Transcription
Hello, I'm Leslie Elliot Boyce and I'm speaking today with Jennifer friend Christine Seenwalk and we have a guest with us today, Dr. Danny Sulakowski. I hope I pronounced your last name correctly.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Well, it's lovely to speak with you. I listened with interest to your conversation with Benjamin Boyce, who is also my husband, and uh I I thought that it was really fascinating your theories on reproductive suppression. And I had I'm skeptical of some of the areas that uh that you see, but I'm really glad to actually have a chance to talk directly with you and ask you some of the questions that came up for me when I was listening. And I'm sure Jennifer and Christine are probably likewise curious to ask you lots of questions. So, thank you so much for joining us today.
>> Oh, you're very welcome. You're very welcome.
>> So, you've been doing a lot the rounds quite a bit. Lots of people are curious about your thoughts.
>> Yeah, as it turns out turns out people think this stuff is is really kind of quite interesting. So, it's been um yeah, it's been an interesting couple of months.
>> Well, I bet. And I don't want to hog everybody's uh all the time, but I I will say one of the things that I've thought for a long time is that there is there Well, obviously we have reproductive suppression going on. Obviously, I mean this this even when I can remember my mom telling me about how it it she felt shamed for having three kids. She was called a breeder. I mean, this was too much. You were supposed to be at replacement levels only. And this was back in like the the 70s and early 80s. So, there was already this kind of like you're selfish for wanting to have, you know, what's now considered a big family, which, you know, a long time ago would have been a really modest family size. So, we definitely have a lot of reproductive suppression going on. We've got the climate change policies which tell you basically why would you even have kids, but also humans are a scourge on the planet. Um, clearly some of the like every girl is on birth control from her teen years. That's a norm now to put young girls on birth control medications. Abortion is another form of birth control that people fight for and and really want access to. And uh we prioritize women's higher education. And I I've I've heard this argued I went to a lecture when I was in college where an author was arguing that women's higher education was a great solution to population control because it keeps women tied up in education through their reproductive years and then when they come out they have a career and they just don't want to have as many children. So this is what we need to be doing. We need to be educating women not because education really benefits women or society but because it reduces population. So I agree with that premise wholeheartedly. But where I I I do see it as a function of centralization of power more than intraexual competition. And you see it as more of a function of intraexual competition. And so that's kind of I I I'm really curious about why you think that and and when you said that you've seen this pattern repeat throughout history where can you point to some examples and and I'll let you here I'm like over talking but um I I was one of the biggest examples of population control u reproduction suppression in modern memory is the Chinese one child policy.
>> Mhm.
>> I was really surprised to find out that at at least half of those people were women. So I would have thought this was a panel of men, but the the people who held up that panel who decided on the family planning laws, you know, it was it looks like it was equally women and men. So that's kind of interesting to me. So uh you know, I'm open to hearing some of these thoughts and I'm just curious what what do you base this theory on?
So I think I think in terms of the intraexual competition angle. So I'm an evolutionary psychologist. So the way I try to understand human behavior is to understand the the human social system as an evolved system. So evolved systems look very much like designed systems. Um they they become tweaked over a very long time. they become quite complex and the different components end up fitting together in ways, you know, in ways that look like um one component would need the other part in order to be adaptive. And so they have to co-evolve along together sort of thing in order to in order to work. And so I don't want to preempt um necessarily any of the arguments that you're going to make, but one of the um responses that I have to this sort of suggestion that this is not so much evolutionary, but it's it's cultural is that those two explanations are not in conflict with each other. So if if evolution is going to select for mechanisms that will produce particular types of behavior, those mechanisms have to have some way of impacting behavior. You behavior doesn't just come out of nowhere. So evolution will select for certain cultural biases and and things like that. So we will of course we will see proximate cultural explanations for behavior but that still doesn't explain why those cultural aspects exist in the first place. And that's where it sort of I guess brings in the the uh other question you asked about where else in the world that we see this or where else across time perhaps more importantly and more convincingly do we see this because that is one of the what I think is sort of it was one of the really important parts of whether or not the theory will prove to be robust and viable um the more we interrogate other cultures, other circumstances and other time points because in in order for it to hold up, it has to be the case that this is effectively a repeating pattern. Um, you know, it has to be the case that this is a circumstance that is not peculiar to us. It's not peculiar to the west. It's not peculiar to to this point in time. It's not peculiar to social media or any of the other um sort of very new phenomena that people often want to use as you know really strong determinants of of human behavior. So, you know, we currently have a wellrecoognized mental health crisis, especially amongst women, especially amongst young women, and especially amongst young women who lean towards the left. Um, and that's and social media is often held up as the the um the reason for that. Oh, that they're spending too much time on Tik Tok and Instagram and and whatnot. Um, which is which to me is not uh is not an especially convincing explanation at all. It doesn't really explain why social media should necessarily cause that amount of mental health problems. It doesn't explain why it would specifically maybe it does to some extent explain why it might be women because women do spend more time on social media than than young boys and they do different things on social media to what to what young men do. So there social media does potentially account for some sex differences. Um, but it very poorly accounts for political orientation differences and there are huge political orientation differences in the current mental health crisis. And the reason why I've kind of picked up on social media and mental health as an example is because I also think that that is one of the phenomena that is then accounted for by the the observation um that I'm putting forward that what we are seeing is intense levels of female manipulative reproductive suppression. It's a form of intraexual competition and I think if you are under immense levels of intraexual competition that's going to cause stress and anxiety and things like that and we do see this um this mechanisms of manipulative reproductive suppression playing out much more strongly on the left than on the right which is why uh you know abortion rights are a left-wing issue. It's why uh it's much more the the right and the conservative that are pro- marriage and pro-children and things like that. So the leftright political divide is not an arbitrary um isn't an arbitrary thing that arises in our cultures or in western democracies or anything like that. It's somewhat of a of a human universal. And what I actually think it is is a is a reflection of how people's sexual strategies change over the course of the course of the rise and fall of a civilization. So the the conservative and the the right-wing is represents the most adaptive sexual strategies when civilizations are young and and growing and thriving. And the progressive leftwing represents the most adaptive strategies when civilizations are declining.
>> Um what because civilizations thrive before they decline. We see the the conservatives being sort of you know the the uh the side of politics that is seen as being behind and the progressives the side of politics is seen being in front. Um and so even though yes I'm I'm sure that there are you know a huge um a very large number of approximate contributors to birth rate decline and we can see it, you know, people point to the um the economic benefits and the manipulation of of world economies by the elites and all all sorts of things but I don't think any of those proximal mechanisms by which a civilization is um a civilization changes to become a place that is very hostile to reproduction nevertheless is a challenge to the explanation of why civilizations go through these phases and become hostile to reproduction that that's an explanation of of how it happens the mechanisms by which it happens but it still isn't an explanation for why this keeps happening and so I don't think that there's a there's not a contradiction there it's just different levels of explanation how is this mechanistically actually playing out versus why does it play out mechanistically that way in the first place? And so the the explanations go together actually quite well. They're not they're not competing. They're adding a fuller explanation to to the phenomenon that we're seeing.
