Why Female Leaders Abuse Their Power (The Science)

Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today.

Today we are going to be going over two persistent myths in society, dissecting them, looking at the actual data to show that no one femaleled societies historically are and actually in modern times, because we're going to be going into new data, not just the old data that we had in our book, The Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, are are more violent than non-female society.

>> Yeah, sure. Of course, >> that makes sense.

But also the myth of the peaceful bonobo is where we are going to start because bonobo society is actually horrifying.

>> I don't understand why people have this vision of the gentle ape. All all apes and monkeys terrify me more than pelicans. And there's nothing scarier than a pelican.

So, we're just going to go over a bunch of data, mostly drawing from a chapter from the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality about why you shouldn't let women run things. And not just that, but how the progressive movement and the progressive part of the academic movement has this tendency to create these con conflations or confabulations of unique examples or cherrypicked data to try to say that we should go back to some earlier way of doing things or some earlier way is natural.

Ah, the old sap argument. >> Sex at dawn where they're like, "Well, our ancestors were polyamorous. Look at the gentle bonobo. Look at the tribal. They are."

And I'm like, "Well, uh, first of all, that's not true of all tribal groups, and it's certainly not true of the more successful ones. You just chose one that fit the society that you wanted. you're like, "Okay, where's the most communist, the most matriarchal, the most, okay, we will say this is a model for early humans."

When that's not actually the predominant evidence that we have, and we can do a separate episode on that, but it's the same with, you know, with with bonobos. They go, "Oh, what what there was a period where like some researchers really romanticized bonobos and now we know that they basically made a mistake and they created it is true that bonobos do have a matriarchal society. It's just not true that it's a benevolent matriarchal society. So, let's go into this. All right."

>> I wonder. Yeah. And I I'm very curious to to know when in history women were seen to be nice. [clears throat] I I'm thinking maybe certainly with the Victorian era that there was this picture of like the woman is being the moral anchor of the household. But yeah, I'm this is going to be fascinating.

Some of our readers may be wondering at this point why we have not referred to bonobos. It has become popular to cite bonobo behavior as evidence that humans in their natural state would be freeloving polyamorous matriarchal communities. This view of bonoboas has been aggressively pushed by those whose political agenda benefits from the belief that our distant ancestors lived in this kind of utopia.

First, we would point to the fact that women tend towards submissive sexual fantasies much more than men. that this tendency does not appear to be socialized and male humans almost certainly have an infanticide impulse. This serves as fairly concrete evidence indicating that early humans did not interact like bonobos or at least how people believe bonobos interact.

Matriarchal utopias do not create evolutionary pressures nudging women to become turned on by violence against themselves or sexually aroused by men stomping on babies like Lucy McGillicuy stomping in a great bat.

A 2015 psychology study of one. This is not from the guide. I'm just sort of adding this for people who don't know because in the guide I just citation, citation, citation, citation. So, I'm just going to go into some of this, right?

A 2015 Psychology Today review of 1,516 participants found 52% of women fantasized about forced sex verse lower male rates for submission, often weekly, linked to implicit associations of sex with surrender rather than cultural norms. A 2006 sex role study confirmed women's nonconcious sex submission link predicted lower arousal if not acted on, suggesting an innate component.

So, I want to pull out what both of those studies are saying. It's saying that if a woman has a forced submission fetish and she engages in vanilla sex, she will not become as aroused during that vanilla sex as a woman. It's not like it's just an additive to her arousal. It is a necessary component of her arousal to reach a a a full arousal state. Um, and in terms of this 52% when you get to 52% of women fantasizing about forced sex, that means that it's the normal thing to do. That means that, well, it's not by a huge amount. It means that the women who don't fantasize about this are the weird ones.

>> It also just says something really sad about our evolutionary history. I'm throwing that out there. Yeah, it does. It does. It does because there, I mean, clearly there was an evolutionary pressure to be turned on by that, right? Like >> Yeah.

Interestingly here, high resource women eg executives report even more forceful submission fantasies as per a 2009 journal of sex research analysis.

>> That is important to note. The reason why we need to bring this up that a woman's desire to be subjugated goes up as she reaches higher levels of status and power within society is that means if you put a woman at the top of an organization or say a country, she will have a desire for not just her, but everything associated with her to be subjugated as a result of that. No, obviously we don't always act on our desires and obviously not all women, right? You know, Margaret Thatcher was a goat leader, right? But it does mean that on average you're going to get this tendency and I can think that this might be why a lot of women politically hold views that lead to a culture or a country to end up in a position of subjugation if they feel like they are overly lauded or overly high status within that culture or country. And the reason I point all that out is...

>> the stronger your survival instinct. Perhaps >> if we lived in a like if the forces that shaped our arousal pathways >> came from environmental pressures and those environmental pressures and those environmental structures looked like the imagined social sea of a bonobo, there would be no reason to see this pattern. So, basically, we know even if they were right about bonobos, they would not be right about us living in that.

>> We don't have a matriarchal evolutionary history. >> Exactly. >> No, no, no.

