The Problem With Being a Pronatalist

This episode delves into the controversies and misunderstandings surrounding the pronatalist movement, contrasting it with antinatalist perspectives and societal norms.

1. Pronatalism is often misunderstood and misrepresented by mainstream culture.
2. The movement emphasizes the quality of life and cultural continuation through offspring, not merely the act of having children.
3. Demographic decline poses severe risks to societal structures, necessitating a reevaluation of cultural attitudes towards procreation.
4. Pronatalism advocates for a non-coercive, optimistic approach, focusing on community and positive reinforcement rather than fear.
5. The episode discusses the potential for human adaptability and technological integration in future generations, advocating for a proactive rather than reactive stance on societal evolution.

1. Introduction to Pronatalism

The hosts discuss the core ideas and common misconceptions of the pronatalist movement. They emphasize the difference between societal perception and the movement's actual goals. Malcolm Collins: "It's about how we are seen as the bad guys, but really, we're just advocating for a robust future through strong family values."

2. Societal Implications

Exploring the impact of demographic decline on social systems and the personal philosophy behind pronatalism. Simone Collins: "Millions of people are going to suffer if we don't address the demographic collapse seriously."

3. Cultural Misunderstandings

Addresses how cultural differences and urban biases shape the perception of the pronatalist community. Malcolm Collins: "Urban cultures often misrepresent us, which complicates our efforts to promote a healthy pro-family agenda."

4. The Future of Human Society

Discussion on the role of technology and innovation in shaping future generations. Simone Collins: "We're looking at a future where human potential is maximized through both biological and technological advancements."

1. Educate Yourself and Others: Learn about the impacts of demographic trends and discuss these with your community.
2. Cultivate an Optimistic Outlook: Focus on positive outcomes and community-building rather than fear.
3. Support Family-Friendly Policies: Advocate for policies that support family growth and child-rearing.
4. Engage with Community Initiatives: Participate in or start community groups that promote family values and intergenerational support.
5. Embrace Technological Advancements: Be open to how technology can improve life and support human development.

There's another thing about the pronatalist movement and that is what I'd call our Tucker and Dale force versus evil problem. It is about the way that the people from the urban monoculture dehumanize other people outside of the urban monoculture to such an extent that they can only see them as like freaks and murderers, no matter how nice they're trying to be to them And end up like murdering themselves in the process

People

Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
There's another thing about the pronatalist movement, and that is what I'd call our Tucker and Dale force, the versus medieval problem. It is about the way that the people from the urban monoculture dehumanize people outside of the urban monoculture to such an extent that they can only see them as, like, freaks and murderers, no matter how nice they're trying to be to them, and end up, like, murdering themselves in the process. Oh, good, look, your friends are here. Hey, you're supposed to want to have children. And this is your ultimate goal in life.

Simone Collins
It is a very artistic, archaic idea, an old idea and representation of a woman.

So you're getting people to sign a pledge basically saying that they will not have children until the canadian government takes serious action on climate change. Is that your blood? Well, no, no, it's college kid blood. And how many people have signed on so far? 1381 as of right now.

Tucker
I know what this is. This is a suicide pact. Oh, my God. That makes so much sense. We have got to hide all of the sharp objects.

If only I was born with a vagina. Solved that problem. Amen, sister.

Tucker
Holy mother of God. Some kid. He just hooked himself right into the wood chipper. What? Head first, right into the woodchipper.

It looked like it might have been one of the college kids. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be talking with you again today back at our old location where we originally started filming. But now we have a hard connection.

Malcolm Collins
So you guys get solid video quality from here. But one thing I wanted to think about today is the nature of running the pronatalists or being leading figures in the pronatalist movement and what that means. And why we look so much younger and less stressed than Greta. Yeah. Because there was an article that came out in Politico about the pronatalist conference, and they noted they're like, despite it being a fairly glum message, everyone seemed really upbeat and everyone was really optimistic.

Yeah. Honestly, there was so much laughing, there was so much joking. There was so much light heartedness. Which is funny because demographic collapse is dire and scary. Yeah, but it is that.

