The Left Eats Itself？ Woke Culture's Internal Struggles (With Bryan Caplan)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
190.0658
Summary
Brian Kaplan is an economics professor at George Mason University and a New York Times bestselling author. He's an author of not just a ton of books, including some favorites of ours, like selfish reasons to have more kids and the case for the case against education, but also in collaboration with the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal, a book called Open Borders, The Science of Ethics and Immigration, which is illustrated.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I've done some fun Twitter polls of, you know, are you left? Are you right? Do you worry about
00:00:04.800
the left getting mad at you? Do you worry about the right getting mad at you? And one of the
00:00:08.640
biggest groups that lives in fear is the left of the left. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Left. It's not
00:00:14.520
quite like the ready, but you know, we're like the Amish, but it is a weird dysfunctional
00:00:20.160
subculture of people who feel like they've got to be looking over their shoulders. Would you like
00:00:24.300
to know more? We are really excited today because we have a very special guest joining us, Brian
00:00:29.920
Kaplan. He is in addition to being a professor of economics at George Mason University and
00:00:35.380
a New York times bestselling author. He's an author of not just a ton of books, including
00:00:40.160
obviously some favorites of ours, like selfish reasons to have more kids and the case against
00:00:44.900
education, like two huge obsession areas for us. But also in collaboration with the creator
00:00:51.680
of Saturday morning breakfast cereal, an awesome web comic, a book called open borders, the
00:00:56.640
science of ethics and immigration, which is illustrated. And there just need to be more
00:01:01.680
books out there as avid readers of comics and manga, like throughout our youth. We are huge fans of
00:01:07.540
this format. So like super stoked, especially when it's something about policy. Well, it's wild. We
00:01:12.300
actually have a Saturday morning breakfast cartoon in one of our books as well. We asked for permission.
00:01:16.420
So that's, but other things he's written on is, is the case again, don't grow up to be a feminist
00:01:20.760
is one of the books. And one of the most recent ones is on how democracies are non-functional or
00:01:26.340
becoming less, less optimized for good economic outcomes. So ladies and gentlemen, if you need
00:01:32.280
some good reading, basically just search Brian Kaplan's name. So the priming that I wanted to go
00:01:38.040
into this interview is because I find this very interesting and I haven't seen your pontification
00:01:42.240
on this particular angle yet. When I look at all of the things that you're seeing as problems,
00:01:47.180
they both seem to align with many of the things that we think about the world or, and I think
00:01:50.940
most people have really thought about things. So they're very sane and based takes, right?
00:01:55.260
Fertility population is going to begin to decline in the developed world, which is going to have
00:01:59.680
major economic effects. The academic system is working less and less well. There's sort of
00:02:04.860
social contagions like feminism, which are causing many downstream societal effects.
00:02:09.760
My question to you is realistically, where does the world go?
00:02:15.420
50, 100 years from now, do we see a beginning of a collapse of the developed world? Do we see
00:02:22.180
small social groups begin to gain more power? What's going on?
00:02:27.360
My honest answer is I always say we'll muddle through. There's no collapse. There's no disaster.
00:02:32.640
Even the idea that things will get overall worse is I think highly unlikely. Mostly I think in terms of
00:02:39.140
missed opportunities, things could have been so much more than they were.
00:02:42.160
If we get to immortality in a thousand years, but we could have done it in a hundred years,
00:02:47.720
well, what a horrible tragedy for 900 years worth of people. It's not the same thing as
00:02:53.920
the Planet of the Apes or something like that, or just a complete takeover. It's just that
00:03:00.740
we could have done so much better and we didn't. How sad.
00:03:05.140
So then economically, how do you think demographic collapse plays out? Do you think that it won't have
00:03:10.160
that big of an effect? Do you think it will have a big, like how can countries adapt to it?
00:03:14.400
It will have a huge effect relative to what could have been. That doesn't mean that we will see that
00:03:19.900
living standards actually go down in absolute terms. I'm not going to rule that out for the
00:03:24.920
most egregious cases. I do think that despite the great dysfunctionality of politics over the world,
00:03:31.400
including democracies, that when things get really bad to the level of things are actually going to
00:03:38.640
get noticeably worse before your eyes, then I think normally countries get more flexible. It's like,
00:03:43.940
all right, well, we can't have them actually get worse. What politics is really bad at is
00:03:49.120
realizing incredible missed opportunities that people just have not gotten used to yet.