To continue further, the concept of peaceful hypersexual matriarchal polyamorous bonobo is complete pseudocience motivated by political fringe groups. Read the naked bonobo for a more in-depth review of the scientific literature about this species. It bucks the mainstream narrative, though it certainly has its own acts to grind. Real bonobo behavior is far more interesting than the myth and no less a living nightmare than the situation we propose for early human social structures.

>> Some examples here. There have been instances of female bonobos holding other females infants lives hostage in exchange for sex. Imagine a woman picking up an infant by the head and threatening to ring its neck unless its unpopular mother went down on her. This is a a a real and repeatedly observed phenomenon among bonobos. So, yes, women are in charge in the most horrifying way you could conceivably imagine.

I would point out that this is not a behavior that we have ever observed in male chimpanzees. So, male chimpanzees when they're in charge do not do this to other female chimpanzees infants in exchange for sexual favors. Female bonobos do. Although I will admit this is a bit of a copout because male chimpanzees practice infanticide. So, they wouldn't be in a situation in which the female would have another male chimpanzees or an unpopular male chimpanzees kid and they wanted sexual access to her.

To go further here, this isn't in the book, but just to add some color, a 2018 study on infant handling at the University of Oregon's Bonobber enclosure found that adolescent females "quote unquote" carry away infants after grooming mothers, sometimes leading to tense stand offs that escalate to threats if demands, including socioexual ones, aren't met. I love the way that that's not they're threatening their lives in exchange for for sexual favor. So, so really quite a horrifying society. And it shows that women, even when we're talking about non-human women, are significantly more sociopathic in the way that they will treat other people when they enter a position of power. And I know this sucks, but it's just the way things are. Like, it's it and and we all know it. Like, we can look at all these studies. I I meant to prep an episode on this where we look at the instances where women tried to have like all female offices.

>> You really got to do that eventually. I think you wanted me to do it because I would get really >> Well, there was also a good study that looked into not not just it was, oh yeah, what percent of women want a female boss, and it was like extremely low. It was like two to three% or something if I remember correctly.

So, there was a Gallup poll conducted in 1953 that showed only 5% of women preferred a female boss. But if you look at more recent studies in 2013, only 27% of women and in 2014, only 25% of women preferred a female boss. Although it's been ticking up. By 2017, it's only 28% of women. So, what you see is women really do not like working under other women in a in any sort of a context here. Like, women intuitively understand that women will treat them worse. Everybody knows this, right? Like, but we've made up this fantasy about the type of rulers that women are...

>> because it fits this weird power inversion thing that's important within the urban monoculture or sort of like social inversion thing. So, anyway, high-ranking females will fight to increase the social status of their sons, but not for their daughters. So, even in a matriarchal society, women care less for their daughters than their sons, which I find to be very fascinating. And lowranking female bonobos trade sex for food while high-ranking females never do. This implies that low-ranking females do not particularly enjoy doing this, i.e. They are being forced to be prostitutes to eat. So, we know people act like what they're seeing in bonobos is this culture of free love, right? Because they see them, you know, going down on each other, >> right? And everyone's having fun. No, no, >> no.

>> The high status females never do this. they see what they see.

>> Well, what's what's also I kind of implied beneath this, it's something that you and I talk about a lot that that sex isn't really about pleasure after a certain point. You know, it's it's more about power andor self-perception. And I kind of have a a feeling like this is more how these female Benon bows are ex exerting and communicating and confirming their level in the hierarchy. Like, what else would you force other members of your troop to do aside from perform sexual?

>> We don't, we do not see this behavior in chimpanzees either. So, we essentially what bonobos are is it's like somebody walked into a group of humans and they go, "Oh, look at these women always like going down on other women and like sleeping together and stuff like this. What a, what a wonderful free love culture." And then you go and and and sit down and you notice all but one of the women is like sitting on the floor and you're like, "Wait, wait, wait. What's, what's going on here?" And she goes, "Oh, these are my sex slaves. What you just walked into was one woman with a bunch of sex slaves. Not a culture of sexual freedom. Okay. You as a leftist were not primed to see that. But that is functionally what was happening.

>> Yeah. >> And these women who were the sex slaves did not want to be doing that. No, >> it was grape as as Epstein would say, grape soda and cheese pizza.

So, to go further here, lower ranking females trading sex for food, implying coercion in bonobo groups, low status females engage in social sexual behaviors, eg genital genital rubbing, to access food controlled by higher ranking individuals. While dominance rarely reciprocates, a 1994 ethnos study observed that young or immigrant females use sex to appease alphas for resources, suggesting it's not purely enjoyable, but a survival strategy in unique hierarchies. A 2021 scientific report analysis of "quoteunquote" biological markets in bonobos confirmed that not swollen low value females groom and offer sex to swollen highv value ones for food access following supply and demand dynamics.

Now, here's where it gets even crazier than everything else I said there. So, you could be like, well, as bad as things are in bonobo tribes, yes, all of the women might be sex slaves, yes, you know, you might only have like one or two actual high status women in a society. And that, but at least we are trading male rule for less male violence.

>> The problem is is this is factually untrue. Male aggression rates in bonobos are higher or equal to those among chimpanzees. >> No.