Simone Collins
It is like climate change, a very scary shift that, if not properly planned for, is going to hurt the most vulnerable of populations. Oh, yeah. Millions of people are going to die slow and painful deaths because of this. Conservatively. Actually, I'd say probably at least a billion people are going to die a slow and painful death over demographic collapse.

Malcolm Collins
And people are like, what do you mean? Come on. That's an exaggeration. And I'm like, okay. Or you could look at every state Social Security system, every state's Medicare system.

How are they going to pay for that? How are they going to pay to keep their elderly alive? Okay, they're not. They're gonna die, they're gonna starve, they're gonna freeze, and they're not gonna get medical treatments. That's what's gonna happen as a result of all this.

But you might say, then why is it such an upbeat movement? Why is it so low stress to operate one? And this is something I really noticed at the event itself, is there is no status hierarchy signaling within the movement. While in our discord server, people do list how many kids they have, that really isn't a sign of status within the movement. Yeah.

Simone Collins
And one reason, and I just want to emphasize this, because this is so freaking important, it does not matter how many kids you have. What matters is how many grandchildren and great grandchildren you have. If you don't give your kids a great upbringing and they're not super stoked about passing on your culture and having their own kids, you've failed. So I don't care if you have one kid or you have ten kids. It matters what happens with those kids.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. So one, I think it's the lack of status hierarchy. When I meant environmentalist stuff, there's a status hierarchy and signaling how much you care about the environment and what you're doing for the environment, which is a very important part of these rallies and attendees and events and stuff like that. And it's actually, like, the reason people go to them. That is an absolutely massive part of why it's so low stress.

As to why there's no status hierarchy, I can only speculate, but it may be because at many of these other events, people who participate in them are participating in them in part because they have been rejected from other social communities. And so the validation that they get within this community is the only source of validation or place where they can really rank high from them, social hierarchy perspective. So they really focus on masturbating that instinct. But within the pronatalist movement, at least as it stands right now, no one's really involved in it who isn't more famous or more successful within another community. And that's probably what's causing it.

You don't get the nerdy neckbeard types going. The second thing that we could talk about is if you look at the antinatalist movement, you can see that they have unusually high rates of sociopathy and narcissism and stuff like that. And I suspect that if you looked at the prenatalist movement, you would see the exact opposite of unusually high rates of incredibly low anxiety and low levels of depression. You're not going to be as motivated to have kids if you are depressed, if you have, if you struggle with life. So, yeah, people who are having kids typically are doing pretty well mentally, financially, physically well.

Malcolm Collins
And I think a wave of nihilism has overtaken our society. And this wave of nihilism that is particularly popular among the youth to enter a community, and the prenatalist community almost necessarily has almost no nihilism in their thinking, has almost no nihilism. Almost none of this. Oh, the future isn't going to be great so long as we can fix it, or the future isn't going to be great for us. I should note here that this wasn't just something that we noticed.

Diana Fleischmann said, quote, in a tweet. Also, it's likely that the natalism conference had the lowest rate of personality and psychiatric disorders of any conference I have attended. And then Boduck said on Twitter, one interesting thing about Natalcon was that every single attendee was extremely healthy and attractive and well dressed, a welcome relief from normal life. But there's another thing about the pronatalist movement that's really interesting, and it puts it in quite a different position than other activist movements. And that is what I'd call our Tucker and Dale forces versus medieval problem, where there is this scene in the movie where they're just trying to help these college kids.

Malcolm Collins
And the college kids think that they're like these horrible villains because they have stereotypes about republicans, basically are like, rural people. Yeah, like rednecks. They're basically. The movie is great if you are anti urban monoculture. It is basically about the way that the people from the urban monoculture dehumanize people outside of the urban monoculture to such an extent that they can only see them as, like, freaks and murderers, no matter how nice they're trying to be to them.

Tucker
Why don't you go over there and talk to her? You gotta have some faith in yourself, man. Girls can smell fear. Now, come on. Whatever you say, just smile and laugh.

