Birth Rates Are Low. Can A “Fertility President” Fix That?

20:58I think a lot of people desire to have family and a lot of people feel like family is out of reach for them. Yeah, because it is in our culture. So basically you have to like go off the grid to actually have kids in a way that is sustainable and not stressful. So a lot of people who do ultimately make it work in the end are making it work in an inherently unsustainable way that's really stressful because you're trying to be a dink who also happens to have kids. Dual income, no kids. Yeah. And it's very stressful to make that work because it was never meant to work. I think as a generation, we're living through a massive cultural shift, absorbing feminism, absorbing modern capitalism, absorbing affordability, changing technology.

21:35I think there's also this sense of like, do I need to have kids? Is like having kids a propagation of the economic system? So it's like, I got to pay into someone else's social security. I think people have a little bit of reticence or reluctance around buying into the idea that everybody needs to have a kid in society, even though at a micro level, they may or may not want to have a kid for themselves. Yeah, I think something that everyone can agree with, whether they're leftists or rightists, or maybe not everyone, but I think most sane people agree with this, that whatever the mainstream way of living is right now, whatever our culture has culminated in doesn't seem to be working anymore.

22:07Everybody understands the current structure of marriage is broken. And what What pronatalism is is us radically trying to fix it by inventing new cultures. And I think that other people try to fix it in different ways. Some people try to fix it politically with new political movements or radically different political movements. But what we do is we try to fix it at the level of ourselves and the level of our families. We'll be right back after the break. Pronatalism as a movement, where does this get going? Because I remember when I was doing this show with Kara Swisher, I remember bringing up pronatalism.

22:41And she was like, she didn't know what it was. It was like 2022, I want to say. It hadn't yet bust into the culture. In 2023, 2024, 2025, there's been a lot of coverage of it. I first learned about it, I think through you guys, maybe just like before the pandemic. Yeah, that's when we first started obsessing about it. That's when you started. And was there already a world of pronatalism that existed outside of these religious societies? No, the world of pronatalism really grew around us. Like, in the first Pernatalist conferences, we were the headliners. We were bringing people together. We've been organizing all the thought leaders.

23:14One of the things that I really care about in this movement, because I was, like, involved in the effective altruist movement before this, is I didn't want us to become a bunch of, like, infighting, you know, sex scandals and all of this. Because when Pernatalism is growing, you've got to keep in mind, we've got Tradcasts. We have ultra-Orthodox Jews. We have people like us. Tradcats? Tradcatholics. Traditional Catholics. Tradcatholics, okay. You have people like us who are using IVF. You know, presumably we have a lot of surface level differences in our ideologies. And it was really important to us to grow a movement where despite those, we wouldn't see this petty infighting.

23:46We wouldn't see these rifts. And I think in large part we've been able to achieve that. And I take a lot of pride in that. And you wanted to bring, to make having kids cool again, kind of? Kind of, yeah. I mean, that was the goal back then. Obviously the goal has transformed since we first started the movement. To what? So when we started the movement, we thought there might be some way to build this into a nonpartisan movement where people broadly understood the scale of the threat and what was downstream of it. As things began to move, we basically entered reality. One is that we're never going to be able to fix fertility collapse in a time frame that's going to release the pressure on things like Social Security before those systems start to collapse.

24:26And even if we could, AI might serve as an alternative. When AI is increasingly replacing the jobs that people can take, the whole economic question around needing humans to produce a tax base ends up changing. So that was the first thing we realized. The second thing we realized is that we're never going to win the mainstream leftists over to the prenatalist movement. One of the things that scared me the most when I started this movement is that, more broadly, the urban monocultural lifestyle, the progressive lifestyle is going to go extinct, right? Like, if it can't motivate its own replacement, which happens to be the dominant culture on Earth right now, what we call the urban monoculture, has basically, and we've never seen this in human civilization before, just decided to, like, pass the baton on to whoever grabs it.

25:06You wanted to have kids naturally. You ended up doing everything through IVF. And also, you started genetically testing. We did. So, like, there are companies like Orchid that provide this service and stuff. And this is also quite controversial. Is it controversial now? I feel like a lot of people do it. So people try to play it off as controversial. We use Herocyte, and I think sometimes that can be controversial because we started using genomic prediction. They don't share things like height and IQ. Herocyte does. Among, of course, all the important health stuff as well. So you have this testing where you can kind of see various genetic traits of your child.

