00:02:14.740I was thinking about actually speaking on this topic, but I'm kind of glad I didn't because it seems to be very well covered.
00:02:20.520It definitely would have brought something really redundant to the theme.
00:02:24.600And it seems to also be very spicy in the UK context because I've been looking at, okay, how have people reacted?
00:02:29.600And, you know, even like the insinuation that, you know, mother and father type of combo should be normative in society seems to have sparked like pretty much insanity in the UK media.
00:02:42.660And, yeah, I mean, the idea that, okay, you know, the fertility crisis seems to be tied into the idea that, okay, the only way to solve this is some form of coercion.
00:02:55.240And this is what, you know, the fascists at NADCON want you to do.
00:03:03.120But before we get into that, a lot of people who are really not familiar with any of these conversations will be thinking, what fertility crisis?
00:03:19.860I mean, at least in terms of kind of the newer data that we have is that I think it's about 3% of the world population are living in countries where fertility is not declining.
00:03:31.740So the idea that, you know, the population is growing is very old news.
00:03:37.700The population is falling pretty much everywhere.
00:03:40.420And it's not falling in the sense of, like, you can't feel it in the water right now.
00:03:44.280If you go out on the street, plenty of people there, you know, you might see more elderly people slowly.
00:03:49.040But it's not something that's, like, an urgent problem.
00:03:51.920But the fact that, you know, the population pyramids in pretty much every region are reversing and you have many more older people than younger people is something that can have extreme, like, knock-on type domino effect consequences that, you know, people are just starting to model and starting to realize.
00:04:09.520I mean, it's predicted that a country like South Korea, which has, you know, abysmal birth rates, they've fallen under one child per couple, like the TFR is like 0.9 something, they're essentially going to die out.
00:04:24.960So this is kind of we're watching the last South Koreans slowly kind of march on to their graves if this trend continues.
00:04:31.420And they're not going to die out in, like, 500 years.
00:04:33.580This is pretty much in about 100 to 150 years, you know, you'll see the last South Koreans say goodbye to them.
00:04:40.340And, you know, this is only just, like, a startling example, but the same trend line applies to pretty much everywhere in the West, with very few exceptions.
00:04:47.200I mean, like, consistently over-replacement fertility rates you have in places like Israel and, like, the Amish community, in Mormon communities in the U.S., but even they are just about at replacement and probably going to fall under replacement very soon.
00:05:03.660So this is a form of, you know, essentially what people are trying to do now is to identify what exactly causes this.
00:05:12.060And, you know, overall, there are many factors that can go into it.
00:05:16.820There's, you know, environmental factors, you know, even, like, kind of xenoestrogens in the water, things that might affect, you know, we've heard about declining testosterone, you know, fertility issues for younger and younger women.
00:05:29.300And the fact that most people who want to have children after a certain age need IVF, there's all sorts of factors going into it.
00:05:36.460But I think the conclusion that a lot of people at NatCon arrived at, and one that I have as well, is that the main factors are essentially cultural.
00:05:46.280Like, we've really, you know, once children became optional, we've really kind of lost the will to have them, in a sense, because they are really a burden in a way.
00:05:57.800And I think people can, you know, they can't really model their lives with children, but they know how they feel right now.
00:06:03.760And they know that, okay, you know, sleepless nights, cost of daycare, you know, I'm renting, I don't want to have that hassle, you know, all these things.
00:06:13.720It's just not worth it to a lot of people.
00:06:18.160Because, look, the housing crisis is a UK very specific problem, but that's part of it.
00:06:24.080But just more broadly, urbanization means, you know, Peter Zahan, who we've had on the show and talked about this, when you live on a farm, kids are free labor.
00:06:32.420When you live in a city, they're like an expensive pair.
00:06:39.480I mean, one can argue that, you know, urbanization is something that's kind of tied into culture as well.
00:06:44.460I mean, the incentives for urbanization are kind of mimetic as well.
00:06:49.900It's not like, okay, it's not just people chasing money, but it's, you know, it's a culture that forms after these kind of, after the Industrial Revolution as well.
00:06:57.820People kind of gather it in urban centers to, you know, to work on the factories.
00:07:01.220And a certain kind of culture emerged around that.
00:07:03.580And then a fertility rate dropped to the level of that culture of people, you know, being together in that environment.
00:07:09.260So I think what we've reached now is the point where kind of a lot of these memes converge.
00:07:15.520And for the life that the typical individual leads in these cities, yeah, it's just, it doesn't make logical sense to have children.
00:08:13.680I think the only country who's actually gotten it back from below replacement to above replacement is Georgia.
00:08:19.620Because they've been, I think the local patriarch, people are very religious in Georgia, baptizes every third or fourth child that a family has.
00:08:28.040So, like, big families are incentivized to, you know, get to the special ceremony to, yeah, to meet the patriarch and have their child baptized by him.
