers into West Germany. But keep in mind, West Germany wasn't
00:09:44.840 like under the United States or something like that. And the way East Germany was under Russia,
00:09:50.120 the communist empire. It, it felt like those propaganda posters are saying, isn't it so great
00:09:56.680 to be West German and have this West German identity and be free as a West German. If you look at the
00:10:03.880 allied countries like throughout this entire area, all of them were subject to lots and lots of
00:10:09.000 propaganda about how great it was to be a member of their national identity. If you were an American
00:10:16.120 at this time period, you would have constantly be told, not only is being America the best and the
00:10:21.560 American way of life, the best and the greatest, and that everybody wants to be American because
00:10:26.520 America is the greatest, but you're getting this in New Zealand as well. You might check out,
00:10:29.720 you're getting New Zealand best and the greatest, right? Interesting. Okay.
00:10:33.800 But in, in what, which of the allies, like which part of the allies wouldn't have gotten this?
00:10:39.160 India, because India is under British rule at this time and, and wanting to escape a British rule at
00:10:45.640 this time. So Britain is not going to attempt to foster pan Indian nationalism while they are under
00:10:52.200 British rule. So this basically explains it. And this is, I think is a huge, it also explains why
00:10:59.080 Austria had such a fertility boom, because when they were under the Nazis, they saw a pan German
00:11:04.120 identity, which they were a part of. And after the Nazis, you would have continued to check again,
00:11:10.040 Austria, was Austria taken by the communists? No, no. Haha, Simone was wrong here.
00:11:17.800 Austria was divided just like Germany was divided. And just like in Germany, further strengthening our
00:11:24.600 point, the side under communist rule did not have as much of a baby boom as the side under
00:11:30.680 capitalist rule. Okay. So after the war, you then had, of course, given how close they were to the
00:11:38.360 communists, we would have been showering them with propaganda about how great it is to be Austrian and
00:11:42.920 not be a part of the communists. Now, many people note that the baby boom started before the war,
00:11:47.880 and it did start before the war, in large part because of medical technology. We've already
00:11:52.120 talked about this. But the big boom that happened after the war, I'm going to argue is directly
00:11:57.800 downstream of nationalism. But didn't nationalism peak before and during the war as they're trying
00:12:04.840 to win it, not after when they were like, okay, let's get back to normal life. No, because after the
00:12:11.000 war, we immediately went into the Cold War. I'm here arguing that the early stages of the Cold War,
00:12:16.360 before it became, you know, like long Vietnam drawn out national pride, the youth is rebelling,
00:12:22.280 blah, blah, blah. Everyone was fairly on board with the idea, right? Like, where are the good
00:12:27.400 guys? They are the bad guys. And better than that, for most people, they had just had it validated in
00:12:32.520 their minds. It's like, look, there really are bad guys. We really can go out and oppose them.
00:12:37.640 Like, let's work to do that. And what doesn't work is globalism for fertility rates.
00:12:44.760 You can see communism in Russia, and it was practiced in Russia versus how it was practiced
00:12:50.040 in China, as proto-globalism. Be proud to be a human. Don't be proud to be an Estonian. You know,
00:12:57.960 don't be proud to be, you know. So I think that in a big way, what's causing our current fertility
00:13:07.080 collapse could be downstream of what caused their fertility collapse during, or I mean,
00:13:15.800 caused the communist fertility to not go up in the way that the other countries did.
00:13:19.800 Because they didn't have this degree of national identity to pair, because they were getting just
00:13:26.520 as much propaganda as everyone else. I know, but I'm just thinking about communist propaganda,
00:13:31.000 and it's all about being so proud to be contributing to your country. You don't think
00:13:35.720 that that counts? I mean, I get this sense as an outsider looking in that there was this really
00:13:41.000 strong sense of here's who we are, and you will pay the price if you don't identify that way,
00:13:47.800 by the way. Well, it's be proud to be a member of our collection of countries, which again, the point
00:13:53.000 that I'm making here is for this sort of nationalist propaganda to work. It needs to be a little more
00:13:57.560 granular. There has to be like, there's no Borg. You can't be the Borg. You have to be like
00:14:05.160 a Kardashian. You have to be a Klingon. Yeah, you have to be one in a Kardashian. Did you mean
00:14:14.360 Kardashian? Sorry, Kardashian. Listen, why did, why? But yes, I mean, Kardashians also have high fertility
00:14:25.240 and a lot of pride. So yeah, I guess either way works. But pride in a distinct identity. And so I
00:14:32.040 think you could see this, like have lots of kids to serve the collective better doesn't work. And
00:14:37.320 it's what the EU is still trying to push, right? Like, yeah, I started trying to push in terms of
00:14:42.760 how they're handling this. And I think it's only going to make the problem worse for everyone involved.
