#302 | Malcolm Collins; Pronatalist talks Population Collapse & Progressivism

Malcolm Collins [00:00:00] You know, we need to start discussing philosophically in media, in the conservative media, what this future looks like, where we are the only ones left, because that's the future our grandkids are gonna be in. I'm Danica Klu, a grad student living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and you are listening to the Vance Grow Podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today I sit down with Malcolm Collins. Malcolm is a prenatal list, which if you don't know what that means, you're probably like everyone else. A prenatal list is a person that supports the idea that people should be having a lot more children. And you will hear in this conversation that Malcolm is serious about this. He's not just thinking about this in terms of his own family, but really entire societal implications of people not having children. I'd heard Malcolm on the Sean Newman podcast and I was introduced to him by a past podcast guest named Michael Vassar, and I really didn't know what to expect with him. He's a fast talking guy that you know has these big glasses on, and what you'll see when you're listening to him is at first you're like, no, that can't be true. But as he goes into his details and his explanation, you realize that he and his wife who have started a school together and are a part of a much larger movement, are really deep in this world. He revealed things that I never thought possible and I really deeply enjoyed this conversation. But buckle up because things he says in here are uncomfortable truths and should be something that you wrestle with. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but before we do, I want to talk about Legacy Interviews. Longtime listeners of the podcast know that I sit down with loved ones to record their life stories so that they can pass it down to future generations. Oftentimes, before people get this as a gift, they wonder what kind of questions will you be asking my parents?

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] Well, they cover areas from childhood to your career, parenting, marriage, and the legacy that you wanna leave behind. But when you get this as a gift for your parents, we will send them a preparing for your legacy interview guide In it, it will give them ideas on what to wear and how they'll be viewed on camera, but it also gives them a list of questions that they can think through, like, who was your best friend growing up? Or, what challenges did you have at work that you had to overcome? These conversations starters allow people to get ready for an interview that is unique. I ask every single person questions that are unique to their situation, but by having this guide, it lets people relax and really think about all those stories that they want to be able to pass down to future generations. If you're interested in having me interview your loved ones, you can capture those stories both to have it on video or potentially to put it into a leather bound book. Go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with this wild character Malcolm Collins. Malcolm cos, welcome to the podcast.

Malcolm Collins [00:03:04] I am excited to be here with you today,

Vance Crowe [00:03:07] Malcolm, why should anybody care about how many children somebody else has?

Malcolm Collins [00:03:12] Well, I started caring about this issue when I was working as a venture capitalist in Korea. You know, doing investments, trying to forecast the economy. And if you look at Korea's current fertility rates, which are 0.8 or 0.7, depending on what you're looking at, that means for every a hundred Koreans alive today, there will be between 6.6 and 4.3 great-grandchildren. And yet this fertility rate is continuing to collapse every year. So it's likely going to be worse than that. We in the US today are where Korea was in the nineties. When people talk about fertility collapse, they are often underselling how extreme it is within the us. When you hear, you know, progressives talk about this, they're like, oh, we can fix it with immigration, carefully ignoring that even by UN estimates as of two years ago, collectively Latin America, south America, central America and the Caribbean fell below repopulation rate. That means that these cultures are, are shrinking on average every year now. So I, I think just the scale of the problem is really high. I mean, for me, one of the really shocking statistics was to see that in the US it appears that even general Mormon populations may be falling below repopulation rate or will was in the next five years or so.

Vance Crowe [00:04:30] So it's interesting because for most of my life people have been saying like, oh my God, the biggest fear, the danger that we have in the world is overpopulation, right? You have this Malthusian, we're not going to have enough food, we're not gonna be able to feed the growing population. That's why we need to grow more with less, all of these things. So to hear somebody talking about fertility rates dropping and populations dropping seems like, is like a new gloom and doom that that like somebody just got switched or the rug pulled

Malcolm Collins [00:04:58] Out Monday. Well, anyone should have been able to see this historically if they had, I think the problem is, is that academics have this fear of looking at populations as being different from each other or people groups as being different from each other. So they were always looking at general global population stats instead of looking at on a poor per country or per population group basis. But this problem has been pretty big across the developed world, really since the introduction of the pill or a bit earlier than that.

Vance Crowe [00:05:27] And when you said, describe it as a problem, like why is it a problem?

Malcolm Collins [00:05:31] So something I, it's a, it's a problem for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is economically. So we've sort of the past 300 years of human history, at least in the developed world, the economy has grown. On average, any idiot could throw their money into the economy and it would get bigger on average. But that was largely the case because the population was growing exponentially and the productivity per worker was growing linearly. Even though technology was growing exponentially, the productivity per worker was largely growing linearly throughout this period. If population begins to fall exponentially because you know, definitionally population either always grows or falls as a matter of an exponent, we could see the economy begin to shrink on average. This becomes a big problem because we sort of set up our society like a big pyramid scheme, not just in terms of social security as people often think, but if you look at the amount of debt that we've taken out of every level of the system from the cities to the states, to the nation state, it's really high. And debt is a wonderful thing when things are growing. But when things are shrinking, it compounds the pain. And I'm happy to go into the mass of that, if that's interesting to you.

Vance Crowe [00:06:41] Yeah, go ahead. I mean, like, I guess before you do the, the, the thing that I have observed in my lifetime is that as inflation has gone up and as more people have entered the workforce, it only compounds that. So right as you started having women enter the workforce, you have more people there, which means that there's the demand that a single worker can make is less because there's more competition for those jobs. So when you describe things is getting smaller, why is it inevitable that that, you know, this won't mean that the people that are living won't get better wages 'cause they need so many more people.

Malcolm Collins [00:07:16] So this is actually really interesting. So for a long time the society as population growth has slowed down. The developed world has been spamming out new workers in sort of cheating ways. Oh, now women can work. So that doubles the number of workers that we have, you know, now, and and you see this with houses, how do you, how do real estate values keep going up when the population isn't increasing at the rate it used to be, it's because people aren't getting married anymore. They're not forming multifamily, you know, units. And so because the family unit is atomized, you get more individual houses. Now, of course this increases demand within a generation, but decreases it between generations, but to the point of debt. So debt's a really miraculous thing. If I'm making a $10 investment, okay, and $8 is at its debt and $2 is equity, if that investment grows by just 20%, so it's, it's, it's growing by just $2. My equity has doubled. But if that investment shrinks by just 10%, just $1, my equity has halved. If it shrinks by just 20%, I've lost my entire equity investment. This is what fundamentally caused Detroit to go bankrupt, is that they had gotten to a point because the city was paying pensions for police departments and fire departments that were created for a much larger city, like much larger than their current police fire departments, other municipal departments. And because they had delayed like their pension plans, like they hadn't set money aside for it, they'll just like, oh, we'll pay this in the future because the city will be bigger in the future.

Malcolm Collins [00:08:49] They went bankrupt when about 50% of the amount of the money that the city was paying was going to debt payments functionally.

Vance Crowe [00:08:56] And so you're saying as people, as there are less people in the economy to be able to contribute to the taxation, the, the, the, the base of workers that you won't be able to service this debt and then that will crush us all?