00:08:35.160So, yeah, I think, you know, a strange exotic type of, you know, incentive that I don't necessarily know would work here.
00:08:41.760I don't know if the Archbishop of Canterbury would, you know, pump people up to have lots of kids.
00:08:47.340But, yeah, I mean, you know, the housing crisis, I think, is really an important thing as well.
00:08:53.140But if I think back at, you know, all of the squalor and struggle that my ancestors went through
00:08:59.980and just the material conditions that they had children in, you know, I don't think the fact that they rented and didn't own was a big problem for them.
00:11:01.300Because there's part of me that thinks that when we delve into this issue, we're going to find a lot of things we don't like pretty quickly in terms of, you know, the correlation between prosperity and the number of children people have.
00:11:15.860You know, do we need to be poorer so that we start reproducing?
00:11:22.800Like that would be a question some people ask.
00:11:24.380I'm not saying I'm asking it, but people will start to ask all of these questions.
00:11:28.280You talk to, I've been talking to a lot of people at the conference about it, like Louise Perry.
00:11:32.600She's like, it's all about prosperity.
00:11:34.180You talk to Eric Kaufman, he'll say, well, it's about religion, you know, and he's not religious, but religious communities reproduce and non-religious basically don't.
00:11:42.380Like, where do you see the crucial piece of this?
00:11:46.920AI and risk-related compliance isn't tomorrow's idea, but rather today's edge.
00:11:52.020Moody's combines advanced AI with one of the most comprehensive data estates.
00:11:55.720Yeah, I think it's, you know, unfortunately it's hard to kind of delineate which particular ingredient in this,
00:12:24.600because these are all kind of factors that accentuate each other and it's hard to say what, you know, what the first domino was when, you know, you're like 100 dominoes down the line.
00:12:34.080So I think, you know, in a way the education of women was a big thing.
00:12:38.920You know, it kind of freed women from marriages that were not necessarily of convenience,
00:12:45.420but in the sense that, you know, they really were dependent in many ways for protection and for financial support,
00:12:51.920which, you know, not saying anything about the quality of those marriages.
00:12:54.480A lot of marriages, you know, are arranged or, you know, maybe coerced a little bit in the beginning and people end up having a really good marriage.
00:13:00.360So, not saying that that's a bad thing, but it's, you know, the fact that people did have a lot more options,
00:13:07.560like in the case of having children as well, I think led to a decline in marriage rates and then, you know,
00:13:13.900and the revealed preference of not having to deal with each other is bullshit.
00:13:17.560And so the inevitable question is, if we are to address this problem, what do we do?
00:13:24.060Yeah, you know, it's like kind of a Pandora's box type situation, putting the toothpaste pack in the tube.
00:14:33.420It's going to completely restructure the way you relate to yourself, to your partner, to your life, to what your priorities are.
00:14:39.460But for most people, this is a good thing.
00:14:42.100I really think so because a lot of the problems that people have psychologically with kind of the burden of modernity is this aimlessness of, okay, what is it that I'm supposed to be doing?
00:14:55.940It's all about you self-creating, you know, building this unique, you know, snowflake type thing that only you represent.
00:15:02.500You know, finding your authenticity, going to whatever silent retreats and meditating on what it is to be alive and stuff like that.
00:15:09.520And I've personally found by doing this stuff, it feels like it's kind of an eternal circle.
00:15:13.940You're kind of always back to square one.
00:15:15.700And it's like, you know, whenever you think you've had this major epiphany that you've kind of fought yourself out of your thinking process, you're back in the shit.
00:15:24.700Do you think part of the problem as well is that we are accustomed to living a life where our own pleasure is the main thing?
00:15:32.500Yeah, I think that is part of the problem.
00:15:35.780It's a hard problem to solve because that's kind of the most immediate thing that you want to do because, you know, in a way, at base we're all animals and, you know, you want to scratch an itch and, you know, eat the candy and do all that stuff.
00:15:48.060Plus, there are so many ways to scratch so many itches that you didn't even know you had and probably didn't have until, you know, yesterday when you saw, hmm, people are having this itch online.
00:15:58.760So I think that's, you know, something that people underestimate, like the mimetic power of a lot of the stuff that comes in from the internet.
00:16:08.540I mean, you know, the kind of more benign way is that, you know, some company convinces you to buy shoes off of the internet.
00:16:14.580The more kind of vicious way is that, you know, your 14-year-old's convinced to chop off her breasts because she saw, I don't know, 500 TikTok videos of people saying,
00:16:27.520So, yeah, I mean, it is a very strange new world and it is, you know, kind of all about this because we don't have a structure to fit into to say, okay, what is life?
00:16:40.420You know, life is you wake up, you go feed the animals, you have this responsibility, this fills up your entire day.
