Ezra Klein

And, you know, Jenner in their quote says, agents of the new world, but not new life.

There's all this emphasis on what life is, the good, the beautiful, vitality, vitalism.

Can you talk about that dimension of it, this the spiritual cell being made?

OK, let me try to think about how to do this, because I will say that typically when I get into a literature, I think I'm usually a generous reader and I leave with more sympathy for it than I came in.

And I read your piece and then I read The Last Man by Charles Cornish Dale, the raw egg nationalist.

I read Bronze Age Mindset.

And it's one of the first times I can really remember coming out of something like this and thinking, oh, there was so much less there than I thought.

Like, I just assumed people were making some reasonable arguments.

But I want to try to be generous before I get into that reaction.

So let me ask it this way.

As you were talking to these people, as you have immersed yourself in this literature, which parts of the critique or the diagnosis of modernity and its ills and ailments did you find recognizable or find yourself responding to?

Vegetarianism is a tool of social control to sap our vitality and make us easier and more obedient to subjects.

That's where you parted company.

OK, let me let me describe the argument of this book, because I think it actually gets at something that I want to try to do, which is it brings up some things really worth talking about and then goes in some really wild directions.

You can correct me if you feel like I am being unfair on any part of this.

The Last Men is an argument that begins by saying what we need is a hormonal theory of politics.

And the hormonal theory of politics is this, and this part is real.

There has been over the decades a measurable and sustained drop in testosterone in men across a number of countries, in sperm quality and count among men across a number of countries.

There's also, and this is a big topic of discussion on this side, and I think an actually important one that I wish the left would take more seriously.

There has been a stain drop in fertility rates across many, many different countries.