25:42Yeah, height, externalizing, schizophrenia. And IQ? IQ. Well, yeah. You can test embryos for IQ. I feel like I want to fact check that. They're looking at— Yeah, yeah. I mean, IQ is highly heritable. Yeah. It's actually one of the most heritable traits that humans have. But you guys do not consider yourselves eugenicists. No, because a eugenicist is somebody who believes that certain people based on their genes don't have the right to exist. Because we want to eventually get into genetic engineering, when somebody says that they don't believe a genetically engineered child has the right to exist, they're being a eugenicist because they're saying a certain class of human beings doesn't have a right to exist simply because of their genes.

26:17There's a lot of concern about the overlap between like pronatalism and racial replacement theory and like concern about becoming a majority minority country or all of these things. And so there's a sense of like, OK, if you're white, you really need to breed. If you're intelligent, you really need to breed. If you're an elite, you really need to breed, whatever it is. There's all these theories on that end. Are you guys part? Do you guys subscribe to that worldview? Those theories are so stupid. Because usually when you hear them brought up, it's, oh, white people are disappearing. When, like, that's the one group that's super fine.

26:48Like, white conservative Christians and Jews are doing super fine in terms of birth rates. Like, they are going to inherit the future. It's all these other groups. It's Emiratis, Jains, South Koreans. All these other groups are just vaporizing in front of us. And no one's talking about it because we're too busy talking about it. We're only talking about it. All you read about is the demographic crisis. Right, but we're not talking about the fact that South Koreans are disappearing. We're talking about like, oh, I might not get all of my social security. In the United States, for example, the black fertility rate is below the white fertility rate.

27:16The native black fertility rate is only maybe 1.3 right now, which is desperately low to the extent that like when we're talking about groups that could go extinct, that's one of them. Right? No one talks about them. Nobody talks about that. Except for us, apparently. Except for us, apparently. Yeah. Because there's a lot of groups where people can point to a country and be like, look, this country has really good fertility rates. And it's like, no, they're just really poor. Like, everyone has good fertility rates when they're in desperate poverty. But groups that are able to maintain high fertility rates in part because their countries are in poverty or whatever, they're not going to be necessarily relevant geopolitically or economically a few generations from now.

27:51I think some of this language is alarming, like relevant geopolitically as like which human life is relevant or not. So are you guys having more kids because you want to have world domination? Or are you guys having more kids because you are concerned about the future of society? No, we love our kids. It can be both, right? Because there's an easy way to get your fertility rate up. And lots of groups have convergently evolved in this. If you adopt an incredibly xenophobic attitude towards outsiders, if you ban your often women from becoming educated, if you ban your group from interacting much with outsiders, if you start to treat women like slaves, like you can get your fertility rate way up.

28:26And this is not like one group that's done this. There's been Jewish groups that's done this. There's been Muslim groups that's done this. There's been Christian groups that's done this. This is a really easy hack to get super high fertility rates. But unfortunately, it means that you become less geopolitically and economically relevant. Like the Amish may have a ton of kids, but the Amish are never going to be like a major geopolitical voice because they can't exercise geopolitical force because they don't have the technology to. Which is one of the, so if you can be one of the groups that doesn't adopt this strategy, but it's still high fertility, that is pluralistic in high fertility, the future is sort of handed to you.

29:01Have you guys seen the movie Idiocracy? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's happening. The first scene of that film, can you describe it? A very nerdy, studious, thoughtful-looking couple is interviewed periodically throughout periods of their adulthood, talking about what they need to do before they can be ready to have kids, and they ultimately just never have kids. And then meanwhile, cut to, there's a trailer park. There's a trailer park, and everybody's running around, cheating on their partner, roughhousing, doing all sorts of stuff that we associate with white trash in America. Excuse the term. And they're having tons and tons of kids.

29:38And I think what the movie Idiocracy shows is that— This is not a documentary. This is a feature film. A narrative film. The heredibility of IQ is not a racial issue. You know, it's an issue within ethnic groups. Within any ethnic group on Earth right now, the less intelligent people have more kids. So is that a motivating factor for you guys? Absolutely. That smart people should have more kids? Absolutely. Well, I would say smart people should have more kids. Simone, you're not saying. Simone's not agreeing. I think there's a difference between you two on this. I feel like there is no such thing as a universally good or bad trait.

30:07Like, if smartness is causing a lack of fitness, then the smart ones will die out and there will be no smart ones left. Like, clearly smart's not working for people anymore. I worry about that because I don't want to end up with some, like, you know, idiocracy-style civilization where they're like, I don't know how the machine works. Like, it just feeds me, right? Like, that's not good. But I also think, you know, who are we to judge? What is a good or bad trait? This is why we are very much in favor of understanding genes and traits and getting each family to choose. And obviously, every family that chooses to have kids is practicing some form of genetic selection by choosing their partner or choosing a sperm or egg donor.