00:14:47.080 Hmm. I disagree with you.
00:14:51.960 So I think, and this is why I promote with a lot of the ideas. At the end of this,
00:14:57.000 we talk about the speech that we're putting together. And in it, one of the things that I
00:15:00.600 talk about and why I want to work to do this is put together some sort of like Japanese perinatalist
00:15:05.960 event so that we can do it as like a joint, like we are doing this for self-defense, but what's the
00:15:13.000 word like national defense reasons, right? National security.
00:15:16.200 And the reason I really want to do that is to freak out the media. Because if you
00:15:21.720 host a US-Japan national security conference, you could invite some other countries, New Zealand,
00:15:27.160 Australia, which you're really doing is why are those countries getting together to talk about
00:15:31.560 fertility rates? Well, the core national security threat to all of them is China. And China is going
00:15:36.440 to immediately realize this. But what it's also going to immediately frame is how strong all of our
00:15:41.080 countries are vis-a-vis China. For people who don't know, China's fertility rates are like around
00:15:45.640 one now. New Zealand's is like 1.5 to 1.8. Australia is at like 1.5. The United States is
00:15:52.440 like 1.6. Japan's at like 1.3, one of the strongest for an economically developed country in
00:15:57.640 the region. So China's going to freak out. A bunch of media is going to freak out because they're
00:16:01.240 going to be like, hey, why are you doing this country? And I'm going to be like, well, you know,
00:16:03.880 we've got to figure out what we're going to do with China when there's no Chinese people left.
00:16:07.400 What we're going to do with Korea when they're all gone. You know, just things that'll really
00:16:10.920 freak people out and get them angry. And then the media does the whole thing on this.
00:16:15.400 And we can use that to get in front of people, one, a very vitalistic message, like us versus
00:16:20.680 them. But then two, frame it in a non-racialized context because, you know, this is, we're looking
00:16:26.840 here at the Pacific theater, right? And then three, I can combine a lot of the art and promotional
00:16:35.000 material with the event with anime and have that be very germane to the setting that we're in,
00:16:40.280 right? And so the media will pick up this over the top, very anime inspired, very sort of like
00:16:45.480 man's world inspired art style as the sort of pro natalist art style. And people will see that and
00:16:53.160 see the vitalism that is inside of it and want to replicate that. It's a very easy way. Like if you
00:17:01.160 want people to like, I'm not, I don't think I'm going to get the government to put pro natalist
00:17:05.480 posters in every classroom in the United States. No, that's not happening.
00:17:10.680 But what can I do? Oh, actually we should add to the speech. The thing about the baby toys.
00:17:16.120 You're half, you have that in there. It's in there.
00:17:19.000 Oh, it is. The people who had the baby toy. I mean, I can put in the actual stats,
00:17:23.080 but I'm going to put that just in the report and we can just talk.
00:17:25.400 No, no, no. I'm talking about when people were given babies by the government.
00:17:29.160 Yeah. And I'm saying I can put the actual stats in the PDF report, like the extent to which they
00:17:35.400 affected fertility and the treatment versus control groups.
00:17:38.680 Yeah. Because when people were given those little babies to take care of,
00:17:40.920 they ended up having more kids. And so maybe that's something.
00:17:42.760 Malcolm's referring to a baby simulation program that was tried in Australia in which adolescents were
00:17:51.480 given actual baby dolls. This was done to dissuade them from teen pregnancy, but it actually
00:17:58.200 increased incidence of teen pregnancy and having kids quite young. So.
00:18:05.080 But I think all of this is upstream of a very simple framing, right? The way you actually achieve
00:18:11.640 pronatalist outcomes, the way you actually get people to choose to have children is to have a
00:18:17.800 cultural identity, like believe they are a something and want more of that something to exist in the
00:18:25.160 future because they think the future is going to be bright.