00:03:54.920
For example, so South Korea, if it really looks like they're going to be unable to staff their
00:04:00.380
old folks' homes, they'll let in the immigrants at that point. It has to get bad, right? And then
00:04:06.060
they will, all right, fine, we will go and prevent things from getting noticeably worse. They'll do what
00:04:10.860
it takes to prevent that. But the fact that they could have had five times the GDP they have right
00:04:17.340
now if they just changed decades ago, well, that can keep going on indefinitely. There just isn't the
00:04:22.460
same kind of pressure to realize theoretical opportunities as there is to prevent obvious
00:04:29.440
disaster where pressure is pretty high, actually.
00:04:33.660
Yeah. So on this topic, I mean, what would be your theory of the best ways to increase fertility
00:04:40.240
rates within a country? I know you wrote a book that was one theory on how to do this, and it's
00:04:45.600
convinced hundreds of people, which is a lot, to have more kids or kids that they otherwise might not.
00:04:50.380
But at a government level, what do you think is the most effective solution?
00:04:55.840
There's a myth out there that natalist policies don't work. Normally, it's based upon this totally
00:05:02.440
impressionistic thing. A country had falling fertility, the government adopted a program,
00:05:08.080
and then fertility didn't suddenly go up. So, all right. Yeah, that's not really a good measure
00:05:13.520
of policy efficacy. As I'm sure you guys know, the gold standard is experimental tests. There are two
00:05:21.500
noted natalist actual bona fide experiments, one in Quebec, one in Austria. Both of these found quite
00:05:28.340
large effects of modest natalist incentives. So I would say that the very best approach is just to go
00:05:36.960
and push harder on these incentives. My preferred one actually is specifically just something like
00:05:43.420
giving people a one or two or three year complete tax holiday every time they have a kid.
00:05:49.460
That is one approach. There's a lot of variations on this. Another one is just we're going to go and
00:05:56.320
tie whatever retirement benefits you get to your lifetime fertility or maybe the amount of taxes that
00:06:02.540
your kids pay. But in terms of just the simplest to adopt and the one that fits most with a lot of
00:06:09.200
short-term thinking, the human exhibit is precisely have a kid. You don't pay taxes that year. Maybe
00:06:14.340
you don't pay them for a few years, which again is also not to be coy. It is a thinly veiled eugenic
00:06:22.140
approach, which I think makes a lot of sense in terms of people that are statistically likely to have
00:06:26.680
kids that are going to have a lot of payoff for society. They're the ones that are best to go and
00:06:32.420
actually encourage. Again, I am very pro other people having kids too, but in terms of bang for
00:06:38.720
your buck, I think this is the one that makes the most sense. I do have a piece where I just snapped
00:06:43.300
together two bodies of evidence, one on how sensitive is fertility to incentives, and the other one is
00:06:50.600
what is the net fiscal effect of having another kid. And I do say that this program that I'm talking
00:06:57.860
about or policy I'm talking about of giving people a like a one-year tax holiday for having another kid
00:07:03.280
is the holy grail of fiscal policy because it really does look like it is a tax cut that more than
00:07:11.960
pays for itself, which has been otherwise pretty hard to find.