30:46Like, keep in mind, we are not eliminating autism from our children, even though a lot of parents would just only want to get polygenic risk score selection to eliminate the odds that they would get autism in their children. And we think that it's their right to decide that. We think that every family should have the freedom to decide what trait they think will be fit in the future and what will not. I mean, this is a—it's interesting to see this tension between you because it seems like— No, I agree with her. I just said it poorly. Yes. No, no, I think she— You flatter me. She said it better than I did.

31:15I meant whatever she said. What I meant by, like, we want smart people is what we mean is that we, as in Simone and I, our culture values this. That's our hypothesis. But we don't demand that from other people. Should we be worried about demographic collapse when, like, we see the population growing? I'm not talking about an individual country by country level, but I'm saying, like, I think the projection is that we're going to have something like, is it 9.7 billion people in the world by 2050? and over 10, like nearing 11 billion people in the world by 2100. Yeah. So let's listen to deracialize the question.

31:50Let's look at just... Deracialize. Well, I think many people, when they hear this... I didn't racialize the question. I just want to be clear. No, no, but some... Okay, let's just say it was in the context of the United States, okay? Somebody in... Because the real problem, at least originally, was falling fertility rates with things like Social Security, the tax system, et cetera. That's what people were really worried about. They weren't worried about people. They were worried about taxpayers. And so they wanted more high-taxpaying individuals. Where the fertility rate has fallen fastest in the United States is in cities like Manhattan and San Francisco.

32:21Now, a kid born to one of the families in Manhattan and San Francisco is likely going to be a higher taxpayer than a kid being born in rural Alabama. It would be great if we had a world where every kid born, no matter what family they were born to, no matter what culture their family was, had exactly the same outcomes as every other kid. But we've been trying to create that world for about the past 150 years, and we haven't even gotten close. And so when we're talking about pronatalism at the level of the taxpayer, right, like the tax system, what we're really talking about is taxpayers within countries, at which point the aggregate world population growing becomes irrelevant.

33:03If we're talking about pronatalism at the level of certain cultural and ethnic groups going extinct, like, say, South Koreans going extinct, Italians going extinct, at that point, it also doesn't matter that people are having kids in another country. because I can't just turn somebody who's not an Italian into an Italian without erasing their culture, which is cultural genocide, right? This is where, like, the stuff gets very, like, and I think you saying to deracialize the question when I didn't racialize the question was interesting because this is where it gets into this. And I remember seeing a quote that Emma had in that piece, and she said this is back to Austin.

33:38Working the crowd at the NATO conference were some academics, economists, demographers, concerned about alliances that the pro-natalist movement had forged in pursuit of reach and influence. And they're talking about, I think, particularly characters who have been involved in what you call the really dumb replacement theory, like people who are more on the, you know, white nationalist, supremacist side of things. And why did you guys invite them to your conference? One, we didn't invite them. They just came. It was anybody who paid for a ticket could go. This was to the first conference. And the second conference, we didn't really have anyone who was particularly far on.

34:12If you look at the actual— I think this was the second conference. They were talking about 2025. Yeah, there was—if you look at the actual white nationalists in the United States, they generally hate us in our movement. Okay, speak about the conference. I don't want to talk about the general. Like, who brought these people—do you feel like for this pronatalist movement to work, you have to make some alliances? Look, so some pronatalist advocates are going to be more focused on their own cultural group. That is kind of how pro-natalism is going to have to work going forward. It's that you have a culture or a religion or a group, and they love themselves, and they want to see more of themselves, and they love their kids.

34:47Think about it like sports teams, right? I mean, it's hard to think about sports teams because it's about people. I do think it's problematic. It is about—no, no, no. No, it's not problematic at all. Like, imagine if, like, you had the Oakland Raiders and the— I mean, don't imagine it. Like, speak about the specifics. So, Simone, it's easier to talk about this in terms of, like, Koreans, right? Like, Koreans are very low fertility right now. To get a group of Koreans, a culture within Korea that has high fertility, I need to convince some Koreans to love Korean culture and identity and want to perpetuate it.

35:13Yeah, so there are people who show up to NATO con who are like, Western civilization is being threatened. It's like someone on a footbeat. We're being pummeled out there. Come on. Let's go. Let's go. And you think that's fine. Yeah. Earlier you said to me that that's so stupid. There's no risk of black people. Well, because it's stupid. It's not true. It's like the Yankees being like, we've never won anything ever. We've got to win this now. And it's like, come on, guys, like we know you're doing fine. Right. But the point being is that it's going to be very hard to convince anyone to want to have kids if they don't have pride and a civilizational identity.