00:18:27.160 Yeah. The way you put it really well is convincing people to have kids isn't about convincing people
00:18:33.960 that kids are great. It's about convincing people that they themselves are great, which is
00:18:39.720 the perfect way to put it.
00:18:40.840 Yeah. And if you, what a lot of groups attempted you to do this is to say, and we're great because we
00:18:48.040 were great in the past, which super backfires. We're always noting like very low Catholic fertility rates.
00:18:54.680 And I think that one of the reasons why Catholic and Catholic countries have such low fertility is
00:19:00.040 because their intuition immediately around fertility. Like whenever I talk with a conservative Catholic,
00:19:04.440 at least is restrictions. We need to restrict lewd images. We need to restrict gay marriages. We need to
00:19:13.000 restrict masturbation. We need to restrict like just restriction, restriction, restriction,
00:19:19.080 restrict abortion, restrict this. And they're basically chaining like a person's humanity and
00:19:27.160 expecting that person to flourish, I think. And I think what we're seeing is, is attempting to increase
00:19:33.880 fertility rate by adding restrictions does the exact opposite of the intent. One of the jokes I always
00:19:39.880 make when I went to AI to double check that this is true. And it was true up until 2023, where, you
00:19:45.880 know, somebody is like, well, you know, we can get fertility rates up if we basically banned immigration
00:19:50.120 and we banned gay marriage and we banned abortion and we made pornography illegal. And I was like, great.
00:19:55.400 All of those things were true in South Korea up until 2023. And the only one that I think is now not
00:19:59.480 true. It's abortion. 2021 I think was when abortion was somewhat legalized in South Korea. That doesn't
00:20:06.360 change the fact that it's still quite difficult to get an abortion in South Korea. Just FYI.
00:20:12.200 Yeah. And the point here being is that the countries with these incredibly strict restrictions have
00:20:19.480 incredibly big problems with fertility rates. I mean, the countries with incredibly loose restrictions,
00:20:25.720 and even the cultural groups with loose restrictions have much higher fertility rates,
00:20:30.680 or at least when the restrictions are expected to be self-imposed. So consider something like the Jews.
00:20:36.200 Jews, Orthodox Jews have tons of restrictions. They're just like restrictomania in terms of all their
00:20:41.160 rules. But the Israeli state, being a soft theocracy, literally enforces none of them.
00:20:50.440 Yeah, the rules have to be endogenous, not exogenous.
00:20:59.720 And I think that this is something that like, people just actually, I should mention that as a
00:21:06.360 contrast with Korea, because I think that's really good. Oh, Israel versus Korea. Yeah,
00:21:11.080 that's a good way of putting it. But yeah, I think that that's what we need to get back to. And that's
00:21:17.080 what every family should be promoting with their kids. And at the national level, get back to and I
00:21:23.480 think it's a conservative party, like we're already in a place where we're really close to being able
00:21:27.400 to do this. Because if you went to the conservatives of the 90s, they wouldn't be able to do this. They
00:21:31.480 had no vitalism to the party, right? Like they were restrictomania as well back then. They were like,
00:21:36.120 let's just go back to the past, create a bunch of restrictions, etc.
00:21:40.360 Well, and the idea also among the conservative party was to impose morality on people because
00:21:47.000 they couldn't be trusted or be seen as capable of imposing it on themselves.
00:21:51.960 Right. And we've talked about this before. The core reason why the conservative party stopped
00:21:55.960 doing that was because they used to be the party of the dominant cultural group,
00:21:59.480 which was sort of this Judeo-Christian alliance. And so they could attempt to impose their morality
00:22:03.960 on the population. But now because they're in the minority and the urban monoculturism majority
00:22:08.600 within this country, the urban monoculture attempts to use the progressives to project
00:22:13.000 moral authority through restrictions on individuals or on threats to companies and a broad alliance,
00:22:19.640 including like gamer bros and tech bros and conservative Christians are all like, no,
00:22:26.280 stop restricting my ability to have a culture that's different from your culture. But what that means
00:22:32.760 is that a big part of the cultural framing has become ultra vitalistic.
