Hidden Payoff of Civilizational Ruin - Dr. Dani Sulikowski, DemystifySci #360

Welcome back to Demystify Sai. I'm Shiloh. I'm Anastasia. This is the place where we search for the theories that will change the world. And today we are looking at the mechanism underpinning something quite terrifying which has been unfolding over the past few years but perhaps has been going on much longer than that which is the apparent suicide of Western civilization. And there are many people perhaps you are one of them or you've encountered somebody who throws their hands up and says I don't understand why in the world these institutions are committing suicide and destroying themselves the way they are. Our guest today Dr. Danny Sulicowski has an answer for that question and she points to an adaptive mechanism for why this is all happening which concerns intraexual female mate suppression. There's been a lot of conversation about the fact that the declining birth rates in Europe and America and Australia, even all the way through, you know, Italy, South Korea, Russia, like nobody really knows why it is that they're happening. And Dr. Silicowski proposes this intraexual mates depression as being the reason for it where it's this competitive edge that emerges in women themselves that induce them to convince other women not to have children. And we start the conversation by getting Dr. Silicowsk's perspective on how she thinks all of this works. And we kind of arrive at this weird conclusion which is that well perhaps it's female emancipation that's caused all of these problems and the fact that women are in the workforce and they're liberated and they don't need men. And so what's happening is that they basically are convincing are are transmitting this mimemetic idea to other women that the source of happiness and the source of satisfaction is not family and children and a domestic existence but in reality it's all of this other stuff. And what's really fascinating over the course of this conversation, which I find to be the best part of any conversation, is that we really start to untangle the question of whether or not some phenomenon, in this case, intraexual mate suppression by women, is that the true cause of a declining birth rate and the disruption of all of our institutions? Or is there something else that started much before the modern era that is actually this piece that's been running in the background that is now becoming the dumpster fire that appears to be the modern age. This is really, really complex and I don't want to give away all the punchlines up front, but we get into some really cool novel territory and it really has expanded my view of the toolkit possible for explaining all of the dumpster fire. So, maybe you have a missing piece of this puzzle, too. You might want to sign up for Paradigm Griff. That's our new segment where you, the audience, can show up and put your name in a hat for a chance to present your idea with the world. We give you 60 seconds to do it. And if you can make a compelling case, maybe we'll invite you back without having to sign up. And if you really knock it out of the park, maybe you'll end up on the podcast explaining it to us at length one day.

And a reminder before we let you get to the conversation that this is a program that is purely supported by its viewers. For us, it's really, really important to make sure that this is a place that is not rife with advertisements, that we are not selling you things that you don't need or interrupting deep discussions for pitches for weird AI sleep machines or dubious supplements. We really believe that we are producing something that's useful for the world and that the people for whom it is useful will be the people that support us. And so with that said, you should come over to patreon.com/demystifiesai because we have a tier where you can donate just 75 cents a week. And if everybody who listened to this podcast donated 75 cents a week, we would be able to have a studio where we could invite people to record in person as opposed to recording remotely. we would be able to host regular in-person events like Paradigm Drift, like we've been talking about hosting a camping trip at some, you know, like renting a Boy Scout lodge and having tent cabins and having people be able to just come out for a long weekend in the summer with their families so that we can really spend time together as a community. We could have scholarships for our conference series where we could bring in more young folks who can't necessarily afford to put themselves up in a hotel for the whole week. And we could we could have the conferences regularly at least once a year. We could have a quarterly live event where we actually made this into more of a community where people can come together and meet as opposed to something that's just on the internet, remote, asynchronous. We already have something like that at Patreon, which is that we meet every Sunday with our patrons. We have our Sunday salons. And that's been really instrumental for us in growing this podcast because it means that we're constantly talking to the people who are listening to it and getting their insights onto the topics that drive them. And so if you have 75 cents a week and you really want to see us grow and you want to see this become something that isn't just a podcast recorded through Zoom, then we would love to see you there and it would really help us transform the world into more of what we want to see.

With that, enjoy the conversation with Danny Sulowski about the evolutionary payout of bringing society to its knees. The scientific revolution starts now. protest. [Music]

It's really funny because you go to the Wikipedia page and you look for mate suppression takes you to reproductive suppression and it's very there's nothing about humans on that page. No. And it's mostly I think it's about like lemurs and naked mole rats and rats is a big one. Yeah, rats is a big one. So rodents So rodents do it. rodents do it a lot and I think in I'm not an expert on this in in rodents but from what I can tell the consensus is moving towards in rodents it not being manipulative. So for a long time it was assumed that what was effectively happening is that we'll just say say rats the the dominant female rat cuz rats sort of have a bit of a matriarchal um struct social structure right so that the dominant ones are the females and or the dominant one is a female. So the dominant female will breed and the other females around her will not. And for a while it was just presumed that that must be manipulative in that the dominant female was doing something physiologically presumably that was preventing the other one's breeding and it was in the interests of the dominant the reproductive interests of the dominant female and it wasn't in the reproductive interests of the other. Um, however, now it would seem, I think, that the consensus is moving towards actually it's in the reproductive interests of all rats to have just one reproducing at a time in that type of a system. And so, it's not actually manipulative reproductive suppression. It's more like cooperative reproductive suppression. So, the the rats being suppressed are sort of voluntarily, you know, I'm not talking about agency here. I'm talking about their own bodies physiologically voluntarily um suppressing their own reproduction because that's actually what's ultimately best for their inclusive fitness at the end of the day. So, and there's I mean there's still debate about that. I just just imagining somebody out there who studied this for their whole life going no that's not what we think. But um I I I think that is the direction that the people are moving towards that it's not manipulative um and it's ultimately working in the interests of everybody. Whereas in humans, what I'm positing is that it is manipulative. So it is definitely antagonistic in that the individuals who are being reproductively suppressed are indeed bearing a net reproductive cost as a result of that happening. I'm not sort of necessarily suggesting a a cooperative system like what we're seeing in the rat. So I'm suggesting something that's a bit different to that.

I think it's probably time for us to unveil what it is you're suggesting. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into the the meat of it. So, what how do you what what's happening in the world today? Okay. So, Okay. So, how do we how do we kind of make this digestible? So, let's start. So, let's sort of start small. So, female. So the first sort of extension to the current understanding of intersectional competition, it's restricted to the time of mate choice. So that the first thing that I would say is well that's that's an an unnecessary and nonsensical restriction. There is going to be selection pressure on you know in favor of any mechanism that will boost your own reproductive success or decrease the reproductive success of rivals at any point across the lifestyle. There's no reason for intracally competitive mechanisms to be limited to the point at which mate choice happens. Um because recall that reproductive success in terms of its currency, its evolutionary currency is relative reproductive success. It's not absolute reproductive success. So an individual can improve their own net reproductive success even by keeping their own reproductive output the same, but by damaging the reproductive output of those around them. Right? That's a still a relative net gain. So what you see especially much more in women than what you see in men is you see women engaging in a lot of reproductive sabotage of other women. The reason why this would be selected for more strongly in women than in men is exactly the same reason why societies send men away to fight wars. Right? We send men away to fight wars because we can lose a lot of men out of a couple of generations and the population can very quickly recover for obvious reasons. If you lost the same proportion of women instead of men, it would take much longer for the population to recover, right? So that's because women women the number of of reproductively active viable women in the population sets your reproductive cap, right? That's that's what sets the cap. So if individual women can effectively knock other women out of the reproductive gene pool or at least damage and inhibit their reproductive success, the result of that is going to be a net drop in the population's overall reproductive success. A net drop in the background repro reproductive success is a relative gain for every woman not affected by that drop. And the person doing that behavior is not affected by that drop because she's doing it to everyone else. Okay? So, so that's why these behaviors get selected for in women. In men, the same types of behaviors just don't have a rate of return, right? So, a man knocking a whole heap of other men out of the reproductive gene pool is not going to see a net drop in the population's reproductive rate. He's not going to get a benefit. That's what kind of starts this off as a female specific behavior. This whole sabotage. So the first thing that I'm sort of proposing is that female female sabotage is a type of interexual competition that we see across the lifespan. And there's we've starting to collect um pretty good evidence in my lab now that this is the case. So just as sort of some examples of how women will um inhibit each other's reproductive success outside of the of the context of mate choice. Um we see things like uh we we sort of call it competitive mothering although that that word can mean other things as well but we can call it competit competitive mothering where women will attempt to interfere with each other's parenting strategies. So by giving other women really what the what you believe is actually really bad parenting advice. So encouraging other women to parent ineffectively and in fact to parent inefficiently. um giving other women ad yeah giving other women advice to prioritize things other than investment in their children. So this is a this is quite a big one. So this can be

Really happens like I I'm feel so like my naive is being shattered on the floor right now. I couldn't I I just I'm I feel like

So I to to to add an example to this I think that one of the most well-known toxic places on the internet is mommy forums. Oh yeah. Where women gather to talk about motherhood and basically any like I have a bunch of people in my life that have just had children and so they end up in these spaces and are immediately horrified because everybody's super neurotic. Everybody polices everybody's behavior really tightly. It's this

But with bad advice. That's the part that I'm just like, "Holy cow." Like that's a that's a common feature. Yeah. Yeah. So, I've got a really I've got a really nice concrete example actually and this one I'm especially confident in because we collected data on this last year and so I know this actually happens. So, this is something we observed in those mothers forums and then we went went about collecting some data to demonstrate that this actually does occur. So, one thing that happens when when you have a baby, right, the mother is doing the breastfeeding because she's the one with the boobs, right? This is a this is a pretty hard and fast division of labor, not something that's really up for debate, right? And so one of the consequences of that is that the mother if you are going to breastfeed if we're not going to sort of bring bottles and things into it whatever because we're just just talking about breastfeeding then if the if the mom is going to feed the baby at night obviously she's going to be up at night every 2 or 3 hours and she's going to be she's going to be feeding the baby. Um, what is the most sensible thing to do then is a very efficient division of labor is for the husband to make sure that he is getting sleep because a very dangerous thing to have when you have a young baby around that you need to look after is having two chronically tired people who are prone to making terrible mistakes. So you need to have whenever possible you need to have someone sleeping because there's not going to be a lot of sleep happening in total. So, somebody has to be sleeping, which means if mom's getting up to do the nighttime feeds, dad has to be asleep. So that when he's awake later, mom can get some sleep. A very terrible thing to do is to insist that dad should get up in the middle of the night to help mom with the nighttime feeds, even though she doesn't need any help, just to help her and support her. Very inefficient division of labor, very damaging in those early few weeks. And what we noticed on these mommy forums was women effectively shaming each other and shaming each other's husbands for not getting up in the middle of the night just because how dare he sleep when you can't. Um which of course is the exact opposite of what you should do. So, we set up a study with a little vignette that described scenarios around breastfeeding and described how it was not working for a particular woman um to have her husband, you know, he wanted to be helpful, but it wasn't working cuz she didn't need him and he wasn't getting sleep and she's now just doing um the nighttime feeds on her own. And this is now working much better. And women who reported, self-reported being more intraexually competitive were also much more likely to indicate that they would advise that woman that she was doing the wrong thing and she needed to make sure that her husband got up with her and helped her um do those nighttime feeds.