Malcolm Collins [00:09:11] Well, it'll definitely change what it means. The developed world's economy, we could end up in a situation like Japan, of course we could fix it with ai. Like if AI begins to simulate economic workers like units in the economy, you have to some extent fix this part of the problem. Another part of the problem we have is the homogenization of the world. And by that what I mean is countless cultural groups are going to disappear in the near future and they are going to be replaced with other cultural groups. Now, fortunately, I am actually pretty partial to the groups that are doing well in terms of fertility rate right now. And they're often not the groups that people suspect. So I think if you talk with your average, you know, American conservative, they think for example, like Muslims have a really high fertility rate when they just don't. If you look at Iran, Iran has a fertility rate of only 1.7 like well below repopulation rate and they've been below repopulation rate for almost a decade at this point. And they've done like really draconian policies to try to get their fertility rate up and just nothing seems to do it. Like what,

Vance Crowe [00:10:09] What did they do? What is, what was draconian

Malcolm Collins [00:10:11] About it? You know? Well that it's a super draconian making it harder for women to get educated banning vasectomies. I, I think banning access to like reproductive education, a lot of the stuff that China is trying right now, which is why I know what China is trying won't work the groups that seem to do well. And when I talk about fertility rate collapse, I'm talking about post prosperity, fertility rate collapse. So anywhere you go in the world, if people are in desperate poverty, I don't mean like moderate poverty, like I'm not talking about like Latin America or India, India's falling below your population rate this year. I'm talking about like the worst poverty you see in Africa. You know, you get really high fertility rates. But the question is, is how can you maintain a high fertility rate in a post prosperity economy? And what you see is certain cultural groups seem to be highly resistant to fertility rate collapse. And these groups are mostly conservative Christian and Jewish groups and, and very few other groups seem to show true resistance to it.

Vance Crowe [00:11:15] The, we'll get back to this where it's growing. But the thing you said, you just kinda slipped it in there that India is falling below replacement rate. That is shocking to me, right?

Malcolm Collins [00:11:24] Yeah, they're two point, you can see all the pe, they're point like one five right now, so they're like 0.5 from falling below replacement rate. China is expected by some measures to be at half its current population within like 45 years. Like they're just gone as a world player. Anyone who still thinks that China has a chance, there's very little they can do. Besides going full Handmaid's tale,

Vance Crowe [00:11:43] Well, 45 years seems like a long time, right? So it's hard to plan an economy to go longer than five years, let alone 10 or 40, 45. Well,

Malcolm Collins [00:11:52] As the saying goes, it takes 18 years to make an 18-year-old and they've been ar they were artificial. So a lot of people think that China's current fertility problem is due to the one child policy, but that really undersells it. The problem is, is they haven't created a culture that motivates people to want to continue it. So in 2020, the Chinese fertility rate, and this was when they had three chi child policy, when they were doing everything they could to get birth rates up, it fell by 20% and then it fell by an additional 13% in 2021. I haven't looked at what the numbers are this year, but I mean if you're looking at year over year decreases, that's insane.

Vance Crowe [00:12:28] And so like what, but what does this mean? Like I, I understand that you have a sense that this is bad and that there's like, you're not gonna be able to pay debt back, but it, it does not seem inevitable to me that this is a bad thing, something we should

Malcolm Collins [00:12:40] Fight against. It's not exactly bad, it's kind of good and kind of bad. So basically, I mean, what it means is the cultures that are going to control the future of our species are not the cultures that control it right now. And the, the cultures that control it right now are getting increasingly desperate because they reproduce parasitically. And by that what I mean is they don't have kids, they convert kids and that's why they are becoming increasingly dictatorial and increasingly aggressive in their attempts to control and propagate their ideologies in the public school systems and the college systems because that is primarily how they replenish their numbers.

Vance Crowe [00:13:27] Yeah, I mean this is striking and like, so let's talk first before we go into ideologies. The, the, well I guess this is ideology. The two groups that you said are beating the replacement rate are Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians.

Malcolm Collins [00:13:44] Yeah. And throughout world. Yeah, at different rates. It was funny we were mentioning before this a lot of people don't understand how quickly a group can grow or how quickly a group can disappear due to fertility rates. And you were mentioning you have a lot of hutterites, which a lot of people don't mention this group, but I love them as an example of how quickly a group can grow. Just 140 years ago there were 400 of them and mostly through fertility rate they've grown to around 50,000 in just 140 years. Whereas if you look at my cultural group, which was the American Calvinists, who you often hear in history books as being the Puritans, they were at the time of the revolution, well over 50% of the white population in America. And they have, they're now like 0.2 to 0.5% of the population and they mostly collapse due to fertility rates and due to secularization,

Vance Crowe [00:14:33] I mean the Hutterite community. So for people that don't know this is a group of conservative Christians, they would be somewhere in the, in the vein of like Amish or Mennonite. But the way that I know a lot of them is that they're in the agriculture community and they are very, very effective. So what they do is they have these communities, the communities oftentimes buy land together, they farm it, they have farm like a very hierarchical system where somebody is saying, Hey, this is how I think we should distribute the labor. You're good at this, you're good at that. They get really effective and grow more quickly than the other ones. So they produce more efficiently than they can pool their money, buy more land, and they just keep expanding. And as their population goes, they've gotten very, very good at growing food throughout Western US and up into Canada.

Malcolm Collins [00:15:22] And so this is what you see. So this is really interesting. So if you talk about them as a group that's been resistant to fertility collapse and you talk about another group which is just famously resistant, is Orthodox Jewish communities. In fact, Israel, if you look at like UN reports, it's like what countries are gonna be above fertility rate at the turn of the century? And it's like two countries in Africa, Uzbekistan, you know, like really poor countries and then Israel. And I think what you see across these communities is a strong sense of cultural identity and a set of, of sort of The way that we argue it is, is the human brain sort of evolved or is meant to work with a strong cultural tradition sense of identity and sense of rules. And as our society has secularized, we stripped a lot of that out and that stuff was critical to provide the exogenous motivation for people to have over two kids. If a person's living only for their own happiness, like this is the core cause of fertility collapse in developed countries. If people can choose, like they have total control over their fertility due to like the pill and condoms and all this other stuff, if they can choose when they have kids and not, and they are living primarily for how much happiness they can extract from life, you don't get that much incremental, more happiness after like kid number two, which means in any community where that's true, you, so for a community to stay stable, so suppose a third of a community is having no kids and a third is having two kids for that community just to stay stable, not to grow. The final third has to have over four kids.

Malcolm Collins [00:16:54] And like very few communities can motivate that without a strong sense of cultural identity rules, social technologies, cohesions, marriage markets like marriage markets are so important right now because of, if, if you just look at the collapse of like people's ability to find good partners, like this is one of the things that's contributing to this. So much of the way society is structured today is just not a minimal with starting a family and having a lot of kids.

Vance Crowe [00:17:20] Yeah, I mean I think about my own life, like we were, I I was not even considering getting married, let alone having children until I was in my late twenties. And then it wasn't until I was in my mid thirties that we were like, ah, about time to get started. It was just like Idiocracy, right? Where you're just like, ah, the people that are, you know, the most financially capable, the ones that have the education aren't doing it because they're maximizing for something else. There was no pressure on me to have children whatsoever at all until I started hitting my thirties. And even then the pressure really only came from the ag groups that I would go see the, the Utah Farm Bureau giving me a hard time that I didn't have any kids yet. Famously. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins [00:18:00] Well it's one of those things we often talk about, and I think that this is a big problem in, in, in society right now is humans are sort of built to have kids, you know? And because our modern society doesn't encourage people to have kids, you get these

Vance Crowe [00:18:16] 30

Malcolm Collins [00:18:17] Year olds who realize now because infertility become such a big problem across the world today. I mean, sperm rates have fallen something like 50% in the last 30 years. Testosterone rates have fallen like 20%. Like it's insane. So they realize they're infertile and then they try to essentially masturbate this instinct to have kids with like pets and stuff, but it clearly doesn't do it for them. And you, you can see the, the depression and the anger that comes out through this cognitive dissonance where they actually get angry at people who are having kids

Vance Crowe [00:18:45] Having, oh, I've like, so I mean I had the very real experience of starting to try and have kids and then not being able to have it and then being like, oh shit, like what will my life be like if not this, you know? Yeah. Will I adopt a child? Will I, you know, take on dogs? Will I become a runner or get really into jujitsu? Because all of a sudden when you don't have children, you have lots of time to be thinking about your existential nature of your life. But once you have two kids, like I have right now, you know, a seven month old that I don't have time to think about my existential problems. I am keeping the lights on, I'm keeping children fed.