00:22:36.520 Mm hmm. And you see this in a lot of the art. If you look at our episode on like the aesthetics
00:22:41.480 of the new right, you see this with, you know, mixing in, you know, anime themes. One of the things
00:22:46.840 I think is incredibly vitalistic that we see in conservative art that you don't see in as much
00:22:50.520 progressive art is the competent and lauded use of AI is both in terms of video creation to create like
00:22:59.560 shorts and in terms of art or like thumbnails or like, whereas in progressives, you get your head
00:23:04.760 spit on off for using that much AI art. I mean, like our videos just use constant AI art in terms
00:23:10.440 of like the videos. We do AI songs in a lot of videos. We, you know, very, very lean into AI.
00:23:15.880 And this is because we don't allow, like they, they, they using their position of cultural dominance
00:23:21.800 want to restrict what we are allowed to think looks good. What we are allowed to, and you, you actually
00:23:27.560 know this of the anti AI community because there's that famous study done that when people didn't know
00:23:31.880 that art was AI art, even if they said they didn't like AI art, they preferred AI art.
00:23:36.600 So it means that the, the stated preference of, I don't like AI art is downstream of knowing that
00:23:41.640 it's created with AI, meaning that these people actually do have a preference for this art.
00:23:44.920 They're just forcing themselves to engage with it through disgust. And, and as such,
00:23:49.800 there is a level of beauty that is like vulgar to them that we can celebrate, right?
00:23:55.720 What you're looking for. And I think that this, this is how you really capture vitalism the most
00:24:01.160 is you look for things that are considered vulgar within the elite society of our age, but not for
00:24:11.160 actual vulgarity, i.e. not because they actually like damage an individual, but because there is some
00:24:19.720 other interest at play like status signaling or something like that. A great example here is anime.
00:24:24.600 I mean, this is why you see anime and anime related stuff so much in sort of new right art
00:24:29.320 and memes and everything like that is because there's this hard lean into. So that's why you
00:24:33.160 see a lot of means in, in mainstream new right art, you know, very, very low culture considered
00:24:38.760 vulgar by mainstream society. The government literally created a department named after a doge, right?
00:24:44.440 Like, but what's the post-World War II nationalism driven element of the baby boom also driven by
00:24:54.920 generally vulgar cultural amenities? Because I didn't, okay, how so?
00:25:00.200 So it was driven by the, the nationalism of the 1950s and post 1950s when you have this boom period,
00:25:08.040 right? Was absolutely driven by was what was at the time considered low culture and disgusting,
00:25:15.320 i.e. what dominated pop media at the time, comic culture, penny mag culture, the early science
00:25:22.680 fiction retrofuturism culture. I mean, today we call it retrofuturism. All of this stuff to your,
00:25:29.240 you know, opera goers at the time to your people.
00:25:31.960 Well, yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Sci-fi books and comic books. Yeah.
00:25:35.640 What we're seeing is very low culture, right? Yeah.
00:25:40.120 And people were taught to, you know, admire their ancestors through what the Western,
00:25:45.320 right? Like the Western, which was popular during these time periods and said, you know, America,
00:25:50.520 great. Awesome. We, we, we, we certainly didn't do anything wrong. I mean, there were Indians here.
00:25:55.560 We had the us versus them, cowboy versus Indian. You as a kid, you'd run around and play this game,
00:25:59.800 you know, but you, you, you, you can't do that anymore. Like you couldn't, you know,
00:26:03.560 take pride in the Cowboys today. Like what? Everybody would, would freak out. Right.
00:26:08.280 Sean, why is there a giant hole in my front yard? The hole was my grave. Gus made me dig my own grave,
00:26:18.200 then shot me and stole my boots. Oh, so you, uh, you were playing Cowboys and Indians, huh?
00:26:25.720 Just Cowboys. Playing Indians is offensive. And then the buzzers ate your entrails. That's awful.
00:26:31.640 Yeah. It was a tragic end to our adventure, but it's the realism that makes it fun.
00:26:36.280 But you couldn't. I guess the last big cowboy film we, no, we've had a,
00:26:39.960 actually there's, there's been a decent number of films romanticizing Cowboys.
00:26:46.840 Which one? Not, not versus Indians though. Yeah. Not versus Indians.
