We do not live at the temporal moral nexus of reality.

The pushback that we get most commonly, especially in elite progressive circles, is wouldn't the world be better off without humans? And I think that's the really big underlying thing is underlying the discussion of changing demographics or birth rates is a very fundamental difference in philosophies among- Humans dealing with abundance, which is that some react to it by being excited about further advancement and taking to the stars and long-term thinking and potentially eradicating to, to a functional extent suffering and starvation and privation.

The other side of it becomes extremely focused on what you could call negative utilitarianism or eliminating all suffering.

You could, you could argue this is the Buddhist approach, which is really just how do we eliminate all suffering? And that is really by eliminating all life.

Human, animal, any- anything capable of suffering, it's better off if we don't have that.

Or at the very least, there's a deep sense of ambivalence toward human life and the damage that humans have done, et cetera.

So wait, to answer your question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But here's one example of AI that has already enabled really wonderful things to happen.

One of our friends, Brian Chow, was able to launch a new news outlet.

It's called Effort.News.

He uses AI to crawl things like SEC filings, like government filings, things that citizen journalists used to have salaries to go out and do, just like dig into all of these public filings.

all of those people are gone for the most part.

They might be like, I don't know, like four local journalists left who can look these things up.

going to jump in there? Yeah, Simone, you want to say

Simone Collins wanted to annotate that.

I would want to add, though, just to annotate, the moral weight that Malcolm takes is both more real than he describes.

I will find him passed out in front of Claude Code.

The urgency is very intense.

But at the same time, what we see a lot of people doing is saying, slow it down, stop it.

We have to stop and think about this for another 10 million years before we move forward.

And that's definitely not the approach that we take.

To really highlight something Simone is saying there, it's not that we think it's impossible that AI could end up killing everyone, right? I don't know if that's the timeline we live in, but what

And so I think you basically hit it on the head there.

I would want to add, though, just to annotate the moral weight that Malcolm takes is both more real than he describes.

Like, I will find him passed out in front of Claude Code.

Like, you know, just the urgency is very intense.

But at the same time, what we see a lot of people doing is saying, slow it down, stop it.

We have to stop and think about this for another 10 million years before we move forward.

And that's definitely not the approach that we take.

Can you tell us about some of the rituals, holidays and other practices that you have adopted in your family? Yeah, Simone, do you want to do Future Day?

It invites comparison.

comparison.I mean, absolutely.

We're very selective about what our kids are allowed to use, and we've definitely learned, like, the hard way about what is and is not acceptable for the kids to be around.

Like, we think that feed-based browsing online is incredibly toxic, and we've learned that in both personally and by starting by letting our kids do anything and then seeing what happens, and then adjusting based on that.

And I agree, there's a lot of social media that is incredibly harmful and incredibly dangerous.

I think it's similar to pretty much anything else, like firearms.

It's probably good that everyone understands how to clean, load, unload, assemble, disassemble, like, obviously discharge, uh, put a safety on a firearm, right? But, like, there are ways to use firearms very dangerously and in a very deadly way, but they're, they're good, useful tools.

It becomes the entirety of your life when you have a reasonable number, you know?

No, no,

no.

Look, when he found from my, like, college days this book I made on world domination, he was like... whoa, man, like, we're the same.

We talked about it on the first date.

Well, we talked about your methods, yeah, and then we got to mine later.

But, like, we're definitely on the same mindset wavelength there.

But, yeah, so he was talking about how he wanted to have a big family.

I think there's a difference between you two on this.

Mm.

When you look at what women read in romance novels, "Don't breed me, sir." This is n- it's not real.

No one is asking progressive women to have kids.

When you look at, like, far right conservative men who are marrying women-

I, I understand

... they're marrying women from Latin America.

They're marrying women from Eastern Europe.

They are not wearing prog- marrying progressive white women.

Church.

Well, church is a big thing.

Honestly, like Catholic colleges, religious colleges are like the new hottest place to find a spouse.

I mean, we need to look at what practically to do because we can talk about this big problem.

The whole thing is like, so what? I guess I'm going to like die alone and without any sort of support or I'm never going to marry.

There are many things that people can do now.

And that's what's important, too, is this is a wicked problem.

And those people who are just postponing

Yeah, Simone, have you got, uh, uh, this just a passing interest, a passion for you? What is this?

We are...

We're hard effective altruists.

We care about the long-term future of humanity, and you can actually see this among many people who are famous pronatalists, like Elon Musk, right? Like, his interests track with what appear to be existential threats to humanity.

He's concerned about the environment.

He, he works on Tesla, right? He sees these things.

Now he's trying to get humans to space.

That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom.

And it's a little bit of an unusual outfit.

I started wearing these when I could no longer wear Siberian snow suits from Etsy during the winter in our house 'cause it's really cold and I can't fit into them while I'm pregnant.

Overall, the world's population is still rising, but there are many countries where there just aren't enough people being born to replace the number who are dying.

And what makes us really worried about demographic lapse is...... there's just a lot of vulnerable people who are gonna be left high and dry if countries don't figure this out.