35:46Yeah. They're not like I'm. And I think people are seeing that. They're like, oh, this is racism. When like, no, this is it is a necessary element. One of the big reasons why we see urban progressives not having kids is that there's a deep sense of hatred of their of themselves and their culture. and we, oh, like we're hurting the environment and all these things. Those reasons are rarely true when you actually probe at them. It's like rarely that climate change is the reason that people are having kids. There's like a deep level of self-hatred in modern progressive culture that is, I think, causing a lot of dampening I find it interesting when you guys were so like, you know, you consider yourselves like such Silicon Valley people, very rationalist, very based on data, you have Excel sheets running, for you guys to like, to make these like sweeping claims about a generation of society.

36:29The way I put it is you can't convince a Mexican to have more kids if they don't have pride in their identity as a Mexican in Mexican culture. I'm sure there are people who have more kids who are not prideful of their culture, and I'm sure that there are people who are prideful of their culture who do not have kids. Well, no, no, no. I disagree. For sure, like, all of these matrix exist. Very strongly disagree, because if someone has a lot of kids and they're not prideful of their birth culture, they are prideful of a new culture they've created, and they're excited to raise kids within it. It's just like, it's like a very abstract conversation.

36:56Like, for me, I'm like, people have kids, like, it's not like I'm going to have kids because I'm like so excited to have Pakistan kids though I love Pakistan I love the food I love so many things about my culture so you're proud of it I'm proud of it but I also I'm not proud of it at the expense of other people I think the thing is I'm not like my kids are better no one ever said it they don't they're not saying it's like we gotta take out no one said that no one was talking about genocide I think for some of these people it is like a football team in a sense I'm not saying it's genocide but I'm saying there are people who are like we have to outperform we have to out populate the earth that's not zero sum That is expansionist.

37:28So this is what I'm asking. The question I'm asking you is, do you think there is a line that you would want to draw in like kind of how far you extend the tent of these people that you would not want to include like white supremacists who have an interest in propagating, you know, white babies and limiting the number of other babies? There's a line in its cultural sovereignty. It's when people start trying to legislate or dictate or curtail in some way the lives or cultures of other groups, you've crossed a line and you're not part of our movement anymore. I've known you guys for a long time.

37:58And when I went to look at your podcast, I was like, kind of like, I was like, what the fuck? Okay, I want to read you. That is exactly what we're going for. I hope it offended you. So I want to read you some of your titles for your recent podcast episodes, okay? Go. It's now illegal to murder whites. Blacks and Sikhs don't know how they'll survive this. Another one is We Need More Sins. Do you want to talk about that title? No, no, I want to go through them all, and then we're going to go back and talk about it. We Need More Sins. Sins equal rules that make your life better. Third one, how a gay Jew rewrote core Catholic doctrine in the 1960s.

38:35That one was wild. D, number four, researching a gangbang radicalized my wife against early-stage abortion. Told you about that. We were wrong in parentheses. Okay. The fifth one, how the world turned against gays. Only 60 % of Dems are pro-trans now. Yeah, have you seen the graphs? And then how Legos taught the world to hate Mormons again. It's like what offends me about it is not like, I'm like, what the fuck? It's just, it's clickbait. I don't know what it means. I'm just like, what is this clickbait hellhole? Are you guys just like trying to win an algorithm or is this like, are these things?

39:10Yeah, you kind of, I mean, look. Is that what you're doing here? So we are coming at this with extreme, like, no funding. We don't get, like, paid for this. That's okay. I self-help. And we have to figure out how to out of nowhere. I'm also an independent podcaster. I don't have this kind of wild title. So the cheapest way that we can get PR and we can get more views and we can get our message out, which is actually fairly substantive, I would hope, is by rage baiting. So what I'm hearing you say is, like, okay, you have a line. Your line is that you don't want to be bedfellows with people who want to expand their propagation at the expense of other people's propagation.

39:42You don't want to be in the world of like— You're saying that I'm okay with people convincing, changing minds. You're willing to co-opt some of the vernacular and the culture around that group to pull people into your economic insistence. Dude, I mean like how— I'm never ever going to racism bait. Like, if you ever want to change a genuine racist's mind, oh, I will never talk to them or ever engage with them in any way. Actually, a common thing is, yeah, they've been like, I was a racist when I started watching you guys, and I'm not a racist anymore. People have come and been like, I used to think that Latin Americans were really different from people in America, and I don't think that anymore after watching your podcast.

