In this episode, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the current state of France, exploring its pension crisis, demographic challenges, immigration policies, and political turmoil. They compare France’s situation to other European countries, discuss the impact of government benefits, and debate the effectiveness of recent reforms. The conversation also touches on cultural differences, personal experiences in France, and broader themes of government dysfunction and societal change.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00 ] Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be talking about just. How cooked France is, just for some statistics that people might be surprised about is in France, your average pensioner makes more money in terms of like cost of living, adjusted money than your average worker in the country. In. In France, 57, sorry, 57% of people are net beneficiaries of the government.

43% pay into the government. Oh no. France is already past the point. And I said this is a point where democracies begin to break down where the average citizen is being paid by the government to exist. And we’re going to look at where this has led to downstream collapse, in just a second here.

Also very fun. What I love about diving into France and we’ve had episodes diving into the UK and diving into Germany, and now we’re diving into France, is each country is completely cooked in like its own way. It’s almost like Europe got to be like [00:01:00 ] the captain planet of evil and country vices. And you know, the UK is like.

I’ll arrest people for memes. You know, like there was the guy who was arrested in Scotland for literally painting Islam can be questioned on his wall. And they, the police were like, no, it cannot the girl who, who well, we’re not gonna go into that. All of that. You can, you can go to our video where we point out that the only reason a country would ban the flying of its own flag is if it was under occupation.

There’s no other reason to ban the flying of your own country’s flag, because presumably you do that in support of your government, right? If the government sees that as an attack on them, and this usually happens under occupation, like France under occupation, you ban it. So the UK has got its draconian speech laws and, and, and all of that.

Then in Germany you have like a secret police force of like brown shorts that literally label mainstream political parties as terrorist organizations and monitor in harass mainstream like people [00:02:00 ] who are to the left of like the United States president or us, for example, as being. Political. Mind you, this is a political party, the a FD that is run by a lesbian in an interracial relationship.

So yeah, not exactly that extreme, right? Then we get to France, right? And what is their nature of terribleness? They’re actually pretty good about not arresting people for stupid things. And they’re actually pretty good about not like spying on the quote unquote far right party, which we’ll go into like lap pen’s party or bullying them.

But they have the curse of the French, which means, oh no. The problem with France is that it’s full of French people. And French people have completely unrealistic expectations around what to expect and. They are treating. Like if, if you, if you watch, and what we’ll go into a bit is this recent OD of you know, Francis current Prime Minister Macron [00:03:00 ] constantly trying to get the retirement age raged from 62 to 64.

Now 64 would be a very young retirement age, globally speaking. And yeah. What,

Simone Collins: let’s see, was it, is it in the USA,

It is 67 for social security.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so the point being is he wants to raise it a a moderate amount, and we’ll go into the data here, but like anyone could tell you that the system’s gonna be insolvent in just like a decade and a half if they don’t raise it. And literally this is what keeps breaking the government.

And when I say break, I mean literally they’ve been through like four sitting whatevers like head of the governments in like the past few years because they, they pee everything to like step down the ministers

Simone Collins: right.

Malcolm Collins: You know, whatever, because France is

Simone Collins: a president and a Prime minister and it’s, they’re, they’re churning through Prime Ministers this point.

Yeah. We’ll, we’ll

Malcolm Collins: get to it. Yeah. And, and the core reason is, and the core reason that everything about Macrons blew up, even though he tried to side with the lefties, is just over this retirement age thing. And what makes this so funny to me. [00:04:00 ] Is the system won’t even exist in like a decade and a half if they don’t make this change.

Right. And this change will, I feel like even if

Simone Collins: they do two years doesn’t seem this yearly enough. Yeah. What change Estimated

Malcolm Collins: to increase its lifespan by one decade. Maybe if they do it immediately. And so they’re not even like arguing for like this being a permanent thing. They’re arguing for a thing they would hypothetically want if money grew on trees.

But like you go to the French people and you’re like. Here is the data. Money doesn’t grow on trees. And they’re like, ah, whatever. So let’s get into this. So right now in, in, in France retirees per workers, so we’re not even talking about dependences, remember I talking about they’re already past the dependency ratio with 57% of the population taking its money from the state, not giving to the state.

Yeah.

For 43% of French is already retirees. Gosh, that’s gonna be 55% by 2070. And keep in [00:05:00 ] mind their birth rate fell 20% in the past 10 years.

Simone Collins: So yeah, this is only gonna get worse. Are there many developed countries that have that proportion of old people or is this is France? Yeah. France is actually

Malcolm Collins: one of the best countries in Europe for demographics.

Oh. They have one of the highest. Fertility rates and all of fertility rates. Yeah.

Simone Collins: But still proportion of old people. I mean, like I, I thought most countries hadn’t gotten to that point of being. Most countries don’t that dependency ratio don’t

Malcolm Collins: have, most countries don’t have a retirement age at 62.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that is really young.

Okay,

Malcolm Collins: so France actually has, like, if you’re talking like fertility rate flies, France is great. And if you wanna know why France is great despite being a Catholic country, ‘cause that’s unusual for Catholic countries, is it actually secularized way earlier than other countries in Europe? And as we have pointed out collapsing fertility rates is largely about the urban monocultural belief system.

And the longer you have been exposed to that, the more resistance you’ve been able to culturally and perhaps even [00:06:00 ] genetically evolve to its lures. And France has about a hundred years on most other European countries because they underwent their first fertility collapse about a hundred years before, for example, the UK did.

Which is why France, I would argue, has such robust fertility numbers. In its native population. But it, but it doesn’t matter because they’re completely unreasonable. I, I should note here, by the way, and people can ask you know, if I’m speaking derisively about French, people know, like, one of the jokes on the show is like, I don’t like really like French people very much.

Like the country very much. You know, I, I make jokes on that and people are like, why? Why, why do you feel this way? Have you been to France, Simone? Been?

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. I’ve been there multiple times too. And I have never been to anywhere on Earth, and I’m not even talking about by like a, a margin, like nowhere comes close to being treated with.

As much rudeness and derision as I was treated for no reason. [00:07:00 ] And, and people can be like, well, it’s a cultural difference. And I’m like, fine then I don’t like that culture. Right. Like, and people in Europe, they talk about this. Like I know French people when they come to the US and they’re like, everyone is so nice.

In inauthentic. And I’m like, no, that’s not inauthentic. You don’t have to like, like somebody to treat them with basic human dignity, right? Like, you, you don’t need to, like if you’re, if you’re doing your job and they’re not like actively resisting you, right? It doesn’t cost you anything to smile and try to make the day of like a random other person who you don’t know anything about, marginally better.

And did you, did you have this experience in France as well, or is this unique to me?

Simone Collins: I can’t say I interacted a lot with people because I generally avoid people whether I’m traveling or not. Yeah. So I guess I don’t really care. And if they leave me alone, I’m pretty happy about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Also it was a constant, I, I mean, this is not unique to France.

It also happened when I’m traveling in Italy. But the constant harassment of young women walking around is also [00:08:00 ] really gets to me. But again, this is just where I’m culturally different, right. And, and people can be like, well, you know, different cultures be different. Right. And, and that’s true around the world.

And I’m just like, from my cultural perspective, I think that you should, you know, give other people that you meet randomly the benefit of the doubt and be nice to them. And people will be like, well, that’s just Par