Malcolm Collins [00:19:26] Yeah, well it's, it's really interesting to me. So we hang out with a lot of, well not a lot, but at some progressives and stuff like that and something you constantly hear in this community, in, in them, in their groups. It's like we need a sense of community. And what's so funny is you'll hear this and like these, these polly houses where it's like a bunch of people who are all in a relationship with each other, like five adults, you know, having parties all the time and it's like you have tons of people in your life. Clearly that's not why you're not feeling this sense of community. You know, there was something that you were supposed to do, you decided not to do.

Vance Crowe [00:19:58] Wait, so you know people that are polyamorous and living in in communal

Malcolm Collins [00:20:03] Oh yeah. Like New York and San I mean, I work in the tech world, so I work in like, you know, venture capital, private equity investing and it's hard to work in like the, the investing world without engaging with, you know, extremist progressives.

Vance Crowe [00:20:15] It's hard for me to even imagine that that's real. See I'm here in St. Louis and I know I, because I see it online that this exists, but it is, it is in no part of my culture whatsoever. I would have to go way out of my way to find that.

Malcolm Collins [00:20:30] It is the norm in New York and San Francisco.

Vance Crowe [00:20:34] I find this really hard to believe. I'm not calling you a liar, I'm just saying

Malcolm Collins [00:20:40] At least among wealthy people, I don't know across like all of New York and San Francisco. But when you're talking about the faction that's like the elite in our society, whatever you wanna call that in the New York and San Francisco area, it is absolutely the norm.

Vance Crowe [00:20:53] So we should stop for just a second and say, who the fuck are you Malcolm? Like what it, why do you care about population? You know, why is there a a, you know, a large gun behind you? Tell a little bit about yourself.

Malcolm Collins [00:21:08] So why I know all of these groups in the p So I've worked in venture capital, I've worked in private equity, but also my wife was the managing director of dialogue, which was a secret society started by Peter Thiel and then Schmidt Futures organization, which is Eric Schmidt thing. They contracted us to like find a bunch of people to join a secret society they were building. And then like we got into like the building secret societies business, which means that we just started to know everyone who is like supposedly the elite in our society and we were like a diversity hire as conservatives on all of these projects. 'cause they're like, well we need your token conservatives. And so we got really in with what they were doing. But then also, I mean we've written five books and all of our books, you know, what they do is they try to look at a subject. I mean all of them have been bestsellers on Amazon. So they try to look at a subject that academia can no longer handle responsibly anymore, you know, like sexuality or governance or religion. But then they investigate it the way that academia sort of tells the world that they investigate things. So we look at it with data, we go into the numbers, we run experiments and yeah, so we do that. What else? Oh, we're also starting a school. We're trying to replace secondary education. 'cause you know, as I've said, so long as the progressives control secondary education, conservatives are gonna have kids and liberals are gonna convert them. So can we,

Vance Crowe [00:22:31] Yeah. So well let's talk about conservatism before. Like I feel like there's a whole bunch of base work that if we set up right, the tower can go pretty high. When you say you are a conservative, what does that mean to you?

Malcolm Collins [00:22:43] Yeah, so this is how I divide the conservative and liberal mindset. I think liberals are primarily, it's an optimization function. So they are optimizing for different things. The progressive movement is optimizing for not just intergenerational quality of life, an individual agency, but in the moment quality of life. An individual agency, even if it has long-term repercussions, this is where stuff like them saying it's, it's, it's hateful to tell a fat person that that's unhealthy, right? Like where like obviously the data says it's unhealthy, they don't have this opinion because they're like pro-science and obviously this is in the person's long-term best interest to know that like they're gonna be in pain for the future because of this. But it hurts them in the moment. So I, I would say that their political ideologies all about minimizing pain in the moment and, and, and, and not maximizing happiness, just minimizing any sort of emotional discomfort or pain. The conservative movement, I'd say is largely divided into two factions, but they have one thing in common. They're both optimizing around intergenerational fitness. And by that what I mean fitness and cultural health. So where the progressive sees themselves as themselves, the conservative sees themselves as sort of a, an avatar of a cultural tradition that they hope to survive. Intergenerationally, you know, their highest aspiration is not that they're maximizing their own happiness, it's that they're maximizing their grandkids happiness, right?

Malcolm Collins [00:24:16] And so they'll often make decisions which are around that. Now, this is where I think the conservative party has a split. And this is where with some conservatives, i i I get in fights sometimes is one conservative group just wants to enforce their beliefs about the world and their culture on everyone else in the same way the progressives are doing now. And then the other conservative group just doesn't want anyone to, to, to mess with them. So they don't want people messing with their kids, they don't want people messing with their communities. But other than that they are okay with living in a multicultural ecosystem. And that's the conservative group that we really see ourselves as aligned with.

Vance Crowe [00:24:53] And when you say this, the, what is the cultural tradition that you are hoping you can pass down? What is the avatar that you are living within?

Malcolm Collins [00:25:02] Well, I mean I, so my, I I mean I, I consider myself a secular Calvinist. My family came and, and I'm a Calvinist tradition and we came from a very extremist Calvinist group. We were of the free state of Jones members, 15 of the 50 were either kids cousins, no, no either kids or siblings of my direct ancestors. So, and then they also ran various other paramilitary groups in the south that like hunted slave owners. So they, they they're like John Brown Calvinists, if, if people are familiar with that and they don't know the free state of Jones. So they were a very sort of isolated and extremist group, which is why they survived. If you look at the rest of the Calvinists, like the Puritans in New England, when a cultural group lives in an environment where they are totally accepted and in no way othered, they typically, their birth rate falls really quickly. Whereas when they live in a slightly hostile environment, they typically do a lot better.

Vance Crowe [00:26:01] Yeah, I mean there's something about the, the fitness that gets created when you're living in a group where people are coming after you, then it benefits you to to, you know, coalesce around these groups. You find ways to get along with them. You know, I always describe that when churches went away, one of the things that happened is you end up having way more homogenous ideas. Because one of the things that church did was you didn't get to choose who else was in church with you. You showed up every week. If you didn't show up, people looked down on you. So you have to show up and not only do you have to show up, you also collide with all these people. And they're of different socioeconomic status, they're of different, you know, whatever their, their work is. And even if you have one group of people that, you know, supposedly believe the same thing within their religion, they have all kinds of other ideas about other things.

Malcolm Collins [00:26:51] Absolutely. And I, you know, I I think when we talk about this multiculturalism, you actually see this around the world and it's something that a lot of people get wrong when they hear fertility rates are sm are falling. Like, especially if they're very ethnocentric, they'll often be like, well then we should close off to immigration. But if you look at the countries that have successfully closed themselves to immigration, like South Korea, which is basically an ethno state, they have some of the lowest fertility rates. If you look at the developed world and you're looking for countries that have been very resistant to fertility rate collapse, you know, you're looking at like the us, France and Israel, three of the most diverse countries in the developed world. But you can even see this within cultural groups. So if you look at like Muslim populations, you can look at Iran, which is just like one Muslim cultural group and they have a very low fertility rate. But if you look at Muslims in like India, where there are multiple cultures, they have a much higher fertility rate, I wanna say like 50% higher than the fertility rate in Iran right now. So generally when you are in a multicultural ecosystem, your fertility rate will be higher. You even see this with immigrants where immigrants coming from mono-ethnic cultures like South Korea, their fertility rate jumps by like 50% when they immigrate to the us.

Vance Crowe [00:27:58] Oh, that's super interesting because then they're the, they're not in part of the in group, they've, they're but, and then I would also say this's probably going on in France, right? Yeah. So you think about the amount of Muslims that are there that have moved there and then how quickly the Muslim population is growing in France. It appears to me that there will be a lot more Muslim French people than there will be white French people.