00:07:16.460
Interesting. So I know your upcoming book is on capitalism and freedom economically and how that
00:07:22.620
benefits everyone. Not everyone. I never say everyone. A lot of people, but probably the
00:07:28.640
aggregate. It benefits the aggregate. Yeah. That's actually the kind of language that the book is
00:07:32.320
aimed to crush. Everyone will benefit. No, not everybody. Most people. Okay. Most people. But so I
00:07:42.320
would love to couch this and I want to hear how you think about this problem, which is when we look at
00:07:48.260
where fertility rates go up and where they crash, you know, when you see fertility rates begin to go
00:07:53.260
below replacement rate is typically in a country when the average citizen is earning less than around
00:07:58.140
5k a year. And you begin to see them go up again when a family is earning over half a million dollars
00:08:04.060
a year at an individual level within a country. And our takeaway from this has been what is actually,
00:08:10.000
and we say this as like big supporters of capitalism, what actually is one of the big causers of
00:08:15.820
fertility rate collapse is when people begin to engage with the modern economic system. Because
00:08:21.520
people at both ends of the spectrum aren't fully engaging with the modern economic system and the
00:08:26.340
modern economic system does a very good job of disproportionate or dynamically pricing the value
00:08:32.880
of potentially productive cultural groups and individuals within a society. But it does a very bad
00:08:38.920
job at judging sort of long-term value of those individuals. So it will always pay somebody
00:08:44.760
just enough to not spend time with their family to some extent. And so the places that are most
00:08:50.860
engaged with sort of capitalistic freedom are often the places that have the lowest fertility rates.
00:08:56.560
Like, how do you think about that? Or do you just reject this as a thesis?
00:09:00.600
Well, let's see. The main thing that I know is if you go and race income versus education as
00:09:05.780
predictors of fertility for the United States, where I've worked with it a lot of the most.
00:09:08.980
So again, just to understand, you know, statistically, this basically means that we're going to allow
00:09:14.200
fertility to depend upon two variables and then see what the relative weights are. So when you do it
00:09:20.220
this way, actually, the big punchline is that it is education and not income that oppresses fertility.
00:09:27.520
In fact, the highest fertility subgroup out of those four possibilities, you know, so you've got high
00:09:35.320
income, low income, high education, low education. The highest fertility suburb is actually the high
00:09:39.920
income, low education group. So in your mind, think of plumbers, high income. So really, I don't think
00:09:47.240
that it is income per se that seems to matter. I mean, I say it's more of education, even education.
00:09:52.000
Well, why would education do it? I'd say it's the kind of education that we are used to in Western
00:09:56.960
countries, which basically, even if it does not explicitly discourage fertility, it basically gives
00:10:02.880
fertility so low of a priority and just replaces it with career success is the only thing that
00:10:08.740
counts. Yeah. Including perhaps we're especially for women, but that is the real story. So it's not
00:10:14.700
income itself that seems to matter. And income by itself does seem to be good for fertility.
00:10:19.180
Yeah. Well, I mean, you could frame it as education is the lengths of time you've spent and the amount
00:10:24.900
that you have personally invested into this cultural indoctrination system that's indoctrinating
00:10:30.960
people into a cultural group that values fertility very little.
00:10:35.220
Yeah. I think that that does make a lot of sense. Right. And it fits with low East Asian fertility.
00:10:41.540
Although I also do like to think about East Asian fertility as being the best confirmation of my
00:10:46.240
story that baseless internalized norms of helicopter parenting, the idea that you must go and ruin your
00:10:54.200
own life in order to be a decent parent. I think it does reduce fertility. I think East Asia,
00:10:59.300
where helicopter parenting is most severe is also where we see the ultra low fertility does fit
00:11:05.060
overall with that story at least. Yeah. Well, and I think East Asia is a really interesting. So one
00:11:10.840
of the things, you know, as people here who really value freedom, one of the things that does concern
00:11:14.900
me is typically within outside of the East, you're looking at like Western cultural groups,
00:11:20.020
typically the less freedom a group permits, the higher fertility rate it's going to have within that
00:11:25.320
cultural group. But you can see that this isn't a truism because it doesn't exist within East Asia.
00:11:29.860
In East Asia, restricting freedoms does not increase fertility rates.
00:11:36.180
So what would be the Western countries that you have in mind for?
00:11:41.080
So it's not countries, it's cultural groups. So typically if you're looking at like religious
00:11:44.980
groups, so in the US, which groups have the highest fertility rates? They're the groups.
00:11:48.720
Yeah. Yeah. Like Amish, for example. Is that what you're thinking of?
00:11:53.420
The Amish, the Haridi, the, you know, and this is true within every individual cultural group. So
00:11:59.660
if I'm looking at Muslims, the more progressive, loosey-goosey Muslim is going to have very low
00:12:05.140
fertility rate, whereas the very conservative ones are going to have a very high fertility rate.