00:16:47.380And then you go to bed and you, you know, say your prayer and you, you know, you report to this authority and you're kind of inbuilt into the system.
00:16:55.900And everyone else believes the same thing because obviously this is what you believe.
00:16:59.540I think, you know, since time immemorial, we had something like that.
00:17:04.840And people are told, okay, it's time for you to, to make up on the fly, whatever you think that thing is, you know?
00:17:10.700And I don't think most people, probably very few people are equipped to actually do that, you know, to create their own authenticity from scratch.
00:17:18.580And then they fall prey to a lot of this stuff that's just like out there in the ether.
00:17:22.700And a lot of this stuff is really predatory.
00:17:24.280Like, you know, whatever, slot machine gambling now.
00:17:27.880It's like, you know, slot machines used to be really bad in like even the 80s.
00:17:31.340But nowadays they have essentially the same logic inbuilt like Candy Crush.
00:17:35.440And you have people just like sitting in front of the slot machines, you know, peeing on themselves after three days and, you know, like dying of dehydration because this stuff is just so powerful.
00:17:45.460And we're really not equipped to deal with it.
00:17:48.300And yeah, like I said, not just a slot machine.
00:17:49.960It's like everything is like that now.
00:17:51.740And, you know, the free market idea is that, you know, there is a need.
00:18:05.740So, yeah, I think a lot of our environment is set up like that.
00:18:11.620And, you know, maybe this trad stuff and, you know, kind of back to the land, all this stuff is kind of a bit of a backlash against that.
00:18:18.920You know, I don't necessarily think it's all, you know, super wise.
00:18:21.640And I think a lot of people, you know, I hear stories of, you know, like 19 and 20 year olds now getting married just and being afraid of all this stuff that we're talking about, the predation that they see around them.
00:18:31.840And then they get really kind of disillusioned by the fact that, you know, marrying some random 19 year olds who thinks that, you know, the West has fallen off the Internet is not like an idyllic way of living.
00:18:46.560And it's not really like, you know, in the pictures of you walking through a wheat field with your babies and stuff.
00:18:50.920So, yeah, we're definitely at a sort of kind of metaphysical crossroads and how we relate to ourselves and in the West in general.
00:19:00.620And people feel like they've lost a lot, but we're still kind of fumbling in the dark about what to do, what to do about it.
00:19:07.940And one of the interesting things that has risen with this whole natalism conversation is the rise of surrogacy.
00:19:15.700Now, you look at it on the surface, you go, OK, this is, you know, this is good.
00:19:18.860You know, people who can't have kids can have kids.
00:19:22.480And then you look into it, you go, oh, this is dark.
00:19:25.780Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a strange thing, because obviously the kind of the more kind of napkin presentation of the case for surrogacy is really nice.
00:19:34.680You know, you have, you know, women who maybe don't are not of great means, you know, but are willing to do it for kind of generously to help someone who maybe is infertile and they really want their own child.
00:19:47.740And this is the only way they can have it. It's really, you know, it kind of pulls on the heartstrings, especially for someone who knows, you know, are infertile yourself or, you know, it's it's it's tough out there.
00:19:58.100Like I said, you know, a lot of people are having trouble with this and it feels like, oh, you know, you you scratch my back.
00:20:03.600I scratch yours type of situation. But I think the the the case for it or against it in a way is kind of a case of like like virtue ethics.
00:20:11.960Like if we allow this type of activity to to start and if we allow this little edge case where, you know, it's obviously virtuous and nice, the thing is not going to stay there.
00:20:24.800You know, we have we have, you know, slippery slopes are all around us and we've been slipping on so many and at this point where I think surrogacy, especially commercial surrogacy and cross-border commercial surrogacy is already a little bit of a of a strange beast.
00:20:41.300Because, you know, especially now with the war in Ukraine, you know, this is kind of a lot of the uncovered was essentially that a lot of people who are evacuating were these kind of like Big Brother style houses of women who, you know, were living kind of in a cluster home.
00:20:55.840I don't know, pregnant with some Westerners baby and they were kind of keep being kept in sort of, I don't know, observation so that the the moms and dads or whoever was ordering the baby from abroad was.
00:21:08.800Yeah, it was kept in check of how the ladies were doing and stuff like that.
00:21:13.540So I don't know. It was. Yeah, I mean, you could see this.
00:21:17.140We're still at the beginning of this and this is already kind of, you know, it feels a little bit predatory and it feels a bit predatory to interrupt and just completely like commercially sever the bond between mom and baby.
00:21:28.540I mean, I've I've had a baby. I'm going to have one again very soon.
00:21:32.860And it's the idea that, you know, in the hospital, even though if I signed the contract before, obviously, you know, I consented to this previously without knowing how I'd feel when the baby arrived.
00:21:44.060I would just have to, you know, give the baby, you know, just hand it over and say, sayonara, I'm going to go home now.