It shows confidence.

You guys, uh, going camping?

Hey, now look, we don't want any trouble, all right? And so they all run out and try to kill these. But they see rednecks, right? These like, basic, very well meaning conservative people, and end up, like, murdering themselves in the process. While these other people are, like, trying to save them.

Malcolm Collins
And there's a scene where he comes back and he goes, I don't know what's going on. I think these people have, like a suicide pact or something. And it reminds me of every day I come home to my wife. You're supposed to want to have children and this is your ultimate goal in life. It is a very archaic idea, an old idea and representation of a woman.

Tucker
Oh, good, look, your friends are here. Hey.

Malcolm Collins
And I'm out there. I'm trying to convince people, often from these cultural groups that don't want to have kids, and they will say these horribly mean things to me. And there's no point in arguing back. There's no point in fighting back. Really, post the point where that your arguments aren't going to land because to you, they're killing themselves already.

Tucker
Is that your blood? Well, no, no, it's college kid blood. One of those suckers can run out of nowhere and speared himself straight through the gut and died right on top of me. Todd. Holy crap.

Oh, no. Calm down, calm down. Don't croc. They are in this act of sterilization. Memetic sterilization or literal castration.

I've had two consultations with two different doctors who offered contrasting opinions. I haven't experienced any sexual sensations. So when the doctors are saying an orgasm is like a sneeze, I don't even know what she's talking about. What girl wants their penis to grow? Not this girl and not any girl.

If only I was born with a vagina. Amen, sister.

Tucker
Are you okay?

Malcolm Collins
They have functionally put upon themselves the worst of the harms that I am trying to prevent. Holy mother of God. Some kid, he just hooked himself right into the woodchipper. What? Headfirst right into the woodchipper.

Tucker
It looked like it might have been one of the college kids. We live mentally in the future, in our future generations. That's where our minds are and they literally are not there. So it's. There's.

Simone Collins
We. Sometimes I feel like we should respond to emails from, like, a diligence standpoint, but, yeah, we've received some emails recently from antinatalists and whatnot where I'm like, you're not even a. You're not. You are. I almost want to just send them back the video from the life of Brian with the crack suicide squad that's coming to save them, and then they all.

Tucker
Be damn people's son. We are to the damn people's front quack suicide squad attack that show them. Hurt.

You silly sods. There's no point. There's no point in engaging because they're not part of the discussion that we're having. They're not in the future, so why do we care? Good for them.

Simone Collins
Do their thing. But it's interesting. So it's also just constantly, when you're in online spaces, you generally end up feeling, I don't think you get the same negativity that other people get. So you're getting people to sign a pledge, basically saying that they will not have children until the canadian government takes serious action on climate change. And how many people have signed on so far?

1381. As of right now. Nobody's really, nobody is against it. In the very beginning, I sent it out to a whole bunch, maybe like 100 of my friends, and I would say like 97, 98 of them signed it. In my generation, climate, fear of climate change isn't an opinion.

We don't. It's not like America, where people start like people are, you know, they choose to believe in the climate crisis. We've grown up learning about the science, so we are all, you know, all scared of what the future will hold. I know what this is. This is a suicide pact.

Tucker
These kids are coming out here and they're killing themselves. Oh, my God, that makes so much sense. We have got to hide all of. The sharp objects, because when I read negativity in online spaces, generally, my response is, mentally, my thought is, um, okay, is this an idea that's going to spread? Right?

Malcolm Collins
Because that's my fear. Like, it spreads and it causes more damage. And then is this an idea that's going to spread to people who, if they didn't adopt it, would have made the future a better place? And the answer, it's almost always no. I'll see these people put out these horrible, vile opinions online.

I'll see things like these protests at Columbia going on right now, and I'm like, they're not going to have kids, so I don't really need to engage with it. Like, they've already done the worst to themselves and they don't see it that way. They don't, because they don't. Their conception of the way a human life works is very different from our conception. We see human life as being an intergenerational thing.