But do you have evidence that they're deceiving in these messages? Like are they doing one thing and advocating another? Cuz that would be the crux of the biscuit. Yes, we did also ask them what they would do themselves. And so when we asked them what they would do themselves, they were much more likely to say that if they were in that situation, they would let the husband sleep. And we didn't ask the same Yeah. And we didn't ask the same people either. So it's not like people knew that we were asking about them and asking about someone else. So what we did is we asked we actually had like a a mixed design. So we had different versions of the vignette. So the one about you and the one about someone else was two completely different vignettes. So people gave completely different answers. But then of course we did the cross comparisons with people in different groups. Um so yes we also asked them what they would do themselves and irrespective of how of how intraexually competitive they reported themselves being. Um women generally just said that they themselves would let their husband sleep and they would do the feeding whereas they told somebody else, "Oh no, you should make sure your husband wakes up. He should, you know, if you have to be up, he should have to be up too." And then that difference was bigger for women who were higher on interexual competition.

You also had an interesting study which I had actually come across before ever hearing about you about the way that women suggest haircut strategies for other women. Can you can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, that's that was a great one too. That was actually that study was actually motivated um by my my then stepdaughter who went to the hairdresser and got not what she asked for. um and she was she was quite upset and that that actually was the the beginning of the germ of the idea for that study. Um in any case what we did in that study is we also set up a series of vignettes and we told participants that they were hairdressers or to imagine that they were hairdressers and that the women that the vignettes were about were their clients and they had to advise their clients how much hair they should get cut off. And so we had a a variety of different conditions partly just so that the vignettes would be different um but also because we wanted to be able to create the specific circumstances in which cutting off hair would definitely be sabotage. So in the condition where the women were reported as having very healthy hair and for each vignette we also included like a little close-up picture of the hair so we could show like beautiful healthy hair or terribly damaged split ends hair. And in the condition where the hair was uh depicted as being very healthy and described as being very healthy and the client was described as wanting um the minimum cut off possible, women who were higher in sexual competition advised those clients to cut off more hair. Um and over a couple of studies where we varied the the attractiveness of the clients, what we saw is that women um targeted that advice most strongly. So advise that the most hair be cut off the women that they perceive to be about as attractive as themselves. So the women that they perceive to be their mate value rivals. So women so people mate assortatively, right? So the highest mate value people mate with each other and and so on down the ladder. So a woman of approximately equal attractiveness to you when all you know about someone is their physical appearance is also a woman of approximately equal mate value. And that's of course is your strongest mating rival and that's who the women were cutting the most hair off. So,

I'm I'm surprised about um the like the self-reporting of interexual company intraexual >> competition. Like, how do you score that? How do you know how intraexually competitive someone is? Yeah, cuz my instinct would be to be like, I'm not competitive at all.

That's actually that's actually a a very interesting question and a very big question. So, there's a scale that is that has been I think it's like a I should know the year because I'd use this scale and cite it all the time. You think I'd know the year it was published. Is it terrible that I don't um I'm an embarrassment to myself. Anyway, there is a scale that people use for this. It's a very short scale. It's 12 items and it asks things. It it just what it actually asks about is just a general subjective competitiveness that people have towards members of the same sex. So, the items are things like um I would not want to hire a very attractive woman at work. I would not want, you know, that's like a female version. Um, and like a, you know, and an item, uh, might also be, um, I don't like it when another man has a nicer car than mine, or, you know, I don't like it when another woman has a nicer house than mine. So, it's it's just sort of it's trying to sort of tap into the the kinds of intraexual competition um, associated emotional responses that people have. So envy and jealousy and things like that of of the same sex and using things like attractiveness because that's obviously important for mate value. Competence is important for mate value. And then things like having a nice house and a nice car are also status symbols and are important for mate value. So people that are high into sexual competition should theoretically experience more jealousy and envy around those things as well. So that's how this the scale is constructed and it's it's proven to have incredible utility. It's shown a lot of theoretically sensible correlations between all manner of things and and interexual competition. So, it's certainly pretty good from that regard. But I think that what I'm discovering is that it's limited to I think it's limited to the kinds of intraexual competition that is at least a little bit overtly nasty. So when you start getting into the kinds of intraexual competition that manifests as support, the scale doesn't correlate with things as well. So the previous example I talked about about women giving other women advice. We actually did see the correlations that we were looking for there, but they weren't especially strong. And I think that there's a split that in the sort of female interexual competition strategies where there's one half that that are pretty nasty and and pretty overtly nasty. Um, and you see a lot of those around to make choice with gossiping and backstabbing and destroying, you know, rivals reputations and and whatnot. And you see a lot of it in the early motherhood stage as well. you see a fair bit of of of nastiness like you say on the mom's forums, the policing of behavior and and whatnot. Um, but there's a whole other side of female competitiveness that masquerades as sisterhood and that's not captured well by this type of a scale and we don't actually have um an alternative. So, I I think we actually, you know, as I'm sort of getting into trying to measure and calculate um these sort of nicer competitive behaviors, competitive behaviors that are reproductively suppressing, but they're masquerading as some type of support or advice or camaradership, um whilst I can observe the behaviors and observe things that they're correlating with, they're getting less and less likely, the nicer they are, they're getting less and less likely to be associated with those negative emotional responses to the same which makes mechanistic sense, but it then creates a methodological problem where we need some measure of people's, you know, just like that is a is a sort of a broadly accepted measure of intraexual competition from a nasty perspective. Um, that shouldn't necessarily correlate with things like how much hair should you cut off unless such advice is somewhat um maliciously intended. Um, but when you start measuring forms of reproductive suppressive behavior that are really manifesting as types of social support and are actually hijacking pro-social motives rather than sort of antisocial motives, then that creates a methodological problem. But that nevertheless is how that is how we measure it.

And so what are other examples of this pro-social hijacking? Yeah. What's the sisterhood thing? So, so I I shouldn't really laugh, but but you two have just sort of like collectively just done what every man and woman do when I explain this stuff is that the guy is like, "Oh my god, do women actually do this? This is so naive." And the woman's like, "Yeah, of course. And here's an example." And this is like, "That's exactly what you two did." It's just

Well, it's crazy because

It just makes it just makes me laugh. I know that men do all this stuff, but they're pretty on the nose about it. like it's not a it's not hidden. Actually, we we have this really funny conversation going in the background cuz I have a I have a totally different experience in the world when I go out and do things by myself without Nostia there. Like I have a wholly different spiritual experience in in the universe. Like I see like the absolute worst of in people often that I just people are are really really

Mean to Shiloh. People I mean like Like I meet amazing, wonderful people, too. I'm just saying. But I don't see the worst in men come out when I'm with my wife, right? It for whatever reason, people put on a different face when you're out with a woman. And I assume even more so when you're out with a woman and a child. Like it's just a totally different experience you have.

But yeah, I I feel like the society of men is just gloves off. Like I have nobody's trying to pull any punches or hide the fact that they're trying to cut you down. like that's absolutely announced and just accepted and I've known about that since I was 2 years old or whenever I first started trying to socialize with other kids. So that Yeah. But the fact that Yeah. the fact that it's going on behind the scenes with women is kind of

It's also interesting too because like I go out into the world and I generally have a pretty positive experience. Like everybody's very kind to me. Like for example, I was rid I was like riding my bike around yesterday and it's not a very bike friendly place but everybody was very was very cautious and they avoided me and you know like the big trucks gave me a wide birth and then Shiloh goes Shiloh goes running and he's like yeah people try to run me off the road. It's weird, but I have the experience where everybody's like waving to me and they're like, "Oh, cool. You're running. That's so good." And so, I think that it is a wildly different experience. And in terms of

I see women be mean to you sometimes, though, and you just don't you act like it didn't even happen. Like, you just won't see it almost. It's kind of an interesting strategy where you just you're just say like, "Anyways," which is awesome actually. I like so this is actually crazy because I've like very very carefully uh curated my social circles to not have this kind of thing happen in them but part of the time I work for a guiding company that is uh that that has a ton of women that work at it. Yeah. And there was one specific trip where there was a woman who I'd never met before who was on this trip who was like her boyfriend was also on the trip and she was so just subtly aggressive to me in the most middle school way possible. like um there was there was a moment where we were like in the vans and I sat down next to her and she moved to a different seat in the van and then I would like say something and there was another female guide and I would say things and then she would like very obviously look at me and then she would start whispering to the other guide and then they would like both be looking at me and I was like what is happening right now? I don't like I didn't I didn't think that adults behaved that way. And so to me it was just this brief glance into the world into a world that I have effectively avoided. And so it's very interesting to hear you talk about the fact that this is such a widespread phenomenon because I think that it is possible to avoid if you curate your circles. But I think that for a lot of people when you go say to the internet, there's very little curation that you can do when you show up on like a mommy forum and everybody's it's just this free-for-all and so you're exposed to this just like electric psyche that warps you by just being in its vicinity.