>> I'm not quite sure if that answers your question, but
>> Well, I would I would certainly agree and and I I think your point is well made about culture and evolution not being mutually exclusive. Like that's definitely and and I I think that this phasic cyclical process of growth and decay the way that you're explaining that that makes a lot of sense to me and I think that it even it even opens up some perspective for me that that I that is really useful and I'm going to continue to chew on. I do think it makes a lot of sense to equate the conservative sort of if you just generally want to lump it in there with the growth phase and the progressive with the decay phase. That makes sense. I uh one of the things that that I know this is one of the talking points that gets thrown around a lot is that women's intros competition involving a lot more like backstabbing and sabotage and like sneaky underhanded things. men's being more direct. Um, and this this and I know I'm speaking really sloppy and generally, but we we hear all the time that we live in an age where women are we're seeing a lot more female violence, if you will, female not not violence in terms of like fighting, but intersectional competition. And I have argued that because of centralization and bureaucratization and the direct power being taken away from citizens in a lot of our countries and in a lot of our societies, you've had a direct attack on the ability of citizens to use direct confrontation as a means to solving problems for better and for worse. You know, I was reading a Twitter post the other day where a young a guy is like talking about how somebody did something really rude to his girlfriend and he would have loved to have just punched the guy, but he didn't want to be in jail for 25 years. So, there's an example. You know, you you can't handle your problems in that way when the alpha gorilla stands over you and says, "I'll kill you if you use violence." So I think that there's something going on more systemically with the concentration of power that eliminates some of those channels for direct confrontation. And this forces everybody both men and women into more of those passive aggress aggressive strategies, the retaliation strategies if if you are going to be in competition with one another. And so I just I I guess there's a lot of arguments that basically are man versus woman right now. That's really popular. It's all men's fault. It's the patriarchy. And then oh, it's all women's fault, it's feminism. And I really see something more of a dovetailing. I see all of us kind of experiencing this wave of cultural change and and cultural evolution together. And then it the way that we break down and the way that we experience that decay manifests in feminine and masculine ways differently, but we're all riding the wave together. And so I am just the point where I become skeptical is when it's a specifically male or female strategy.
>> So, so I don't disagree I think with most everything that you said that all of those observations are for for the most part correct. I think that there is an overemphasis. I think there's always been an overemphasis on the extent to which men use physical violence for intraexual competition. I think men um men do men certainly use physical violence much more than women. I mean they're much better adapted to it for a start. Their bodies can do it much more effectively than ours can for sure. Um but actually I think men use intra sexual comp uh use physical violence much more for protection of women and children then they use it for intraexual competition. And so and you're also correct um 100% correct that violence overall is is going down. What my argument in response to that observation would be is that matches that that violence going down overall is that matches the or rather is in is in line with the um the condemnation of masculinity more broadly. So the the you know the phrase toxic masculinity the the invention and of the patriarchy and then demonization of that patriarchy um as to become like a catch all explanation for for everything. It's you know it's the patriarchy um has been a very very effective piece of of propaganda but it's largely it's largely nonsense. um you know there is there are few if any um objective measures of anything that would suggest that we have lived in a in a society for well potentially forever. Um, but that we've lived in a society that systematically puts the benefits of men above women. That's just objectively untrue. We live in a society that values the lives of women much more than it values the lives of men. It values the health of women much more than it values the health of men. And that's always been the case. Right. There's a reason why the men died on the Titanic and the women and the children were saved, right? There's nothing unusual about the Titanic. There's a reason why we send men off to war and we don't send women off to war. And the reason why societies value women much more than they value men um is because inherently women biologically are just much more valuable. A society can send 90% of its men off to die in a war and its population can recover in the next generation if few to none of its women die. if it sent 90% of its women off to war, it couldn't recover for many, many generations. So women are just more valuable as you know, men are in in a thriving in a developing, growing, thriving society. Men are effectively expendable. And that's how thriving societies treat men. They work them incredibly hard. Lots of men die in the workplace. Lots of men die in war. Lots of men die heading out to the frontiers to explore, to gain new territory. Men are, you know, in a thriving society. Men are effectively expendable. Women are not. And so that is how society treats women. Uh one of my favorite um favorite is probably not quite the right probably not the right word. Um one of the examples that I like to pick up on is the the the claim that women often make that you know society spend much more money on male healthcare than it does on female healthcare. And it loves pointing to this paper um that showed that 13% of sort of health budgets were spent on female specific issues and and cited touted that as evidence that you know so much more money is spent. That same paper showed that just 6% of budgets are spent on male specific issues. The rest of it is spent on issues that are not sex specific. So the exact paper that that these feminists use and constantly point to as evidence that governments only spend 13% of the health budget on women actually showed that it spends more than twice as much on women as it does on men and that excluded anything to do with obstetrics and and childbearing. So of course the differential would be much larger if you included that and those statistics excluded that. So you know the the the objective evidence is is clear and it can be shown in any kind of domain. You can set up um little psychological experiments where you sort of give people little vignettes and descriptions of sort of you know quite unlikely scenarios like stuck in a little lifeboat in the middle of the ocean and you get them to choose who gets thrown overboard. And it's very easy to show that in every kind of hypothetical scenario the implicit value that people place on the life of a woman is much higher than the value that places on the life of a man. Uh and that is reflected in every aspect of society. So that the suggestion of a patriarchy is just is is absolute nonsense. Um but I suspect I'm probably preaching to the to the converted on on that. Um but what I the way I look at the decline in the social acceptability of violence because one thing to remember about violence is that whilst it's very easy to demonize violence, you also have to have to remember that violence is often used to serve very important purposes. There are very few people who would have um well maybe more so nowadays I should probably um qualify that statement. I suspect there used to be very few people who would have been remotely bothered by a man going out and beating the holy [ __ ] out of someone who would sexually abuse his children, for example. No one would think that that was an inappropriate or or univilized um use of violence. That's the kind of thing that you can't do anymore.
>> Mhm.