00:21:50.060So, yeah, there's also a lot of physical cost involved.
00:21:56.080Yeah, it's it's, you know, recovering from pregnancy is not always easy.
00:22:00.080There are risks of, you know, risks that are really hard to calculate in advance as well in terms of the impact on your health.
00:22:06.180You know, some women, you know, end up having like stress fractures, uterine ruptures, all sorts of, you know, things that just happen in the course of being pregnant might lead to infertility for themselves afterwards.
00:22:18.060So, yeah, I mean, obviously, if someone's more of a libertarian bent, they say, OK, you know, put this in a disclaimer, put it in the contract, obviously, let them know that this, you know, side effects might include this, this and this.
00:22:30.340But I think when it comes to something so profound as the bond between a child and mother, you know, I don't think your body knows that, oh, this is someone else's egg and this is some, you know, third party sperm.
00:22:42.540And, you know, this is a strange, it's a different situation.
00:22:45.500But, yeah, it just feels like, you know, one of those slopes that, you know, it's you can tell when you reach the precipice that it's like this, this is the direction it's going into.
00:22:56.940And we're just about there and we're taking the first step down the slope.
00:23:00.540And it's, you know, the the darkness at the bottom is essentially, you know, people ordering babies for anything.
00:23:06.500Well, it comes back to the point you were making about the market is like, what is the commodity that's being traded in that exchange?
00:23:15.160And it starts to get a little bit creepy very quickly.
00:23:19.860And then, as Francis says, once you look into it, then it sort of starts to make sense a little bit.
00:23:25.120But I want to come back to what what can be done about it, because I was chatting to a bunch of young women at the conference.
00:23:33.060And I actually did something I don't usually do, which I just stood back and listened for a long time.
00:23:39.060And there's a kind of different set of perspectives on this, because there are some some people who go, well, you know, we got to put the message out there and whatever.
00:23:47.820And there are other people who I think quite rightly say, well, look, like a guy on stage telling me a bunch of statistics about when I'm supposed to get pregnant by isn't really going to persuade me to do it.
00:23:58.420And, you know, since I've had my son a year ago, I've been putting out like wholesome thirst traps on the Internet about like, is this is how fun it is.
00:24:09.620This is how much I'm enjoying his acute photo, whatever, you know, I'm going to stop doing that.
00:24:13.160And what is the way to to just let it's not about persuading people into doing stuff is just like letting them know that that option that we talked about has all these benefits that you might not see because you're living in, you know, in a big city.
00:24:30.280You may none of your friends have kids.
00:24:32.320You know, the one of them was saying, I didn't hold my first baby until I was 30, which to me and probably to you being Eastern European, you're like, what?
00:24:39.460Well, you know, that was the case for me as well.
00:25:06.440It's real bad if you don't pop them out tomorrow.
00:25:09.200Yeah, I don't think that's that's good.
00:25:11.600And I do think kind of your approach of thirst strapping is probably more more suitable to to to how to do it.
00:25:19.060I think people seeing high status people, people that they look up to, people that they want to emulate doing these things and presenting it.
00:25:27.240Like I said, in a bit of a realistic manner, because, you know, you can also have the the overshot where it's just all just wheat fields and, you know, women surrounded by by seven babies, you know, real thin with their, you know, wonderful blonde hair, you know, flowing in the wind.
00:25:59.400Just I think if you put like five adorable thirst traps of wonderful things, throw a dirty nappy in there occasionally to remind people that there's a bit of a bit of a downside in there as well.
00:26:12.120And the reason I feel really strongly about this is I don't know if I've told this on on in public before, but I did this discussion that unheard a few months back.
00:26:23.580And Freddie, who Freddie says, who hosts it, he said to me, he said, there's something different about you since you became a father.
00:26:33.420And I went, well, yeah, the future is not an abstraction anymore.
00:26:36.760It has a face and it has a name, which I hadn't thought about before.
00:26:41.360But that's what came to me in the moment.
00:26:43.340And then as we were standing outside, I'd broken all my post father promises and bummed a cigarette off Freddie and I was him and I was standing there smoking.
00:26:51.920And this couple walked out of the club.
00:26:55.260And the woman came over to me and she was like, oh, I'm so glad you said that.
00:27:00.480You know, you really changed the way I think about it.
00:27:26.720And I felt that that was a kind of sign to me that I shouldn't keep quiet about it because I don't want people to end up in that position where that realization comes that late and there's maybe not a huge amount you can do about it.
00:27:45.620And I think the whole slew of people from our generation, we're both 40, if you're a woman our age and you haven't, you know, you're in trouble.
00:27:56.620So this is a really serious issue, not just like for the survival of South Korea, but like for people's sense of fulfillment and well-being and happiness and all of that.
00:28:07.980And increasingly, I meet and hear from a lot of people who are in that position.