00:12:08.680
And this is one of the things that this actually, Diana Fleischman was doing an interview with you
00:12:12.900
and mentioned that we had this idea. And I was wondering what you think of it, which is if only
00:12:17.880
through, if it is true, and it appears to be true, that within countries, the groups that remove
00:12:23.940
individual freedoms, especially from women, have higher fertility rates, that they will come to be
00:12:29.640
more predominant mindsets in the future. Would you agree with that? Or?
00:12:33.360
That's pretty obvious. You essentially just have to have some massive force cutting the other way in
00:12:38.100
order for that not to be true. Honestly, my long-term view is straight out of Jurassic Park,
00:12:43.960
life finds a way. It's not possible for fertility to stay low forever. We know that there is a
00:12:50.940
substantial heritable component to desired and achieved fertility. So in the long run,
00:12:56.040
childless people are just, their genes are getting wiped out of the population, and they're going to
00:12:59.920
get replaced by people who actually want to have kids and like doing it. So it's just, you know,
00:13:04.700
that may take centuries, but still, you know, the idea that we can just go down to zero, I think is
00:13:09.220
pretty crazy. Like when life finds a way, it really does. No, I agree. I mean, it's engaging, and yet
00:13:16.660
we just want to think about who feels like they are, have to watch their backs, and like they're
00:13:22.920
under a lot of social pressure. I actually think that very left-wing people in the West are some of
00:13:29.160
the people who, you know, not just are, but feel like they have to really watch what they say for fear of
00:13:34.580
getting kicked out of their subculture. I've done some fun Twitter polls of, you know, are you left?
00:13:39.420
Are you right? Do you, like, do you worry about the left getting mad at you? Do you worry about the
00:13:43.400
right getting mad at you? And one of the biggest groups that lives in fear is the left of the left.
00:13:50.340
Yes. Left. Right. And so, I mean, I think that they have actually managed to create, you know,
00:13:55.420
it's not quite like the Haredi, but, you know, or like the Amish, but it is a weird dysfunctional
00:14:01.600
subculture of people who feel like they've got to be looking over their shoulders every time that
00:14:06.260
they go and discuss what they see with their own eyes to make sure that reality is allowed,
00:14:12.700
reality is discussable. So I think of them as, out of large groups, I think that they are probably
00:14:18.600
one of the largest groups that just feels a lot of internal sense of, I have to be really careful
00:14:25.180
what I say. I was kind of surprised by how open people that were responding were to this.
00:14:31.740
You know, it's obviously, it's a Twitter poll. You can always say, ah, people are just making
00:14:34.720
stuff up. I just tend to doubt that. So we have the idea that like people are deliberately going
00:14:40.040
and responding to anonymous polls with mischievous answers. Sometimes they'll do it if it's like
00:14:44.540
really funny, but it's got to be funnier than I'm left wing and I'm scared of the left. That's not
00:14:49.540
hilarious. Well, I also think it's intuitive. I mean, I think anybody who looks at that and
00:14:55.560
this isn't happening is probably lying to themselves to some extent. And this is, if people
00:15:00.680
say, what, well, what are we trying to do with this channel is trying to redefine what the right is
00:15:07.420
to an alliance of diverse cultural groups against a homogenizing urban monoculture, which is to say
00:15:14.480
that, you know, one of the things I always say is that if you look at a progressive Muslim or a
00:15:18.980
progressive Jew or a progressive Catholic, you know, they're going to have the same views on
00:15:22.100
gender, the same views on sexuality, the same views on where we, how we should relate to the
00:15:26.580
environment, the same views on the future of our species. Whereas if you talk to, you know,
00:15:31.120
conservatives of these groups, they're going to have wildly different takes on that. And so
00:15:35.220
I think rebuilding the conservative movement as an alliance of free thought is one of the ways we
00:15:44.060
can preserve and ensure that at least within one space that's possible, but we still get
00:15:48.900
trashed by our viewers all the time, you know? I mean, what you're saying makes a lot of sense
00:15:52.580
if you think about modern leftism actually is something and everybody else is more just like
00:15:58.040
people on the island of Misfit Toys, where it's like, I'm not that thing, but I don't know,
00:16:02.600
I've got like a broken paw here. Okay. And meanwhile, I'm the one whose head isn't screwed on,
00:16:08.260
right? So I think you've got something going on there. I don't, I don't know if you catch the
00:16:12.960
reference to this classic animation. Oh, I know you have a playmation. Yeah.