40:20If you want to change minds, if you want to fight the culture war against Nick Fuentes, you need to be getting in front of the same audience that he's getting in front of. I went and listened to your show. So I'm not just like judging you on headlines. And I listened to the one about it's now illegal to kill white people. Yeah, that was wild stuff that's going on there. Well, you talked about the killing in Belfast, which has been a lightning round and Elon Musk has himself gotten involved. And it's like led to a protest, led to violence all over where this immigrant had been involved in this killing.

40:52And then you also talked about, when I heard another story in Germany, and then what I hear in your show is like, Malcolm, sometimes you'll say some like wild shit. And sometimes you'll say some extremely inaccurate stuff. I'll just say like, it's like you go back and sometimes you guys are correcting or whatever. And Simone, you're often pushing back. You'll be like, well, because, so Malcolm will say, they killed these people. They killed this guy. And all they got was community service. And now they're picking up the trash and whatever. And then Simone's like, well, you know, they were teenagers, and there's probably different laws regarding teenage— Well, you shouldn't be allowed to rape someone just because you're a teenager.

41:27I'm not saying—I don't think that that's what the law says. Well, then the law wasn't being applied, and that's concerning, and it makes a bunch of people feel like the law isn't being applied evenly. No, I think that what it's—in that case, it's like you think that the punishment for the law is not sufficiently strong for the crime, and that's your critique, baby. Right, yeah. But you weren't saying that. You were saying something else. You were saying— No, I believe that the law was being applied differently along ethnic lines for ethnic reasons. And I think that that's wrong. But just take your face value of this dumb headline.

41:58It is now illegal to murder whites. Don't you think it's illegal to murder whites? Well, if you look at the reaction to the Anthony trial that just happened, a bunch of people being like, what am I going to tell my kids? What am I going to tell my five boys? Tell them not to murder people. Because this was a clear case of somebody just murdering someone. So why are people freaking out about this? We all have the facts of this case. We all know that he was asked to leave that tent multiple times. And all the kid did was attempt to forcibly remove him from the tent. And he killed him. And then everybody's freaking, when people protest that, when people protest him being sentenced for murder, for committing murder, it shows that they had an expectation that they wouldn't be tried for committing murder if they did it like this.

42:38And that, to me, is not okay. It's not okay that we have normalized this within parts of our society. And we're trying to elevate this. I want to stop you right now because you're getting very angry and now you're smiling and happy. And I'm wondering when you just did that, are you performing or is this – were you angry? I'm 20-weekly furious. Okay, so here I want to speak to you about this. So there are like across the board – and I haven't looked at the facts of the Carmel Anthony case, which is taken off. But there are throughout society, Malcolm, edge cases of things that are like, I cannot believe that this horrific thing happened.

43:15Like, whatever. I'm not even commenting on this case. I don't know this case. But I'm just saying there are always examples. And that's what led to BLM. People should be able to get mad because of edge cases. BLM can be justified even if it's based on edge cases. Well, I don't think that BLM was about, I mean, when you look at the data about racial violence and police forces. When you look at the rate gang data, when you look at the, yeah, we are using edge cases to motivate anger around something that is a wider statistical phenomenon. And to what end are you motivating that anger? What end are we motivating the anger?

43:46In the very episode that we had that on, we had a large section of like, do not make people of different ethnicities feel uncomfortable in our spaces. Make sure that this is a movement that is inclusive of people regardless of their skin color. But that doesn't mean that we should be okay with the people who are cheering after, you know, the October 11th attacks. 7th. Sorry, I'm just kidding. October 7th attacks. When we have parties in U.S. campuses before the IDF did anything, because of those attacks, that means that this is a normalized culture, that people think that they feel safe going and partying in a university campus because people are being raped at a music festival.

44:23You're making an argument there that I think is a bit like of a slippery slope, which is to say, I think that there are people who were protesting Israel's actions throughout. There were people who went out and celebrated the October 7th attack. There are people who went out and protested that in advance, like prophylactically, any Israeli action against Gaza because they knew it was coming on the basis of history. If you look at the retaliation of the IDF and the Israeli government for attacks and the fallout of that retaliation, right? Because it's often not the perpetrators of the attack who get punished.

44:59It's often the kids, women, other—it's like a whole society. They weren't protesting. They were partying. And this goes all the way. Look at Claudia Gay. I mean, she runs Harvard. So here's the thing. You're just saying words—like, you're, like, now vomiting words of the culture wars, and I'm trying to have a conversation with you, okay? There continue to be protests in the summer well after. At that point, I would say the Israeli response was quite significant. Yes. You would agree? In Gaza. So there are kids that continue to protest. There are people who would like to lean into this kind of headline where you kind of try to make everyone who's a protester appear as if they're, quote, anti-Semitic or, quote, like there's all these ways that this thing spin up into the culture wars.