00:28:13.460But as we talked about, the top down, do this, this is what all of that isn't going to work.
00:28:19.620So other than you and I thirst trapping people online, what else can be done culturally about this if it's a cultural issue?
00:28:26.900Yeah, I think, you know, the kind of the policy wonk type stuff, I think, should be done, not necessarily because each individual policy does something, but because it signals that this is a kind of a priority of the state.
00:28:40.060And I think it should be because, you know, very few things are as serious and as imminent.
00:28:46.620I think the problem that we have with kind of democratic politics is that people think in like four or five year cycles and it's like, OK, what's what's burning now?
00:28:54.680And these things like this is like generational, multi-generational issues.
00:28:58.800And it's very hard to bake in kind of a long term view because, you know, what's what's the return going to be on whatever, you know, politicians priorities for the next five years.
00:29:09.280So I think that's a challenge. But given the fact that, you know, a lot of people really are having this problem and the fact that this is like the main theme of this conference is not just because it's filled with, you know, weird like Westminster wonks, because it isn't.
00:29:25.400It's filled with a lot of people who maybe have gone through, you know, trying to have children or have have gotten to some some issues with it.
00:29:33.540You know, we're talking about housing. We're talking about all this stuff. And they're trying to solve these issues. And I think this is symptomatic of a change in the culture as well.
00:29:43.280I mean, this you didn't hear about this five years ago, though. It was already kind of a problem if you in the South Korea sense, it was already kind of an issue.
00:29:51.340But now it's an issue as well, because I feel many people from the millennial generation or so are starting to feel the burn of this as well.
00:29:57.540Like they're seeing people in their cohort either trying to have children, not managing to have children or, you know, having pretty kind of depressing lives, you know, trying to, you know, keep going to the clubs with their, you know, wrinkly whatever.
00:30:11.200And, you know, it's not it's just not. Yeah, it's not a satisfying thing.
00:30:14.720So I think it's it might have a chance to just be be picked up.
00:30:20.120And, you know, through a myriad of thirst traps from from influential people such as yourselves, I think it's going to. Yeah.
00:30:28.300You know, because also as well, it leads to the problem of mass immigration, where we have a labor shortage in this country.
00:30:37.360And the only way to fill it is to get people from overseas.
00:30:43.300Yeah, of course. I mean, it's this is, again, the five year cycle.
00:30:46.560It's like, yeah, for five for the next five years, this is an extremely good, you know, you're going to solve patch the problem.
00:30:51.800But immigrants get old. Immigrants stop having kids as well.
00:30:55.240You know, it's it's it's the same type of thing.
00:30:57.140You're just getting in essentially a new dependent class because, you know, they're they're not they usually have, you know, maybe more children than the than the typical, you know, Westerner for maybe one or two generations.
00:31:08.220But it declines already fairly steep once they get here because of urbanization, because of the incentives of living in the space, because of, you know, the fact that obviously their children will be educated.
00:31:20.160They want them to come here to be educated.
00:31:54.520But it also leads to problems within a nation because the lack of cohesiveness within the nation, you know, people from different cultures mean that it's it's not as homogenous as it once was.
00:32:06.260That leads to problems, leads to problems of national identity.
00:32:10.640So, you know, there's there's a flip side to mass immigration as well.
00:32:19.740There are many, many issues with mass immigration.
00:32:23.120I mean, like I said, for fertility, I would say, yes, it's kind of a bit of a patch in the short term.
00:32:28.640But in terms of kind of what it does to to to national cohesion, and this is kind of like very vague terminology.
00:32:34.760That's what people attack. It's like, oh, what does cohesion even mean?
00:32:37.580Well, you know, if you go to Bradford, you see what cohesion means.
00:32:40.720You know, if you if you go to places where cohesion is broken down, you know, you you can I know it when I see it type of things.
00:32:48.100You know, a lot of kind of modern politics is about kind of the rule of experts, you know, bring bring your own spreadsheets, bring your own graphs and type of stuff.
00:32:56.940And I feel like a lot of the problems that you have with mass immigration is just, you know, kind of the sound is a silent disenfranchisement of people who used to live here.
00:33:05.500You know, it's like this whole like white flight type discussion.
00:33:08.400People just kind of, you know, slowly moving out.
00:33:10.660It's hard sometimes to quantify or people don't really want to quantify it because it's not a not a favorable statistic to the incentive structure that the people in politics want to build.
00:33:20.760So it just you know, you just wake up one day and like, you know, Bradford is majority.
00:33:26.200I don't know exactly Bangladesh, Pakistani, something like that.
00:33:28.840And, you know, people might say, oh, it's just the way the cookie crumbles is fine, whatever, you know, but it's not just that, you know, you obviously have the grooming gang crisis.