>> So, male aggression rates are equal to higher than chimpanzees. Contrary to peaceful stereotypes, male bonobos exh higher rates of intragroup aggression than male chimpanzees. A 2024 current biology study comparing coalopari bonobos and bombbe chimpanzees found bonobo males engaged in 2.8 times more aggressive interactions overall. three times more physical ones like pushing/biting, though less lethal. For the bonobo lovers out there, the rates are actually even higher than we had thought originally. Specifically, a 2024 study in current biology showed that in bonobos, aggression was 2.8x to 3x more violent or more physical as they word it than chimps. Aggressive Bay bonobo males also achieve higher mating success similar to chimps per 2023 PMC review. So, bonobos don't just do sex more but women also female bonobos are also turned on by the physically violent and aggressive male bonobos because they are having more sex with them. And this is something we see in chimps as well. And I'm sure we see in humans as well. This is this is what women are looking for in a partner.

Now, what is fascinating is that it does still appear that female bonobos when they are in positions of power within a tribe are more turned on by acting dominant themselves towards especially other females. And this may make them more optimized for positions of power than human females. I.e. If human females actually acted like bonobos, became very aggressive, controlling monsters when they came into positions of power, and didn't want anyone else to subjugate them, then we may have fewer externalities in our society from putting them in power, which ironically is exactly the opposite stereotype we have of bonobos.

Now, as a caveat here, just like to give bonobos one point, they have lower rates of lethal aggression. >> Oh. than chips. So, good job >> for not being total psychopaths.

>> No, they're total psychopaths. I mean, what is the point of emotionally and and and mentally torturing someone if they're dead? You can't. Okay.

>> That is actually the bonobo mindset, the bonobo clean. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> I love that.

No, it's it's really like they think that they've entered this society of like equality just because a woman's at top and it reminds me of like Thunderdome like Max Road Warrior Road Warrior 3 where it's it's run by that woman who's like very violent and aggressive and that's the way you should think of bonobos. They have a thunderdome where people fight with weapons. They have a a female running it but it's it's not not nice. All right.

There is no perfect society out there hidden in the midst of our distant history enjoyed by some undiscovered tribe or orchestrated by another species of ape. People desperately want to believe that if they just travel far enough back and pull back that last bit of dense foliage, they will find like some sort of social elorado some obvious and easy utopia. The pragmatists of the world know where our hidden utopia lies. It is not lived out by some faraway tribe or described on a dusty tablet chiseled by our ancestors. Our ideal society lies in the future we have the power to create. Optimal societies aren't easy. They aren't obvious. And they certainly aren't about following some simplistic ideological doctrine into the letter. An enlightened society will be nuanced, slow to build, and will need to constantly experiment. Citizens of a truly perfect society must update their beliefs about the world as they try new things to see whether or not they fail. No one alive today knows how to create this glittering society. Not yet. The best anyone of our generation can hope for is to climb Mount Nebu and catch a glimpse of what we might be. For now, we must be content with our lot as one of the many diligent marching in the desert. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the glittering idols. Simple, easy answers. Every day we reap the rewards of ancestors who suffered so that our species might ascend from the total depravity of our primordial conditions and basal instincts. We spit on their sacrifice by not doing our part to advance the flame of civilization because it is a flame which holds back the darkness both in the world and within ourselves.

And then I have a Oh, sorry. We just blacked out there. Did we just go on a crazy rant? But you see, I was driven by madness at how stupid the concept was that there is some hidden perfect way of living. But let's go beyond the bonobo myth here. What happens when women rule an otherwise male-dominated society? The real world scenarios in which this has happened certainly defy stereotypes. You can see we were so much less biased back then.

A study investigating rulers between 1480 and 1913 found Europe's queens were 27% more likely to wage war. According to economists or orelian doob and sph historical nugget though it [crying] probably doesn't say anything innate about female rulers. I would change that now but let's let's hear my explanation from back then when I'm trying to hedge my bets.

>> Yeah, let's do this.

Queenly queenly wararmongering was more likely a product of the societies in which queens lived. When you break these stats down further for married versus unmarried queens, married queens appear far more likely to go to war, though unmarried queens had war declared on them more often. During this period of history, a married queen could socially pressure her husband's country to go to war with her to "quote unquote" protect her while other kings could not do the same with their wives countries easily, making war slightly easier and thus were tempting for women. So, for people who don't understand what I'm saying there, it was considered like if you took a husband from like the royal family, if I'm a British and I take a a son from the royal family of Germany to to to be my husband and now I, the British queen, declare war on France, I can go to Germany and be like, "I'm just a womanly woman. I I need your help. Are you really going to let your son get crushed by the Germans or by the French?" And they go, "I guess." But if you if you marry their daughter, they were like, "Well, I married her to you because I thought you were strong. Like, I'm not going to go to war with you." Right? So, women basically got this cheat card for for certain wars.

>> My my hunch when hearing you talk about it this time around was that women are at that time and even now today just don't get that much firsthand exposure to combat. Whereas men in positions of leadership were more likely to have at some point been exposed to combat coland. And so they just were more easily able to abstract it and not see just how tremendously horrific it can be.

>> Maybe >> that must I can't not be a factor. The more removed you are from something, the easier it is for you to make sociopathic decisions about it.

>> Or you could just say that women are terrible because we're going to go to the next. >> Women are terrible. The alternate name for this podcast. Simone, you chose the bear. You chose the bear.