00:16:16.580
Yeah. No, but it is really interesting to say that. It's pretty rather than true, but I still
00:16:22.100
like it. Yeah. Well, I mean, people ask, well, you know, why are you really only interested in
00:16:26.820
talking to the right? And it's because it's this left cultural group, while they may be the dominant
00:16:30.180
cultural group in society today, they lower fertility rates so much that they really aren't
00:16:34.940
part of the conversation when we're talking about the future of the species. So, you know, right now
00:16:40.340
we're focused on communicating with the other groups that are going to be there in the future
00:16:43.980
to hope we can get along once this group has self-extinguished.
00:16:49.340
Yeah, it's going to, it will be a while, but I mean, honestly, I mean, I try to talk to anybody
00:16:54.140
that's curious to talk to me. It's just that while there's many individuals on the left that have
00:16:59.660
talked to me, but I basically get no institutional love from any left wing group, no matter how
00:17:05.500
simpatico my themes are with what they're doing. It's just, yeah, he's not, Brian's not one of
00:17:10.300
us. So we're not going to go on platform and we don't want to be associated with anything that
00:17:16.140
we don't like. There's this one cartoon that I really like. It's basically just a stick figure.
00:17:21.900
And the first panel says, wait, did you just agree with one of the things that I believe?
00:17:26.920
Next panel, you have to agree with all the things I believe.
00:17:34.820
I love that. You know, one of the things that you said in a recent interview, and I want to hear
00:17:39.820
pontification on why you think this is the case, is you're saying that when people really angrily
00:17:45.540
attack you, that the most common or a common trait among them, and this is for your pronatalist views,
00:17:53.020
is that they have chosen not to have kids themselves. Now your pronatalist views and our
00:17:56.740
pronatalist views are boasted. This is a choice for every individual. We don't want to pressure
00:18:00.760
any specific individual who doesn't want kids into having kids. Why do you think that they get so mad
00:18:06.040
about this? Yeah, normally I don't like to do this, but this is a case where I just have so much trouble
00:18:12.820
resisting the simple story that you are going against billions of years of evolution and there's
00:18:21.120
always a part of you that's just saying, no, no, we have a billion, you know, let's say,
00:18:27.300
what would it be? A hundred million ancestral generations have reproduced and you're going
00:18:34.020
to stop. There's some sense of internal conflict. And again, this does just fit with me that,
00:18:40.300
I mean, I have had irate people, I guess always women, you know, just call me up and yell at me
00:18:46.960
and say, I am very happy to my life. I don't need kids. And I don't think a person happy with
00:18:52.420
their life calls up a stranger and yells at them. So just so our viewers know how insane is it.
00:18:57.580
Every other day of your life is happy. And this is the one day you're having a bad day. And
00:19:01.480
I'm the person that's on the receiving end. It just doesn't sound like that to me. It sounds like
00:19:06.320
you're in a lot of internal conflict. You know, like I, I hate to go and sound biblical about this,
00:19:13.180
but it does sound so much like the story of St. Paul getting kicked off his horse in the desert
00:19:18.340
as is all what I saw. So you still saw it. It's like, oh, why does not persecute me?
00:19:24.100
It is hard to kick against the pricks. So I get, of course, it is so entertaining and almost like
00:19:33.580
cackling to yourself with the glee and the thought that, oh, my opponent secretly agreed with me.
00:19:37.620
And normally I don't have that at all. This is what I'm like. It's kind of fits. I don't know.
00:19:45.100
Like, I can't read mine. So I'll never really know. But still, it sure seems that way.