00:33:38.860I mean, scandal, you know, whatever, just like this pervasive insanity that happened with the majority Pakistani grooming gangs.
00:33:49.160And also because there is kind of a silencing on this and, you know, people don't really want to rock the boat.
00:33:55.380They don't want to be anti-immigration and things like that.
00:33:58.120These things tend to escalate to a point where, you know, it's it's it's really it's really unsustainable.
00:34:04.660And yeah, this stuff doesn't make it into the into the GDP calculation.
00:34:08.820Just, you know, overall GDP is growing.
00:34:10.880You know, it doesn't matter what Bradford looks like.
00:34:13.920It doesn't matter if, you know, you know, that, you know, girls are tortured in Telford or something like that.
00:34:20.480That's what, you know, most of the policy wonks care about.
00:34:23.320So, yeah, that's kind of what's going to flow into the statistics.
00:34:27.220That's what the experts are going to care about.
00:34:29.600But yeah, I think like that's a lot of the stuff that's kind of low status.
00:34:33.440And so right wing politics and things like that is based on, you know, things that are nakedly visible to the eye that are, you know, obviously painful for people experiencing them.
00:34:43.940But that somehow don't make it into the statistics.
00:34:46.340No, it's one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because you're one of the people that I see talking about status a lot, high status, low status.
00:34:55.100And I think Ed West talks about this quite a bit as well.
00:34:57.800It's it's a very interesting way of looking at why some ideas are popular and others not.
00:35:04.160Because I think it's tempting, particularly if you're like us, you care about truth.
00:35:09.120It's sort of tempting to think, well, if something's right, then other people are going to.
00:35:14.120But that's kind of not really the way we think about these things, is it?
00:35:18.260Yeah, I think status is a really important variable that, yeah, a lot of people overlook because, you know, yeah.
00:35:25.880People tend to think that, OK, we're the world operates on truth claims.
00:35:31.100OK, if something's more science based, if something's more kind of knowledge based than something else, it will somehow for some mechanism win out in the end.
00:35:41.500But in reality, kind of the way power works and the way ideas become influential is who exactly holds these ideas?
00:35:50.540You know, how do they propagate the fact that they hold them, who is influenced by them?
00:35:56.660And, you know, it's kind of, you know, we we hear that, you know, the argument from authority is a fallacy, but it's pretty much how how arguments work, you know.
00:36:05.400And even even you like, for example, if you want to inform yourself about whatever kind of, you know, strange topic that you don't know much about, you know, you go to X expert and see, OK, what is the consensus in the field?
00:36:16.420Maybe you listen to one or two speakers or something and then you from authority and take that guy's word for it.
00:36:23.620And now because we have so many domains, pretty much every domain of life is a domain of expertise.
00:36:28.580And that's kind of what we believe in.
00:36:30.800You know, the argument from authority is pretty much what we what we all believe.
00:36:34.600And then status in every field is how kind of that authority is conveyed.
00:36:44.220And actually, whichever side of the argument you come down on now and this is what I was going to ask you about, because now with I feel that so many of the issues that we're talking about are product of social media, because social media gives status to ideas that aren't true, but sound good and punishes ideas that are true, but don't sound good.
00:37:04.520I think in a way that even discussion in the mainstream media doesn't even reach that level.
00:37:10.040Like the level of derangement on many things in social media is amplified by the fact that it really rewards things that sound nice and therefore high status versus things that don't.
00:37:22.800Do you think that's a big part of it, the social media entering into the fray?
00:37:26.360And that's one of the reasons that there's such a separation now as well?
00:37:29.360Yeah, I think social media kind of exacerbates what is already present in human nature.
00:37:34.640Yeah, I think if you if you were in like a little band of people in your village, you had kind of the same instincts of, OK, I'm going to trust the high status guy and I'm going to think this guy's a loser because he's whatever since whatever loser signals.
00:37:45.280And I'm not going to believe his religion.
00:37:46.460I'm going to believe this guy's religion.
00:37:47.520And that's kind of what you have on social media.
00:37:50.380I mean, whoever you follow, they're the influencers and you're going to kind of side with them, even if they make some crazy statements.
00:37:58.000Because an interesting thing that I've noticed about even like political social media is that the clustering of positions is sometimes not very coherent.
00:38:07.060Like, you know, you had, for example, with COVID at the beginning, the most intensely lockdown, pro lockdown, pro masking, pro people on the fringe, right?
00:38:14.780Because they were kind of early on this.
00:38:16.140They there's a lot of them in Asia for some reason.
00:38:18.580And they they were really kind of, you know, on the barricades and learning about this and telling people where to get their masks and stuff.
00:38:26.180And then it kind of flipped when it became a little bit more mainstream.
00:38:29.760People, you know, at first it was all about hugging your friends in Chinatown and stuff like that in the mainstream.
00:38:34.380And then it flipped. It was all, you know, this is the end of the world.