And I think it's really interesting too to the way you say that you've kind of like curated your your social circles as much as possible to to keep these people out because a lot of people aren't able to do that. So, as a function of where they work, as a function of who who they're friends with, and sometimes even who, you know, who family members might be friends with, it can be really difficult to actually avoid this type of behavior for a lot of women. I think that's um I think most women would avoid it if they could. I think it's a little bit like the I think interexual competition and that general competitive drive is a little bit like the the dark traits psychopathy and machellinism. It's the trade itself I think at sort of damagingly high levels is relatively rare. Um but just like when you get someone like that in the social circle when you get highly competitive people in the social circle it kind of tends to infect the whole network a little bit and people have to sort of deal with it and people have to push back against it. I mean, you know, you were able sort of, you know, you sort of said you went on that one guide with that particular woman, but imagine if that was your, you know, 9 to 5 job 5 days a week and you just had to be in an office with her and she was just constantly, you know, behaving in an incredibly childish manner, giggling behind your back. I mean, at some point you're going to have to do something. You know, at some point you're not going to be able to just let that go, right? At some point something's going to have to give. And so that's then used to, you know, you get drawn into, you know, sort of, you know, working out, okay, who are my friends, who are my allies, who am I going to get, who's going to actually when she does that is going to walk away from her and come and stand next to me instead. And, you know, then those types of of social games have to begin. And so, it's great if you can curate a social circle that doesn't have that, but I think for a lot of of people, they just have no choice but to actually get drawn into it. Um and that's what makes the behaviors perhaps much more widespread than you know than the people who kind of instigate them who I think are relatively you know I think there are relatively rare the people who really do that super nasty stuff especially as adults um you know that there's some sense in which I think that the the teenage adolescent period is like the immature period of intersectional competition where women are behaving like that but as they get older they learn how to get those same effects surreptitiously. They learn how to get them with subtifuge without looking nasty. The ones who still behave like that as the adults are the ones who never actually really learned those skills. That that's just a woman with really bad social skills. Um, you know, still still behaving like still behaving like a teenager. Um, you know, most women if they want to achieve a kind of you know, a curation of their social circle and remove certain people from it, they don't do it like that. Um, so that's that, you know, that's someone I think who never grew out of that adolescent phase cuz that, I mean, that is classic female interexual competition, you know, behavior amongst adolescence, that that kind of deliberate attempts to ostracize and and and things like that. That's just what you see all the time, but less so in in grown women. In grown women, like you say, it's much more subtle. It's much more um much more like subtifuge. So a lot of it is

Hard for people to learn that they even need to curate. Like that's a hard lesson to learn and it can be really painful, right? Because there's a lot of kind of bankrupt institutional wisdom uh where the where you know everybody's you know we accept everybody into this circle and blah blah blah which is like founded in the best intentions but at the end of the day like you you got to be pretty good at pruning like your tree at the same time, right? And that's that's a that's often a hard one piece of wisdom for for young people. I know it was super painful for me.

And um that that is true. It's a lesson learned. It's definitely often a lesson learned.

Um what percentage of women don't engage in this kind of behavior? Like when you do these studies, do you find people that just are fully resistant to it? Oh, so this is also a really interesting question and something is changing in the data over the last few years or the last I don't know maybe maybe 10 years. So it used to be the case that intraexual in older studies using the same scale it's been used for a while now in older studies using this scale you tend to get similar levels of intraexual competitiveness in in men and women and it tended to be kind of normally distributed. What you're finding now is that that's still what I'm seeing for men a rather normal distribution. So the majority of men kind of having medium levels of intraexual competitiveness and you know fewer being very low and being very high. Um but in women I'm starting to see and it's come out again in the data I've collected this year a really skewed distribution. There are many many more women on very very low scores on this scale than there used to be and fewer women with very high scores. although there are some very high scores. So, we're seeing a really skewed distribution and I well I'm seeing a really skewed distribution and I'm noticing it more so as time goes on and so like the first thing I need to do is like a formal meta analysis and make sure that what I'm observing is actually real. This is actually a genuine change over time. But um I am kind of pretty much convinced that it is as convinced as I can be without doing the formal meta analysis anyway. So, really quickly, um, a high score means that they're more competitive or Okay, so you're seeing more women that have lower scores, which means that they're shifting towards being less.

Well, what I'm seeing is a lot of women reporting really zero levels. Now the thing with the items on these scale it's a little bit like so in one of the things that people do in social psychology is they introduce what are sort of called social desiraability measures and they contain items that it's very socially desirable to say oh look I I never do this. Um but it would also be a dishonest response to say that you never do that. So, it's kind of like, oh, I, you know, I never get I've come trying to think what the items are, but things like, you know, I never get angry with someone who's lied to me. I never tell white lies. I never, you know, so a whole bunch of things that are very unlikely to actually be true, but people with a high tendency to respond in a socially desirable way will say, "Oh, yes, strongly agree. Strongly agree. Yes, I never lie. I never get angry. I never blah blah blah." And that's how we kind of measure people who might be responding in a socially desirable way on other measures in the survey. So we can then control for that to see whether other effects that we're observing are a result of social socially desirable responding or more likely to be more reliable than that. Um, and I imagine the spread of like therapy speak and um just exposure to what is socially desirable and what makes a person a good person versus a bad person must be skewing this tremendously. I look I suspect so I'm not quite sure how I'm not quite sure how widespread that is. That's widespread in particular demographics which may be also the same demographics where data comes from especially data that's collected in online surveys and things like that but I'm not quite sure how widespread generally as a phenomena that is. Um, but what I was going to say though is that a lot of the items on the interexual competitiveness scale are a little bit like the social desiraability items that lead me to question somebody who has such a low score that they've indicated that none of these items are applicable to them at all ever. And so what I'm so what I think I'm what I think this is going to turn out to be or one of the things I'm wondering if it might turn out to be is probably a better way to put it is that we're sort of seeing we're almost seeing a a shift to the more um fake nice forms of intraexual competition. So the more camaraderie, this is sisterhood type intraexual competition and less aggro intraexual competition. And so we're seeing these people who are kind of overdoing the niceness and reporting and like a lot of them reporting really really low on a scale that up until relatively recently used to be pretty normally distributed. Like that's a big shift of people down to the low end of this scale that just never used to happen in older studies. in both my experience in my lab and in like other studies as far as I can tell from reading other papers. So, you know, that that's that's quite a big shift. And I think what it marks maybe what it marks um is a shift away from that aggressive type of intraexual competition um towards the more sisterhood types where we're seeing intraexual competition manifesting as pro- female, pro- women ideologies and movements and supports like that. So the one thing that so feminism is you know it's it's quite a complicated ideology. It's not simple and it has its different branches and it has its internal inconsistencies and its debates. But the one thing that unites feminism is that it's reproductively suppressing. So you've got the different brands of feminism that are sort of united by being um a devaluing of motherhood, a prioritization of career over motherhood, reproductive rights being very important in terms of access to abortion and things like that, but being much less important in terms of access to say reproductive fertility technology and things like that. So you know what we're seeing is you know only particular women's rights being motivated or being highlighted by different feminist movements and the ones that are being highlighted are the ones that are effectively antiatal that you know any kind of pro-natal movements tend to be largely stamped out. So there was quite a nice example of this um a few months ago. I've kind of lost track of time, but a little while ago, Macron in France announced that he was I ended I think he ended up actually not doing this, but um because of the backlash, but he announced that he was that France was going to France's birth rate is declining like everyone else's. And as part of addressing that, he announced that he was going to make fairly available to any woman who wanted it free fertility screening. And the idea is that because a lot of women are waiting until their mid30s or even late 30s to have children, they're not discovering that they have fertility problems until they have very little time left to do anything about it. So his idea was that he would make this free fertility screening available so that women would at least know that if they were going to wait until their mid to late 30s to even try, they would know what their chances would be kind of by the time they got there. And there was a big feminist backlash against it. How dare he, how dare he, you know, dedicate money to trying to trap women in oppressive motherhood when there are so many more important things, you know, etc., etc. Um, and you know, I don't think I've ever seen a feminist backlash to any kind of advancement of abortion law. It's it's just it's just considered universally good. It doesn't matter what the the abortion is. any loosening of restrictions around abortion is just universally good. Um any increase of availability of fertility is is you know objected to and and frowned upon. And that's what kind of unites and and that's sort of that's kind of what I mean by the the female interexual competition is moving away from the antagonistic o you know kind of overtly aggressive nasty stuff and it's now shifting more to a kind of pro-sisterhood where you know advising other women not to get married and not to have children is is for their own good because that will mean that they'll have a much more fulfilling career and be much happier. happier and you know so on and so forth and so what it's doing is and perhaps if I take one step backwards one of the reasons why I think a shift from antagonistic stuff to you an antagonistic method of interexual competition versus a kind of method that has to leverage off pro-social motives is as female interexual competition is increasing in the population which is what I think it's doing um becoming more and more intense just like individuals was high on psychopathy and sadism and those nasty traits that those people aren't very common. If intraexual competition is going to become really widespread, then one of two things has to happen. It has to take a form that nice, normal, pro-social people are happy to engage in, or everybody has to become really nasty. One of those two things has to happen to allow female interexual competition to become really widespread. And so that's why I think it's, you know, that's why I think I'm seeing that shift in the data. Although I acknowledge that's pretty speculative. Like that's really just me going maybe that's it and I don't have any other evidence that I'm right. Um, but I do think that that's why we're seeing this kind of, you know, lower means certainly of female interexual competition, but still really um, readily identified and increasing levels of female reproductive suppression, which is all leveraging off pro-social, pro-women sisterhood motives, not leveraging off the nasty kind of, you know, high school level mean girl motives. because aside from anything else, there just aren't enough mean girls to support that kind of a system. So, you've you've got to leverage off pro-social motives if you're going to see like widespread population reproductive suppression or it's just not going to happen.

I mean, I would like to move towards a consideration of whether this is a hallmark of our times or whether it's something more deeply human. And if it's a hallmark of our times, is there precedent for that in the transition of different imperial civilizations in the past or you know cuz it seems like before we even had this conversation, I would have probably been swayed toward the perspective that we do live in a time of increasing jealousy and envy and those are serious uh spiritual sicknesses in our civilization. But and and you can unpack the different factors that might lead to that. Um but we're talking about human behavior as if it's like this, you know, feature of the machine almost the feature of the human being. Uh sorry to call humans machines, but like like it's built into the biology or something. So how much of this is the now versus and how much is this contextualized by the world we live in and the acceleration of the features that have driven us into this more envious, jealous, uh, you know, paranoid way of living.