00:26:50.840 But the point here being is that in the 1950s, the culture that was lauded, think back to,
00:26:57.960 to the 1950s cultural boom. And what do you think of if you are imagining like what people are doing
00:27:06.360 or where they're gathered, right? It's at a diner, a very low culture restaurant or at a soda shop.
00:27:13.560 Oh, soda fountain or soda parlor. Yeah.
00:27:16.920 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not imagining, you know, big glamorous restaurants or anything like that.
00:27:22.360 Right. Um, which is if I go back and I try to imagine, you know, other periods,
00:27:26.360 like say the 1920s, I am imagining that. I am. Yeah. Well, and today what is considered
00:27:31.320 aspirational are these jet set lifestyles such that people are literally buying, renting time on a
00:27:38.760 private jet set just to fake it to people that they're on a private jet. Yeah. That they're that
00:27:45.960 what is now aspirational is unsustainable. Whereas during these times of nationalism,
00:27:49.400 you're right. Low culture is framed as more celebrated.
00:27:54.520 I know what she's talking about here. What she means, because this is actually crazy to me that
00:27:57.640 this is a thing is you can rent private jets. You don't take off. You don't fly anywhere in them.
00:28:03.480 They're set up so that you can take lots of selfies in them.
00:28:05.960 It's I don't, I don't even know if it's a real private jet. There's this one in LA that you can
00:28:09.720 spot as soon as you see what it looks like on like the rental site. And then as soon as you see it,
00:28:15.080 you can tell which social media people are renting like an hour on it.
00:28:20.360 That's wild. Yeah. But yeah.
00:28:22.440 So people, I don't know if other, other evidence of this, just in case you find this amusing,
00:28:26.680 people literally buy things like Hermes bags on eBay. So they can look like they've purchased
00:28:33.240 a bunch of things from designer shops. And there's also this really huge issue of
00:28:40.200 What do you mean? Do they like go to the designer store and take pictures like walking out with it?
00:28:44.120 No, they typically just show the pictures in their apartment, but it makes it seem like they went
00:28:48.120 shopping and they're like, Oh, this is, you know, just so busy. And then people also buy and return
00:28:54.120 clothes so much so that retail stores are suffering and they're needing to change their policies because
00:28:59.960 so many people are just buying and immediately returning outfits to make it seem like they
00:29:04.920 are having these huge clothing hauls that they ultimately can't afford.
00:29:08.120 And in the 1950s, you didn't have this.
00:29:10.520 No, no, people value thrift. And it, yeah, what was aspirational was more that you had the perfect
00:29:19.400 wife and the perfect family and the perfect kids and that you entertained. Well,
00:29:23.720 you had your barbecue. You could make a good burger. You could make a good jello dessert,
00:29:30.920 but you had your car in the garage, but it wasn't that you went on fabulous vacations or bought a ton
00:29:36.680 of stuff. I mean, it, there were consumerism was big, but it was consumerism on a slightly more
00:29:41.560 sustainable level. And it was like, do you have the top of the line kitchen?
00:29:45.400 No, it wasn't that there wasn't a wealthy elite culture of the time period. It was, it was that
00:29:50.520 there was outside of that, a mainstream cultural perception of an ideal to strive for that was not
00:29:57.960 that culture. And, and if anything, the highest form of culture you could ascribe to was the not
00:30:05.240 elite culture version. And if you look at, I mean, we try to do this within the way we, we, we promote
00:30:10.680 things like people notice I wear Amazon essentials in every episode. Simone got her dress on Etsy,
00:30:16.520 you know, like we're, we're not coming at this, like trying to show, oh, this, this glamorous life.
00:30:22.920 We talk about being a Kikomori all the time. Like we never leave our house. We don't bother
00:30:27.080 entertaining people. We don't do, you know, birthdays for our kids. We don't do, you know,
00:30:32.040 big Christmases or anything. And, and we, we brag about this because it sets a norm,
00:30:39.960 which is the norm that you need, which is a patriotism in whatever you are and how that's
00:30:45.400 different from other people, which obviously we have a lot of pride in and in sort of wholesomeness,
00:30:50.360 I think as well, like the, the, the culture that was sold was wholesome. But then as I also mentioned,
00:30:55.480 very important, there was, it was a forwards looking culture. It was not a culture trying to recapture
00:31:02.920 a past. So what's really ironic is the people who, you know, do the cargo cult of the 1950s and,
00:31:09.320 and do the child wife dress up and everything like that. They're missing the spirit of it,
00:31:13.320 right? The spirit of the 1950s, which was retro futuristic, which was, which is progress,
00:31:18.280 which is look at how great it's going to be in just a few years. Yeah. Like we split the atom.
