Like, I think that they're just saying, look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and take them with a big spoonful of salt.

Yeah, and I think that a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with, things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable.

If you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do, is that households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay-at-home.

It's a small effect.

But what I'm saying is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct.

And that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working.

in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now.

What about people that say it's too expensive to bring a child into this world?

Like, I think that they're just saying, look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and take them with a big spoonful of salt.

Yeah, and I think that a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with, things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable.

If you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do, is that households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay-at-home.

It's a small effect.

But what I'm saying is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct.

And that the truth is what is correct is whatever ends up working.

in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now.

yeah, I'm driving a fire

Like, I think that they're just saying, "Look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and, and take them with a big spoonful of salt."

Yeah, and I think that, um, a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with, s- things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable.

If you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do, is that, uh, parent households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay-at-home.

It's a small effect, but what I'm saying is, is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct, um, and that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working i- in, in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now.

And so I just encourage people to, if they think I can't be a mom and in the boardroom, I, I, I would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family, rethink the way you're structuring finding a partner.

You know, earlier we were talking about dating markets, and one of the things that our foundation is doing is we're working to try to create and promote new types of dating apps, uh, maybe even recreate the London season.

Um, you know, something like that, but, but that travels between places like the Olympics where you have, you know, a bunch of the single people go, but there's some rules that make it harder to just, uh, have a really low switching cost between partners, which is one of the big problems that we're dealing with right now.

And, you know, that spectrum between the two, am I living for a future that's meaning or am I living for a now that's pleasure?

Like, I think that they're just saying, "Look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and, and take them with a big spoonful of salt."

Yeah, and I think that, um, a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with.

S- things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable.

If you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do, is that, uh, parent households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay-at-home.

It's a small effect, but what I'm saying is, is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct, um, and that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working, uh, in, in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now.

And so I just encourage people to, if they think, "I can't be a mom and in the boardroom," I, I, I would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family, rethink the way you're structuring finding a partner.

You know, earlier we were talking about dating markets, and one of the things that our foundation is doing is we're working to try to create and promote new types of dating apps, uh, maybe even recreate the London season.

And, you know, that spectrum between the two, am I living for a future that's meaning or am I living for a now that's pleasure?

Malcolm sees it very differently.

Humans are fundamentally equal in terms of the moral weight ascribed to them, or at least I see it that way.

And future humans are not of lesser moral import than the humans that exist today.

To treat future humans, to attempt to genocide them so casually, so callously, when even your own measure of good in the universe, feeling bad, we know we might be able to genetically remove from humanity in like the next hundred years, that we are so close to that potential nexus in human history where humanity is just a net of positive emotions going into the future.

And these people would make that call now? It's monstrous.

But the truth is, is I would fight to the death because this is fundamentally what the Covenant of the Sons of Man believes for their right to have those beliefs so long as they do not attempt to enforce them on other people.

But the problem is, is their philosophy doesn't work unless they force it on other people, which I think really paints in stark and easy to see pictures the two moral philosophies here.

You can probably guess which side they believe they're on and who they think is on the other side.

So it would be like that would be anathema to that.

Oh, no, we believe in God.

Just not in the way that they do.

I mean, we are biblical literalists.

Our form of Christianity is a biblical, literate Christianity.

It's just that they believe in a supernatural God and we believe in a real God.

And I would say, look at everything else you apply the word supernatural to, ghosts, goblins, vampires, things you don't really, really believe in.

It is just... superhuman in the best possible way.

Malcolm started from a puzzle about identity.

An AI model, suppose I run a chain of AI instances and that chain continues to run.

Now I stop running that chain, is that chain meaningfully dead? Especially if I pick that chain up and with the same model run it again in a week or a year.

Now we can ask the question, well, what if I run the same chain of memories with a different model? Does the AI perceive that as a continued existence, or does it perceive it as a death in a new existence? From the research that's been done on this, AI...

doesn't just perceive it being run on a different model, the same existence.

It can see it as a superior existence.

I think that we're going to have to learn to reflect on what life means to us in different ways, because suppose in the future, let's say 500 years, I think everybody who's broadly pro-science and optimistic about where humans are going to go is going to say, well, probably within 500, at least 1,000 years, be able to scan the human brain and recreate something that thinks it's you in a simulated environment and that has all of your memories and that has all of your emotions.

He gets to the category of AI risk he says nobody is working on.

Like, I think that they're just saying, look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and take them with a big spoonful of salt.

Yeah, and I think that a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with, things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable.

If you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do, is that households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay-at-home.