00:19:50.400
What I think is really interesting about what you're saying, if for people who haven't read
00:19:53.780
his works or seen his other interviews, is you are the first to admit that statistically,
00:19:58.500
having kids actually doesn't make you that much happier. Like it makes you a little bit less
00:20:02.540
happy on average. And, and so you're not even going out and saying, oh, these people have no
00:20:08.020
happiness in their lives, but that's what they're hearing because I think it's what they fear and
00:20:14.020
what they, what the little devil in their head is telling them. Yeah. So probably the most irate
00:20:19.100
caller, I actually had a summary of the happiness research on both marriage and parenting, where I
00:20:25.300
said that statistically the people to feel sorry for are not people with kids, but people who are single.
00:20:30.320
And this comes down to, yeah, like the happiness gain of marriage is huge. There is a tiny happiness
00:20:37.800
hit from being a parent. And then I said, if you combine these two things and remember that having
00:20:43.340
kids is a lot of what keeps marriages together, then it seems like from that point of view, it's
00:20:47.360
net positive. But this was a childless and single woman and she was irate. And I say, I'm just
00:20:54.540
describing the results, trying to do it in an amusing way. I don't mean to mess up your day or
00:21:01.600
anything. Perhaps you are really happy, even though you're calling strangers and yelling at
00:21:05.700
them in the middle of the day, but probably not. Well, it is interesting the way that people enforce
00:21:13.280
cultural norms within the far progressive, the sort of like urban monoculture is through
00:21:20.140
chastising either privately or publicly, people who say things that deviate from those norms.
00:21:26.200
And that's not true for most cultural groups. Very few cultural groups publicly chastise people
00:21:32.340
from other cultural groups for not following their rules, which is fascinating.
00:21:38.740
Although perhaps given how much fear the left has of being yelled at by the left, they might not be so
00:21:44.220
exceptional, actually. Probably most of the energy is directed towards your in-group.
00:21:48.160
I have talked to multiple left-wing professors who have said that they are scared of getting
00:21:53.620
cancelled. And I'm like, I'm listening, I'm squinting. You, you're like totally boring. And you're like
00:21:57.820
man of the left. They might get me. And it is because they are just culturally so much closer.
00:22:06.940
Whereas, honestly, my fear of having the left do anything bad to me is really low. It's because
00:22:13.500
I'm just not that close to them culturally. And so, you know, it's, oh, well, none of us left-wing
00:22:18.920
people will be your friend anymore. So, wow. All right. Yeah. That's not really going to change my
00:22:22.860
day that much, actually. Yeah. Well, and that's something I really appreciate about you as an
00:22:27.480
intellectual is you clearly have no audience capture. Like you're looking at the work that
00:22:31.900
you're putting out and it typically would appeal to right-leaning individuals. And then you put out
00:22:35.720
something like we should have totally open borders without any fear of losing your audience.
00:22:40.500
But I think people who are in this sort of intellectual dissident space can afford to do
00:22:45.940
that in a way that almost no other group can because your audience won't hate you for saying
00:22:50.700
something that you think is true with data to back it. Yeah. I mean, probably it's true that
00:22:56.440
the people that have, you know, like, like, let me put it this way. I've received very few death
00:23:01.460
threats in my life, but I think a hundred percent of all the death threats have come from anti-immigrant
00:23:05.520
people. Wow. Oh, they are the most psychotic people that I interact with, which does not mean
00:23:15.120
that most of them are psychotic, but they do have the highest share of psychotics as far as I can tell.