>> And the the the uh connection that I see between the the rise of um the part of the the tactics of the rise of uh reproductive suppression is the emasculation of men. And so we're seeing that, you know, obviously I mean masculinity, you don't hear that that word anymore without the word toxic in front of it. Not in, you know, not anywhere in the mainstream press anyway. So, it's just, you know, masculinity now just is synonymous with things that are inherently bad. We've got um, you know, I don't don't know about in your part of the world, but certainly in my part of the world, there's regular, you know, little news stories about some high school or even younger, even primary schools introducing, you know, um, misogyny classes for all the young boys to teach them how to not grow up into sexual predators. Because, you know, up until about 5 minutes ago, we broadly understood that the biggest risk factors of someone growing up to become abusive was them being abused as children, not being abusers as children. As as you know, not nice as childhood bullying might be. It's a largely normal behavior for the most part. Obviously, it can get very extreme, but for the most part, it's largely normal. And it's kids working out their own social dominance hierarchies. And it's not the bullies that typically that grow up to become the abusers. The kids who go on to become abusive as adults are the kids who were abused typically by a caregiver themselves. They're the ones who grow up to become genuinely abusive adults. So if you think you're going to do something about, you know, domestic violence and violence against women and children by giving young boys anti-misogyny classes, you're not. you're not going to do anything about that at all. Zero impact on the problem that you're purporting to want to solve with that. What we are seeing though is a is an a mascul an emasculization of that's even a word of men. And so we're seeing it in male testosterone levels. So over the decades, male testosterone levels are quite substantially dropping across the population. Um, we're seeing a demonization of the uh of well everything masculine but specifically of masculine ways of uh engaging in any kind of social dominance. So anything masculine is now demonized and anything that is feminine is being you know whatever the opposite of demonized is angelized. And the effects of that is that female ways of um of getting the same results. So female methods of intimidation and social manipulation which is how women get the same results because women don't have for the most part the option of just going and flattening somebody. It's not something in our repertoire. So we have to have other skills when we need to we need to you know socially hold particular people in line. um those methods are now being you know are being lorded as appropriate and frequently being frequently being abused. Um but you know so so you know that the tactics that women use and the tactics I guess that nasty women are then able to exploit to sort of rather to then you know police bad behavior but to kind of control the people around them inappropriately. um those tactics are kind of all okay because it's not violent. What society is demonizing is what males do. So that means males can't really do anything because males aren't good at the social manipulative games that women are good at. Males are good at going out and sorting problems pretty quickly um with problematic people, but they can't do that anymore. And so that's what I think is the that's what how I see this decline in um in male violence and the the um what you sort of you're sort of framing as it's coming from this sort of centralization of control. But I think it's not just about the centralization of control. It's who's influencing that control center and who is influencing that control center is increasingly women. So we're seeing more and more women in these powerful like supportive bureaucratic roles. >> Yeah. that where where a lot of influence is being pedled, but we don't have a female Bill Gates out there trying to reduce the world population. We don't have some we haven't seen a lot of female forefront to this population, you know, reproductive suppression movement. We usually see men at the head of that. we see like men at the head of uh like Justin Trudeau or you know you see male um leaders in positions where these things are being put forward and so if women have an e men and women have different evolutionary strategies available to them. Women like you said they're not going to go and and deck somebody usually because that's not the strategy that wins. So from an evolutionary perspective, would it be fair to say that women would tend to be the strongest sort of supporters of whatever the power structure that is existing would be? So they would be the it's almost a sycopantic role of um I will support the current thing. I support the current thing. I align myself with whatever's in power right now. And so you would see this like army of bureaucrats that's that's basically pariting the main message that's being sent. So if the main message is population control, then that would be the message that you would hear through the women, but it's not necessarily a female uh or origin of this particular thing.
>> I'm not sure that there's very good evidence that women are
>> So, you know, I don't know about in your part of the world, but certainly in my part of the world, there's regular, you know, little news stories about some high school or even younger, even primary schools introducing, you know, um, misogyny classes for all the young boys to teach them how to not grow up into sexual predators. Because, you know, up until about 5 minutes ago, we broadly understood that the biggest risk factors of someone growing up to become abusive was them being abused as children, not being abusers as children. As as you know, not nice as childhood bullying might be. It's a largely normal behavior for the most part. Obviously, it can get very extreme, but for the most part, it's largely normal. And it's kids working out their own social dominance hierarchies. And it's not the bullies that typically that grow up to become the abusers. The kids who go on to become abusive as adults are the kids who were abused typically by a caregiver themselves. They're the ones who grow up to become genuinely abusive adults. So if you think you're going to do something about, you know, domestic violence and violence against women and children by giving young boys anti-misogyny classes, you're not. you're not going to do anything about that at all. Zero impact on the problem that you're purporting to want to solve with that. What we are seeing though is a is an a mascul an emasculization of that's even a word of men. And so we're seeing it in male testosterone levels. So over the decades, male testosterone levels are quite substantially dropping across the population. Um, we're seeing a demonization of the uh of well everything masculine but specifically of masculine ways of uh engaging in any kind of social dominance. So anything masculine is now demonized and anything that is feminine is being you know whatever the opposite of demonized is angelized. And the effects of that is that female ways of um of getting the same results. So female methods of intimidation and social manipulation which is how women get the same results because women don't have for the most part the option of just going and flattening somebody. It's not something in our repertoire. So we have to have other skills when we need to we need to you know socially hold particular people in line. um those methods are now being you know are being lorded as appropriate and frequently being frequently being abused. Um but you know so so you know that the tactics that women use and the tactics I guess that nasty women are then able to exploit to sort of rather to then you know police bad behavior but to kind of control the people around them inappropriately. um those tactics are kind of all okay because it's not violent. What society is demonizing is what males do. So that means males can't really do anything because males aren't good at the social manipulative games that women are good at. Males are good at going out and sorting problems pretty quickly um with problematic people, but they can't do that anymore. And so that's what I think is the that's what how I see this decline in um in male violence and the the um what you sort of you're sort of framing as it's coming from this sort of centralization of control. But I think it's not just about the centralization of control. It's who's influencing that control center and who is influencing that control center is increasingly women. So we're seeing more and more women in these decision-making positions in sometimes what what I mean increasingly in sort of the the hard power positions as well in the the overt leadership positions but frequently in the soft power positions. So women in the bureaucracies, women in the universities, in education, in health, women in all the positions where they're able to have influence over in journalism is a massive one where they're able to have influence over the the social narratives and the the social priorities and the social agenda. Um women have been setting the social agenda for a very long time if if not forever. um even when they set that social agenda from you know from the kitchen where they were where they were barefoot and pregnant they've been setting the social agenda for a very long time um and and thinking that it's that it's men who have been setting that agenda I think is is falling for a little bit of a head fake women's been setting the agenda for a long time and it is suiting the reproductive suppression um goals very well so one thing that led me sort of down the path of thinking about female intricate sexual competition and reproductive suppression from just being uh you know an explanation for um just female female behavior. So just you know in individual groups or one-on-one you know just looking at how oh yeah women will do that and that has that outcome and oh that's interesting and we can measure that and we can show that the women that are more competitive are more likely to do that. Oh that's interesting as well. What took it from that kind of level of explanation of behavior out to a broader society level was just thinking about the consequences of well what if you know large numbers of women did this? What would then be the social effects? What would be the emergent social system that we would see if we started seeing these types of things happening on mass? Because we are now starting to see these types of things happening on mass. So you know what used to be um so just advice giving is probably a a great explanation a great example sorry um so we do have data showing that women will give reproductively inhibiting advice to other female friends. So and the women who self-report being more intraexually competitive will be the ones that are more likely to give the more reproductively inhibiting advice. So if you ask so if you give women sort of equivalent scenarios and you ask them what would you do versus you ask them what would you advise a friend of yours to do well the advice they give to the friend will be more reproductively inhibiting on average than what they indicate they themselves would do and then that difference is larger the higher these women are on interexual competition.