00:31:22.360 We're in the atomic age now. It was so, you know, retro futuristic that everything was called like
00:31:28.920 atomic at the era. Like, like the, the, the entire art style that you associate with like 1950s ads
00:31:33.960 is called the atomic art style. Like that might actually be really cool to make that like slang
00:31:38.920 in our family, like atomic, but to mean like, cool, but yeah, like every, everything was about
00:31:45.880 the atom, you know, and when you'd go buy toys, they'd be like, what do we, what do we call our
00:31:51.320 wagon? Well, what's like cutting edge radios and flying. Okay. The radio flyer.
00:31:57.640 That was sort of a bit earlier era, but it was still an era that looked ahead. And now so much of
00:32:01.960 conservative culture are parts of it really. I'd say the, probably the, the, the backseat
00:32:06.920 part of it, like the part of it that's sort of, I think right now filtering out of the party
00:32:11.320 after sort of the MAGA coup wants to pearl clutch and go back to an earlier way rather than embrace
00:32:17.240 vitalism and look to the future. And it's, well, it's not working. It's, it's not working for them.
00:32:23.400 In fact, most of the influencers I know of this persuasion don't have a family and kids.
00:32:28.360 I mean, I think it's because it's just not fun to tie your life to somebody like that,
00:32:31.320 right? Like that, that could be a big part of it. Like what, why, why, why does nobody,
00:32:36.280 you know, want to marry Nick Fuentes, right? Like if you have this, let's go back to this
00:32:41.480 earlier era and then maintain it in, in stagnancy forever, who wants to, who wants to sign on for
00:32:47.640 that? Right. But if you're like, look at this bright future, look at the future, look at the
00:32:52.840 talking, the future of talking machines that we have now, right? Like this is amazing.
00:32:56.760 Right. And yet so much of society, interestingly, not as much the conservatives, much more the
00:33:02.520 progressives have a shoot it. They're like, ew, I hate AI. It's so gross. It's so icky. It's so
00:33:09.720 terrible. I only can see how it's, it's bad. And then you have the, the much more common on the
00:33:15.160 conservative side, which I think surprised a lot of people that the conservatives became the party
00:33:18.200 pushing for like regulation against regulating AI. And the progressives were pushing for the regulation
00:33:24.200 of AI, but it's because they, they, they maintain norms through this pearl clutching. And so everybody
00:33:30.680 who wanted to pearl clutch about AIs naturally found allies among the progressives.
00:33:36.920 Yeah. It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, just how pessimistic about the future
00:33:44.040 the progressive party is. And also the urban monoculture in general, that, that enthusiasm
00:33:49.000 and excitement for the future is totally gone. And it does seem to be playing a major role in
00:33:55.160 the depression and lack of vitalism in younger generations. They're like, why should I bother?
00:33:59.320 I'll never have the same level of wealth as my parents. I'll never have this or that. It's really
00:34:03.160 frustrating. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I, and my kids talk like that. I'll be like, bro,
00:34:11.640 you're growing up with talking machines. Like, do you understand how cool what you can do is you
00:34:19.960 can go to one of these AIs and just type in a question and it will give you an answer that you
00:34:24.840 can chat and have interactive worlds with them. Like we're building with our fab.ai to make better
00:34:29.400 that you can like just the future to me looks so infinitesimally bright compared to previous
00:34:36.280 generations. If, if we do this right. But that was also true in the 1950s. I mean, this was the
00:34:42.360 era where it was very much a, the future might be bright if you put everything in to make it awesome,
00:34:47.080 but also, Hey, stick your head in the locker in case the atomic bomb explodes and kills everyone.
00:34:51.640 You know? Well, yeah, it was, yeah, I guess. So what you're saying is the right
00:34:57.560 mood for a baby boom is one in which you are very proud of your group and you think the future is
00:35:05.080 bright, but there is an existential threat and victory is not guaranteed. Yes.