Malcolm Collins [00:28:20] But, but the, the, what is interesting is that the French white population also has more kids because of the Muslims. So they have more kids than they would have if they were in like the uk, which is

Vance Crowe [00:28:32] Much more monocultural. Wow.

Malcolm Collins [00:28:36] And this is fascinating. So it totally changes the way you see the world when you begin to realize that we're in a world of constantly collapsing population now. So historically, like an area that I really focus on, 'cause I worked there is like Korea, Japan, China, right? Like these were three countries that were constantly trying to kill each other and now they have collapsing fertility rates and Korea will be basically depopulated in a hundred years and Japan could just march in and take it. So could China. But both of them are also gonna be depopulated. None of the three countries can motivate a high fertility rate in a world where to win, all you need is a high fertility rate. And you can look at what's happening in the Ukraine and Russia, both of which have fertility rates of like 1.2, like desperately low. And they're like killing an entire generation because they're thinking with a previous generation's mindset of trying to secure resources, trying to secure land,

Vance Crowe [00:29:28] Trying to

Malcolm Collins [00:29:29] Secure like geopolitical isolation when we are just in a population numbers game these days.

Vance Crowe [00:29:37] So one of the things I paused you from talking about before was when we were talking about progressives and you started being like, Hey, there's all this ideology and they're trying to pump it into the schools. This is something that everyone is aware of. Everybody knows that this is happening,

Malcolm Collins [00:29:52] But

Vance Crowe [00:29:52] The way that we got connected is that Michael Vassar, who's been a past guest on the podcast, a good friend, but al also a guy that can get really worked up about stuff. He and I got into a, into like a full on argument and the argument was he was like, the kids are not all right. And I'm like, Hey man, I'm in St. Louis everywhere I traveled to see farmers, the kids are fine. It's a little bit different than it was in, you know, the late nineties and two thousands when I grew up. And he's like, Vance, you are so out of touch, you gotta talk to Malcolm. So let's pick up from there. What are the kids all right? Like what's going on in the schools and how freaked out should people be? What's going on there?

Malcolm Collins [00:30:30] I would be, well it depends on, so when we talk about progressivism first, I'm gonna take a step back and talk about the way we think of progressivism more broadly, because I think a lot of people, like they think the enemy is wokeness, but it's not really wokeness. It's sort of like a virus that, like the threat throat virus, a mimetic virus, like a virus of ideas that infects organizations sometimes like more liberal leaning religions, stuff like this. And it, it, it spreads within them and like the strep throat virus, it will kill your red blood cells and then sort of wear them their skin to hide from your immune system. And so the progressive movement has be able to become so powerful because it's one ideology that's wearing the skin of a lot of ideologies that's killed. You know, whether these are,

Vance Crowe [00:31:20] I think I drive, I drive every day past a bunch of churches in a town called Kirkwood and they all, every single one of 'em are flying the rainbow flag, right? And so this is exactly what you're describing. Like

Malcolm Collins [00:31:33] Yeah, it

Vance Crowe [00:31:33] Wouldn't be unified on anything else other than maybe we're all American and now they're all flying that flag

Malcolm Collins [00:31:38] And they, this wasn't the case 50 years ago. And you see this within, you know, whether you're talking about like the most progressive like reformed Jew or the most progressive unitarian universalists or the feminist movement underneath the surface, outside of their superficial traditions. All of these movements now basically believe all of the same things about the world. And this is very different from the conservative movement where we are an alliance of people who think very different things. 'cause we still have like the original traditions. And so when people look at woke ism as the enemy, they're not seeing just how big the enemy is these days. And it is incredibly big and incredibly powerful and as it realizes it can't reproduce on its own, which it is increasingly realizing. First it really focuses on controlling the school system. So you can look at like Manhattan is, there have been talks, I mean you look at the progressive states, there's a reason they're banning homeschooling. But now in Manhattan they're even looking at banning private schooling, you know, and, and I think in Germany they already have, or they've at least banned homeschooling. So the like, the more advanced the virus gets, the more they try to homogenize your kids to take your kids from you because it's the only way they can stay stable. And this actually has a genetic component as well that gets really interesting.

Vance Crowe [00:32:52] So let's stop on the schooling thing. 'cause I like, this is exactly right, A few years ago, maybe two and a half or three years ago, I remember seeing an article fly through Ag Twitter. So this is my, my world, and you were seeing this article and it is a Harvard professor that proposes that they, to protect the children from conservative ideologies and hate you had to ban homeschooling. And like there are a lot of people in, in my world, in the ag world that are homeschooling their kids. So I reached out to talk to this person and they refused. They wouldn't, they not only would they not come on my podcast, they wouldn't connect me with any other author on there. And I was like, what you believe this thing? Why is it that you wanna stop people from doing this? But what you're saying makes total sense. Like it's not just that they think they're getting a bad education, it's that they're trying to suck them into their system.

Malcolm Collins [00:33:42] Yeah, they're trying to, well, so I mean, other cultures have done this in the past. I mean, the residential school system in Canada tried something similar. I, I don't know if people are familiar with this, but historically you, it was this great tragedy is they believed that all of the native populations in Canada were deplorable savages and that they, they needed their kids acculturated to like modern ideas. And so they took them from their families and they put them in these boarding schools and tried to erase their birth cultures. And I think that you're seeing a very similar mindset right now if less aggressive, but it will become more aggressive with time. I mean, i, it it is just, you see this in the states that are more liberal is it's becoming more aggressive right now and it always pans out. I mean, all of these crazy ideas, I'm sure any of your, your people who have kids in school right now, these, you know, really out there ultra leftist ideas that they probably never expected to hear was in their own schools or see was in their own towns 10 years ago that they were hearing about, they're now likely seeing in their communities. And I will say, yeah, it takes 10 to 20 years, but they do eventually comfort you.

Vance Crowe [00:34:49] So let's, let's talk about what ideas are actually being put into those schools. And like I remember a couple of years ago, I had a guy on the podcast named Jeremy Laco and he mentioned that the state of Illinois was putting tampon machines in the boys bathrooms. Like it was a part of the way you got your taxes, you know, or the way you got your money for the schools. We howled with laughter, we thought this was so funny. And he was like, well that'll never happen in central Illinois. They just won't do it. So many of the listeners that are listening right now are they these ideas, they've heard about them, but they are very far away. So it doesn't even register on their, on their radar that this is a real thing that you're talking about.

Malcolm Collins [00:35:30] Well, I mean, I don't wanna, I I I guess I just say if you're not certain yet, the only thing I can do is just say, pay attention to what's being taught in your kid's school and many things that you thought were crazy 15 years ago. You'll start to see normalized. And I think what you can take away from that is, the crazy stuff you're hearing today will be normalized in 15 years. So

Vance Crowe [00:35:54] What are those ideas?

Malcolm Collins [00:35:56] Well, I don't wanna go too specific with this stuff. You know, I I I also have to worry about, because I engage, you know, a lot with progressive culture for work.

Vance Crowe [00:36:04] Oh, that's interesting. I was sitting here thinking, man, Malcolm has no fear here. He is saying a lot of things that I think could, could get people to come after him. And the line that you draw is pointing out where, where the specific things are. I mean that I, it's fair I understand

Malcolm Collins [00:36:21] That. What I would say is, is it's a different cultural group that's trying to acclimatize your kids to it. And like within our school system, the way we get around it is we use prediction markets like meticulous, which does like predictions of like future political events and stuff like that to judge which students actually have a better knowledge of a subject. And then we normalize our multiple choice questions to the students who did best within prediction markets within anything that could be politically charged. And so this prevents any political bias within our tests. And so that's the way we always try to approach it. And I think that anyone, even progressives admit that they are trying to acculturate kids out of these older, more traditional cultural practices.