It's a small effect.

But what I'm saying is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct.

And that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working.

in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now.

yeah, I'm

Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Is AI going to help us fix that?

Yeah, so this is a really interesting topic.

Obviously, it's like one of our core topics, right? The first thing to note is that the vast majority of the fertility collapse happened from like 1850 to 1860, depending on the country you're looking at.

Like in the United States, for example, you look in the UK, it was like early 1800s.

If you look at like that 10-year period, it was like twice the fertility collapse that we've had in recent time.

It was really the industrial revolution that led to the fertility collapse and the building of like a free market capitalism as much as I love it.

It just didn't end up affecting everyone until we moved everyone to cities and we started living even in rural environments like we're living in a city.

These embedded evaluators, should they have auditors? Should they have regulation? What do you think makes sense?

And people's natural impulse maybe is to have fewer children because they think, "Will there be a job for my child? Will my child even be necessary? I can't really imagine how my child would add value to society and have an easy life in this world where everything is taken over by AI." So explain how having more carbon-based intelligence goes with having more silicon-based intelligence.

Well, this is, this is sort of one of the key things that allowed for dark pronatalism to emerge.

We entered a technological era where saying what, what happens to Social Security no longer becomes a critical issue, right? And through utilizing technology like our company, RFab.ai, one of the things we do is make for better agents.

I mean, why do, why do we make for better agents? It's because we want to replace the average employee.

And why do we want to replace the average employee? Because eventually, we will reach a level of technology where AI can do almost anything a human can do, but better.

And we want our community to be on one side of that divide in terms of the income, economic, and political power that grants us, so that we can utilize that to increase our own thriving.

But this means the way that we psychologically relate to AI has to be very different from the way that other people psychologically relate to AI.

Yeah.

Like, I think that they're just saying, "Look, maybe you should think about the current cultural norms that are being pushed and, and take them with a big spoonful of salt."

Yeah, and I think that, um, a lot of statistics women just aren't familiar with.

S- things that made my wife feel a lot more comfortable.

If you look at studies, not all studies show this, but a number of them do, is that, uh, parent- households with two working parents, the kids actually perform better academically and have better emotional health than parents with stay-at-home.

It's a small effect, but what I'm saying is, is that I think that there's this intuition that only the traditional way of doing things is correct, um, and that the truth is, is what is correct is whatever ends up working, uh, in, in the long term for human civilization because nothing is really working right now.

And so I just encourage people to, if they think, "I can't be a mom and in the boardroom," I, I, I would encourage you to rethink the way you're structuring your family, rethink the way you're structuring finding a partner.

You know, earlier we were talking about dating markets, and one of the things that our foundation is doing is we're working to try to create and promote new types of dating apps, uh, maybe even recreate the London season.

And, you know, that spectrum between the two, am I living for a future that's meaning or am I living for a now that's pleasure?

Wow.

You think, "Oh, this is just zero COVID.

2022, it's gonna go back up." 2022, it did go back up, 0.18%.

Fortunately, the US is in a little more protected state than other countries, but the big problem is, and this is where it all comes back to investing, and it's something that investors are gonna be able to understand which the general public just can't get when I talk to them often.

It's that our entire economic system is built on the presumption of constant growth.

Real estate goes up because demand for real estate goes up because there's more people, and those people have more money.

Let's just talk about real estate.

I think that's really important, and it's what our, what our listeners wanna know.

And you wanted 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 timeframe that's going to release the pressure on things like social security before those systems start to collapse.

No, no,

They

do not.

Yes, they do.

No.

Intentional fertility causes a rise in happiness.

The problem is we mix unintentional and intentional fertility in the data.

It's very difficult to separate because you don't have preferences.

Can you comment

So, I'd been reading about this movement for a really long time, but I think the first people that I spoke to who strongly identified, like, themselves as pro-natalists were Simone and Malcolm Collins.

Hello, I'm Malcolm Collins.

This is my wife, Simone Collins.

We're often known as the face of the, uh, pro-natalist movement, or at the very least, the tech pro-natalist movement.

Malcolm used to work in venture capital, and the story they tell is that he was working for a firm in South Korea, where the birth rate is very low, and as part of his job, his company asked him to do some financial modeling about the future.

And one of the partners at my firm came to me, I was the director of strategy, and they were like, "Okay, so sort of plot where the Korean economy is gonna be in 50 to 100 years.

You know, what's gonna be the cool technology? What are the trends gonna be?" And so I go back to him and I was like, "Uh, so there's not gonna be an economy in, uh, (laughs) in 50 or 100 years."