>> God, no one will ever let me live this down. I love it. I love it. Anyway, and by the way, she didn't choose the bear in the classic woman bear in the woods thing. It was when a bear had built a thing under a guy's house and she's like, "He's just not trying hard enough." But the she I I love that as like a a slaying for an overly woke woman. Like >> she chose the bear. >> She chose the bear. >> Oh my god.

Okay. So, a 2022 Forbes review of global leaders found 36% of female heads of state had initialized military disputes versus only 30% of males. So, even today, women are more likely to start wars. A 2022 conflict management and peace society study on rebel groups showed conflicts last longer when females are mobilized as fighters as they enhance bargaining leverage and sustain war efforts echoing how queens leveraged alliances. So, when women are fighting in war it lasts longer. Uh, Medieval Chronicles, eg Saxo, Grammaticus, Gested, Donna Moore, admire warrior queens like Alvid who led battles while preserving "quote unquote" modesty, suggesting historical respect for female aggression without defeminization.

>> Wait, sorry. In what way did she preserve modesty? I mean, everyone who's not trying to die on a battlefield is wearing as much armor as they can. I mean, this gambison, for example, it's not modest because I'm trying to cover up. It's modest because I don't want someone to cut off my head with a sword, right? Like, that's the design of armor. I >> I think they were just impressed that she didn't dress like a When they say modesty, I think they mean not dressing in male armor and stuff.

>> Oh, that she would like I don't know, rode side saddle or something, which actually like special armor. a battlefield side saddle looks like it was really hard to do that people are doing jumps and stuff side saddle can you imagine I can't I can't stand a horse first thing I ever did in a horse was fall off of it >> if we want to go back to bonobos to learn a bit more about how they structure their societies...

>> so bonoba societies are female dominated overall but males inherit maternal ranks through philopathy staying in natal groups allowing high status sons to outrank some females. A 2010 Max Plank Institute study found that matrinal presence boosts sun's dominance and mating success, creating a linear male hierarchy where the top males, often the sons of alpha females, can eclipse lower females. This contrasts with chimpanzees, where male coalitions dominate. And keep in mind, the way that males keep power in chimpanzees is through coalition building among... >> Okay, so you want to be a dragon woman Nepo baby. Is that what I'm getting from this? Well, what you want to be is the chimp. You want to understand that only through coalition building with other men can men maintain the higher spot within a homminid society.

>> Bonobos keep men at the bottom while ensuring that men stay a strict hierarchy that really has no reason to make alliances among itself outside of with the women, the the high status of alpha women and stuff like that.

>> High ranking females proing sons over daughters. Bonobo mothers invest heavily in son social advancement but not their daughters. As females immigrate to maturity while males stay. A 2019 current biology study showed mothers intervene in conflicts to elevate son status tripling their paternity success by guarded mings and forming coalitions against rivals behaviors absent from their daughters. This maternal bliss is linked to indirect fitness gains as the sons produce more grandchildren. Oh, >> so you see it's it is useful for women to be nepotistic about their sons. >> Hasbobos >> has bonobos.

>> Anyway, that's that's what I got to say about that. What, what are your thoughts on femaleled societies and why they're so terrible? I mean, [clears throat] I think on the human level, because we talked a lot about bonobos, I think there's just a lot of evolutionary drives that women have that, I mean, we we've talked in other episodes about how women are engage in a lot of mateguarding behavior, for example, and and and tend to tear each other down subconsciously, like it's not intentional, but that there there tends to be among female male humans, a lot of mateguarding behavior or even within like we'll say a herm environment, you're still competing for resources and favor and security. And so, in the end, other women are just inherently a threat. They're a threat to your resources or they're a threat to your access to high quality men. And so it's really hard to create an inclusive female environment where women aren't even if like logically and ideologically, they really want to be supportive of each other where they're not taking each other out. And I think a lot of that is just downstream of the instincts that were bred into women in societies where men were lynchpins in in resource provision. Especially in those periods of human history where a very small number of men did most of the reproducing implying that women were like competing for the best men and also competing for the resources that those men had. Does that make sense?

>> Yeah, >> it does make sense. And I think if I was going to say like why you see, I mean, I think that there's a lot of individual reasons why you see this but I also think that the way that women resolve disputes works really well when they are in the submissive role which is sort of aggressive socializing bickering scheming. Yeah.

>> It's really bad if they're in the dominant role. >> Yeah.

I mean, Katherine the Great did seemed to do a really good job in her leadership position. Queen Elizabeth the 1, famously successful in her leadership position. Queen Victoria was seen as a good leader, as was Queen Elizabeth II. There there are lots of great female leaders, of course. Then there's, you know, Bloody Mary, who came right before Queen Elizabeth the first. Cleopatra was a hot mess for her country. As much as she did a great job in the beginning, but it was more just by courting popularity among the common people and like actually pretending to be Egyptian instead of... >> there's really only been a very small handful of of good female leaders. England's had a lot of them. If if you look at other countries typically like when you have like female Egyptian pharaohs you're like oh a dark age is about to come. Like that's that's the way it normally works. It just depends on on what area region you're talking about. But I don't think this is necessarily because of the females themselves. I think it's because most heavy, you know, hard cultures would prohibit a female leader. And so, by the time you have a female leader get into power, you know that it's already a very... >> Yeah, this was plan D. It was not plan A, B, or C. Yeah, >> there was that.