Vance Crowe [00:37:04] This is fascinating to me. A lot of this has just been like, you know, when like Bill O'Reilly is just the opposite, the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. And so for me, when people would talk about these, all these crazy ideas in the school, I'm kinda sitting there being like, ah, I don't know. Like it's probably just the same way that they fear conservative ideas being in the school.

Malcolm Collins [00:37:27] Yeah. So it's interesting, I think that the reason why you're seeing a lot of wealthy tech people like Elon, you know, freak out about this first is because their kids are in these east coast schools. So they're seeing this before the, the Midwesterners are, but you know, even he isn't able to protect his own kids, you know, so I I think, you know, some of his kids just absolutely hate him. Like they've been convinced, he's like, you know, you, you see this with the, the way that they publicly repudiate him. And, and I think that's really sad, but I think that that's the goal of a lot of school system is to convince our kids if we are following a cultural tradition, which isn't like the societal mainstream isn't the virus that we are evil.

Vance Crowe [00:38:10] I like one of my true horrifying nightmare scenarios is when you learn about what happened when in China, when those children would come home from, or would go to school and they would be taught all these terrible things about their parents and thinking that they were doing the best thing they could possibly do, reporting on their parents and having their parents take, you know, ripped out of there, put into work camps killed this

Malcolm Collins [00:38:34] Is is, oh, who was this who was a famous conservative woman who was in the Trump administration and her daughter turned on her? Ugh, I don't know, I'm sure you're listening.

Vance Crowe [00:38:46] I mean, who, like, whoever it is, this is like the most horrible thing you can imagine is that some public bureaucrat, teacher, whatever would turn their, their a child on their parent, which is the most sacred of all relationships.

Malcolm Collins [00:39:00] Well, I mean they get your kids for most of the day. I mean, how could they not if they have it within their inclinations, if you don't control your local school system? Where this gets really interesting is where things start to change personality wise. So I think everyone who has kids knows that an aspect of personality is genetic. You know, they see what they pass on to their kids, they see kids act like their parents to some extent. And something that's been seen in the data is the way we vote has a genetic component. So it might be like 60 to 70%. And so a really interesting counter to this phenomenon. So I mean, one of the things that Progressive Machine is doing is trying to break up family units to an extent because single women, and, and they'll admit this, and like there's things they vote much more progressively than than married women. And you also see this with, with men, but to a lesser extent. So through disrupting family units within the populations that they control and have full access to, they make them much more progressive within a generation but much more conservative between generations. And so this is also something, I mean like when we look at the prenatal list movement, we're not actually about like causing birth rates to rise. We're about like trying to get people to look at the world the way it actually exists and plan for the future. We're actually going to see, which is homogenization rapid population collapse and the conservative communities that are actually able to motivate a high birth rate. You know, we need to start discussing philosophically in media, in the conservative media, what this future looks like, where we are the only ones left because that's the future our grandkids are gonna be in.

Vance Crowe [00:40:38] Well, when you describe it before about the, the fact that the progressives don't have children, this was an interesting comparison. You talked about this on the Sean Newman podcast Yeah. Where you describe like, hey, there are some religions that they didn't have sex and so they couldn't have children shakers. So let's talk about this and make that.

Malcolm Collins [00:40:56] Yeah. So the shakers replenish themselves by running orphanages. And you could argue to a lesser extent Quakers replenish themselves by running a lot of, most of the school system to the Northeastern US. And, but the shakers were a sub branch of Quakers. But anyway, so they believed that all sex was prohibited and they collapsed after the state offered a state run alternative to the shaker orphanages. And the Quaker numbers collapsed largely after public school became popular. And so you can really trace these when a community, and this is partially why progressives push so hard for like nanny state services for things like, what's the word I'm, I'm I'm looking for here for things like, you know, social security and welfare and stuff like that is because traditionally these things we're often provided by our cultural groups. You know, anyone from a strict cultural group, whether you're a Hutterite or a Mormon, you know, you typically have some cultural mechanism for providing for people who are down and out to convert people away from your culture. One of the things they need is the safety nets in place because it lowers the switching costs. And that's one of the core reasons they fight so hard for these because they try to be like, oh, conservatives don't care about like poor people. And it's like, I see very few like s progressive, like Salvation Army like efforts. They don't run these things, but they don't like that these things often come with rules attached to them, which are part of the cultural transmission system that they sort of were built up to play a role in.

Vance Crowe [00:42:35] What do you think it is that is attractive to people about becoming progressive, about like living in this, in, in the world where the future is not something that they're thinking about?

Malcolm Collins [00:42:49] It's very interesting. This is, so we wrote a book, the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, and it really focuses heavily on this subject. So there's a few things that are happening here, right? So there's two things. There's soft cultures which generally lean progressive, but then there's also the virus, which is hardcore progressive. So we typically divide cultures into hard cultures and soft cultures. Hard cultures typically have a unique way of dressing, a sense of identity, strict rules. Whereas soft cultures typically have less of these things. Now what's really interesting is soft cultures are typically much older than hard cultures. Hard cultures were typically sprung out of whatever, like cultural chain they come from pretty recently. And then over time they get degraded by pop culture, which is like the generic culture in our society. Like it's a caustic acid making them softer and softer. And as they get softer, they lose the hard choices that people are meant to make. They move from an internal locus of control. IE my failures are my own fault to an external locus of control. My failures are society's fault. And they typically give up most of the harder practices that they have to maintain. You know, they want things to be easier and easier and easier. And this is just sort of a, a thing that happens intergenerationally until you get some new iteration of the movement spun out. And then, you know, you get a new hard culture. So that's one thing that's driving the to this, it's just intergenerational cultural degradation. But then another thing is why does this cultural degradation happen and why is a super virus so effective?

Malcolm Collins [00:44:25] Is because it's selling people. You won't have to feel pain anymore, any pain you are feeling right now, we can remove this from your cultural group. And they use some very sophisticated mechanisms like cultural technologies to spread, which makes them very hard to fight. So if you think of cultures as like nodal networks, which overlap with each other, historically, if you had somebody from a different cultural group come into your cultural group, you just kill them. Like if a Catholic came into a Protestant country and was preaching, you know, you'd light them on fire. Same way a Protestant went into a Catholic majority country. Or if somebody like had a new way of seeing the world, whether it was Galileo or a witch, you know, you're like, okay, this is different. We're gonna maintain cultural fidelity by just killing this outsider. The the virus evolved a new system. So if you think of it as sort of like infecting nodal networks with this promise that no one in the network will have to feel pain again when a network begins to be infected, infected nodes look for nodes that look like they may look immune to the virus, like a college professor who says something like men and women may have systemic differences in how they see the world and they're like, oh, this person's immune to the message because that could hurt somebody's feelings. So they begin to deconnect the strengths of all of the connected nodes to that person lowering that person's influence within the infected network, essentially they shadow ban people, which is very different. People often focus on cancellation, but cancellation is actually a minority way that the virus hoards power over people.

Malcolm Collins [00:46:04] It's more like a terrorism tactic. It doesn in extreme circumstances. This sort of shadow banning process is really what makes it so hard because as soon as you try to walk into one of these environments, you know, you're like a, a Gore-Tex glove going into water. It just parts surround you and no one can hear any immune message.

Vance Crowe [00:46:26] This is fascinating. Like I, I find myself without question, I'm, I'm just sitting here being like, well, I mean like the, the parent in me feels an immediate like reaction like, like I've just jumped into cold water, so I'm going, and, and, and so my immediate reaction is like, okay, wait a second. Is, is this just fear tactics that you're doing? And, and like I'm, I'm saying this because if I feel this strong of a reaction, the right behavior for me to do is to be very suspicious because this isn't what I see. I can kind of see it off in the, in the distance and, and it doesn't feel like the world is collapsing around with these ideas. But as you describe 'em, I'm like, no, that's right. And when I look at churches, I see these things and when I look at schools, I, I see this as well, where else is this showing up that people don't realize?