>> So interesting.
>> Yeah. So, so you can sort of see that from it within a kind of
>> Can I ask a question about that, Danny?
>> Is that reproductively inhibiting
>> uh advice that is but but is it more are you seeing that from people who are talk like have you studied the differences between trying to uh inhibit the size of a family of an already established married woman or are you talking about mating strategies? Because I see a lot of female introsexual competition, but I see it more in the short term in terms of like competing for attractiveness to potential catching the man or catching his attention.
>> Not so much in terms of women actually wanting to reduce the number of children that other women have. I in fact, I think that sometimes a woman who's had children is considered safe to other women. Oh, good. She's off the market. She's no longer competition. In fact, she's now she's losing her body and she's, you know, it's to go. Why don't you go have five of them?
>> Oh my god, that's so dark.
>> I know. Not so much. So, so the two studies I'm thinking of the the advice that we were targeting was around relationship formation, having children, and then the relative investments in children versus career. So, having more children versus going back to the career and things like that. So, it was in all of those contexts primarily. And one of them was one of them was focused entirely around the investment in children versus career kind of trade-off. Um the other one sort of had a broader span of um the sort of reproductive life cycle if you like. Um, but most definitely we're looking at postmate bonding okay manipulative reproductive suppression. So a lot of the the research around intraexual competition has focused on that mate attraction um arena. But it's also interesting though, we also now have pretty good data um from there showing that what women do specifically around makeup and adornments is not to impress men.
>> Um that's actually to ward off other women. So when women get dressed up in the hair and the makeup and the clothes, turns out men not so much a fan. Other women, however, think that that makes rivals look very attractive and they also uh perceive those rivals as being quite aggressive as well. So when you're when women are doulling themselves up and going out, they're not saying to men, look how attractive I am. They're saying to other women, get out of my way.
>> There is there is a dominance display.
>> That's the Yeah, that's the message that's being sent. Men for for their role in all of this actually think that that stuff is makes you less attractive. So women are actually imposing sort of are actually sort of wearing an attractiveness cost if you like. They're imposing a cost on themselves. They're actually making themselves less attractive to the men they are trying to attract in order to signal to other women to stay out of their way.
>> That's how those signals are actually working. And that's a this idea of um women sort of being convinced or or consciously thinking that oh what I'm doing is to make myself more attractive. but it's actually um those behaviors are actually serving signaling purposes to other women and not making them more attractive to men. That's a really recurring theme. So you see exactly the same thing with body weight. So women attempting to to lose weight thinking that they're trying to make themselves as attractive as possible. No. The male ideal um weights in terms of attractiveness. So if you give like a male like a little morphable body, little morphable female body and say make this body as you know make it the the most attractive you can they will make that female body heavier than what a woman would make it to make it as attractive as possible. So the male peak of attractiveness is heavier than what females think it is. So when women are attempting to make themselves super skinny, it's not, you know, they may think that that what they're doing is trying to make themselves more attractive. Um, but that's not what they're doing at all. What they're actually doing is responding to interexual competition from other women that are setting body standards that are imposing attractiveness costs on other women. So,
>> isn't it also neotony? I mean, there's also that factor that they're trying to make themselves look younger and that the younger a younger woman between 17 and 21 is going to have a different body shape than a woman once she's about 30. you're going to everybody spreads and broadens
>> to some extent, but most of the eating disorder stuff we see is in that 17 to 21 and in fact younger range. These women are not trying to make themselves look younger. In fact, for the most part, you wouldn't want to look younger. In fact, women in that age range are typically trying to make themselves look older. You know, the 14, 15 year old girls trying to make trying to pretend.
>> So, you're talking about like all the way to eating disorder, not just diet culture.
>> Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All the way down to eating disorder. So there's, you know, I'm not sort of this isn't necessarily um sort of my ideas. Other people have have written about this as well as eating disorders as intraexual competition and and um and there's really good evidence that it is. And so what women are doing by setting these attractiveness standards, so you know, they love blaming this mythical patriarchy for setting these unrealistic attractiveness standards, which is nonsense. If if women were attempting to meet male attractiveness standards, they would be heavier. They wouldn't be wearing makeup and they wouldn't be wearing, you know, revealing sexy clothing. So, um you know, they they'd be doing very very different things if they were actually attempting to meet male attractiveness standards compared to what we actually see women doing. Um, what they are doing is they are meeting the the uh physical appearance standards that are set by other women. and other women set these physical appearance standards in order to impose attractiveness costs on their rivals. So you can think of it as like you know that the peacock the male peacock has this great big giant tail um and it makes him look magnificent. However, if you're a male peacock who's not in great condition, then this great big giant tail becomes a massive advertisement that you're not in good condition because the tail won't be in good condition and it will have parrot will be full of parasites and every time you go to display it, you'll be displaying the fact that you're not in good condition. And also, if you're not big and strong and fast, you're just going to get eaten as well because you got this great big tail that you've got to carry around. And if you can't escape, you know, the I don't even know what eats peacocks. um large cat um some large cat in Asia where the where where these um peacocks live um jaguars I guess maybe no anyway um if you can't escape then you're going to get eaten right and this is why the females like the males with the big tails because number one if they're still alive well that means they've been successfully escaping that's good good sign and number two the females can very well assess the quality of the males when he opens his tail because if it's free of parasites then he also must be that's a really reliable sign that is going to be fit and healthy and and whatnot. And women are doing the same thing to other women with body shape ideals, with fashion, with uh even things like um like the things that women are doing now with their faces, the you know the fillers and and the things like that. Men don't find any of that stuff attractive at all. Not not a bit of it. not remember.