00:38:38.320And you could see the kind of the status hierarchies like solidifying in real time because, you know, it wasn't clear exactly what the position was at first.
00:38:47.740But then it was clear, OK, you know, my people believe this.
00:38:51.240We believe, you know, vaccines are holy.
00:39:06.340And it just leads to like definitely more derangement in terms of like people holding on to positions really strongly than you'd have in, you know, the village with the loser guy and the high status chat telling you what religion to follow.
00:39:18.280So, yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of kind of mechanics built into the Internet that, like the slot machines, we're not used to like social escalations that we're not used to dealing with in real life.
00:39:31.620We're not built for that scale of, I don't know, exacerbation of ideas.
00:39:36.980And is the answer to get off the Internet?
00:40:10.120And I feel like just personally, I'm just now I'm trying to kind of moderate my use of it, you know, trying to be, yeah, I don't know, try to be very paternalistic with myself and how I use it because no one else is going to be.
00:40:20.920But I can see how, you know, how much of a downward spiral it can be for other people who, you know, for some reason or another maybe don't have, you know, good self-control.
00:40:29.960Not that I have extremely good self-control, but, you know, I'm really, you know, doing my best to do this.
00:40:34.700But, yeah, it's, you know, it's another thing that is and can be predatory if it's not put to good use.
00:40:41.980And I think this is kind of a dynamic that you see a lot nowadays in terms of, you know, the space we're in with all these technologies and all the stuff that's really changed in the last 300 years is really good and gives like insane returns to a very small percent of people.
00:40:58.420You see just everywhere from dating markets, from the economy, you know, there are a few people who are very well placed in terms of being like very high IQ, high conscientiousness, low neuroticism type people who can just take this stuff and just like plug into it like robotically and just, you know, make the most money, you know, get the best partner, things like that.
00:41:18.520And then that works out for them. But because it is such a, there's so many wild cards here for the other people, this is essentially like predatory.
00:41:28.180The fact that this is all just like completely, you know, very like, you know, build your own adventure, non-paternalistic, we don't judge type stuff.
00:41:36.640But it is really, yeah, it's quite aggressive for the people who are just not equipped to deal with it.
00:41:43.480So, you know, we've kind of built our society around the idea that, you know, freedom is perfect, it's really good.
00:41:51.460But I think there are gradations of how much any individual person can consent to this stuff, both in the sense that the stuff is getting more predatory by the year, like every year, the stuff, you know, A-B testing, like everything's more refined.
00:42:06.020And I feel like a lot of people who are at the top, you know, tend to be very libertarian about this, it's all fine.
00:42:11.700But I feel like there's, it's coming for you.
00:42:14.860Like you're not, you know, you might say you're going to plug into the AI and become like a Superman, but you're not a Superman yet.
00:42:21.640You know, you've, even with your high IQ type stuff, it'll get you.
00:42:26.140Like some, one of these traps will get you eventually.
00:42:29.100And, you know, it's, you know, for now it's okay that it's just kind of like consuming the plebs and whatever.
00:42:35.440But, yeah, it's coming, it's coming to a theatre near you.
00:47:19.140I mean, I think we should have a society that has kind of a relatively core normative ideas of how to live life.
00:47:25.820You know, the two family type, two parent family type situation.
00:47:29.800And that policy should be geared towards supporting that.
00:47:33.200And, you know, we should be having a kind of a long-term consideration of what our societies will look like, which brings in the kind of the birth rates conversation and all of this stuff.
00:47:41.780I think religion should have a kind of a revered position in society, though, you know, my personal relationship with religion is a little bit tortured, I know.
00:47:50.920But, yeah, I think, you know, I'm kind of right wing in the sense of, yes, my values align with pretty much, I would say, most right wing people who would consider themselves right wing.
00:47:59.380What the dissident right brings to the table is kind of a more granular critique of power.
00:48:07.380Like, a lot of people in the dissident right wouldn't say that, you know, okay, we just need to win the next election.
00:48:12.080Because I think that the main epiphany that they've had is post-Trump, post-Brexit, is that things just don't work that way.
00:48:19.100You know, it's not like you win an election and you have power.
00:48:22.220Your side has power and now you do your side's things.
00:48:24.640We discover that, you know, there is a whole substructure, kind of managerial substructure, you call it the blob, call it the cathedral, call it whatever you'd like, that essentially has a mind of its own.
00:48:40.120It's fueled by what the elite, the actual elite who is in power, not the figurehead guy who you voted in or out.
00:48:46.720And what they believe and what fuels them and what interests them.
00:48:51.720And for now, the major kind of ideology behind the elite is some form of wokeness.