Malcolm Collins [00:47:22] Well I, I I guess I'd say if you doubt that this is culturally normative, was in the power centers of our society. Just look at modern media. I mean, you can look at what Disney's putting out. You can look at what I mean, they're a giant company, right? Like clearly they think these ideas are normative, but you can look at what CNN is saying, you know, do you think these people,

Vance Crowe [00:47:45] Like this is the thing that strikes me about this kind of ideology, like it, is it directed from, are there, is there a cabal of people? Is there a secret society of people that are like, we need to go push these ideas out there. Or is it like, like you're describing an infection and people don't even realize what they're putting out there there? Secret

Malcolm Collins [00:48:02] Societies are my jam. It is not a secret society. Actually most of the older secret societies are highly affected. So one secret society I can talk about because I don't have any connection with them, is skull and bones. And right now Skull and Bones have a major fight because all of the young skull and bone members are like super woke and they've like let women in and everything and they're very like trying to be ultra progressive and they hate all the old members who are like hardcore old school conservatives. And so across many of these older secret societies that people think to be afraid of, they've been infected by this. And when you're talking about secret societies, the infection is so pervasive amongst the people who run like tech companies in our society and stuff like this that almost all secret societies, 'cause they try to stay politically neutral. They basically have like affirmative action programs for conservatives because it's so hard to find conservatives who are in powerful places within our current society. And you can look at us, I mean, we lost, we had a million dollars for the school at one point and it was stripped from the school because we, I had had the crime of being publicly conservative.

Vance Crowe [00:49:07] Well this happened in St. Louis. The, there's a, a secret society is very famous called the Veiled Prophet Society. And the Veiled prophet is really about civic leaders coming together to, you know, better improve the city. And it turns out that that girl that was on the office, oh, I can't even remember her name. The the, she's like a very cute, she's like, St. Louis just loved her because she was like their their darling child that they sent off to Hollywood. Well somebody found out that she had been crowned the Veiled princess thing and she denounced it and then the veiled profit group came out and said, you know, we are so sorry for our, you know, racist ways and like, it it was like this very, very big deal. And it's so funny to hear you describe this because we watched this play out about a year and a half ago. And exactly the, the way you're describing,

Malcolm Collins [00:49:58] You know, if we had more powerful secret society networks, we probably wouldn't be dealing with this anymore. And this is really interesting. So secret societies, there's multiple classes at secret societies, but one class that has almost entirely gone extinct in America, but used to play a very important role. What they would have is they would have offices in different cities and was in these offices, you'd achieve a rank basically. And, and you'd go through and this rank was tied to sort of your social capital within that city. And your sort of moral standing was in that city. This was the Rotary Club, this was the Lions Club, but it was also the Freemasons, the Society of Oddfellows. It was like this type of secret society. And what it did was it allowed for social capital banking. So if you achieved a certain rank in your local Freemason society or rotary club in Chicago, you know, you could then go to St. Louis or or New York and get into parties and get investments from bankers with similar sort of social rink. 'cause people knew, oh, this is your rank. As the university system proliferated it developed a monopoly over this social accreditation, which used to be much more democratized in our society. And as that has happened with the death of these secret societies, our society, the, the, the infection has completely controlled the university system now. 'cause they realize this is a good way to get people. And so many people from conservative cultures know this. They send their kids to university and this is where they really did you create a good enough pitch for your kids that your way of life is good.

Malcolm Collins [00:51:32] And I'd say even the best cultures probably have a 30% bleed rate when their kids go to college.

Vance Crowe [00:51:37] Yeah. So this is something, so when, when I was traveling around the country, I still do it to some extent giving talks to farm audiences. They would come up to me and say things like, you know, I'm trying, I'm really struggling with whether or not we should send our kids off to college because if we do, the one of two things happens. Either they go off to college and they are pushed to the ag side of campus where they're, you know, totally ostracized from everybody else. When they come over for English and history class, their teacher tells them that they're, you know, they're poisoning the earth and they're doing all these horrible things or they go off to school and when they come back at Thanksgiving they hate us and they never want anything to do with us again. And they go on and, and you know, get rid of their church and all these things. So what should we do? And my answer was, you're gonna laugh at this. I brought Jordan Peterson to the American Farm Bureau and this really pissed some people off. But like, this is the experience that the American farmers having. They're saying, Hey, I was told I need to educate my kids. They need to know about technology, they need to know about science and chemistry and math. But when they do this, they're risking losing their children to the whatever the virus.

Malcolm Collins [00:52:50] Yeah. Well let's talk about why the virus is so effective in the university system. So first the virus differentially targets anywhere where it can get a large population to infect, whether that's public school system, university system, anything like that. Like where through controlling what is true because that's where our society determines what is true. You know, it can control the population. When an organization is infected, any organization, it begins to develop tumor like growth. And in humans, you know, when you develop a tumor, it begins to like rewrote the blood flow all around the tumor, which is the resources of the body. And you begin to see this in universities that they begin to form new departments which are not really dedicated to research anymore. They are entirely dedicated to spreading a certain mindset, you know, whether this is your fat studies department or whether this is your, you know, multicultural,

Vance Crowe [00:53:42] Sustainable ag, whatever. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins [00:53:44] Yeah. And so, you know, imagine you're an engineering professor or you're a biology professor, you're an ag professor, you need to spend most of your time actually like moving forward science, right? Whereas if you are in one of these tumor departments, a hundred percent of your day and your social status within this department is determined by how much you can force other departments to kowtow to your beliefs, to how much you can convert students on campus. And this is an incredibly effective system because it mean that they are constantly like in the body, you know, you have antigens which are searching for like foreign bodies to sort of tag and then say, okay, immune system attack this foreign body. And so they, they, they look and then they will tag foreign bodies, immune individuals with things like, you know, where it's like problematic or like this could hurt somebody's feelings. And it's not just individuals, you know, they tag facts, they tag news sources, they tag, you know, like a normal person. If like there's a book and it has like one line in it that's like offensive to you or even 20% of it that's offensive to you. But like the rest could be like interesting new ideas. Like you'll engage with it. I'm sure any of my books would be offensive to most of your listeners, but they'll still feel like they get something out of it. But the virus doesn't care about actually learning or moving forwards or any sort of real progress. It cares about having complete mental ownership over the people it infects. And so it will tag like a book is problematic and then no one who's infected is allowed to touch the book.

Malcolm Collins [00:55:17] And if they are seen touching the book, if they are seen talking to the, the bad person, Jordan Peterson for example, then they also get disconnected from the network because the network now suspects they might be immune even more insane. There's this concept of dog whistling, which means they have no proof that you're immune, but they suspect that you kind of talk like somebody who might be immune. So it's just better to destroy your career. And that's really scary. And I, I mean you don't have to deal with this. You're like, why don't I see any of this? It's 'cause you're not working with tech people or investors. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:55:49] I left corporate America. I mean like I was seeing this, now that you mention it when I was in corporate America and like the, the diversity and inclusion e events, D and i, all this stuff, I was just like, oh, I'm not going to any of this. Like it it is, but, but I also was like, I gotta get outta corporate America because this stuff is coming for everybody and you're totally right. I used to say and that it was the communications departments within a company are the most dangerous thing. 'cause those people really don't have that much to do all day. They have some marketing, but most of the time it's shopped out to a PR firm or to an advertising firm. But the, but they can run around and be political animals inside of a corporation. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [00:56:27] So, so what are these departments doing, right? Like if you're in a department today, you're like, I just won't engage with them today if you're an employee at most major government companies. 'cause I've seen people having to do their, their things. You have to do like a quiz four times a year that basically is saying, are you sufficiently woke on these issues? And, and even people may disagree with the test, they're like, well I can just lie. Like I know what I'm supposed to say. But what these organizations are doing is saying this is the beliefs you are allowed to publicly have. And to say that this doesn't shift the public discussion, I mean it's really actually a very effective way to do it.