>> And that was certainly the case with Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. King Henry VII tried so freaking hard. They were there the whole time and he's like, "No, >> no, no."

So, we're conflating two people here. One was Mary, Bloody Mary. This was King Henry's oldest daughter who was totally evil and just murdered tons and tons of people. And then the other was Mary, Queen of Scots, another evil Catholic who Elizabeth locked up and tried to have her killed on three separate occasions. The reason she was even in England and needed to be locked up was because her well so this guy murdered her husband and then she married him and then she also wanted to kill a ton of people but that's a whole other thing. So, sorry here that we conflate the two evil Catholic Mary queens of this period. So, if you are a tutor queen and you ever run into any Catholics named Mary, keep in mind they're basically telling you... >> nice to meet you. Listen, if you ever need anybody murdered, please give me a call. I have no code of ethics. I will kill anyone anywhere. Children, animals, old people, doesn't matter. I just love killing you.

>> But I'm No. >> And it's one of the worst queens in British history and one of the best.

>> Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's it's it's hard. It's hard.

>> It's also interesting now. I'm just thinking about him and his daughters. The the mother's the first one was his his >> his brothers, >> right? >> Yeah. >> The the >> his brother's widow, but the marriage was enulled. She swore up and down that it was never consummated >> the with the brother, >> the Spanish queen. Yes. >> Yeah. And then she ends up having the the evil daughter and and Mary, Queen of Scots was just a purely evil person. Like if if you read history, she's one of the most comically evil characters in all of history. She >> she like famously her sister who, you know, after she had put on these trials and just done, you know, hundreds of >> Well, that and that's because a lot of people were were using her. I mean, a lot of it had to do with misaligned incentives. When you are, you have to take out anyone who threatens your position. So, after she was put in the the Tower of London by Elizabeth, >> Elizabeth was like, "Look, I really don't want to have to kill you. I'm going to try to give you the best life I can." She then attempts to kill Elizabeth in spite of that. Elizabeth again comes and says, "Stop trying to get me killed. I'm really trying my best to give you a good life here." >> No. The problem though was that there were lot plenty of people who did not care really whether Elizabeth died or not.

>> No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Mary was found organizing these plots. >> Yeah, but people were telling Mary that Elizabeth and her supporters were out to kill her.

>> No, she she was clear. They could have killed her at any point. They obviously just go and execute her when when after the second murder attempt, right? Like they could have killed her at any point. She was in the tower. There was no political fallout. It was purely a net negative for Elizabeth. It was purely an act of mercy to leave her alive. But Mary was just incapable of not trying to take the most evil choice with every single thing that she chose in her entire life. Evil maxing. That's that's >> evil maxing. >> We joke about but >> I feel bad for her.

>> And it's weird to think that that Elizabeth's mother was seen as as as like the more cunning and evil one and Mary's mother was seen as the like kinder, more witless one. But I think that's part of what led Mary to become so evil is she was very easy for the people around to manipulate and Elizabeth was not. So, >> well, yeah. Plus, you kind of had like a nepo baby family versus a very, very cunning >> family, >> sociopathic mercenary family, you know, like this. This was this that family had clawed their way into influence versus you know Katherine had just married into it and had not not only you know connections at at the height of power in her own home country but also with the papacy. So you know she was extremely privileged and didn't have to be good. In fact she never even really learned proper English. You can see from her spelling in her letters that she still pronounced things with a really bad accent throughout her life because she would justetically.

>> Even if you're a Catholic, you should hate her because if she had just had grace and told her family members to get the anulment for the king, >> she would have lived out her life in luxury. >> In true luxury. Yeah.

>> But she ref >> and she had such a good go of it. And she was also just having all these miscarriages. Like if I were her person, I'd be like, "Yeah, I" and also like I'd be grossed out by the fact that my husband was sleeping with all these other women and like clearly wanted to end like if if you wanted to end your marriage with me and you were clearly trying, I would be like, "Well, yeah, like if you love someone, let them go. I don't want to like I do not want to be a ball and chain. I don't know what kind of woman wants to be. I don't know what her game was." It was it was very stubborn and that's and so yeah, not not great. Not great.

>> Yeah. Not Not great. But just to think, if she had just not been such a prick, the the Protestant movement might have just died out. >> My god, you're right. Yeah, that is that is really something. Yeah, >> but to being too arrogant to learn the local language and just come on, come on. She was always going to be that way. She was always going to be a nightmare.

>> God, that cathedral in St. Andrew probably could still be standing, right? There's so many gorgeous cathedrals in the UK that would not be >> Yeah. But we probably would have never had the Enlightenment. >> Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of conservatives these days like that. I should do a video on that. The Enlightenment was a very good thing. Like the Enlightenment was like the idea that like our problems or wokeness's problems stem from the Enlightenment is a >> thop on people. Like the Enlightenment was everything that we need to return to. It is what we lost with wokeness. It was when civilization made a major jump forwards.