00:48:58.340You know, the most interesting and powerful people in the world believe some form of wokeness, either because they are true believers, which I think most of them are,
00:49:06.660or because it is useful to them because it has, you know, some useful characteristics for the upper class because they can essentially have kind of this very profound moral vision where they can not only feel good about themselves for, you know, flagellating themselves because, you know, whatever, white guilt and all this type of stuff.
00:49:26.640They can hate the people that they usually hate, which is kind of the middle and lower middle class.
00:49:31.860And then they can also kind of virtuously give handouts to their client classes, which are the lower classes, you know, people, immigrants, you know, all the woke coalition, the woke pyramid that you want to.
00:49:44.380Obviously, they don't mingle with these people, but they are their client class and they can make promises to them and they can gang up on the middle, obviously, because the middle is always the contender for the top spot.
00:49:54.520You know, you're not worried about, you know, you're worried about the people in Newham, you know, you're worried about the people in Cornwall, you know, and you don't want those to come and get you.
00:50:04.740So, Alex, that being the case, if winning elections doesn't solve things, what is the dissident's right version of the solution?
00:50:14.560There are many, there are many solutions.
00:50:16.080And that's always kind of where the thing breaks down a little bit, because the solutions are typically a more centralized form of organizing society.
00:50:30.300I mean, you know, you call it authoritarianism, but, you know, this, you know, democracy is, you know, is something that's quite recent in human history.
00:50:40.260I mean, we've had some form of monarchy pretty much since time immemorial.
00:50:45.340There's always kind of, you know, that's kind of the hierarchy.
00:50:48.680You know, you have middle management, upper management.
00:50:51.140At the top, there's a CEO in any organization that's functional, you know, except for the state, where apparently we're all kind of co-partners and we're all CEOs in our own right.
00:50:59.940But in reality, that's not really how it works.
00:51:02.300So I think that the main critique isn't that, you know, democracy on paper is bad, is that democracy in reality is essentially a shadow oligarchy.
00:51:12.920It's like, it's not that, you know, it wouldn't be good for it to be this way where, you know, we have these really relevant people who actually have power in government that we can all vote for in an informed way.
00:51:25.380And, you know, this is, this all sounds great.
00:51:27.240I buy into it, but witnessing the process of politics, how the sausage is made in reality, what you have is essentially a whole cast of people who you cannot see, who are unaccountable, who are distributed within this whole kind of hydra of managerialism.
00:51:43.840And, you know, like with COVID, like who exactly, you know, has been held to account for the fact that most probably this stuff escaped the lab.
00:51:52.120Most probably a lot of the policies were completely misguided, like an extreme amount of, you know, a lot of people died because of the policies.
00:52:00.260I mean, you know, because of issues with the policies around the hospitals.
00:52:05.120So, you know, there's absolutely no accountability for this stuff.
00:52:09.100There won't be a Nuremberg trial for COVID because there are no figureheads, you know.
00:52:32.180It's like, OK, if you want to have any sort of functional organization, you need to have a chain of command.
00:52:38.240You need to know who the guy at the top is because, you know, when you go out to have your little French Revolution to oust him, at least you know who he is.
00:53:19.540I mean, I think it's a problem of scale as well.
00:53:22.220And it's a problem of, you know, the fact that a lot of the managerial system that we have now in government, it really is kind of necessary.
00:53:28.600Like, you know, back in the day, you didn't have, like, FDA, EPA type organizations, which, you know, people might, you know, not think they're extremely effective, but you kind of need them now because the complexity of the whole system really is, like, incredible.
00:53:42.400You know, you need to have consumer protection.
00:53:44.560You need to have all these types of things.
00:53:46.240So it really is hard to see who's in charge of these things.
00:53:50.860So, yeah, I think there is an issue with that.
00:53:52.980But, I mean, you know, with Chay Chesko, we didn't shoot the guy and things did change.
00:54:14.820I think, you know, I think a lot of people on dissident rights would say that, you know, our democracy might be closer to that than you think, you know, to the figurehead type.
00:54:24.500So, what's the solution then, as I fiddle my microphone back in my pocket?
00:54:29.640The solution, I mean, like I said, there's different proposals.
00:54:33.000I'm not sure that I, you know, buy any of them in, like, wholesale.
00:54:37.640But the idea would be, you know, a lot of people are interested in kind of more decentralized ways of organizing society, like, you know, like charter cities and stuff, where it's kind of much easier to have kind of a CEO figure at the top, where it's, you know, small.
00:54:49.240You essentially buy into this community, and then you also have exit rights.
00:54:54.460So, you don't necessarily have voice, where you vote for the guy, but it's like, it's whatever, Constantine's charter city, he's the boss here.
00:55:01.960I kind of like what he's doing with the place.
00:55:03.940And then I apply to get in, you know, Constantine says, you're nice, okay, you can stay here.
00:55:08.720And if, you know, it hits the fan, you can have exit rights.
00:55:12.760How many wives am I allowed to have on this?