00:35:13.080 Yeah. I think, yeah. I think feeling like you've already won or that's what Israel has right now.
00:35:17.960 All of those things you just mentioned. That's a really good point. Yeah. Okay.
00:35:23.240 I actually think that this is part of why Muslims have struggled so much with their fertility rate
00:35:28.200 is they force other Muslims into a pan Muslim identity over pride in their own group. Whereas Jews,
00:35:34.760 Jews have much more pride in their own sect of Judaism often than they have over
00:35:40.440 Jewish identity. Yeah. This is something else I hadn't really thought about. Cause I was just
00:35:45.080 assuming for example, that Soviet Russia or the USSR more specifically would just have this,
00:35:53.160 that there would be no difference between pride in the USSR versus pride in like your specific
00:36:00.760 Orthodox Jewish sect. But what you're saying is you really do need much more localized communities
00:36:07.400 to feel excited about their own identity and they can be loosely allied. So it doesn't have to be
00:36:13.720 that you are as an autonomous country, a small thing that's proud of your small group. You can be part of a
00:36:20.280 big country, but you do need to also be part of a small group and really proud of it. Meaning that the
00:36:25.720 diversity or variety of the United States is helpful and important insofar as we're allowed to celebrate
00:36:31.880 it and let it be distinct. Right. And we'd probably be worse off without it. Cause it was something that
00:36:38.200 happens a lot in the comments as people are like, no diversity is terrible. And it doesn't seem intuitively
00:36:44.520 right to me. Help you see your own group as more different. Like there's a ton of diversity within
00:36:51.000 Israel, for example, right? Huge Muslim population, huge Christian population. As Curtis Yervin suggested
00:36:57.240 we, we use instead of diversity is variety, which I think is, is a pretty good way to put it because
00:37:02.280 diversity has been somewhat ruined as a term. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's my new take on what we need
00:37:10.040 to be leaning into more. I like it. I like it. Variety, pride, a feeling of existential threat,
00:37:19.160 but a feeling like beyond that existential threat is a future so bright and exciting that you are
00:37:24.280 so stoked to fight for it. Exactly. Beautiful.
00:37:31.400 All right. I love you, Simone. Alexander is actually religious. He identifies as Jewish. And then I
00:37:36.920 remember when I went to their house, one of the times that they were doing a Jewish celebration,
00:37:42.840 one of those meals. I want to say, I don't remember which one it was. Was it a Shabbat dinner? Yeah,
00:37:48.120 you might've been a Shabbat. Yeah. But I didn't contextualize it as religious in my head because
00:37:52.200 there were so many, obviously non-Jewish people there, but of course, how is someone obviously not
00:37:56.920 Jewish? Because their affiliation was clearly rationalist above all else or, or not rationalist,
00:38:04.440 but you know, the wider like EA community. So I thought of it as like an EA meetup in my head
00:38:08.680 more than a Shabbat dinner. But I was like, oh, of course. Yeah. So they are raising their kids.
00:38:14.040 Religious. So, yes. Any comments on today's episode were very mean when I checked them.
00:38:22.040 I didn't check them. I was so busy trying to get the slide deck and started and...
00:38:26.840 Yeah, we're going to speak.
00:38:28.760 I don't know if we're able to say that. Oh, we're not? Yeah. Well, don't screw it up. Just
00:38:34.360 don't mention anything about it until... Until it's done.
00:38:38.360 Well, or yeah, or maybe we won't like that. We could be invited back if we keep our mouths shut.
00:38:44.040 So, you know, there, there's one of these...
00:38:50.920 Oh, let me get my ethernet cord one second. This is one of these things where I want you to keep
00:38:55.080 your mouth shut until we know it's okay. Don't make them regret inviting us when we could...
00:39:00.280 I mean, you're trying to pitch a conference. You're trying to pitch all these other things.
00:39:03.160 You're not going to get them. You read the new... You read the new write-up?
00:39:10.360 I did. Yeah. I'm... You're not making this easy to set up. You're not like...
00:39:17.880 Like, I'm just going to write a book and that's going to be easy. And I'll just memorize the book.