>> Yeah. The what the enlightenment was gentleman scientist. The the enlightenment was techro accelerationism of its time. It was not it was not what people Yeah. It was not woke. Wokeness is the esoteric hermeticism of of our time. And >> you're absolutely right. Wokeism is in a way a sort of mystical framework. It would [crying] sort of it is a mystical framework. It is based on feelings. It is based on what you wish were true. Whereas the enlightenment is a a very like we can work this out. We can reason this. It it's it's very masculine at its core, not feminine. And I mean that's we you know in our episode about peacocking that sadly bombed. The reason why men stopped dressing in a very fanciful manner was also due to the enlightenment. It was because they became focused more on form than uh sorry on function than form.

>> And that's why suddenly clothing wasn't like you know it was like we dropped the lace, we dropped the buttons, we dropped the frills, we dropped the the man dresses and the heels and we got to work. And that's awesome. That that actually be a good episode is how the enlightenment created masculinity because before that men you know dressed very effeminently.

>> Yeah. No, even even military dress was >> was very very what today we'd think of as as as >> well literally the cre was was modified from what was it like Otto an Ottoman military uniform. Like all of the super fancy stuff was was it the heel, like I was saying, the high heel was taken from what was it? Persian warriors who who rode on horseback and needed the heel to to be able to stand up and do archery from stirrups on a horse while moving. Like all of the stuff that is fru fashion came from military. Military dress was fabulous. And the enlightenment was when some guys were like, well, I mean, shouldn't masculinity be more about like stoicism and not wasting money and, you know, focusing on things that actually matter for civilization? And then you had the colonization period during the Enlightenment, which was huge as well. And that was when you did the good colonization, not just the exploitative type, you know, nation building in other countries. And >> yeah, no, it was it was it was space space style final frontier colonization. It was we were going to go to the unknown lands. I mean, of course, any leftist is going to be like, are you kidding me? The Americas were fully populated with indigenous Americans. This is not the unknown open frontier.

>> Which is, I mean, not exactly true. The the the diseases that the Europeans did not mean to bring over with them, had mostly wiped out most of the American population at that point. It was >> Oh, so they were already >> It was heavily depopulated. I want to say, >> were they more than decimated? >> If I remember correctly, >> I don't I don't actually know. Like >> shaking is 98%. >> Wow.

Also, decimation as a practice doesn't make any. Do you understand the reasoning behind it? Why would you kill 10% of your troops even if they were naughty? That doesn't make like you need them unless they were too too expensive to feed and you were just trying to like save money while also putting them in line. Do you understand the reasoning and behind decimation? >> [clears throat] >> So, I, I mean, obviously it's it's a punitive thing. It's so that you and everybody understands what it means to failure to fail in an instance or in a in a case where failure rates could be extremely high. So, yeah, it says here, >> okay, so you as a general would decimate your troops when they behaved really poorly because you knew that basically if they didn't shape up, you'd probably lose like 50% of them in your next thing where historically if if a route happened, everyone died. Um, >> Okay. So, yeah, better to to lose 10% and scare them straight than to lose 90% next time you go to battle. That's >> Yeah. So, it says the commonly cited figure is that diseases killed approximately 90% of the Native American population over the centuries following contact with some sources specifying up to 95%. In certain regions or overall so, yeah, and then, Yeah. Yep. So, 90 to 95% it was it was com It wasn't decimation. It was the decimation is what was left.

>> Yeah. My god. Oh. >> So, so yeah, America was, I, I know... >> mean to >> not a a pleasant thing to say, but and it's one of the things that I also almost want to do an episode on is there have been various times in human history where a group has lived through a post-apocalypse. And we >> as we were expanding in the in the West and in the Americas, the the native populations that we were encountering from their perspective were living in a post-apocalyptic world. their entire societ like when we talk about how savage many of them were.

>> Well, yeah, it sounds kind of Yeah, it was very road warrior, right? It was like we're just going to raid other groups and >> they were acting like road warrior raiders because they were living in a post-apocalypse. There was still like one or two peaceful settlement. Not like one or two there. There were like I'd say it seems I I don't know. I want to say like >> Well, the peaceful ones that I learned about I learned about in school in California like the Aloney because I don't know like maybe in the West >> the Cherokee were the ones who got screwed over the most. They were they were fairly peaceful westernized. So there there were there were some peaceful Indians but but a lot of >> Oh someone told me recently someone I think who listens to this podcast that the Inuit are above repopulation rate by the way.

>> Oh wow. Yeah. The uh and and so much of Native American history. We totally have to do a video on on Native Americans. Like you're you're just told lies. Like the the whole if you've been told the story about the giving >> or thinking about giving infected blankets to Native Americans. >> Oh yeah.