Vance Crowe [00:57:06] Yeah, it's a, a fascinating way to do it because it's like, it gets everybody to either say, will you be compliant or do you actually think these things? And if you say them enough times, if you go to enough of these classes, eventually you're like, well, you know, maybe they're kind of right that the, you know, that we need to start doing these things. Like I remember when when bearer announced, after they had purchased Monsanto, they took like, I dunno a few months to decide who was gonna be on their leadership team and that they was like a makeup of people and people openly stood up in meetings and they would say, there aren't enough women on there, there isn't enough Asian people, there aren't enough. Like, you know, and you sit there and you say like, you are openly saying that the leadership of the company is incorrect and you're saying it based on their race or their sex. Like when did this become okay? But people around them are clapping and cheering and so you realize like, oh this is, this is already done. They've already made these conclusive that, that the company itself accepts these and isn't trying to change that belief system inside of the company.

Malcolm Collins [00:58:13] Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, you're absolutely right. And it's, it's really interesting. So what's fascinating is, is the way that this sort of virus has evolved. So when it infects a system, the system, it, it's not really helpful if it's just infecting people coming into and out of the system, it really wins. If like a fungus that's like infected and ant and mind controlled it, it eventually needs to kill the ant so that the spores can fly out into the environment. It's fundamentally parasitoid. It needs to kill the host to infect the, the, the vast majority of other organizations because the iterations of it that killed their hosts out competed the iterations that didn't. And this is why stuff like the Wall Street, like Occupy Wall Street movement failed or like Gawker failed or like modern feminism has largely failed and split apart is because it needed to release the nodes after it converted enough people. And then they get into other organizations and once they reach

Vance Crowe [00:59:11] So they all get fired and then they all go out and find new places and then they take those ideas. Is that what's going on with California? Is California a failed state? And then sending all their terrible ideas about how you should run a state onto Texas and Colorado and Idaho and these places?

Malcolm Collins [00:59:27] Well, so what's really interesting is how when you get an advanced infection, how little this, this virus cares about any sort of the things it claims to care about. And you can look at numbers of this, you know, when when like b LM moves into an area, typically at least perceived inequity increases and a lot of like inequities actually like measurably increased. It doesn't. And this is why nobody cared when it turned out that like the BLM movement had like thrifted tons of money. So it's like leaders could buy mansions and stuff. It was because the goal was never actually to increase equality. It was to kowtow other people into saying they see the world a certain way and that's how you move up within these hierarchies. And it's, it's really damaging within because I've, I've looked at like the major nonprofits 'cause I've like worked adjacent to them. And one of the problems is, is you get two types of people in these nonprofits. You get people who actually care about doing good in the world and then you care about people who, who have this signaling like I care about the virus and I care about signaling my dedication to it. And using that to move up these people who only care about signaling because a hundred percent of their time can be dedicated to politics. And because they have nothing, they genuinely believe they move up much faster. And where this gets really dangerous is any form of immunity. Not just like any, any form that says like I'm not listening to the virus will get you canceled and you can never get back in their good graces even once the virus has agreed that this is true. So I mean right now recently in the New York Times that I'm sure this person's gonna end up being fired or like have some major problem, they were like, hey, like we need to admit that like the data says that like the mandatory maxing policies didn't really work, right?

Malcolm Collins [01:01:02] Like all conservatives have known this for a long time and I eventually the liberals are going to accept it so progressives are going to accept this. 'cause just the data's so overwhelming, you know, and it, and like 7% of this giant trash pile in the ocean now is just masks now in the center of the ocean. Like even the pollution stuff they claim to care about. But they will never rehabilitate anyone whose life they destroyed over this. Even though, I mean, I don't know if you remember there was like Levi's or something like somebody who is basically in line to become president ended up getting fired. 'cause she was like, Hey, you know, this is really hurting like underprivileged and like bipoc communities that you're closing schools because it's not happening in these wealthy white communities. And they're like, no, you can't say closing schools is bad. You now have signaled that you might be immune. And so we don't care if like you're actually doing good, you must be erased because now you're a danger. Now we know you will say, yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:01:56] This happened exactly to me when when that stuff came out on on when people were putting masks on. I was like, I don't agree. I do, it's not by default. I agree. And I think there's trade offs and you know, I don't know, at the time we didn't know for sure whether or not the, the breathing, but I was like, there's downsizes people called me a eugenics. People would like, I i I had work taken away from me. It, it was, it was like a crazy thing for me and I really didn't understand. 'cause I was like, well eventually people are gonna feel bad about it, but they're never gonna feel bad about it. They're never gonna go back, they're never gonna change their their minds on it

Malcolm Collins [01:02:30] Because it was about standing up for the orthodoxy. Like this, it it's so fascinating. It it has a lot of parallels to like the pre reformation Catholic church where it was like, you know, you can't have an outside idea and the church may up update what it thinks and then now there's like a new norm and this is what's true. But

Vance Crowe [01:02:54] I, so I I, okay so you right now are fighting against this in a macro way about the ISTs movement, right? Have children understand how religion works and think about conservatism in this different way. What about today? What about like what can you do now or is it, is it like hey abandon all hope today and just shoot for 45 years from now when your culture can outpace them?

Malcolm Collins [01:03:18] Well no I think that, I mean the reason why we're looking at replacing the school system now is we need a good alternative. We work a lot with the University of Austin. We are trying to create a school system that upon graduation from high school kids have these same job opportunities so that they would have if they were graduating from Harvard. You know, because I think you can, you don't really learn that much in college anymore. So we're just trying to advance through what we call democratized nepotism. Like figuring out how to make this system works, how to solve the major societal bottlenecks that, that are used to convert kids now. But in addition to that, we really need to now start thinking because we will be the inheritor of the years. You know, you used to win, you used to take over other people either by no less so by converting people but mostly by conquering other areas. You know, that was how, that was the game that everyone played. And now it's a game of can you have a lot of kids and have those kids enjoy their lives, their childhoods and their cultural group enough to want to perpetuate it. And with that being the case, I think we need to start creating cultural alliances among those conservative groups and begin to think about how we build these cultural alliances for those conservative groups that are okay with living in multicultural ecosystems. Because the next big enemy we're gonna face is the aspects of conservative cultural groups that aren't okay with living in multicultural ecosystems.

Vance Crowe [01:04:41] Oh, so then you're saying like you, you either have to align with the people that are open to hey different cultures, different ways of thinking or align with the people that are like, no, I'm a white ethnonationalist and I only want white ethno nationalists here.

Malcolm Collins [01:04:56] Yeah, well 'cause eventually only those groups will remain, the progressives have lost. When you get exposed to a certain amount of radiation, your cells DNA gets scrambled and they can no longer replicate and that means you're functionally dead. There is no way you can survive at that point. There is nothing anyone can do to prevent you from dying. You are dead and you just don't know it yet. That is the progressive movement right now. And so I am looking at the world my kids and grandkids are going to inhabit. I don't really worry myself that much about progressives. I worry about the effect they can have on my kids. I worry about how they're gonna panic and their death spiral and start lashing out at everything and hitting everything and they're going to, but eventually they're going to die because they're not having kids. And so, you know, I think there is a lot we can do. We now live in

Vance Crowe [01:05:45] A world. Whoa. So you're saying the game right now is outlast them and try and keep them from propagating their system through grabbing the orphans or, or or taking your children?