So So here's what I I'll tell you what I think first and then I'll then I'll I'll tell you why I think it. So I think that this is not unique to the here and now. So, I don't think there's anything especially special about the current circumstances. And I I acknowledge that I probably differ a little bit from a lot of people um who just who have who very readily accept that the modern world that we live in for how quickly it has changed in such a short period of time must have somehow created serious mismatches between evolved behaviors and the functions of those behaviors now. And I I don't really adhere to that at all. that's sort of a bit of a separate conversation which we can have if you're interested but I don't really adhere to that. Um so what I think is actually happening is that there is a civilizational cycle and this is not like I'm not the first person who's observed this by a long way right so you know a lot of people have observed that when civilizations fall at least they tend to have a lot of things in common and the kinds of things that they have in common is birth rate

decline, uh, what we tend to call feminism, so greater female representation in the workforce, in civic duties, and in key institutions. They also tend to see, um, another thing that we also see in our society and that we consider to be very progressive, and I'm sure in other civilizations and societies they also consider it to be very progressive, which is sort of a, a, what is effectively a decrease in the market price of sex. So sex becoming much more open, much more readily available, and much more common, and much less, uh, restricted. So far fewer social rules around, um, when sex can and can't happen and how it, and how it should be used, um, and, and sort of other things that we sort of see civilizations having in common as they are weakening and declining and eventually collapsing.

And so what I, what I'm sort of positing, I won't say that I 100% believe this to definitely be true, but I don't think it's going to end up being very far away from accurate. Um, is that when civilizations are building, you need to have very masculine men. Men need to do a lot of building. They need to do a lot of fighting. Um, and building and physical work and fighting are very dangerous. You need to have a lot of masculine men. A lot of men are going to die. And male intra-sexual competition is very rife. And when male intra-sexual competition is very rough, you get a lot of sex, you get a lot of babies, and the population grows.

As a result of that, you end up reaching a sort of accumulated, some accumulated level of societal wealth that results in a level of, of luxury. Um, and we see this in the sort of the demographic shift, and we've sort of keep seeing it in country after country now, and it's, and it's historical as well. Um, where what you get is as a society gets wealthier, um, we see a mortality decline. And it's mortality decline of everybody, but in particular mortality decline of babies. Now, if you're having seven or eight babies in the hope that two or three survive, all of a sudden, if you're going to have seven or eight babies and they're all going to survive, then that's not optimal, right? So, people start having, so in response to mortality decline, fewer babies dying and more people growing up to become adults, then we see birth rates beginning to decline.

Now, initially, that's not a problem because of the declining birth rate, but the declining mortality, the population doesn't actually decline. However, what we then start to see is all of the things that we've sort of been talking about that, that we in our society have, have labeled feminism. We start to see women, um, becoming less and less interested in motherhood and becoming more and more involved in occupations, vocations, civic duties, politics, institutions, um, all sort, all manner of things. And this is not the West, this is just societies generally. So this happened in, like, you know, the Arabic Empire in the 10th century, and it happened in Rome, and it happened everywhere else. Probably not everywhere else. I shouldn't say that. Um, but it's happened a lot. Um, and you see women be becoming heavily involved and just spending less and less time on, on motherhood. And what you see is you see birth rates declining as a result. You see the institutions weakening as a result because the priorities in those institutions change, and eventually you see economic, you see sort of population collapse and economic collapse. And rarely does a society collapse, um, is actually allowed to fully collapse on its own. Right. What happens is it usually just gets, it usually falls in battle to some other, to to someone else and gets taken over. That's how most of the great civilizations fall. Right. That's exactly that's right.

But the reason why I'm saying, but it's actually saying the barbarians is actually really important because what the civilization falls to is another civilization that is in a very different part of that curve. Is in a part of that curve where the men are fighting and hunting and building and are very aggressive and are very masculine. And so then the whole process begins again. And so that what drives the loop is that the, the women who are mo, the women who are most influential and are driving these reproductive sort of suppression ideologies and norms are themselves still actually having babies. That's the, that's the kind of catch, right? So this kind of a, a reproductive suppression strategy cannot possibly be selected for if its end game is just societal collapse and everyone dies. That, that's a, that's a strategy that dies out the first time it appears. Right? The only way something like this could actually evolve and be maintained is if the individuals who are driving it survive the population collapse, survive the bottleneck, and become the founder population for whatever rises from the ruins. And if they're the ones with the genes responsible for driving these ideologies, and they become the founder population for whatever rises from the ruins, then of course those genes will just spread and they will become, you know, very, very strongly overrepresented in the, that founder population, which of course then sets that founder population on a path where it will ultimately end up following exactly the same strategies and exactly the same routes. And that's how that cycle just continues to go. And it's just driven entirely by individual level success at each stage of, of the cycle. That's effectively what that, that's kind of the, the transition from reproductive s, so from inter-sexual competition and reproductive suppression operating at a generation to generation level and how it might actually be operating from a societal to societal level.

It, if it, I'm pretty confident, I don't, I don't think it's too controversial, um, to suggest that the, the motives for reproductive suppression are linked, so sorry, that the motives for the birth rate decline or a big part of the causal factor of birth rate decline is is reproductive suppression selected for by just normal evolutionary processes that, that, um, reward those who have the, the greatest reproductive success where it becomes, um, where I think what I'm saying becomes very contentious, certainly a lot more contentious, is whether or not the end game of societal collapse is what is what typically happens or whether or not society reaches another turning point. So reaches a turning point where, you know, you go from male inter-sexual competition where the population grows and it just accumulates wealth and everything's just going great guns, and it hits a turning point where the men become a lot less aggressive and the women start competing, not necessarily physically aggressive, but they start becoming relationally aggressive. Right? There's a turning point. Now, does this mechanism result in population decline to the point where society and its economy is sufficiently weakened that this does actually explain what was happening to other societies that fell under similar circumstances to the kinds of ones that we're experiencing in the West now? Or is it the case that we do see this general pattern I'm describing, but society reaches another turning point? There is another set of circumstances that results in birth rates picking up again and behaviors changing.

So what I've kind of described sort of so far is, you know, we have a particular circumstance with people behaving in a particular way, and that changes the society and the environment. Now, in a new environment, people behave in a slightly different way. So each time people are behaving like this, we're changing our own society, and in response to that society now being different, people then behave differently. So is it the case that in fact, this current birth rate decline that we are watching around, you know, and experiencing in all our own countries, is this in fact the ride down to the ground, or are we going to reach a point where something changes and thus behavior changes and it picks back up, and this is not actually the end? I'll be honest, I'm not especially optimistic, but that's probably the most contentious thing about what I'm suggesting. I think that's probably the weakest part of what I'm suggesting that there's probably not, I'm not yet convinced because I don't have enough knowledge about past societies to say that what looks like it's kind of similar based on the limited knowledge I have to what's happened in the past that did definitely precede the end of those societies, cuz that's happened in the past and we know that they ended. We saw it ended. So we don't have to debate about whether that was leading into the end. It was. What I'm not yet confident enough to say with certainty is what I'm sort of describing that I'm thinking is happening now, is that what was happening at the end of those societies too? It certainly has similarities.

>> Very different world in many ways, right? Like the fact that we're sitting here having a podcast that, you know, thousands of people are going to participate and start think, you know, there's there's a huge participation in our society in the intellectual space of, in some sense, engineering our own future. We have this ability to reconsider things in a way that just really doesn't have this kind of precedent as far as I can tell.

>> You are absolutely correct, and I shouldn't smile, but the reason why I smiled is because greater participation in intellectual discussion is also one of the things that declining civilizations have in common.

>> Interesting.

>> I know. So it is. So no, but but it's actually true. So, so it increase, so a massive increase in what we now call knowledge work. People whose job it is to kind of think about stuff and fill out paperwork and make records.

>> Jobs is jobs is different, but jobs, people just taking interest.

>> But I think this links back directly to the decrease in in reproduction. Like this is actually really funny. I hope, like my dad, my entire life was like, you know, back in the day, it made sense to have children, and now children are just, you know, expensive parasites.

>> Yeah. And so which I'm like, you know, he's, he's well known for calling a spade a spade, but it's like, in some ways, it's true. If you work on a farm, children are a net boon. If you're doing physical labor, children are a net boon. If you're weaving in your house, still a net boon. If you're in a society where everyone has moved away from physical labor, it seems pretty clear that like a child is a draw of resources that may or may not ever be useful to you. And, and that feels very cold and callous to say because, you know, like the idea of of bringing a child into the world and having this new, you know, portal into consciousness that goes out and does incredible things is is very powerful in and of itself. But if you assume that humans are these rational creatures that make a calculation of, okay, these are the resources that I have right this moment. This is the amount of resources that have to go into raising this child, and this is what I'm going to get out of it in the next 20 years. Then it feels like that calculation in a society where you're not doing a lot of hard labor is pretty straightforwardly, uh, pointing downwards in terms.

>> No, no, no. Yeah, I, I get exactly what you're saying. And you're not, it's not that you're wrong. You, you're from, from that perspective, you're absolutely right. Um, however, when humans consciously rationalize their behavior, that's usually unrelated to the reasons for that behavior. And there has been, would always have been very strong selection pressure against, um, any behavioral mechanisms that would lead individuals to just go, actually, let's just not reproduce. Let's just not, um, because those individuals would not reproduce, and those, those mechanisms wouldn't survive. So, we have to come up with an explanation for the birth rate decline that explains why individuals are choosing not to reproduce.

>> I, I mean, it seems plausible that it has to do with some kind of crowding signal.

>> Yeah, I'm thinking of a rat utopia here. Really hard. This is hard for me without to hear what you're saying without thinking of John Calhoun's experiments.