It's this intergenerational cycle of improvement that we all have a duty to. Ours is a journey that spans generations, where one story ends, another begins.

The world our ancestors faced was brutal.

Yet from it, they drew life as. Winwood Reid says all men, indeed cannot be poets, inventors or philanthropists, but all men can join in that gigantic and godlike work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature, improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four footed life, and who cultivates the social affections. He who endeavors to better his condition and make his children wiser and happier than himself.

Whatever may be his motives, he will have not lived in vain. But yeah, and I completely agree with that quote. I think that is how I judge a life well lived. And I don't. As we've talked about before, ship of Theseus and all that, simone and I don't believe we are meaningfully the same people who existed ten years ago, 20 years ago.

Malcolm Collins
And when I look at who I am today, and I contrast that person with who I was when I was my child's age, I don't think I am any more the same person as that person than I am my child. And so it's not that we think our children, in the way that, like many antenatals refer to, we think our children are continuations of us today. We just don't believe that humans are meaningfully that contiguous to begin with. And so all we can do is live as sacrifices within every moment to try to improve this intergenerational unit, both myself in the future, but also my kids, my grandkids, everything like that. I think there's another big reason why this is a low stress movement, especially when you compare it to other movements like environmentalism, is that inherently this is a non coercive movement.

Simone Collins
And by that, to win, you don't need to get everyone on board with your cause. You don't need to get even a majority, even a large minority of people to do something. And that in itself is very low stress, because it means that you're only getting those who are really enthusiastic to tap into good resources that may already exist. You're not forcing people who are not on board to get on board. And I think something really stressful about being, for example, someone who's trying to get people to take action around climate change.

Or let's say you're a vegan and you understand just how horrendous animal cruelty is. When people are eating meat and you're trying to convince people to not eat meat, it's incredibly stressful to try to convince people to do anything. And the great thing about prenatalism is we're not forcing or trying to convince anyone who's not into having kids into having kids. We're just like, hey, if you're into kids, here's a community where you get rewarded for that. Here's a community where you get to lead in and imagine if you were a vegan and you got to achieve an end of animal cruelty by just getting to interact with other really enthusiastic vegans and trade vegan recipes and make really cool vegan foods and invent new vegan foods together instead of trying to get all these non vegans to stop doing horrendous acts.

Right? I swear, this scene reminds me of every time we have to talk to reporters, and they're like, oh, so you're Nazis? And I'm like, no, no, no. We're not Nazis. You see, you have to understand, the Nazis killed people.

Malcolm Collins
Lots of people. Like, that's why they're a problem. They go, oh, okay, you're violent. Far right. Extremists.

Well, okay, we're not violent. And I don't know the term extremist applies if it's just, you know, let's keep our civilization afloat. What's worse is when these reporters are. Indoctrinated in the urban monoculture, not only do we sound just completely insane to them, but they're always, like, taking Simone aside and being like, okay, blink once if this is like a hostage situation. Expecting that, of course, no woman would sign up to associate with these kinds of ideas.

Malcolm Collins
So conversations with reporters always go a little like this.

Tucker
Hi. Hello. There we were. Yep, minding our own business, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, these kids started killing themselves all over my property. Now, I don't know how much experience you've had with this, but we were scared.

Shit. You must think that I'm some kind of moron believe story like that. Not a moron, just open minded. You say you are just working when this kid ran up and stuffed his head into that wood chipper. That's a fact.

And I think maybe they might be trying to kill the girl that we have inside. She can maybe explain the whole thing if I hadn't knocked her unconscious with a shovel. On accident. On accident. You've got another one inside?

Yeah, she's in my bedroom.

Malcolm Collins
This is, I think, really a place where people might misunderstand us, is we are not diversity absolutists. So by that, what I mean is a lot of people know that a core purpose of the movement is to preserve some level of human diversity. Like, we think that a diverse species ethnically and culturally had the better chance of surviving and will be more productive and will be less likely to turn fascist and authoritarian. And people hear that, and they're like, oh, so you want to save absolutely every cultural group, absolutely every ethnic group, and no, we are a coalition of the willing. And when somebody stubbornly says no, like, I would make the worst Noah ever.