>> What about the influence of pornography on these these feelings in in young women? I mean, there's a lot of display of particular types of people that you see. And uh you know, this is increasingly causing a lot. I mean, I've I've seen I've and and heard stories of young women who are choosing a trans or non-binary identity partly because they're so intimidated by what they see represented as as femalehood and and what the ideals that are represented and early exposure to pornography is a big part of that.
>> It is a big part of that. Um, it's also the whole the not necessarily to some extent the trans but the the non-binary phenomenon is a little bit different. Um, I mean it's it's it's a lower bar for entry in terms of in terms of what the person has to do. So it's a it's a it's a uh it's a less it's less costly social signal um to adopt a non-binary identity. But I think that is also a that is also wrapped up in intraexual competition as well. So, what you've got with these non-binary trends, if you've got women, you know, doing a whole bunch of things that are deliberately making themselves unattractive. And what that is is that's a submissiveness signal to other women. If if dolling yourself up and making yourself is super attractive is becomes a dominant signal that's perceived as aggressive, then doing the exact opposite yourself to yourself.
>> Could it be a non-competition signal rather than submissive? Like, I opt out of this. I'm
>> submissive. I think they're I think they're kind of much the same thing, right? If you know the you've got you've got sort of the competition continuum and at one end you've got sort of the aggressive dominance and the other end you've got the the submissiveness signals, right? So in terms of the mating market, effectively what those women are signaling is that they're not currently in it. Right? So that they're actively signaling to the rest of the women that they're not going to be presenting a threat in that re in that regard. Um, but yeah, so uh the the adoption of all of these body adornments and things, they're imposing costs. The more attractive you are, the more you can get away with doing things that are ostensively going to make you a little bit unattractive. If you set those as social norms, then that's going to make lots of other women then have to follow them because we know that one one thing that women are incredibly motivated to do is to follow the social norms set by other. That's why women are so much more susceptible to social contagions than than young men are. Women are incredibly strongly um mo motivated to follow the social trends. And so the the influential women are able to set social trends that just impose attractiveness costs on everybody else. and they wear those costs themselves, but they can afford to, right? A woman who's highly attractive, um, with a gorgeous body and a gorgeous face can afford to shave her head. Um, she's still going to be, you know, very highly attractive. A woman who doesn't have a lot going for her physically speaking, who then also shaves her head, is also going to look a lot less feminine and bear a much bigger cost for following that particular fashion trend. That's also why we see so many you might sort of intrinsically think that if fashion was driven by intraexual competition then fashion would be um flattering and that's why we see so many clothes that come into fashion not being flattering because that's actually the point of it that the point is to actually impose a cost on other women to have to keep up with these fashion trends. Um, they're clothes that are difficult for a lot of people to wear if they don't have a a perfect figure.
>> It feels though I mean it feels different when you're doing I specifically related to online dating for example when you're building a profile. I mean, it seems as though the most attractive photos that you have of yourself and the most attractive photos of what what you're wearing, of yourself, having a good time, all these things that add to your attractiveness factor. It's the hair and makeup and clothing, and it's the hanging out with, you know, people and friends, and it's the the showing of the hobbies that you enjoy. All of those things contribute to this attractiveness. And it's those women that are getting the most attention online with online dating. It's not the woman who's a little heavier and kind of, you know, maybe doesn't dress as well. Maybe she's a little more plain to look at. Maybe she's a little more frumpy to look at. So, it feels like there's a discrepancy when it comes to something like that. And I'm just sort of speaking anecdotally, I don't have any statistics on this from women who I know that have done the online dating thing who kind of vary from very attractive and gorgeous almost model looking like women all the way down to people that you know are just average um and who is attracting the most male attention and who isn't. And so it just feels like there's a discrepancy there. So, I'm just curious about your thoughts about that.
>> There is there is a discrepancy there, but but it it has um it has a few interesting explanations. So, the thing to remember about there's a couple of things to remember about online dating and that is that the men on online platforms tend to be higher in what we call like the dark triad of personality. So, they tend to be psychopath more psychopathic, more narcissistic and more machavelian. And the women who are on those platforms tend to be higher in neuroticism and anxiety than women in the general population. So when you're looking at what's happening on those online dating platforms, you've got to imagine sort of, you know, what will happen if you know nastier than average men come up against more neurotic than average women. And so what a lot of the men on those dating platforms, and obviously this isn't, you know, clearly isn't true for all men. I'm sure there are plenty of men out on those platforms who are looking, you know, for genuine relationships. But what a lot of the men on those platforms are looking for is they're simply looking to have sex. And so what they're looking for in the pictures is not necessarily how attractive a girl is. What they're looking for is indicators of how um how likely they think they will be to be able to have sex with her with with relatively little investment from them. Of course, they don't have to date her for several months to be able to have sex, right? That's a lot of investment. What they're looking for is who do they think based on photos, appearance, hobbies, and what they say about themselves is going to be more likely to effectively have sex with them. Um, and what you find is because the a lot of the women on these platforms are higher than average in sort of neuroticism and anxiety, a lot of the women on these platforms are going to have sex with these men because they're quite desperate to find a partner. And so they will kind of you know be you know willing to lower the market price of sex if you like to attempt to attract these men. And so you end up with these dating platforms you know happening with that kind of a phenomenon. what the men are choosing. It's not necessarily the women that are more attractive, but what men are where women are wearing makeup and, you know, sexy clothing and fancy hair and all dolled up and that's giving a signal out to other women that, you know, stay out of my way. I'm on the hunt. You know, I'm not someone that you would like to mess with. um at this point in time. Well, men also see those signals and go, "Huh, that's someone who is wanting to portray that she is out on the hunt." And so that's why they're more likely to go for those types of photos on the dating sites. If you ask men um and you know, and this research has been done sort of done to death now. It's kind of it's it's pretty clear. Um, if you ask men to be choosing women as partners for as women as prospective long-term partners, they're more likely to find attractive the women you described as not getting as much action on the dating websites. The women that dress much more conservatively, much more plainly, don't show themsel decide to choose a picture of themselves with a wine in their hand and, you know, half-drunk friends all around them in the pub as their profile picture, that kind of thing. Right? So they're the women that men are would be more interested in for an actual long-term liaison. But the fact is that in spite of what they might tick in their profile for what they're looking for, there is, you know, the majority of men on those platforms are looking for short-term liaison and they are choosing women who they think that they will be able to get those from. And if these men have been on there for a while, then you know they're just going to learn through trial and error. whether they understand the psychology behind it or not. They're going to learn pretty quickly through trial and error what kind of profiles work when you try to hit these women up for sex and which profiles say no to you. So, they learn pretty quickly which women to swipe left on and which ones to swipe right on, even if they have no idea of the psychology behind that, right? They they're just going to learn. Um, so that's kind of what's happening on dating sites. It's it's important to remember that it's not a it's not a rep it's not just that it's not representative but the fact that it's not representative means that the entire dynamic on those sites is quite different to what you would then see out in the real world. So it's not just the people that's different but by having different people it creates an entirely different because it's a it's a game right the behavior of one group impacts the behavior of the other group and impacts the payoff matrix for the other group. So the whole dynamic of how those of how men and women on dating sites interact differs quite a bit from how men and women then interact in the real world. Obviously there's there's similarities and there's corolleries um but it's not really quite the same.