45:35I think there's a way to, like, paint people in the worst possible light in order to drive clicks and drive rage. It's for me, like, I think that's where I'm like, I don't recognize you guys in that. Do you ever worry about, like, do you ever worry? And I'm asking you, Simone, first. Okay. Do you ever worry about this, like, falling into, like, this world of, that's actually completely irrational. They're completely, like, interested in morphing anecdotal cases to drive and rage bait and anger people and motivate them into, like, becoming memes of themselves. No, I really don't worry about that.

46:14I mean, it would be like someone who makes fishing lures, like, worried about, like, well, I only ever just make—I guess there are people who just only make fishing lures. Is the fact that you don't worry about it, like, worrisome in and of itself? Like, do you have guardrails of, like, how you think about your content and what you want to put in the world? Yeah, I mean, we are continuously focused on whatever it is that maximizes human flourishing. That is what we want. And clex. I mean, well, that is part of the ideology that drives our effort, right? So you have your long-term goal, and then you have, all right, here are my resources, right?

46:45Here's the hand I've been dealt. Here's how much money we have to spend on this. Here's the other obligations we have in life. Here's how much time we have. How do we get, you know, start to build a community, raise awareness about demographic collapse, raise awareness about a bunch of other societal issues? And how do we get to there? And that clickbait, that ragebait element of our strategy is one of those ideologies on, by the way, after we tried many more polished and more responsible and professional pathways, the thing that ultimately got traction, the thing that ultimately has product market fed, and that ultimately engages people.

47:16And so, all right, well, this is what works and this is what we can afford. And this is actually making a very positive impact for everything we can measure. So we're going to keep doing it. Leaning into the algorithm of the identity bait, for me, I'm like, I think that's fighting a ghost that doesn't exist. I think most people, like even the COVID stuff, like a lot of people will be like getting out there. And I've interviewed Fauci and I've interviewed Jay Bhattacharya. And I've been like, you know, I've been through this, the gambit. I've covered this stuff. And now people will hark back to that.

47:41I don't think there's a lot of people right now who would say like, yeah, you know, closing schools was a great idea. And if we were to do it all again, we would do it again. And people like dine out on that historical mistake to animate people about a world that doesn't, like a yesteryear that doesn't exist so that they can continue to be mad and then move to whatever they are interested to move them to. The way that is, I think that this war, this internet low culture war that a lot of people think is below them. The war that happened when we were younger between Tumblr and 4chan, right? Like people thought that was like weirdos online.

48:15But that was what was downstream of the modern Trump administration and the modern, you know, Xeno pronoun side of the progressive movement, right? Like this war that we're having, it's this underground culture war happening online that determines the future of human civilization. Nobody reads the newspapers anymore. You know, the conversation that's happening by the elite in the ivory towers is no longer the conversation that ends up shaping policy in 10 years. It's so interesting because it's like I'm having this conversation with you guys and it's like a little slippery because like you want to say like, OK, yes, like we are not white supremacists and we will.

48:49But yet if white supremacists want to increase their number of people and they're prideful of their culture, like that's OK. It's like you're kind of like trying to be like a equal opportunity, happy, go lucky. He drew where our line was, and it's with cultural sovereignty. Right, yeah. Not curtailing the rights or liberties of other people. Like, I don't see what the problem is. But being the outing of your own group is fine. Like, I'm interested to understand, like, how you were thinking about it. Because at the end of the day, it's a business, right? It's also a media business. But there was a Guardian did a profile about you.

49:14And in there, there's a scene where, Malcolm, you guys go out to—you guys are out at lunch with your son. And I think it's up to the end. He's over here. And he did something with his foot, and it, like, topples the table. Our younger kid, Torsten. But yeah, yeah. Torsten. Okay, Sorsen. And I gave him a bop. I slightly slapped him across the face. Yeah, you described it as giving him a bop. The author said that she was shocked and, like, very much, you know, didn't classify it as a bop. Well, she said that within 30 seconds he was laughing. So clearly he wasn't, like, injured or something. I'm not here to litigate your parenting.

49:47What I was shocked by on it, there's a story about your husband where it basically, it's like, you know, you're portraying him as someone who's like, okay, this is how Malcolm disciplines his child. Yeah. And in a way that's like shocked this journalist. Then, Simone, you said Jenny Kleeman, quote, did your nonprofit advocacy a huge favor from that story. Were you joking or is that the actual business model? She came to our house. She's a lovely woman. We still really love her. She came to her house and just set up like an amusement park to like inflame journalists. Yeah, she entered the fun house, okay?