I'd go to an animal, and I'd be like, hey, you guys should get on the ark. We're trying to save you. And then the unicorns and fairies, they'd be like, hey, honestly, what you're saying sounds a little homophobic about the flood and everything like that. And I'd be like, it has nothing to do with homophobia. I'm just trying to get you guys on the ark, because you're gonna die if you don't get on.

And then there will be no more fairies, and there will be no more unicorns. And they're like, I don't know. I hate you. I'd be like, fuck off. I don't care.

Go do your thing. I would be the shortest. Temper, Noah. I know. That's why God did not give me that role.

I just feel like, okay, whatever. So often, we will have these individuals come to us, and I'll see these movements, like, right now, the four B movement in Korea, it's beginning to spread in the United States, particularly among some parts of american black culture. And I like american black culture. I would like it to survive. I will do what I can to make them aware of the problem, but I'm not gonna force them, you know, and if they're gonna jump into the wood chipper in an effort.

So the four B's is the culture that came from Korea. No sex, no men, no marriage, no kids. And it is seems to be catching on, the black community, because black women feel that within the current american culture, they are not treated with respect by black men, and they just don't have any good options, and so that it's better just to not engage with them. And this is a cultural fight that's not mine to have. It's women trying to spite men that are both outside of my cultural group.

And all I can do is say, you know what? This whole thing you guys have going on is pretty toxic. And I hope that we can save some iteration of black american culture, and I hope it doesn't include you or the people who were susceptible to this. And so it's so interesting in that it's a movement that while. And this is another thing we talk about the horrifying things that are going to happen, millions upon billions of slow and painful deaths.

And people will be like, why doesn't that stress you out? And this is, there's a reason why it doesn't stress us out, because we as a movement do not really motivate with fear or with pathos. This is one of the things that a lot of people are like, why don't you go more into the pathos, more into the pain and sadness? And I'm like, I don't know, it's just not my thing. The movement's so autistic.

We're just coming out here with stats, this is what's going to happen. And they're like, why not lean into the passives? And it's because I don't believe the passives. And I'll explain what I mean by that. I believe that people are going to suffer and die.

I also believe that no matter what we do, we are not going to make a meaningful impact on that. There really is, unlike the environmentalist movement, which uses the environmental panic to motivate. Action, lots of fear mongering, lots of fear mongering. We don't do that. And because of that, it means that people would be like, the world is going to be in a bad situation and it's going to be that no matter what we do.

So why stress? Why stress about the things that are going to happen no matter what? And more importantly, it's the optimists movement in that there are some people who are just a little bit more driven by the potential, by the opportunity, by something really cool that could happen, than people who are driven by, what's carrot versus stick people? And we're carrot people. It's okay, there are lots of stick people.

Simone Collins
They can do that. That's fine. Yeah. And the future that we're trying to create, I think, is also so optimistic when contrasted with the visions that different cultural groups tied to, like world catastrophes are freaking out about. Like the environmentalist movement really wants some form of like authoritarian government that can control people's actions or brainwash everyone into having the exact same opinions about the environment, which would require like, a state, a mandatory state school system.

Malcolm Collins
Just really horrifying stuff across the board. The anti AI people, a lot of people don't know this, but I've talked to them. I'm like, realistically, how do you implement this? How do you prevent anyone anywhere in the world from working on these AI technologies? And then they're like, realistically, what they would need is a lattice of Internet of things around the world that is monitoring everyone all the time.

That is the only real way that the anti AI movement could become a sustainable. So they're not really anti AI. What they're for is one authoritarian world government AI that they run. That is the end game for most of these organizations. Yeah, no thanks.

Yeah, no, thanks. I do not think that AI is enough of a risk that we would submit humanity to becoming chattel for you and your bros and your cultural ideas. Because I know that AI isn't going to be just monitoring for AI development. It's going to be monitoring to make sure everybody follows your little cultural subset. And it's a horrifying vision for the future that they really have.