>> So I I have another question for you Danny about the uh the overall structure of this. So you point out that there's a lot of women in uh powerful like supportive bureaucratic roles.
>> Yeah.
>> that where where a lot of influence is being pedled, but we don't have a female Bill Gates out there trying to reduce the world population. We don't have some we haven't seen a lot of female forefront to this population, you know, reproductive suppression movement. We usually see men at the head of that. we see like men at the head of uh like Justin Trudeau or you know you see male um leaders in positions where these things are being put forward and so if women have an e men and women have different evolutionary strategies available to them. Women like you said they're not going to go and and deck somebody usually because that's not the strategy that wins. So from an evolutionary perspective, would it be fair to say that women would tend to be the strongest sort of supporters of whatever the power structure that is existing would be? So they would be the it's almost a sycopantic role of um I will support the current thing. I support the current thing. I align myself with whatever's in power right now. And so you would see this like army of bureaucrats that's that's basically pariting the main message that's being sent. So if the main message is population control, then that would be the message that you would hear through the women, but it's not necessarily a female uh or origin of this particular thing.
more likely to support the status quo. That was something that, uh, Dr. Eric Kaufman talks about, and, and I, I would, gosh, I would love to get a conversation with the two of you and hear your ideas bounce off of each other.
I think, I think at the moment, with the, the far left, um, you know, the far left that we're seeing, we're seeing women supporting the status quo, right? So, um, but that's because it's the progressive status quo. He's made the same argument for when conservative is the status quo that you see women in, in terms of like temperance or, or other things, other big conservative movements. You've seen a lot of women at the forefront of that.
Does he have specific examples? Because sort of a lot of the examples of progressive, um, you know, progressive protest and whatnot also features women very heavily. So, you know, and, and you know, for reasons that that align with reproductive strategy, but women were at the forefront of the sexual revolution, for example. Um, it was female behavior that, you know, that, well, I mean, it's female behavior that controls the market price of sex. So, it's, it's predominantly always going to, by definition, have to be female behavior that brings about a sexual revolution. Um, so maybe that's sort of, you know, it's kind of wasn't really an option there to, to, to be there for the men. But I think it's, it's, it's the women who are certainly enforcing, um, the more progressive side of things. Um, but I'm not quite sure that there's that there's as much evidence that women would necessarily just support whatever the status quo is. I mean, I mean, certainly at the moment, um, there's a, a huge divide in political orientation between men and women, right? So women are much more left-wing than men at the moment, um, and that's not, that's not always been there. That's, you know, as politics becomes more and more progressive, it is, you know, the, the divide between men and women is becoming much larger in terms of their mean political orientation.
But politics has also become more salient in terms of, uh, of social identity.
Compared to like, compared to when, like what do you mean?
Compared to in my lifetime, even, you know, we see the polarization increasing quite a bit between left and right. And so it's more of a language that people use in order to sort of idiomatically express their discontent. We, we go into the, the language of politics right away. You know, in the, in the '90s, it wouldn't have been as common to walk up to somebody and immediately, you know, accuse them of voting for the wrong guy or, you know, things like this. So we, we have this way that we are channeling a lot of our social angst through this political sphere and political language. So it's kind of unique in that, in that regard.
That's, that's true. But I'm not sure that that's, um, that that's sort of fundamentally different from obser from from just observing that there is that has become a massive, um, sort of shift between the sexes between being more progressive and being more conservative. So, it's clear that whatever the cause of it might be, it's clear that we have a, um, a shift in political alignment that that we're seeing playing out over recent decades, right? That's that's clear, whatever's causing it. And so, I think, you know, the observation that politics is becoming much more salient, I don't necessarily think that that's either, either a necessarily a cause or effect. I mean, I think it's something that just goes along with that shift, but I don't think it's, um, I don't think it replaces an explanation for why that shift is occurring. I don't think the shift is occurring just because people are starting to pay more attention from politics. I mean, if anything, I think it would be more likely to be the opposite. You have this massive divide and then you start having, you know, you start having problems and, and whatever with it. But I think the, the key question though is, why are we having this massive political divide? Why is it that the political interests of women are deviating more and more from the political interests of men?
I've got a qu, I have a question. What, what specific aspects of female psychology drive civilizational collapse do you think?
So the explanation for it that I have, and it's less about aspects of female psychology and more about the, well, we'll get to aspects of female psychology, but the, the fundamental driver of it is the genetic payout of being there at the end. So when civilizations collapse, you don't rarely, if if ever, do you get to a point where the population disappears. For the most part, what civilizational decline and collapse means is that the population gets shrunk, the population gets invaded, and the population then grows again. So if you are part of a, if you're part of a large population, your lineages will be, you know, some small proportion of that population along with everybody else. If the population gets driven down to a very small bottleneck and you are one of very few lineages that exist in that bottleneck and then the population explodes from that, then your representation in the population goes from being minority to being majority, and that is the genetic prize that drives the behavior. And it doesn't just benefit women, which is why I think that, what you were mentioning earlier, Leslie, about male and female behavior dovetailing together to bring the collapse down.