What is not told about that story is the city was under siege. There were women and children in the city. That very group of Native Americans had wiped out women and children in other cities they had sieged. [clears throat] um, like they were in an existential fight for their lives and the Native Americans were regularly committing war crimes. Like, anybody who wasn't stupid would have done the the infected blankets routine there. By the way, if you're like, well, the Indians were being massacred and that's why they attacked the fort, no, no, no, no. That wasn't why the Indians attacked the fort. They attacked the fort because they stopped getting random guess. For context on what caused PTOIC's war, after the British defeated the French in 1763, they took control over former French territories in the Great Lakes region in the Ohio Valley. This shifted alliances and policies towards Native American tribes who had often sided with the French. So, specifically, they did this because the the Indians of this area had previously sided with their enemies and killed their people. British commander Lord Jeffrey Ammerst implemented cost cutting measures implementing reducing gifts and trade goods to tribes which fueled resentment. Ottawa reader PTOIC rallied the coalition of tribes including the Ottawa, Delaware, Lappi, Shwani, Mingo, Ajabi and the others to resist British expansion. So, specifically, this war was motivated because the Indians stopped getting gifts. Stopped getting gifts. They like, "Okay, now we got to kill you." The conflict was brutal. It was often estimates of around 2,000 civilian settler deaths. And this particular settlement had 300 people in it. And if we're looking for the total deaths that potentially came of this, i.e. of the the smallox deaths, it was only 60 to 80 Native Americans. That is talked about and not the horror that led to it is talked about. I think shows the historical bias in how we remember these events and that in the eyes of progressives and your professors growing up, white lives are literally irrelevant.

>> I also learned though that at one point Benjamin Franklin made up stories around Native American war crimes to I think in in relation to the Revolutionary War implying that the red coats, that is to say, the British were working with these war crime committing native Americans. I'm sure he was just using stories of actual atrocities committed in other contexts, but just made the connection with the British.

>> Yeah, Jesus did a lot of scalping and stuff like they did a lot. >> No, no, no. One, the whole shell thing that I told you about in relation to Pocah. >> Oh, yeah. They killed This was the which tribe? Pocahontas's tribe where they would pick off your skin with a shell until you died.

>> I think they scraped it. I don't think you like >> scraped it. Yeah. While you were tied to like a a post. >> Yeah. But, Yeah. No. So, I, I'm not saying that they didn't do that. But I'm just saying like there was there was unfair propaganda and stuff. But yeah, anyway, yeah, we we should do something on that because another person who listens to this podcast was telling me how like based on their calculations or telling us actually via email, I think that most Native American tribes are functionally extinct. If you define, you know, like pure like both sides like 100% inherited Native American, which many tribes do define, is like to be a member of this tribe, you have to be both mother and father of this tribe. And also to be culturally of the tribe, which I think he he said was defined as dreaming in that native language. Like, people just aren't dreaming.

>> Oh yeah. No. If you are going by those standards, I'd say almost every Native American tribe is extinct. >> Yeah.

And and I just think that this is just functionally true. Even if you're talking about some of the more successful tribes like say the seinals or something like that, you know, their their kids are growing up with TVs and iPhones and and and western culture. >> So they're dreaming in debauched English >> which is a a a bigger factor for their daily lives. Yeah. because the the tribes that survived often survived by leaning into capitalism, you know, and and even when they performed well in that, they got absorbed entirely. I, I don't think that there are functionally there there might be like a few meaningfully unique native tribes left, but not really in terms of what you're talking about here. So, that's another thing, right? I, I love her with like the the land acknowledgements and stuff like that in their speeches which >> oh I just heard of maybe on blocked and reported I can't remember where on what podcast I heard about this but about a professor who I think felt obligated or was pressured to or possibly even like forced to by policy make a land acknowledgement but his was very passive aggressive and that he actually did the research and discovered oh [snorts] no he's like by the like this theory of land ownership this tribe doesn't own the land. It was like the like some some theory of ownership that means like if you work the land, you own it. But this Native American tribe had never this indigenous tribe had never actually like cultivated the land. So he's like >> by this definition of land ownership, they never owned it. And then he like proceeds to do his lecture. No, I think that for that reason his syllabus was removed from the university website and the university apologized for his terrible >> That's not the way to do a passive aggressive. How

You do a passive-aggressive land acknowledgment. Is you research it and you start the land acknowledgment out totally normal, like, you know, "We thank the X tribe for this land, who were then massacred by the Y tribe, who were then massacred by the Z tribe." Yeah.

And then we massacred then this tribe, who rightfully owned this land after massacring the so-and-so, who had massacred the so-and-so before them, who had massacred the so-and-so using the following explicitly violent methods. That would be fantastic.

No, no, no, no, no. What you do is then you then end the land acknowledgment and so, "We massacred that tribe to, you know, out of reb-"

To honor their tradition of ownership. Yes.

No, no. What you pointed out, what I'm saying is you structure it as a the the point of the land acknowledgment is to say that we are showing our gratitude to the first tribe that owned the land by slaughtering the tribe that took it from them.

As, yes, as retribution for the land being taken.

Oh, we, yeah. Yeah. Because they, how dare they take it from?

How dare they take it from the very first person who walked through?

We were doing, we were just, yeah, it was revenge.

It was revenge for the other Native Americans, don't you?

Yeah. So, sorry, not sorry. You were wrong. Oh my god. Okay. Well, love you.

There's a dinosaur in my lap going to blow out, so I have to run. You want Burmese mint chicken and rice, perhaps?

Yeah, that'll be easy.

Okay.

I [snorts] love you a lot. Thank you for your grilled cheese today. That was really delicious.

I'm eating two meals today. This is how you know today is a day of luxury.