And so they have to occlude a vision of the future from their people. And then people, some of the, like, theocrats that they think our vision for the future is horrifying because they're like, what? Like, you are pro. Like gene alteration. You are pro.

Like AI development. You are pro human machine interface. And it's. Yeah, yeah. You are pro with genetics making, allowing people.

We wouldn't be doing this ourselves, but I am not against the idea, and I know the technology is coming down the pipeline to do things like, given elephants, essentially, the types of neural density that humans have, and that would allow them to be a completely new type of sentient entity that could interact with the world in completely new ways and think in completely new ways that would be as orthogonal to us as maybe AI is. I know you wouldn't do that because. You'Re not a big fan of elephants. No, I don't really like elephants that much. But whether you're talking dolphins or dogs or something like that, if your response.

To this is, well, I haven't heard of us being close to that kind of technology. My question would be, if there was a group that was close to this kind of technology and they made it public, would they be shut down? That being the case, the fact that you haven't heard about any group being close to this level of technology means nothing about our actual proximity to this level of technology. In fact, the only people who would know are people with a large public profile and who could be actively useful to the type of person working on this. I think that the world of intelligence is about to get a lot bigger.

Malcolm Collins
It's not just human Nai's in the future or human AI's. It's going to be a lot of things out there, and that we will create our own aliens before we run into other aliens, I suspect. And by that, what I mean is very alien intelligences, maybe even reviving some extinct branches of man, neanderthals halls, stuff like that. And they're like, oh, this is horrifying. What do they really mean?

Like, why is it horrifying? Because different things will exist in the future. I think there's this one inclination in the heart of man that fears change when they want everything to stay the same. And I get that. I understand the fear of radical change in society, and can we adapt to it?

And what differentiates us from them is, our answer is a resounding yes. Humanity can adapt. Humanity can overcome anything. I believe in the boundless potentiality of man and where we're going as a species. And I have no fear for what man can accomplish when he joins together and sets his differences aside to create a genuinely better future.

Because from my perspective, we already live in a utopia. When I contrast the world we live in today was the world of 150 years ago. Was the world of. When I look at the world 150 years ago, it was a utopia compared to the world 500 years ago. I'll read the quote from the martyrdom of man, this book that was written 200 years ago.

Right? And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries today than did the king of England in the anglo saxon times. And at his command are intellectual delights which, but a little while ago, the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe the labors of other men.

Let us therefore remember them with gratitude. Let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind. Let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past. And hes saying, yeah, we basically live in a utopia today when contrasted with the old anglo saxon kings, appreciated. And when I look at this sort of march of history, I don't fear the future, and I think that's required to be within this movement.

Malcolm Collins
You have to believe that things are getting better to want so vociferously for humanity to continue. And for those who say there are a lot of prenatalists out there who don't hold this view, there are a lot of people who call themselves prenatalists, who have these, like a lot of fears who are. We don't consider them prenatalists. These people are typically racial supremacists or religious groups that are against abortion, but they're not actually religious groups that want. Their religion to win.

They're like, yeah, I want more Catholics. I want more. That's not about pronatalism. That's about catholicism, or that's about whatever ethnic group is being. It is solved through prenatalism, the existing world architecture.

Simone Collins
No, it's solved through prenatalism for their group only. For their group only pronatalism and conversion. Right. You know, and so you see this like, a great example of one of these individuals would be someone like Lyman Stone, where he's nominally a pronatalist, but it's really about promoting christian ideology. And we see them as being allies to the non denominational pronatal movement.

Malcolm Collins
Which is what you mean when you say, really, pronatalism is their core goal, this pluralistic, non denominational, non ethnocentric, non single cultural, centric, high fertility rate, which is what makes this. When she says not pronatalism is what makes it not pronatalist, because there is. Otherwise, it's just value system of pronatalism. Yeah. It's another value system which pronatalism is serving.

So they're not our enemies in any way. They are our friends. They are working with the prenatalist movement, but they have a different end agenda. And as such, I understand what you're saying. So this is what we mean when we're saying prenatal, but also within these communities, there also is like that when they are in the prenatal spaces, because they are often working with people from many different perspectives.