>> Yeah, that is true. But if we look at where the birth rate decline, it's happening in places that are not especially crowded. I mean, Australia is not especially crowded. Large parts of America are not especially crowded. Like, yes. Okay. Europe and the UK, it's a bit harder to make those arguments about. Um, the other thing with the with the, um, the sort of rat utopia situation is that we were able to sort of observe in that a number of clearly maladaptive and disorganized and high stress driven behaviors. Whereas what is being described in people is not, is not, uh, maladaptive or disorganized or sort of, you know, signs of ill mental health type behaviors. And, um,

>> I don't know. It's really funny. We live in the country right now, and we will go into, um, San Francisco or New York, these like very large crowded places, and they feel very maladaptive. Like I've told the story on the podcast before. So we were, we were staying with our friends that lived in, uh, Dumbo. It's a neighborhood in Brooklyn that's very, very posh and very populated. And so, I mean, everywhere in New York is crowded, but Dumbo is more crowded than average.

>> And so, we get there, and Shil and I are going to go to the grocery store because we're going to cook dinner for them.

>> And we start walking, and you're in this throng of people. And at some point, we end up at this intersection where we have to cross the street. And there's literally some, there's a woman, this like wrinkled old, pseudo-woman sitting in a wheelchair screaming, "Please help," over and over again in like a perfectly monotone screech, just over and over and over again. And I look back at her, and she's just sitting there, and she's got this like big Gulp cup, and she's shaking it, and she's like, you know, scream, like she makes eye contact with me, and she's screaming like, "Please help." No one is looking at this woman. And we, we leave, she's still like, we come back, she's still there. We go back to my friend's apartment, and I'm like, "Man, that was crazy. There was this woman." And they were like, "Oh, yeah, that's the 'Please Help Lady.' She's always there."

>> And I'm like, I can't think of a more maladaptive situation than that, right? You're just,

>> But I mean, except though, she stands out though because she's in the minority. Like, if you went, if you went to Dumbo and like 95% of the people were standing there screaming, "Please help," then you would say like, okay, yes, we, we've clearly got like disorganized, you know, social level, disorganized behavior. But she's like one person, and everyone else is like, "Yeah, that's the 'Please Help Lady.'" I mean, yeah, we don't get it either. You know, we get it. We get on with our day, right? So, I mean, look, I, I guess, I guess what the, I guess what I'm trying to say about sort of the, the theories that I'm sort of positing is that they make, you know, not trying to claim that they're not that they've not got problems or they're not criticizable or anything. That's not what I mean by perfect, but they do make perfect theoretical evolutionary sense of birth rate decline. And they make evolutionary sense of a bunch of the things that we're seeing happening in society that are going along with the birth rate decline, which are otherwise very difficult to account for. So it's quite difficult to account for why, uh, you know, why individuals would have been selected for, like, and women in particular would have been selected for to, you know, behave in ways in institutions that weaken those institutions. But if the ultimate end game is a population bottleneck, which you are going to be a part of, and thus, you know, you might be, your lineages might be 1% of the population you're in. If you finish in that bottleneck, you will be the founder, you will be all of the lineages of the next population. So the evolutionary prize is enormous for bringing your own society down to its knees if you can be there at the end. And so what it does is it explains everything that's happening in a way that at least is like, it doesn't mean I'm right. It doesn't mean that I'm not wrong about something. That's not what I mean by perfect. But it does explain it in a way that accounts for a huge amount of what we're observing. And doesn't rely on anything like, oh, humans are just behaving stupid now because the world's really modern and it's different. And so all our behold, you know, all our evolved tendencies just don't work anymore because the world's just, it doesn't rely on any kind of vague throwaways of, oh yeah, that's just, that's just humans being weird. We can't explain that, we can't explain that. It kind of explains a heck of a lot and makes it evolutionary coherent. So what it means is not that I'm correct, but it means that if I'm, that if, if I'm wrong, at least we can have evolutionarily coherent accounts for why civilizations weaken and then die. And if it's possible to have those, mine might not be the right one, but there's probably other variations of it or other similar types of mechanisms that could be applying. So Ed Dutton's got one. I, we kind of tried to do a debate, and I don't think either of us moved like one inch in either direction. Um, but I don't think we actually got into the details either. But he has a slightly different take that is much less about intra-sexual competition and much more about sort of dysgenic kind of purging and stuff, which I'm, I'm not quite sure is right, and I don't want to go into detail because I probably won't get his argument correct anyway. Um, so I'm not the only person who's sort of suggesting that there is an evolutionary explanation for what's happening here that you can understand it perfectly coherently without having to appeal to any kind of, you know, get out of jail free cards that some parts of human behavior just can't be explained. And some things are just maladaptive because this isn't the environment we evolved to live in and and sort of, you know, throwaway lines like that, which to me are always just like, go back and think harder excuses. Um, you know, we, you see it in animal behavior as well. Sometimes people go, "Oh, maybe you're just studying something that's not adaptive." And it's like, "No, no, it is adaptive. I just haven't figured out exactly how it's, it's working." It never turns out that something is just not adaptive. You just haven't, you're just not thinking about it right yet. Eventually, you always figure out what that animal system, whether it's its mating system or its social system, eventually you figure out what's going on. You go, "Oh, yeah, that really weird, stupid behavior that everyone told me that wasn't adaptive and I should just not study it." Turns out it is, and now I figured it out. And it's the same. It's the same with humans. There is an explanation. I'm not necessarily got it. I'm not saying I'm 100% right. And I don't, you know, I'm not going to even change my own mind about it as I, especially as I read more about history, which is a rather embarrassing gap in my knowledge for someone talking about civilizational decline. Um, but there is an explanation to what's happening. I, I might have a bit of it. I might have part of it. It might not be all of it, but there is an explanation. Um, and if we can understand it, then maybe, maybe we can change the path that we're on. Maybe.

>> I love that.

>> Pardon the interruption, but I have to ask you for a favor. If you are listening to this podcast and you are enjoying yourself and you are enjoying the way that we encounter ideas, then consider coming over to patreon.com/demystifies. We have a really epic vision for what this podcast can be. And that includes recording in-person interviews. It includes hosting quarterly events. It includes really growing a live in-person community of people that are interested in the most pressing and important ideas of our time. If you have 75 cents a week that you can donate to this project, you can be a huge part of making this happen. And so I hope to see you over at patreon.com/demystify.

There's a couple things that from this this first segment that I really want to make sure that we really draw down. And so the first thing that I see is that you're making an argument that the decrease in the birth rate is due to mates intra-sexual female competition.

>> Yes.

>> So what is, what is the strongest evidence that you have to support that? Cuz that's like a pretty big assertion. And you've said before that like a lot of these ideas are are distributed through various papers that are in progress and things that you've read and seen and experiments that you've done that haven't necessarily been published yet. But I think that because it's such a strong claim, it might be worth taking the time to kind of lay out something that's more than just, you know, women being weird on motherhood forums or that that degree of suppression.

>> So like, can, what's your strongest case for the birth rate decline being due specifically to female competition?

>> So I think, so I think that there's sort of two questions there. One is about the empirical data. But the empirical data just links within, just links intra-sexual competitive motives within particular women to how they treat other women. So we know that women, so some of the data that we've got is that women that are more intra-sexually competitive are more likely to engage with reproductively limiting social media messaging. So, messaging that is, uh, anti-natal, pro-abortion. Um, what other categories of, we had a few different categories of of messaging. Um, those types of things. We know that they're also more likely to advise other women in reproductively inhibiting ways compared to what they say that they would do themselves. So, I had the example of that very specific example about breastfeeding. But in that same study, we also looked at advice about having babies, returning, when to return to work after having babies, even just basic advice about whether or not to pair up with someone in the first place. Um, and then I did a separate study that was similarly an advice type study, and that was focusing, um, again, very much around that career, motherhood, um, sort of nexus, and again, it effectively replicated and showed the same findings. So women with higher intra-sexually competitive motives are more likely to give other women reproductively inhibiting advice, which is not what they say that they would do themselves. So in terms of empirically linking that within individual women, that's the kind of data that we're collecting at the moment to look at actually who are the women who are giving this type of advice. Um, and they are the women who are more inter-sexually competitive. But to link that to birth rate decline requires, I think, a combination of theoretical arguments and large kind of multiple countrywide data sets and analyses. Some of which I'm starting to do with a, a friend of mine, um, who does that sort of things. He sort of has all those data sets, and this is sort of what he does. It's his line of research. He just analyzes all those types of of large, like, you know, data sets from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, sort of countrywide, multiple continentwide statistics and things, and beginning to look at what, um, what in societies is associated with the birth rate decline. So we know from the demographers, we know about the, the change in mortality. We know that there's a pretty, um, I think it might be, might be 10,000 US per capita or something, but there's a particular GDP which is very, very similar, you know, across the world. As once a country's GDP reaches that particular level, you begin to see the shifts and the changes and the birth rate begin to decline. So it seems to, there's very strong evidence that whatever is going on, it's definitely linked to a country's wealth, or if it's not directly linked to wealth, it is linked to something else that very closely correlates with a country's overall wealth. So these are the kinds of empirical findings that I'm, that I'm putting together and thinking about and considering.

And then the, the other half of the equation that we haven't really spoken about tonight, but I think is also important, is also looking at what men are doing. So, we've sort of spoken a lot about how, you know, I'm suggesting that women are potentially sort of, you know, getting more aggressive, but then actually as it, as the birth rate decline becomes even steeper, where, and the female inter-sexual competition becomes really, it moves away from being that competitive aggressive competition and towards a more widespread, um, suppression, then it takes on pro-social motives. And we haven't really spoken about what men are doing throughout this whole process. So if this was, so an alternative theory, say, is that, um, nothing I've said about civilizational level mechanisms is correct, and all we're seeing is just runaway female inter-sexual competition. So, you know, the consequences for civilization are not part of any broader system that has an evolutionary reward at the end of it. We're just seeing runaway female inter-sexual competition, reproductive suppression. If that were the case, um, then we would expect men to be selected for to fight back and to balance that. But that's not what we're seeing. So, men are typically speaking not fighting back against feminism. In fact, feminism, um, and all of its associated, uh, social norms have become very mainstream. So, you know, in almost all, I think, you know, progressive societies, the majority of both men and women support most feminist norms, um, equality of the sexes, uh, equality of the sexes, and, um, general disregard for traditional gender roles, um, equality of opportunity, no matter what the traditional gender roles might be between men and women. Um, strong motivations for, uh, parity, so for, uh, parity of wages and salary and and things like that. So all of these things that we know in societies are associated with birth rate decline are being embraced by both men and women. So if this were just runaway female inter-sexual competition, not a sort of society-wide mechanism, then we would expect men to be very strongly selected to pick up on cues to this and to resist it, to try to to balance out. Um, but that's not what we see. We see men actually behaving in such a way that they're fitting perfectly into this system, even to the point where we're seeing male testosterone levels declining, um, over decades.