Yeah. And it was on homemade sourdough bread. All ingredients sourced from our, like, that you can read. No mystery ingredients.

Finally getting to a point where a lot of people are finding no bugs on our fab, which I'm really excited about. And tomorrow, by the way, I was thinking of running the Star Wars episode just because I want to see people's reactions to it. You okay with that one?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right. I love you to death.

So sad that we lost Ghost Rider.

Well, no, I'm happy it happened and really grateful for everything we learned from that. Now I just have to figure out how we can do it.

I think creating an AI agent to do it.

Well, I'll, I'll figure that out with all the time I don't have. [laughter]

It'll happen. I, I'll, I'll make an agent to figure it out for me. It'll be great.

Do it with the agents on our fab right now. They can at least do stuff like that pretty well.

Well, help me out. Let's do it.

Okay.

Love you.

Oh my god, he has such a blowout. Like, way like my mercenary approach to life and the world and relations is unfortunately if I'm going to be leaving homeschooling going to become like disproportionately represented in our children because it's already showing up in things like, you know, how I I deleted all the fun apps from our kids' phones or tablets for the end of the night. I just put on like learning apps and stuff. But but even then, the other night I asked Octavian like, "Can you set up a tablet for Indie and like put on a PBS Kids show or something?" And he's like, "Only if she does two lessons first." Because I am super mercenary with him. I'm like, "You get to take a break after you finish like three math exercises." Like,

"Only if she does two lessons?" I love that.

Oh god.

Hey, he's got to be managing her education one day. So, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. And well, and I bet you were wondering why he was being so good when you came to help him get set up while we recorded.

My my mercenary exchange with him today was he was allowed to watch the rest of that Mr. Beast Games episode if he finished a bunch of lessons. And boy, did it ever. Like, I've never seen him focus like that before, which I just actually came across a study showing that leaning into your strengths and interests with ADHD is like the top cure. So, like, I get it. But man, he blew through it. Then he watched that episode and then tried to cheat and watch another one, and I immediately snatched up his laptop. He pouted big time. I thought he was just going to tell me he hated me and that there was going to be nothing I can do for the rest of the day. And then I had this long conversation with him of like, listen, if we show you a thing and then you behave poorly after it, are we ever going to want to show you that thing again? Like, obviously not. And I thought he, it was just going to go all over his head and he's just going to be mad at me all day. And then suddenly he's all like blasting through his math lessons. And then, you know, like you come to the room and he's like, "Oh, well, can I take down my whiteboard and my my number magnets [laughter] to work downstairs? Yeah, I got to do some math." Like the because now, but it's all like so instrumental and mercenary, and I actually really like it because I don't think people should, like, part of me is like, oh, I'm doing this wrong because he should just love math for math's sake and he should just love learning words and phonics just for. But honestly, it's a little tedious getting some of these fundamentals in place.

And it's, I'm just realizing it's, it's just bribery all the way down. And I don't know. I feel very conflicted about it.

I love it. Is he, is he learning, by the way? Do you see him making progress?

I was stunned. I was actually going through the the primary thing I'm using to evaluate where he stands wise with his homeschooling, then he might be getting to the second grade like within a couple of weeks in some domains.

That would be amazing.

Yeah. Because my, our, our goal was, because he's in, he's technically in first grade now, to get him in to the third grade by the end of the year. So to have him one semester ahead, basically. But I think we're gonna blow through that.

Yeah. Because at school, he was always considered behind.

Yeah. Oh, severely behind. What also is insane to me though is we, I, we're not gonna stop over the summer, you know? We're just like, it's every day is just gonna be a school day. And it's so bizarre to me that we still have summer vacations in the US that like, oh, I mean,

You can work on the summer.

Yeah. Like, yeah. And that was like this this social contract of like, okay, please just let us teach your children to read. You can keep them as farm workers. Don't worry.

Are you even going to send him to school? Are we going to just not send him at all?

I want it to be his decision. And every time I bring it up, I'm not yet sure what his decision is going to be because he, much like Octavian, only knows of the school bus. He has no understanding of what's on the other end of the school bus.

School bus.

But he wants it's like I think it's very similar if you drive by a nightclub and you see people waiting in line for the nightclub and you're like, I got to get in there, you know, like,

That looks cool.

Yeah. Like they're all waiting in line. It it has neon lights on the outside. like I gotta get, you know, you're like, you know, it's it's there's you can hear the music booming inside. What's going on in there? And then you get in, it's crowded, it's loud, there's vomit everywhere, the floor is sticky. I mean, actually, they're exactly the same. Nothing happens. You wait the whole time. Lines, instructions. [laughter]

Like, oh god, you should see our episodes on school. We We got to do an episode on how bad school is these days. Like, nobody.

How you're going to deal on how bad nightclubs are, too. We're kind of notorious about this. Everybody know nightclubs are falling apart. They're like not a thing anymore. I mean, they're for old people. That's That's what nightclubs are now.

You show up and it's just boomer women.

Boomer women. Yeah. All right. I'll get started here. [clears throat]

Okay. What does this word say?

Octavian, let him try it. Let him try to read it and then you can tell him if he does it right or not.

Okay. You can have the book. Well, you have Well, you have to show.

No, you cannot have this.

What has a cat?