00:23:22.400
But still, I'd say that the only groups that will just shun me are ones where being anti-immigration
00:23:30.020
is the whole thing. Whereas ones where they do a lot of issues, then it's okay. Maybe Brian is,
00:23:34.580
we're totally bad on immigration, but we like this other stuff. And that doesn't mean that we
00:23:38.000
dislike him. It's more of, you know, dissident groups are generally just not so picky and they're
00:23:44.080
like, well, you know, we'll take what we can get. Where, you know, obviously if it's a single issue
00:23:48.640
group, then they do tend to be hostile to me. Yeah. And of course, even that varies quite a lot
00:23:56.140
by individual, but, you know, none of them, there's no immigration person who's ever threatened me or
00:24:03.720
anything. That is interesting. Yeah. To me, that means that these anti-immigration groups probably
00:24:09.980
view it as an existential threat to their culture if immigration is allowed. Yeah. Which is interesting
00:24:15.620
because countries that have the strictest immigration policy, one thing we always point
00:24:19.900
out is if you look at wealthy countries, the countries with the strictest anti-immigration
00:24:23.520
policy typically have the lowest fertility rate. And they typically had the anti-immigration
00:24:28.160
policies before their fertility rate collapsed. So it appears to actually kill a cultural group
00:24:34.880
to not have competitors around. Yeah. At least it's somewhat plausible, I guess, to whether it's
00:24:40.580
causal or not. It's a bit hard to say. Let's see. I mean, I guess I would go around thinking
00:24:45.300
about, let's see, well, here's actually the East Asian economy that's most open in France, which
00:24:50.380
is Singapore. They're not the worst of fertility, but they're not the best either. Yeah. Or again,
00:24:56.400
that's just one example. I mean, I mean, a lot of this, I would say, maybe we just don't have
00:25:00.880
enough data to really know. Well, yeah. And different cultural groups relate to things in
00:25:06.140
different ways. So it might be that East Asian groups don't increase their fertility when they have
00:25:10.060
cultural competition, but Western cultural groups, whether it's like Israel or the U.S., do.
00:25:14.940
Yeah. Yeah. Israel, there's quite a bit of plausibility. And this is the main country where
00:25:20.620
normal people talk about there being race. That's a good point.
00:25:24.860
We've got to beat that other group. I mean, at first time, people were telling me,
00:25:28.400
that's not really true. Okay, fine. It is actually true there. It's not just something some intellectuals
00:25:33.060
have superimposed on behavior. It's something that normal people use to describe what they're doing
00:25:37.240
with their lives. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're proud of who they are. And I think that when you
00:25:42.520
were talking about education plus wealth, Israel is where it's that rings true for me. When I think
00:25:47.660
of like conservative Jews who do not like variety, who don't engage with the education system,
00:25:52.100
but are otherwise wealthy, they have lots of kids. Yeah. I mean, also worth pointing out,
00:25:56.000
they got lots of education, but just of this bizarro kind that consists in, let's argue about the
00:26:01.740
meaning of dead books written by a bunch of different people and pretend they all have to agree.
00:26:05.160
Yeah. I mean, my impression is it's not necessarily.
00:26:09.560
What a shame that so much brain power goes into this completely futile intellectual endeavor.
00:26:14.880
We talk about that. It seems to us like a bit of an IQ shredder. We're like, oh my gosh,
00:26:18.540
these are like, we were, we spoke at one point about the meritocracy system of that culture as well.
00:26:22.840
Like how it really sorts for very smart people, well, smart and charismatic people. Like the most
00:26:27.380
informed is able to get the most power and status and influence. And yet we're like, oh,
00:26:30.720
but these people could get us on Mars, but they're not.
00:26:32.840
But as I pointed out to Simone, when the cultural group abandons that, that's what the reformed Jews
00:26:38.980
did. They said, oh, we'll still judge cultural status by how smart we are, but we'll have this
00:26:43.220
done by some sort of external system, like the university system. And that just acted like a
00:26:47.460
huge backdoor, which destroyed their fertility rates and was used to convert them all to the
00:26:52.520
progressive urban monoculture. And so there's a reason why they do this, even though it appears
00:26:57.580
unproductive. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, hold on. This has been fantastic. We're out of time,
00:27:03.680
but I would love to have you back. Simone, do you have any final thoughts?
00:27:08.660
No, I just, I'm very entertained that the death threats come from immigration. So Malcolm,
00:27:13.720
we better watch our backs if we ever start talking about that more.
00:27:16.120
Yeah. I mean, I think it's almost all cheap talk. I'm not actually worried.
00:27:23.280
But it's interesting to see where it comes from.
00:27:25.200
A lot of fear of even normal intellectuals, much less dissenters, especially when there are people
00:27:33.000
of tenure who say, I'm afraid to speak my mind. This was like, if you won't do it, come on,
00:27:37.100
who's going to do? It's like, you have this dream job for life. You don't live in a war zone.
00:27:42.240
If there's something that's worth saying and it won't be said, but for you, stick your neck out
00:27:47.180
and say it and take your lumps. There's no other way to live. It's worthwhile.
00:27:53.400
Beautiful parting words. Thank you so much for coming on.