Malcolm Collins [01:05:58] Yeah, well that's the game. We've already basically won that game I think because they're gonna get better and better at it. But even if they get better and better at it, you know, due to even just like basic evolutionary pressure will get better and better at resisting them. I mean the kids who had a sociological profile that wasn't amenable to their ideas will be the kids who end up reproducing. 'cause they'll stay in the cultural groups and have lots of kids. So that's why my big fear isn't actually the progressives, it's the, it's the rise of what will be like true ethno nationalists Nazi like individuals. Which which will not like the many small conservative religious traditions across the United States.

Vance Crowe [01:06:42] I mean the problem that I'm seeing right now is I I agree with, with your potential like outcome there. That that is definitely possible and but I I naturally have like a, the the kind of idea, like I would never wanna join a club that would have me as one of its members. Like I am not a joiner and most of the people that I know i I are not joiners. They don't wanna join groups.

Malcolm Collins [01:07:07] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:07:07] They don't want to be seen in that way. Is that just something you have to overcome if you don't want your your

Malcolm Collins [01:07:14] Line

Vance Crowe [01:07:14] To be

Malcolm Collins [01:07:14] Alone? No, I mean that's what we wanna protect, right? They're not joiners and that's why they have stayed immune. But all of these people who aren't joiners, there are ways that we can work together more efficiently to achieve combined outcomes like don't take our kids. And I think that we're getting better at that as a conservative movement because the conservative movement has something that the progressive movement will never have, which is diversity. Like we genuinely see the world in different ways and we've had to learn to work with people who see the world in different ways.

Vance Crowe [01:07:48] Oh, that's a hundred percent. And like I people when they do, when I say, oh I I'm in the ag community, people like have this image in their mind that it's like one person farmer John multiplied by, you know, a thousand times. You go to one of these groups and these people are totally different. They are so different. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [01:08:06] That

Vance Crowe [01:08:07] Like you, the the like the most amazing thing is local farm bureaus or even the state farm bureaus because somehow even though these people are all in competition with one another, they're all like doing different things. They find a way to like keep themselves together strong enough to have a bond. But it is like this tenuous thing. So if you ever meet an American Farm Bureau president, I shit you not, this person is a coalition builder because everybody in that group is fighting with one another.

Malcolm Collins [01:08:37] Yeah. Well and it, it's funny, you know, another thing that we need to focus on is media. Our kids are consuming to some extent and stuff like that. And I think even within the conservative movement, you know, our kids are getting really toxic media. So you look at the top influencer among Gen Z last year and it was Andrew Tate and, and I say a Andrew Tate is a, is a boy's vision of what a successful man looks like. It's not a man's vision or a dad's vision of a successful man, right? Like he has nothing that I would envy.

Vance Crowe [01:09:05] Yeah. So for people that don't know, he's like saying, look, I can get you all these riches. I can help you become super athletic. And the reason it's so attractive is because he is saying like, look, you know, some men should have access to as many women as they want and the people that are weak won't, and look at all these things I have around me. So

Malcolm Collins [01:09:23] It's

Vance Crowe [01:09:23] Conservative in a way.

Malcolm Collins [01:09:25] Yeah, conservative in a way. I mean, you know, he, he's liked with, he recently converted to Islam, you know, so he's found religion as well. But what I mean by that is I think for a lot of our young boys, you know, something that's just not provided for them in any aspect of our society right now is a role model of, of what it means to be a dad and not like a, a successful playboy. Which I think is what TikTok and the social media is really selling them is how they can get maximum number of women.

Vance Crowe [01:09:56] So let me ask you this, like you are not a strapping man with like some big, you know, burly voice and, and, and beard. First of all, how many kids do you have? And second of all, what makes you a dad that you think they will look up to one day?

Malcolm Collins [01:10:11] Well, I mean I think, you know, you can provide it for your own kids, but I, I want my kids to see that it's not just within our family. So I hope, you know, but we're at three kids right now. We do one every year and a half. We are a very odd cultural group. Like we are incredibly technophilic, you know, we DNA sequence our kids, we have the embryos pre frozen from when we were young to optimize around, you know, minimum genetic conditions. So we are like a highly regimented family that does things in a really regimented the hard culture way. But that's incredibly technophilic in terms of reproductive technology and we just sort of feel we have to be because there's no other way my wife would be fertile. It's so hard without technology these days to have kids for, for a lot of people who don't live in environments where they're really able to isolate themselves from all of these, you know, endocrine disruptors and stuff.

Vance Crowe [01:11:04] Yeah, I mean we, we did IVF in my family, I'm open to telling people about it because I wish somebody had told me one earlier that you might need to and two like just, just recognizing like, hey this, this may be the reality and once you understand it then you better know what you have to go through to get it. Because television and media tells all these young women like, don't worry about it, you can freeze your eggs. Like this is not a fun process. This is, it's

Malcolm Collins [01:11:28] Hundreds of

Vance Crowe [01:11:28] Shots in the ass

Malcolm Collins [01:11:30] Like this big in your butt. It hurt so much. I mean our family, we did the year of the harvest the first year when we were younger and that meant my wife just did IVF cycle after IVF cycle after IVA cycle for an entire year to try to get as many young embryos as we could.

Vance Crowe [01:11:45] Whoa. That's a whole different level of this game. And do you mind if I ask how many, how many you have frozen?

Malcolm Collins [01:11:52] Yeah, so well we have enough that we could go for the number of kids we wanted, which is is seven to 13. So I, I can't remember exactly. I think we have 30 frozen right now. So you know about half of those will take and we are going to keep going until they remove my wife's uterus or until she can't have kids anymore. I mean the way that our cultural group sees childbirth is that any kid that you can have that you don't have is a kid you may as well have killed. Which is interesting because it puts us directly at odds with cultural groups that believe life begins at conception because they think that what we're doing with IVF and genetics is wrong, but we both have like the same overall goal and like, this is what I mean by cultural conservative communities, learning to work together with people who are genuinely different and have genuinely different beliefs but are on the same side of not wanting other people to take away their ability to have kids.

Vance Crowe [01:12:46] This is, I've never heard that argument before. So this is for people that have eggs after you've done the harvest then you, you fertilize them, now you have an embryo, it's potentially viable. What happens is you may have a woman that has three children and then decides I don't want to go any further. So the question then becomes a moral one becomes what do you do with those embryos? Is that a life? Is it not a life? And you guys are saying we believe as long as we keep going as long as we can, then we move around that, that embryo problem. That's super interesting.

Malcolm Collins [01:13:18] Yeah, well it has to do with the way we see time. Like again, it's an interesting cultural view of reality. So like we see reality as sort of branching timelines and probabilistically. So every child exists probabilistically in relation to their potential to come into existence. So instead of saying life begins at like sperm, 'cause you know, some cultural groups are like, oh, you shouldn't spill seed on the ground or be believing it Brits at conception. We just believe that all potential life has, has, has value, all potential human life has value and that we shouldn't be drawing the line anywhere. That's like a sunk cost fallacy, but, but we respect cultures who see things differently than us.

Vance Crowe [01:13:53] Malcolm Collins, this has been a wild and fascinating conversation. If people wanted to have you to learn more about what you do, where would they go?

Malcolm Collins [01:14:04] I mean the Pragmatist Guide series, we talk about things from sexuality to relationships like, which is dating markets governance. We have a book on that. We have have a Guide to Crafting Religion, which is one of our latest. Just check it out. We usually sell 'em for two bucks and all the money goes to nonprofits so you know they're on Amazon. Or if you're interested in our school system, the collins institute.org.

Vance Crowe [01:14:23] Well this has been fantastic and man, thank you for jumping on here. We don't normally do remote interviews, but I needed one and I was like, all right, let's have Malcolm on. Let's see what this is all about.

Malcolm Collins [01:14:32] I appreciate it so much and I had so much fun.

Vance Crowe [01:14:36] Thanks man.