That is what's happening because it isn't just women, of course, who benefit because every single human being is the, the, um, the offspring of both a man and a woman. So it is the, the female behavior primarily, again, because women control the reproductive output. If the reproductive output is going to increase or decrease, it has to be female behavior that changes to do that. Right? Men are, you know, men are are largely superfluous as far as reproduction goes. Right? Women are the rate limiters of reproduction. Women only, women can increase the reproductive rate, and women have much more power to, to lower the reproductive rate than men do. So, it's going to have to be a, a thing that is in that regard, in terms of population decline, it's going to have to be very heavily driven by women. But if we were seeing an evolutionary system in which, okay, there was this sort of intersectual competition playing out where women are suppressing each other's reproductive success as part of competitive strategies, and that was having a net negative impact on the society, which was effectively not, not coming with the genetic reward at the end of it, then we would expect men to be very strongly selected for to interfere in that and to intervene in that. And instead, we're not seeing men as a group interfering and intervening. We're seeing men actually going right along with it. Men are qualitatively lowering their levels, facultatively lowering their levels of testosterone. Men are behaving less violently. Men are coming out as more and more feminine and more and more effeminate and becoming much less masculine. Men are supporting women in the workplace. Men are supporting abortion. Men are supporting women not having families. You know, men are going along with the strategy, as are the vast majority of women. So what we're seeing is a whole civilizational change in behavior that is driving the civilization down into the ground. Now, if this was a one-off, if this was something that was happening that we hadn't seen happen before, then perhaps the most parsimonious explanation would be, well, look, the world has changed a heck of a lot in a very short period of time. We have technologies we didn't have before. We have a level of global communication we didn't have before. Maybe something really bad is happening that hasn't happened before. But this has happened before, and a, a lot of the same markers that we point to in the world that I now point to as sort of, you know, direct flow on consequences of women spending less time in the home rearing children and having families and spending more time in civic duties and in workplaces, and not just spending time in those areas so that they're not spending time having children, but spending time in those areas promoting policies and, um, and the social agenda that creates a society that are very hostile to reproduction. That's what women are doing in these, in these institutions. And those institutions don't behave. Even though the men who are in there cooperate with what the women are doing, when those institutions are dominated by men, they don't do that. They don't create an environment that's hostile to reproduction. So you need to have a certain, uh, like a threshold representation of women in these institutions before you start to see them becoming hostile to reproduction.
To jump in. Um, I, I feel like I have so many questions for you, and I, this is such a fascinating conversation. I feel like we could go in lots and lots of different directions. I wish we had three hours to spend together. I've been reading Mary Harrington's *Feminism Against Progress*, and I find her, her arguments and her logic about this very compelling, very interesting. She kind of breaks this down into how feminism has emerged in the post-industrial era, as a response to the way that our lives changed so dramatically, men and women's lives post-industrialization. And women, and I'm going to totally butcher her argument, so I'm not trying to to really represent it properly, but she kind of sees this bifurcation in the feminist movement between those who would like to assume male jobs and do things that have been a part of, uh, the male role, and those who would like to have more respect for the female role. And, uh, one of the things that she talks about in terms of the allure of, uh, maybe the po, the marketplace outside of the home, economic engagement outside of the home for women, is that women never were in the home. That's not, that was, that's a fiction to think that women used to just be in the home. That's a very specific, like, very Victorian, upper-class privileged kind of opportunity to be in the home. Women would have been in the fields and they would have been working labor with other, with other women and in big groups of people while tending their children in, in large social groups. And so this new era where you can either go out and work in some job outside of your, your house, or you can be isolated in your home with your children, is a really unnatural thing and it creates un, it creates a lot of pressures and stresses for people. And so what we've done is we've really taken the human animal and pulled it out of its, its normal environment and expected it to perform. And so now we have all these responses to this. So part of that, I, I guess that statement right there could launch like another hour of discussion because I'd love to hear all of your responses to it. And I, um, I don't know, do you guys have like another 10 minutes to go a little bit longer? Because I also know Jennifer and Christine might have other thoughts. So, let me defer over to Jennifer and Christine. If you guys have any other thoughts or questions that you want to bounce around, we'll, we'll see if Danny can engage with those and we'll save mine and maybe we'll have a chance to talk about it another time. But Jennifer,
Yeah, I, I don't know if I can state this in a way that makes any sense, but I'll, I'll give it a go. Um,
So, you know, I very much grew up with, um, you know, the, the advice that I should, um, focus on getting an education and having my career and making sure that I was never financially dependent on a man. Yes, have kids, but 100% set yourself up first. I feel like that advice was coming from a good place, and that place was, hey, we've seen a lot of women in terrible marriages that are having a very difficult time leaving due to their economic dependence. And so that, I, I feel like that advice was given in good conscience. And, um, but I also see that that advice has had some ill effects, and that people are sometimes, you know, a lot of people now are putting off childbirth until where now they need IVF. Um, and so it, that was just created a whole industry, um, but also a lot of problems for people and a lot of people never getting to have the kids they hope to have. But I, I always felt that that advice was coming from a good place. And I'm wondering, how do you determine the motivations of the people offering that kind of advice and the institutions offering that advice? I know that you think that it's for this, you know, suppression of reproduction, but how, how can you sort of look within and determine what that motivation is?
So the, so it's a similar question to the point we talked about earlier with the difference between proximate and ultimate explanations. A lot of female intra-sexual competition is very nasty and very overtly nasty. And women who are very high on intra-sexual competition also tend to be very high on the dark triad. Those just, you know, you just think of them as the nasty personality traits: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Dishonest, manipulative, callous, entitled. Um, and so a lot of intersexual competition is very nasty. And that sort of, that makes intuitive sense, right? If you're going to engage in the kinds of behaviors that are going to, you know, deliberately disrupt other people's relationships and, and things like that, obviously, you know, in order to do that, it would, it would help if you're an inherently nasty person. Um, however, if we're going to posit that female manipulative reproductive suppression is becoming widespread, then one of two things has to happen. Either pe, it either needs to leverage off pro-social motives because the majority of people have many more pro-social motives than they have antisocial motives. So, it either needs to leverage off pro-social motives, or the, uh, the proportion of antisocial motives in people needs to increase. And I think we're seeing a little bit of both of those. So, we know that the, um, the left-wing progressive activist type crowd is sort of surprisingly high on the dark triad, and a lot of the, you know, the sort of far-end reproductive suppression sort of stuff coming out of that end is kind of quite nasty. So I think in some senses, we are seeing, you know, a sort of a shift in the social norms where narseness is becoming more acceptable to facilitate these types of ideas becoming a little bit more mainstream and more and more acceptable. We're seeing that to some extent, but I think to a much broader extent, if it's going to become a society-wide phenomenon, it has to leverage off pro-social motives. And this is where the, the advice-giving studies that, that we gave were sort of came in handy is that you've got, you know, women sort of, you know, ostensibly giving advice to their friends in these studies about what they think they should do, like focus on your career first, get your career set up, have children later once you're financially secure, you know, blah, blah, blah. But what we find is that when we ask women to say what they would do in those situations, the advice they would give themselves is more pro-reproductive. So we're seeing, you know, so we're seeing women encouraging other women to take the, the less, you know, pro-natal positions, whilst they for themselves, where they've got the most interests, you know, the most reproductive interest and the most proximal nice interest in the outcome, saying that what they would actually do would be a slightly more reproductively, you know, inclined take. And so we are sort of, and then sort of the, the clincher to that is that when you also measure how intra-sexually competitive the women are, the, that difference, what you would tell other women to do versus what you would do yourself, is predicted by how intra-sexually competitive you report being. So, you know, even though I don't, I'm not proposing that women are consciously giving what they think is misleading advice, but what I'm suggesting is that women have been selected for to give reproductively inhibiting advice to other women.