>> But isn't there, there's institutional reinforcement. I mean, it would be career suicide for a man to step up and say something publicly to counter, >> any of those ideas that you listed. And so, I just have a hard time like separating the evolutionary aspects from the just trendy institutional moments that we're in at at any given point in time. Um, you talked about feminism, but there's like some other competing ideologies too that might be pointed at as well. And I, I wonder if you've considered, like, we, you kind of, uh, downplayed the rat utopia stuff because, you know, in some, this happens in places where the population isn't ballooning, but there's still this wide, especially with the rise of interconnected media and interconnected, the rate of transmission of ideas and shared ideologies amongst people. There's still a pervasively popular attitude that is in the spirit of the population bomb. I think it's taken a slightly different flavor now, which is more like humans are bad for the planet or something like that.

>> Uh, but that's not exactly feminism. And I, I, I hear that one much much more these days than I hear the, there's too many people, although they kind of play into the same theater.

>> Um, so do you, you know, like, is there a way to separate out the cont, and maybe I'm missing something too. Is, are there other ideologies that are at play which reinforce population decline?

>> Um, so there's definitely a few. I mean, certainly the, you know, the, the climate, um, the climate change emergency has, you know, zeroed in on net zero, which is, um, you know, very destructive to institutions and certainly consistent with population decline. But the other thing that's, um, I think that's important to be observed, and there's also feminism, and I guess one ideology that we haven't spoken about that is also, uh, very reproductively suppressing is also the whole, uh, transgender ideology as well, which is also very reproductively suppressing, which itself kind of arose out of sort of one branch of of feminism, but it, in itself, has of has split the feminists. Um, but it arose, it sort of had its, um, its roots in in feminist and queer theory anyway. So they're kind of not necessarily separate ideologies, but it's a branch of it. Um, but what we can also see, what's also interesting to observe though, is what's been called the omni-cause. So all of these sort of left ideologies that have this reproductive suppressing thing in common, they're all kind of coming together in quite rather discontiguous ways. So, and I guess the, the sort of classic example of that, um, is probably like the, the queers for Palestine. So, you know, that's a very, um, illogical kind of movement. You know, that there is no part of of the, the Palestine movement, and in fact, even they've been quite vocal about this, um, that is remotely sympathetic to to gay people, um, and they do not want the support of gay people. And yet, in the West, we see things like queers for Palestine, where we sort of see the, the LGBTQ movement combining with the, the pro-Palestine movement, and then of course, we sort of see this weird crossover where the poster child for the for the climate emergency has, has now becoming the poster child for the Palestine movement. So, we're sort of seeing all of these causes kind of meld together, almost as if they do actually have a unifying motive in that anybody who supports, not anybody, that's obviously an overgeneralization, but people who support one tend to be very likely to support the others, even when they are ideologically at odds, at complete odds with each other. And yet, because they're all leaning towards this same sort of, you know, civilizational decline, same type of thing, they're all rolling almost into what some people have been calling the omni-cause, where the individual causes cease to matter much less than than the intersection of all of them. And so it's not, it's, you know, it's not just feminism, and it's not just queer theory, and it's not just, um, you know, the climate emergency or specifically the, the sort of anti-natal messaging that's beginning to grow up around the climate emergency. Um, it's not just any of those things, but it's all of those things, and they're, you know, that they're coming together and melding together. The differentiation between them is becoming less and less important.

>> So interesting. Yeah. What if we're going to see like, uh, LGBT for barbarians next or something?

>> I just, I, I got distracted because I was looking at the, uh, TFR versus population density by county in the United States. Because if you look at,

>> What was that acronym? Uh, the total fertility rate versus population density. And it maps pretty cleanly, and I'm, the computer is frozen, so hopefully at some point I'll be able to show this, but it maps fairly cleanly where the lower the population density, the higher the fertility rate. And so it's hard for me to see this as being not partially driven by, okay, so like, I have an overarching theory here, which is that people spend a lot of time on the internet, and the internet is the pre, people's presence on the internet, I think, is, uh, skewed artificially because there's some very, very small number of people that are the ones that are the posters and the participants in the conversation, and then there's a much larger swath of people that are doing the reading. So most people are kind of lost in the dark matter of the internet where they're not really participants, they're just observers. On top of that, there's also the fact that the, uh, adoption of the use of certain types of social media, I'm thinking of like Twitter, which is probably the like the, the place where culture starts to to ferment and then it like, like spreads out because I feel like the culture war frontier is in these hyper-fast social media spaces. I feel like the vast majority of the people that are driving the culture in those spaces are from these very, very dense places. They're from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and, you know, London, whatever other major cities. And so it feels like there is some part of the environment that we sample when we go on the internet, which is the psychological state of the people that are living in really dense environments. And so I don't doubt that there is mate suppression happening because you see this across the board. Like there's tons of, there's tons of content that's being produced that is centered on the idea of you should have less children. The question really comes down to what is the germ of that impulse in the first place? And so your model is that the germ of the impulse is some sort of awareness of a future bottleneck that people are driving towards that will induce their lineage to survive while all of the other lineages die. And so can you kind of elaborate on on how you tease apart the effect of density and the presence of these social media actors from dense locations versus this overall sensation of an impending crisis that we're speaking towards?

>> Okay. So I think, so I think a really important distinction is not that it's, uh, any kind of intrinsic awareness of an impending doom. So that's like a, a sort of a teleological explanation where you're requiring on something, you know, you're sort of relying on something that hasn't happened yet, something that's going to happen in the future to be part of the causal explanation of something that's happening now. And that doesn't work evolutionarily. So the reason why, you know, under my theory, assuming it's correct, it may not be, but the reason why people are behaving like this now is not because of what this is going to cause. It's because people who behaved like this in the past were ultimately the survivors who were selected for, and their genes are now being carried in our population. So it's not that it requires any awareness of any pending doom or anything like that. It's not, um, it's not about that. What it is, is because evolution is, uh, evolution can't plan, right? Evolution doesn't select for traits because they will have a particular outcome. It's, it's an, like it has no, um, there's no conductor of evolution, like it's not like an orchestra where there's someone at the at the front keeping everyone together and keeping everything coherent. Evolution is an entirely passive process. Simply those individuals, or more accurately, those genes that survived are the ones in the population. And so the people here now, or in any population, the individuals here now will develop, will grow and develop and, uh, mature and behave according to whatever they inherited from the individuals who survived and who have survived for many, many generations. So it's, there isn't any, there's no need for there to be any awareness, conscious or subconsciously or anything like that, about any outcomes of this behavior. It's purely just when people are in this situation, this is how they behave. The consequences of that behavior is that we see birth rate decline. And so when you think about the ultimate explanation like that, what you, what sort of comes out of that is that the, uh, rat, the rat utopia studies offer are much more likely to offer a mechanistic explanation for what's happened, not a functional explanation. So there are two different levels of explanation. So there's what actually causes, what are the actual mechanisms inside your body, the cognitive mechanisms, the physiological mechanisms that actually cause you to execute a particular behavior in the moment. That's one explanation of what causes behavior. But there's a whole another explanation, which is where, which is what I'm interested in, which is why do those mechanisms exist in the first place, and why do they behave like that? What functional outcomes did they previously have that means that they're the ones we have here now and not some other mechanism that makes people behave differently? And so if we think about the rat utopia studies, if putting rats in really dense situations, and it wasn't the thing with those studies too, it wasn't just the density of situation, there were other aspects as well. It was also really critical that these rats were given, um, had all of their needs met, and so they had their entire, in the first place.

>> That's right. And so their, their entire sort of, uh, like the whole reward system in their brain kind of broke down because they didn't have that experience of needing something, getting something, and experiencing the reward, because they just had everything. So you see a similar type of like mania, is probably not a great word, but a similar type of just disordered behavior. If you just put people in a sensory deprivation chamber. So when you put people in, so, you know, the human brain can only function by actually processing information coming in, whether that's in the form of like, you know, light, sound, whatever. If you actually completely sensory deprive people, it doesn't take them very long for their brain to just not be able to function anymore. A brain can't sit there and be static, not be receiving any input. Um, and so what they did, it wasn't just the population density that was a problem, although obviously that then became a problem, but it was also a complete disruption of the reward system pathways. And so it might be that the rat utopia system, or what we observed rather in that whole series of experiments, is not completely mechanistically unrelated to what we see in human populations that, that reach a certain level of of societal wealth. In that there is also clearly a big change that happens, or maybe a gradual change rather than a big change, but clearly that is going to make a change to the rewards pathway and a change to, you know, what kind of feed-in all of those mechanisms are getting, and then we get different behavior. So it's not that, is this a civilizational level effect, or is it just, you know, that there's just too many people? Um, part of the way this civilizational effect happens might be because people do have some things in common with rats, and when you change the reward system, and you have, you know, a certain level of reproduction, a certain size of population, that is one of the triggers that, you know, causes people's behavior to change. Remember I said earlier that sort of what I'm effectively supposing is that we have this situation which causes a certain set of behaviors, and that leads to this situation which causes a certain set of behaviors, which leads to this situation. Maybe there are parallels to be drawn between those situations and the behaviors that they then cause to take place, and what we were sort of seeing on some mechanistic level. There might be overlaps in what we saw with the rats. But that's not necessarily an argument against what the functional consequences of those behaviors in those circumstances are, and, and the fact that what we inevitably see is a birth rate decline, which either, which is, I mean, it's only going to have a couple of possible outcomes. One is it just hits the ground, um, and we start seeing genuine societal collapse, or at least in, you know, within certain areas, or something turns it around, or some sort of unknown third option sort of involving, you know, mixing of societies. So, you know, a society might not completely collapse, but individuals come in from elsewhere who, you know, which sort of happens, or which is already sort of happening to some extent in that, in most, um, countries, immigrants have higher birth rates than the native population, and that lasts for a couple of generations. So we're sort of seeing that anyway. And so what we might see is massive migration, um, on a really big level happening, and that's how we kind of get out of this birth rate rut. Um, that might be the, the thing that, that sort of happens, but there's really only a few outcomes from here on in. Something intrinsic to the society turns it around. Nothing turns it around and it crashes, or a bunch of people come in from elsewhere and that turns it around because those people are behaving differently anyway. There's not a lot of, there's not many other ways out from where we are now. There's only so many things.