00:39:22.520 And like, no, no, you should have just made a simple outline, but you are incapable of doing that. And so
00:39:28.440 somehow on top of everything else that I have to do this week, I need to... So it's just going to take
00:39:34.600 longer because you decided to make this impossibly difficult. And of course not ordered. And I get
00:39:40.040 that you're like ordering it from a like narratively rich standpoint, but you like keep jumping around
00:39:46.520 from like causes to significance to solutions in a way that doesn't work well with slide decks or
00:39:53.320 outlines unless you're doing like a Ted talk. And I get that you're trying to keep it narratively
00:39:57.880 engaging. So like, I'm trying to accommodate that while also like giving materials that are
00:40:01.800 professional and usable after we leave. The burden I place on you... That's my job.
00:40:08.920 In case you can't tell, because it does have a structure to it, is to start with why is this
00:40:15.800 important? Then to transition to all of the things... What are the causes? What are not the causes?
00:40:21.800 And what are solutions? I know, I get it. And that's good. You just jump around.
00:40:27.880 I do not. And you're not exactly like thorough. And you just jump to like the solutions that
00:40:33.720 are the most self-promotional and like not evidence-based, but fun.
00:40:40.920 That's the real solution, as we'll learn in today's episode. The real solution to fertility
00:40:46.360 collapse is promotional sort of nationalism, futuristic nationalism, I guess I'd call it.
00:40:51.960 And you, you know, a lot of people, when they come to this, they want to do it from the perspective of,
00:40:57.560 you know, cash handouts or regulation or, and all of that stuff seems to make things worse.
00:41:03.880 In the, in the slide deck I put together, if you look, for example, at Europe and you look at
00:41:09.240 the, the amount of contraception laws that are in a country, and you look at the fertility rates,
00:41:15.000 a strong correlation to more contraception laws leading to lower fertility rates.
00:41:19.320 And so like, I, I get, I, I, I don't know. I just, I, I don't, the self-promotional ones are the
00:41:28.040 ones that work. You need to create promotion. You need to create pizzazz. You need the public
00:41:32.360 talking about it. That's the one thing that nobody has really tried yet.
00:41:36.360 Oh, wouldn't you say Hungary and Turkey have tried it pretty?
00:41:42.280 No, no, they, they, so if you, if you look at what they did, they made like a number of
00:41:47.720 politicians went around and talked it up and everything like that, but they didn't create
00:41:51.640 like a branded movement. They didn't create like a, oh, and you can identify as one of these things
00:41:57.640 and dedicate your life to this. And this can be like an active choice that you make.
00:42:01.640 They didn't do that. It was just like, go back to sort of an older Hungarian identity,
00:42:07.800 which is what you see a lot of traditionalist conservatives innately wanting to do when the
00:42:12.440 point that I'm trying to make here is don't do that. It makes things worse. So if your intuition
00:42:19.320 is we should look to the past to make this like, like be more like we were in the 1950s or something
00:42:26.840 like that instead of become this new, amazing what it is to be American thing, because in the 1950s,
00:42:32.600 how did they contextualize themselves? Well, you know, because you can just read like the,
00:42:36.680 the comic books of that time period, it was retrofuturism, right? It was all like, we're
00:42:41.000 going to go to space and we're going to conquer the universe. And we're going to, which is ironic
00:42:45.720 that people would be like, go back to the 1950s when in the 1950s, everything was futurism
00:42:50.840 or, or like over the top, bigger than thou sort of like superheroism and stuff like that. Not,
00:43:00.360 you know, broody superheroes like we have today, but like the, we're great kind. So I'm, I'm promoting
00:43:07.080 this stuff because I think genuinely it is the stuff that works. Not that it doesn't also help us, but
00:43:14.840 you think it's too self-promotional? I'm going to
00:43:24.360 like adjust things a little bit just to add professional polish. But I, I think it's,
00:43:30.920 I think it's great overall. Okay.
00:43:33.000 Nobody survives!
00:43:38.520 Everybody!
00:43:43.240 Oh no, he's got a shield!
00:43:44.760 Oh no!
00:44:00.200 Get me!
00:44:02.360 Come on and get me, monster!
00:44:06.200 The pain!
00:44:12.240 Everybody!
00:44:14.900 Let me in!
00:44:15.940 Let me in!
00:44:45.920 But now who saved you?