Could that be what they've been for to do?
Sorry, Danny. Could that be because, uh, the risk-benefit analysis is easier to make coolly when you're speaking to someone than when your heart is involved in it? I mean, there's that kind of feeling, right? Like, I might, I might go for the guy and take the risk even though he's a broke musician and he works in a pub and, you know, and it doesn't look like a good bet, but, you know, I'm in love, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. But if my girlfriend said, "Do you think it's a good idea that I, you know, I'm really kind of in love with him? I think I'm gonna quit law school and start dating this broke musician." And you'd go, "Girl, just finish law school. Date him, but don't jump straight into the thing, you know, and, and may that may or may not be autobiographical." So I'm just saying.
Um, so, well, it's interesting actually, because there's a couple of things in there, and one is, um, one is that we actually kind of did that manipulation. So we did scenarios where the, the guy was ostensibly like a good bet, and we did scenarios where we described him again, not meaning anything autobiographical. Um, so we kind of had, we had, you know, we had like the, you know, the really good prospect, and we had the really poor prospect. And when the guy was the poor prospect, we did see that situation reverse where women were then less likely to say that they would invest, but they were more likely to advise.
For advice to invest. So.
You should date the broke musician. But.
That's right. And the other observation I would make is that people, is that what we, what people generally consciously are thinking that they're doing, and the, the sort of, you know, rationalizations for their own behavior and decisions that we come up with, doesn't necessarily bear a very strong relationship to the reasons for those decisions. So, you know, humans have been, you know, your, everybody's mate choice apparatus has been selected for and refined over many, many, many, many generations by people who selectively, who could, you know, successfully reproduce, which is why we're here, right? All the people who failed at that aren't, aren't here anymore and didn't leave any progeny. So we have very refined mate selection mechanisms. Um, and so what people would typically do for themselves is the result of mechanisms that have been finely honed, not to always make the right choice because you can't always make the right choice, but to make the choice that would be the optimum on average. So, given the information that you have, this is the best bet of what the right choice would be. And obviously, you're going to make the wrong choice fairly frequently because we don't have complete information about the people we're making these choices about. But we have systems that have been designed to make those choices. So when we are advising other people to do something other than what we think we would do ourselves, it's a reasonably safe assumption to think that we're advising them to do something suboptimal.
And when, when we're at suboptimality. Yeah. Go ahead.
Go ahead. I just have one last question because I know we're kind of getting to time. Um, ha have you done any kind of studies or comparisons on kind of levels of happiness among these groups? So people that say, for example, selected for having those families earlier in life with the kids and focusing on that versus the people that waited and that maybe now have some reproductive issues and maybe they don't have reproductive issues, but they decided to wait, um, and pursue careers, or they pursue careers and now they're they're having a hard time finding a mate. And, and I'm asking this because actually this question came up on Solid Ground the other day about happiness and, you know, knowing, you know, how many people do we know in our lives that are happy, or do we know people that are that are happy? So I'm interested to know if that was ever tested, um, that people found happiness or.
Yeah. So definitely not by me. I don't have any of my own data that that speaks to that, but I do know that, um, there has been a, a number of studies that have attempted to assess happiness of women and happiness of women with children, especially as women get to the kind of late 30s, early 40s, where it sort of becomes that if you haven't had children by then, it kind of becomes clear that you're, you're very unlikely to. The happiness of women at that point who don't have children goes down substantially. So there does, so it doesn't necessarily appear to, as far as I know, I don't, I don't certainly know the data that well. Um, from what I do know though, there is now increasingly good evidence, um, for a serious decline in happiness and mental well-being of childless women once they hit basically the point at which it becomes clear that they're not going to have children. So younger than that, um, I don't think that there's much of a difference, as far as to the best of my knowledge. Um, but once women effectively kind of, you know, realize, either consciously or not, or whatever, um, that they have missed that boat, then there are serious declines in mental well-being of childless women in those age groups, at least. I don't know for how long it lasts for. I don't know if that then becomes a sort of a lifetime lasting effect or if it's more short-lived than that. Um, but as far as I know, that much has, has sort of been, is becoming quite clear now in the data. So, it definitely is having impacts on happiness, but not soon enough to change people's behavior.
Yeah. Okay.
Danny, this is so interesting to me. I, your, your interests in your field of study open up a, a magnificent world of exploration. And I, uh, I'm, I'm really curious. I'm, I'm still skeptical about some points and some places of emphasis, but overall, I find this just tremendously fascinating, and I'm so grateful for your time in sharing your ideas with us. I wish I could keep you here for a long time and just pepper you with lots of questions and have a great conversation, but this hour has flown by, and, um, I just want to thank you for spending it with us.
H, you're very, very welcome. Um, if you would like to feel free to send me any of the questions. I'm, I'm especially interested in the bits that you're not convinced by. Okay? Because,
Um, because they're, because they're the bits that either I'm wrong about, potentially, um, or at least I need to think harder, um, because there's something that I'm missing. So, I'm especially interested in the things that you're not convinced by. And I'll do my best, not just sort of for your benefit, but for everyone's benefit. I'll do my best to think harder and see if I can write something down, even, you know, if I don't necessarily have to come back again, but I can certainly write some things down and, and, um, and see if I can, you know, at least speak to that. If not necessarily change your mind or anything, but I would be very happy to speak, especially to the bits that you find unconvincing. They're the bits that I want to hear most about.
Well, that, that would be great, actually. And if you want to, if you're free at some point, maybe in the next, uh, month or so, we could do a part two and get into some other things, uh, go deeper. One of the things I'm really interested in is any research on that kind of long-term, uh, genetic planning sort of mentality. What, what research do we have on people actually taking a lineage perspective when they're thinking about these things? Like, how important is that actually to people? Because my tendency would be to think that people are more short-term oriented and more, uh, so, and, and I know you might have some, and I'd like to hear that. So, um, but where can people find you? Where would you want to point people to if they're curious about your work and want to learn more or even contact you?
So the best place to go is to go to Twitter, or X now, I guess it's called, um, Dr. Danny S. So, anything else that I do, um, on Substack or my website or anywhere else will also always end up on X. So, if you just go there and you find me there, um, then you will find anything interesting that I might say at some point.
Excellent. Well, I will post that link in our video description for people if they want to go follow you on Twitter. And, uh, thanks again, and I know it's late for you in Australia, so thanks for staying up late to talk with us.
Thank you so much. That's all right. It was my pleasure. I had a great time. Incredible. Thank you.