Based Camp - The Left Eats Itself？ Woke Culture's Internal Struggles (With Bryan Caplan)

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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. 0.96

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, 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.94

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 1.00

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.

00:13:48.700 Right. Yeah. Yeah.

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 1.00

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.

00:17:29.760 Yeah, we get that a lot.

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 1.00

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 1.00

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, 0.92

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. 1.00

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 0.86

00:25:47.660 of like conservative Jews who do not like variety, who don't engage with the education system, 0.61

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 1.00

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, 1.00

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.

00:27:56.420 My pleasure, guys. Thank you.

Based Camp - October 19, 2023

The Left Eats Itself？ Woke Culture's Internal Struggles (With Bryan Caplan)

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