50:17The mirrors are there. She's freaking out. But you called, yeah. But like, listen, you're not going to get really good reach with the story unless it has something really controversial in it. Do you think this conversation is going to be controversial and, like, click-gated enough? I hope he doesn't get you any flack. Hey, I just want the audience to know that she doesn't agree with anything. She hates everything we say. We are monsters of hers. She brought us out here to highlight how bad we are. That's not why I brought you out here. I brought you out here because I want to understand. First of all, there's this whole, like, culture war story about how, like, elite universities across America are only breeding a single type of individual.

50:48And I think if you look at these two graduates of the Stanford class of 2014, you will see that like it's a very like you guys have, you know, five kids hoping for 50. And I'm like got some eggs in a freezer. Like, you know, like we look like the white trash couple in idiocracy to a lot of people. That's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. The white trash, you know, just do whatever. Yeah. But you know what I mean? I do want to make a point that like we did win. Like we went out there with these crazy tactics. And now everyone's talking about falling fertility rates. With extremely little funding or support.

51:21Like, the thing is, people put billions of dollars into anti-AI. So let's talk about, like, your funding and support, because I'm so interested in this. Where I want to end is, like, your business model. Because that—so you guys have this nonprofit, and you received—what was it, like— A$500 ,000 grant. So the Skype co-founder, this Estonian billionaire, gave you guys, like, near half a million dollars. Through a donor-advised fund. This was not his decision. He did not. He has nothing to do with this. I love that you, like, don't want to implicate anyone in your extremism. No, look, when you make yourself toxic, you don't want to pull anyone down with you.

51:48You also have the Collins Institute for Gifted Youth, your online school. Yeah. How many kids are enrolled in that? Oh. It's not an active enrollment school. It's a Socratic tutoring system based on AI. Yeah, not a ton. You know, maybe a dozen. And you guys homeschool your own kids, right? I mean, our platform that's doing really well is rfab.ai, which we've built to replace workers. Yeah. And it actively tutors, like that tutors our son as much as the Collins Institute platform does. We've never taken a dime in salary from any of this. We have only ever worked off of our savings or day jobs or investments because we've donated a lot of money to our foundation.

52:27And what does the foundation money go to? The foundation money goes to building things like less expensive educational models that people can use instead of college because that's one of the biggest costs. Does that mean that you use the money from the nonprofit to build the Collins Institute? So you're reinvesting the money in your own properties? No, it belongs to the nonprofit. Okay, you wrote these books and you said the proceeds go to charity, presumably your own charity. Yeah. So I think some people could be listening to this and be like, are these guys like cult leaders? Are they like grifters?

52:54We don't make any money from the nonprofit. Like, that's not paying us. Like, none of, I mean, it's lovely when people donate, but like, that's not going to put food on our table. I mean, we're largely living off our savings right now. Yeah. So hopefully he's trying to build a new company. Like an AI companion company that's beginning to build income. That's our fab.ai. So it's basically like AI sex bots and stuff like that. And you have this travel company still or no more? No. Mostly separated from that, yeah. You're separated from that. Is that controversial? We're separated. We stepped down because we didn't want any of our advocacy to impact the employees at that company.

53:28I mean, Simone, when you guys started this partnership, you said there were always going to be money. It sounds like there's not a lot of money. What are you going to do? But we find this work really meaningful. I never wanted to put my career on the back burner. It was never I wanted to put money on the back burner. It was I never want to lose my identity in parenting and no longer do work that I found intellectually stimulating and meaningful. And I have that more now than I ever have before that I could ever get from a job because we really believe in this work. Do you guys want to be famous?

53:55Absolutely. I want to have impact. I think a lot of people, they look at us and they go, ha, ha, ha, look at these people. There's proof that they wanted to be influential for a long time before they were influential. And I'm like, any influential person wanted to be influential before they like it takes time. and effort to build up a podcast, right? And you're going to have failed attempts first. I wanted to influence the public narrative and the direction that we influence the public narrative, like the core thesis of our podcast is like, let's build this alliance of diverse cultural groups and take to the stars and conquer the universe and take our manifest destiny in space, right?

54:30And I love that that is something that, you know, you look at the other influences in our space and they're beginning to pick up this idea as well. You know, you look like Leafly Dude's the popular conservative influence there now. And she's all into stellar humanism, conquer the stars. And I, because when I was younger, I didn't have any movement that felt like this, that had this intense excitement about the future of humanity. Well, one has it, and like she's a friend of mine and has been on the show, Cleo Abram, huge if true. She's been extremely successful. She's so great. She's so great.