They get along so well. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, there is. And we talk about this. There is this period of detente now where we have a common enemy that is trying to erase our unique cultures.

Simone Collins
There could be a point at which some of these groups decide, okay, now we're in a stronger position, and we're going to try to force everyone to be like us at that point. Then there will be conflict between these groups. But for now, basically, as long as all these groups are not the dominating culture, they are, they get along really well. Yeah, yeah. And keep in mind, like, when we're talking about, like, leaning into genetic stuff and stuff, like, why does that lead to such a positive perspective?

Malcolm Collins
Because we think that these developments, these continued technological perspectives, so long as we can resist their temptation, so long as we can walk through the valley of the lotus eaters, we say this time it's a trial of the lotus eaters. All of these technologies Elon Musk tweeted recently that we'll be able to, our kids will be able to have AI wives that are, like, better than any human you could have today, and more caring and loving and complete sensory environment. How do you motivate somebody to play this civilizational game when that's the alternative? They have to have an intense belief, like, fundamental belief in the future of the human species. And the only other alternative is the fire and brimstone approach, which is to say, we need to go back to the old ways.

We need to. But this fire and brimstone approach, when it is practiced in this context, also isn't very optimistic. This idea that technology destroys everything, every generation, is getting worse. We are an eroding society from some past greatness. That belief system, of course, also isn't very optimistic.

And so it intrinsically doesn't lead to. We don't choose these things because we are. We decided to choose the most optimistic path. I think it's the most logical path. When I look at humanity's history, I think humanity's history is one of optimism.

We have achieved so much as a species. I always replay the civ songs and stuff like that that we see as our songs, and I'll link to them or put little bits. You're plotting a new course again, aren't you? The currents before us are ever changing. We must adapt and press forward if we are to see our journey's end.

It is the nature of humankind to push itself toward the horizon.

We test our limits.

We face our fears.

We rise to the challenge and become something greater than ourselves. People should definitely check them out, but I see them as being, like, the songs of the movement. Not just our songs, as a relationship, but, like, this idea of intergenerational improvement and march of civilization. And, yeah, sometimes we have setbacks, yes, sometimes we have conflicts. But there is something beyond our civilization as we understand it now that's going to be as incomprehensible to us as the civilization we have built is to someone just 200, 300 years ago.

Simone Collins
Yeah. And I think it's. I'm glad you highlighted this. I think it's nice for people to know that there are causes out there that are not stressful because most causes, I would say, are, but because most causes have to be coercive in order to win that by coercive, like, you have to get people who are not on board and not okay with it to be okay with it, not on board before you can win. So for those who would like a non stressful fun, optimistic cause.

Consider joining us. And this is something you see all the time. If you look at the pronatalist subreddit or the antinatalist subreddit, the antinatalists constantly brigade the pronatalist subreddit, like saying mean things, saying angry things against them. The pro. It's every third post.

Malcolm Collins
The pronatalists never brigade the antinatalist Everett. Because there's no point that, again, they're not part of the conversation. They literally do not matter. And I would appreciate our fans, people in the movement. Don't go and attack the people who are different from you.

Simone Collins
There's no point. No point. Let's keep the positivity of this movement going. I'm so happy that, that Kevin Dolan is getting all this attention right now. He got retweeted from the conference by Elon.

Malcolm Collins
He's got 8.3 million views on that. He's getting all sorts of interest. And it's just so exciting for me because even though he's in this religious faction of the movement, I like that side is getting traction as well. We need religion. We desperately need religion.

We do. And I like Mormonism. I'm glad that the leading individual in the religious faction is a Mormon. Mormons are the best, one of the most aligned iterations of a religion with this movement. I'm just so excited for what's happening for him and all the positivity.

Even people like us and him who potentially see the world so differently, can work together like this. Yeah. Anyway, I love you. I love the positivity you bring to my life. You are the son of positivity in this universe.

Simone Collins
But I love.