Also, I mean, I think that the reason that the rat utopia stuff is so interesting is because the, the question is so like, the way that I see the pieces fitting together is that there is a decline in the birth rate. The decline in the birth rate is driven in, let's say that there's some density related feature that is the trigger for it. But then once you have the density related trigger for it, there's all of these behaviors that appear in the population that are runaway behaviors that perpetuate and accelerate the the situation. And so if we point to feminism being the cause and the downfall of, or the cause for the decline in the birth rate, then we have one set of solutions to offer for that, which is well, if feminism is the problem, and the emancipation of women is the problem, and the education of women is the problem, well then the obvious choice is to remove all of those things from society.

>> Get them back in the kitchen.

>> Yeah, exactly. Right. To like return to this world of barefoot and pregnant. And I'm like, okay, maybe. But if there's right, cuz I mean like if if we if we accept that having a high birth rate is really, really important, and we identify the underlying cause of it as being the emancipation of women, then there's not really that, there's not really an alternative to removing the emancipation of women, >> right?

>> Higher death rate.

>> See, I don't see, I don't think that necessarily works.

>> More wars. Sorry.

>> I'm sorry.

>> No, no. See, but see, the thing is, I don't think that necessarily works because even if, even if we say theoretically, I mean, obviously there's a whole host of reasons why logistically we actually couldn't do that. I mean, if we tried, you know, women would not let it happen. So, it's, it's not, you know, I think logistically and culturally it's not a viable solution. Even if theoretically it would work,

>> I've come across a tremendous number of women on the internet, and maybe they're just bots, but they're like, "Yeah, take away the vote." Like, prevent women from becoming educated. Like, this is, there's a weird cultural current that seems to embody this idea.

>> There there is to some extent, but I think, um, I think the comment about someone daring to say something like that seriously, um, and in public would be the end of your career, I think, is probably still a more accurate description of what would happen to somebody trying to actually do something like this, right? I don't, I don't think that, um, the, a movement of of women or anybody in fact, um, in favor of this is anywhere near large enough to give it any kind of legs. And there's also, uh, which is something else that we could also talk about just on its own for 3 hours, but the phenomenon of this social policing of what you can and can't talk about is incredibly strong. And, you know, we, so we've got this concept of the, of the Overton window. And it's very difficult to explain how people know what they aren't and aren't allowed to say, and how people perceive that that appears to have changed, and all of a sudden you can say, so it's a, it's a fascinating, um, it's a fascinating phenomenon all of its own. Um, but it very strictly polices, you know, the, the implementation of certain social norms, and it makes it almost impossible to break them down. Um, but the reason why I think what you're suggesting wouldn't even work theoretically, even if we could do it, you know, even if culturally we could, we could somehow make it happen, is because all we would be doing would be going back in time, or, you know, changing the state of society back to a particular point, but the fundamental nature of people would be the same. Which means that particular society would create the same behaviors it created before, and that would move us to this society, which would result in the same behaviors we had before, which would move us to this society, and we would just end up in the same place we're in now. We might save that off for a few generations. But if all we do is try to just go backwards to where we were, we could do that somehow, we would just end up coming forward to here before too long anyway. So I don't actually see that as a solution. If there is a solution to to this,

We have to actually disrupt this cycle. So if we sort of imagine that we've moved through some societal conceptual space along this trajectory, well, we need to find out what society looks like when we put it up here or when we put it down here. We need to take it off this trajectory and see how people behave, right? We need to put society somewhere where it's not just going to move through this cycle all the time. Which means it's not a matter of undoing things that we've done. It's a matter of working out how can we arrange it so completely differently that we just don't get these types of behaviors. I'm not sure that that con that sort of theoretical, you know, conceptual space actually exists for a real society. I don't know what that society would look like and whether any of us would want to live there. But theoretically, I think that is the only solution. Find a society that is not anywhere on this trajectory, which means it doesn't look like what we look like now, and it doesn't look like anything in, you know, rather recent memory from before the birth rate began to decline because all of those ones just have the same end point. So, we need to find something entirely different. What that would look like is quite difficult for me to conceive of. I can't honestly say that anything really springs to mind, but that's what the solution will look like if indeed there is one.

We have to somehow.

Rational argument for a progressive mindset that I've ever ever heard before. I think it is really the strongest argument, but but it's different than than defaulting. I think that either side of the political alley defaults to some reversionist idea of how things worked better in some either idealized past or some uh you know historic past and and I think that that's a really good point is yeah, we and I guess this is why I I kind of want to circle back to this thing about intellectual participation being portentious because I I feel like we're in a particularly unique position to be able to put all of our heads together and imagine what comes next in a way that doesn't look like what came before.

But you're saying.

I think you're right. I No, I think I think you really are right about that. I think if there's one like spark of optimism in this whole sort of, you know, otherwise rather depressing um tale that I'm that I'm telling. If there's one spark of optimism, it is that every society is unique. So even if we can find commonalities between past societies and ours that doesn't necessarily mean that you know they couldn't escape what happened to them therefore we can't escape what is potentially happening to us. It doesn't follow logically, right? Every society is in fact different. Um, so even if we can spot patterns and look at history and go, actually, um, that, you know, she seems to be right that sucks. um, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's set in stone. And you know what our society has, you know, more than anyone that's come in the past, which is true of every other society, but it's never and it hasn't saved them in the past, but is technology and knowledge, right? So when civilizations collapse, we frequently lose what that is one thing that gets lost, right? So we often lose technology and knowledge when civilizations collapse and we've lamented the loss of that, you know, many times. Um, but nevertheless, every society that comes up and now it's us more technology and more knowledge than other societies had at their disposal to try and solve this problem. Which means that, you know, no one may you know, there are no past societies that still exist by definition. So none of the ones that are gone solved this problem. Um, but none of them had the technology and knowledge that we have. So, you know, we don't know what our odds are of surviving this problem or resolving it or coming up with an an adequate solution, but they are better than what the odds were for any other past society.

So they still might not be very big, but they're better. I think I personally, I mean, I think that the defining feature of this moment from an optimistic standpoint is the interconnectivity of of individuals like you don't have to be a professional philosopher to contribute to the discussion that's happening like that. It's never been an outsiders' world like it is right now in some sense, and there's going to be all sorts of institutional suppression and those are problems for sure, but I see it as a a really, really unique moment, right? We had, I mean, the obviously the printing press is huge, writing books, people being able to educate themselves like this isn't entire like this isn't a brand brand new thing, but the scale of the interconnectivity is completely without precedent as far as I can tell.

Well, and I also think that if density does have an effect, and I think that it's hard to argue that it doesn't because you go to big cities and there's fewer children than there are when you go to rural places, you can look at this data, then the solution seems straightforward, like figure out technologies that allow people to disperse and also like support the development of rural areas. Like why do people concentrate in cities? It's because they're cultural nexuses. There's restaurants, there's art galleries, there's there's things happening. And so there's this attractor to being in those places. And you go out into a rural community and there's there's not really music, there's not really culture, there's not really stuff to do, there's not.

Really culture.

We did find a record store out here yesterday.

We did. But it's but it's true. I mean, like there's there's like two good restaurants in in a town of 20,000 people. They are really good though.

They are very good. But it's.

So what cities have that what larger cities have that smaller cities don't have is economies of scale. Right? That's what allows there to be so many nice restaurants and such diversity of restaurants and, you know, diversity of other entertaining luxuries, you know, arts and record shops and and whatever it might be, right? So, it's that benefit of economies of scale that allows cities to have all these things that regional towns can't offer because they just haven't got enough people to support it. So I I suspect that that is that economies of scale. I will I imagine without being a an economist or a demographer, but I imagine that economies of scale also benefits the individual people living in those places as well. So yes, real estate costs are higher, but you sort of you got to imagine people dispersing themselves as being like an optimality problem. So you get a lot of economies of scale in big cities, but the cost of actually living there, the cost of property is higher. And so that price differential of the property is the balancing out of the the economies of scale that you lose. You go to a regional town, the property is much cheaper, but then other things end up being more expensive. And so humans kind of arrange themselves in dense clusters and less dense clusters, and it's effectively just an optimality problem. And then property prices then reflect the demand for property in this area versus property in that area. And how people trade off the the economies of scale they get here versus what they miss out on over here. So I'm not sure like I'm not quite sure that forcing extra even if population density is one of the key triggers of these types of behavior. I'm still not quite sure that attempting to force people out to disperse more is necessarily going to help because I think you will still get local optimality. you'll still get, you know, people attempting to solve that optimality problem by coming together to create economies of scale. And ultimately, I mean, I don't know, maybe you can get maybe you can get a really well controlled city planner or something, but I I suspect that would be a difficult a difficult thing to completely undo because people will just come together for those economies of scale again. The reason they came together in the first place. The reason why we're not uniformly spread out, you know, well, we've had, you know, most countries have got their entire their entire country to spread themselves out in and that's not what they do. They, you know, certainly, you know, United States and Australia are great examples where, you know, the majority of people live on a tiny minority by surface area of the available land in the country.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this this points to something else that you were saying, which is that it's a problem that tends to recur where it's like even if you were to shift things to a different condition over enough time, it just reverts back to the state beforehand. Which kind of leads me to something else I wanted to ask you about, which is that a lot of the times when you look at the decrease in the fertility rate, people are comparing with, you know, the 1950s and they're like, man, it's really gone down. But then if you look at the trend from maybe like 1900s onward, the 1940s through the 1960s are this huge anomaly. Like you see the curve start to decline in 1900. You get the baby boom and then it starts to decline after that's over. And so I'm like, do you think that these this same principle of of intersexual mate suppression has been operating since the 1900s and started to play out even a hundred years ago? or do you think that this is something new and different and recent?