54:57And she's all about like bringing people into the world. And she talks about questions about like kids and declining first rights. She talks about all these things. And she does it without any of the headlines that I gave you. I know, because she's so talented. And she has great solutions. But if you guys aren't talented at this, maybe you shouldn't do this particular thing. Someone needs to raise the alarm bells about demographic collapse. Look, no one was doing it. No one was doing it. We're, like, really concerned about it. Would you prefer to do it another way now? No, I mean, this is fine.

55:22It works. Whatever works. I'm having, like, the online right, which is the space that we're in right now that has all of this, you know, sort of performative edginess is really, like, culturally to me, I have never been in a culture that was so accepting. and kind. It's really fun. It's so fun. Do you think they would be as accepting and kind of me? Absolutely. Do they think they would be as accepting kind of somebody who is influential in the BLM movement? A lot of people like, okay, you mean like Candace Owens? You're saying a lot. Because Candace Owens used to be a pro. She's a progressive influencer.

56:00She came to the right. What I heard in your very clear response of yes to me, but like a long, long answer to that was probably not. Well, so the problem is if someone's very active in the BLM movement. Basically, in environmentalists, whatever, if they're very abrasive and not willing to talk and chat, then they're not going to be... Simone was active in the environmentalist movement. Simone worked for the Earth Day Network. She was writing the little pamphlets. It's cool. I think that there's a lot of room in the middle to reach people with concrete and important messages that we don't need to just go to the ends of the fringes of the ecosystem to try to bait them in.

56:32Let's just look at the influencers in our movement that we've interviewed recently on our show. We've had Lee Flit on, who's a Japanese-American. We've had Nux on, who is an Orthodox Jewish-American. Soon we're going to have Kirsha on, who has a furry, a Fox girl avatar VTuber, right? And all of these people are widely accepted in the movement and were accepted with open arms. I love your, like, podcast version of I Have Black Friends, but yes. No, no, no. This isn't my friends. These are people who are wildly influential among this audience. It's not just that we have friends like this. is that we listen to these people as intellectual authorities.

57:07It's just more like it could misinform people and radicalize them in unintended ways. Right, and there's a very similar argument made about like Silicon Valley startups, right? Like how dare you move fast and break things because what if you hurt someone in doing this, right? But like we wouldn't have this level of innovation if people don't sometimes take a risky approach. That said, again, the whole reason we're in this is we want as many different groups taking as many different approaches to the world's biggest problems as possible. And demographic collapse fundamentally threatens this. We are very happy that you disapprove of our approach.

57:38I don't, I'm not saying I just, well, I mean, I kind of do. Yeah, I do. I kind of disapprove of your approach. I'm really glad. No, I disapprove of your approach because I think it's like full of factual errors that are misinforming people. I do. I think, and Malcolm, you are the guiltiest of this between the two of you, but you both have it in you. And I think it would take you like a little bit of time to, because you have this like ostensible fact check, but it's not really a fact check. Maybe it would cost you some points in your inflection. We do daily episodes. Maybe we have to weekly, guys.

58:06I think it'll be okay. I like daily. A lot of people rely on us in their daily routines. Yes, that worries me all the more. But anyways, I'm going to like, speaking of daily routines, I'm going to let you guys get back to it. We had every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking our guests a question that they don't know the answer to. It's hard to ask this to people who podcast about everything, including things they don't have the answer to. I know, the last dumb question I asked Malcolm was with, you know, sex dolls, like for real dolls, like how do men get over the plastic smell when they buy them?

58:30And I said men don't care about stuff like that. Yeah, so that was my last dumb question. Okay. Yeah, there you go. You're welcome. Great. That is actually a great way to end this.

58:41All right, that was wild. And I want to know what you think. It was a really strange episode for me because of the way that Simone and Malcolm talked about media. It was like this very maximalist interpretation of all press is good press. And as a journalist, I never want to be part of anyone's like kind of press tour or propaganda machine. But I hope that that back and forth was interesting and revealing. not just about pronatalism or whatever business the Collins may be running right now, but also about the culture wars and how it's fed this kind of media environment and what it rewards and what it creates.

59:14And most of all, I want to hear what you think of this episode. You can drop comments in there. You can DM us at smartgirldumbquestions anywhere on social. And you can also email me directly at nahima raza101 at gmail.com. This episode was produced with Suntin and Igam, Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, and Melissa Lee. It was edited by Devi Chin. It was shot and produced with Desta Wunderad and Aisha Jordan at Wonder Studios. And I'm your host, Naima Raza. I'll see you next time for an all-new Smart Girl, Dumb Questions, No 12 Children. Right here.