I I don't the main reason why I don't think it's something new and different. Um, I've looked at those same curves and I I I'm also not sure on the the uh role that just World War II then played in the sub because of just how many people were killed. So I suspect that there's also a human, you know, a a a triggering um releaser in war that leads populations because of course whether you win or lose a war, you lose a lot of men and it's time to to rebuild. So I suspect that that World War II was a massive factor in the subsequent baby boom that happened. And so that may be enough to explain the anomaly. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it actually is. Um, but the main reason actually why I think that the the mate suppression stuff is sort of predates just the last you know whatever it might be, whether you know, you sort of got the sexual revolution in the '60s and '70s, but then we got the suffragettes much earlier than that. So it's it's hard to pinpoint where you might want to say this started. Um, but because the the same thing is apparent in other very very different cultures and societies going back in time leads me to think that whatever the particular mapping in our culture. I don't think that it's just appearing very recently and and is not explaining birth rate declines previously. So, um, I was reading um John Grub maybe might be his name. I forget it. He wrote quite a famous little essay on on the sort of rise and fall in civil civilizations and what what we can learn from that and one of the things he observed is that um one of the sort of complaints of Rome at the end was that Rome was run by women. So there was you know dissatisfaction with the the presence of women and he also notes um that in you know in other societies I forget he has I think he has about 10 that he uses as like case study examples um and he observes that an increase in women in the institutions is always you know a very reliable precursor to the decline of those institutions and then the economy and then ultimately the society. So it is a repeating pattern. However it's played out for us on this particular occasion, we could probably, you know, debate really have really interesting discussions about, you know, the roles of war and other conflicts and other social movements. And obviously we've got probably a very unique situation in that we have much more cross-cultural influence and interference than has ever been had in the past because of the you know basically since the internet we've got so much influence now coming from one part of the world to a completely different part of the world that's a much more difficult puzzle to unravel. But because it's one of the sort of the the common themes that sort of keeps appearing in very very different societies to what we have now, um that suggests that we're probably not going to find the root of it in anything that's special about our modern time. Um, that's going to help explain how it played out for us, but it's clearly not a a special requirement for it because it's happened in other very different parts of the world in very different times.

Well, what's I think the really shocking piece of this puzzle for me is that this institutional suicide is somehow evolutionarily adaptive for the women participating in this kind of cultural suicide. That's what's freaking wild. I think that's at the crux of the argument that's really radical is that.

The women carry their jeans on past the barbarian incursion.

Yeah. And the men, I mean, they don't really, you know, play into this story as much.

Well, I think the thing is though, I think that the men, you know, the the genes, the lineage is carried on by those women. Um, there's just as many male lineages carried on there, like every every offspring is the result of one man and one woman. So, the the male lineages are being carried on, too. I think what's interesting about the male.

Presumably the barbarian lineage, the male barbarian lineage or whoever is coming into.

From that perspective, yes, but within the women they had fathers, right? So the lineages of those fathers are being carried on through their daughters. So what's interesting about the role that men are playing is that there's very little evidence of you know, sort of organized sort of you know, male sort of sex group level resistance to what's going on. Instead, what we're seeing largely is, you know, is is men being, I won't say quite as enthusiastic, but men are certainly playing a role in, you know, in these institutions as well, and there isn't a huge sex divide around the policies of these institutions. Men are getting on board with sort with the, you know, what are sort of associated with the more feminized policies in these institutions. You know, men are definitely getting on board with those. It's not like it's just a female driven thing and the men are like, well, what's going on? That that they're very much active players in it. Um, so, you know, they too are attempting to, you know, I guess be the fathers of daughters who will become the founders of the next population. So, you know, they're also hoping for a spot courtesy of of their daughters in in the founder population as well. And so, it's not just the women who are benefiting from it. It's also, you know, the men are playing a part of this. We're not seeing if it was just, like I said before, it was just isolated female, you know, runaway stuff that sort of had got itself in some kind of a loop it couldn't get itself out of, you would expect heavy selection pressure on men in those circumstances to drag their society back out of that. And we don't see that. We if anything we we actively see the opposite. Um, and that's.

I just I love I just I love how this rationalizes something that I often hear people throw their hands up like why are these institutions committing suicide? Like why would they ever like they're just they've gone crazy. It's just insanity and everybody's lost their minds. And it's like, well, there actually might be some selective pressures for that to happen.

Well, there's a weird thing that's kind of operating in the background here, too, which is that the highest fertility rate cohorts are the wealthiest ones.

Like, if you look at, you know, by income decile, if you're making more in the United States, I think the highest fertility rate is among those making more than $700,000 a year, which is like obviously a very small fraction of the society. But it seems like you can also parse this not just in ter like.

Well, historically the elite classes tend to be co-opted by their conquerors too, right? So it's like you will kill off some portion of like the governors and stuff, but like you'll often also take the leaders from the elite from that conquered society and install them because it's a lot easier to uh, you know, bring a society into your dominion if you can adapt the elite of that society to it. So there is like an actual ongoing class war that has evolutionary roots as well.

Yeah. It's also it's also really interesting because again, the like the only way that this could work is if people with a fair amount of social influence who are actually have the power to drive these types of ideologies implement these ideologies police them and punish anyone who dares to deviate if those are the people who are ultimately at the end. And so it makes sense that even though historically for quite some time it's been poorer people actually having more children, um, that is starting to that is starting to change as we're seeing, you know, people having fewer and fewer children. We are seeing um emerging at the top um the higher fertility rates as you say amongst those elites who are the ones who have to be the the enforcers of this type of a strategy because without their support, it it couldn't go anywhere. If there was no such thing as, you know, you lose your job if you say that, um, then people would, you know, it would, you would be much harder to convince people to go along with a lot of stuff, right? People go along with a lot of stuff because of the consequences of not going along with it. And so it has to be people with a certain level of not necessarily wealth, but that correlates with wealth having social status and some sort of social influence. Um, so it's not necessarily wealth, but that's going to be a fairly good predictor of it.

Well, the wealthy people are are certainly propping up institutions. I mean, if you've worked anybody who's worked in science is writing grants to I mean, yeah, there's some.

There's some money from the government, but increasingly less. A lot of these private foundations come from super elite elements of the society, right? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and,

You know, Soros and like all this stuff, right? And there's also the fact that the information sphere that everyone is exposed to is not neutral. Like it's well known that there's ideas that are allowed to propagate, ideas that aren't allowed to propagate. And so I wonder if there isn't some sense where there's a hyperfertile elite quartile or desile of the population that is more or less immune to whatever is in the channels. And maybe are they the ones that are practicing the mate suppression and their signaling is getting is is getting boosted like what do you think is happening there?

So I think that I think that that is not too far from it. So it does seem to be that if you sort of think that there's got to be people who are like this is a, you know, this is effectively a a competition and the majority of people are not going to win. That that's the the game that's been set up, right? The whole idea is to drive to a bottleneck that the majority of people are simply not going to win. They're not going to be left at the end. Um, and it does seem that the the individuals who are most likely to embody these types of ideologies, so actually enact them, so actually not have children when they say that, you know, you shouldn't have children because of the climate. Um, and they actually don't have children. And, you know, various other examples of similar themes. um, it does seem to be people who are tend to be lower on mate value and have less wealth, less status. So it does seem like the individuals who are perhaps evaluating that they're less they're very unlikely to be, you know, left at the end. And so their role in all of this is to um just go along, you know, not rock the boat, not try anything, just sort of go along to get along in the hope that I guess they will have some inclusive fitness from, you know, relatives of theirs who might be left at the bottleneck, but certainly they've got nothing to gain by trying to disrupt the process even though they're less likely to win. So it seems that we have people whose perhaps it's a little bit like um a little bit like grandmothers how grandmothers are sort of past their own reproductive um period, but they still have an opportunity to influence their inclusive fitness by influencing the fitness of their children and their grandchildren and their relatives and things like that. So they're no longer interested in their own fitness. They're kind of past that. But there's still things they can do to influence their inclusive fitness. It seems like um women who self-evaluate and and and women who sort of um like there was a really interesting fad for a little while where women were getting their fallopian tubes cut out and sort of advertising that and you know, sort of said, oh look, I've, you know, I've gone and done it, I'm free, I'll never be hampered by having children, and that kind of became a fad, and you would think that that's an, you know, reproductively speaking, that's an extraordinary own goal, and the only thing that makes it not that is if that person had a relatively low likelihood of reproductive success anyway. And in an unusual situation where birth rates are declining and the majority of people in the population are not going to have reproductive success, then the selection pressure to not do things like that drops away. So in these circumstances, you do see these types of, you know, in circumstances theoretically in circumstances of sort of, you know, very narrow reproductive success in terms of a narrow band of the population is actually going to continue each generation, you do start to see relaxed selection pressure and you do see these really maladaptive type things emerging, which I guess is not that dissimilar to the rats again. We come we're coming back to the rats.

Oh, it's hard to avoid the rats, right? Because I think that you just said something so interesting, right? Because it's a situation where reproductive success is already low. Like that's the pre-existing condition. And if that's the pre-existing condition, then I feel like all of these strategies that you're describing are the result of something that is some like shadow that's being cast on the on the society. And I'm like, where does that shadow come from? Because the fact that the birth rates started declining in 1900 as opposed to staying constant is fascinating to me because I'm like, that's an old that's a that's that's a more than 100 years old at this point.

And that's also when people started to move to cities. I like I know that this is uh like.

Is it?

I think so. I mean, like I think that that's the like the kickoff of the industrial age.

I think cities have been focal feature of many civilizations for thousands of years.

But I think that the uh transition away from largely living in the countryside to largely living in the cities was completed by like 1930. And so you don't think so?

I'm just thinking of, you know, like Teotihuacan and Rome.

Dead civilization. Dead civilization.

No, no, dead. Yeah, but it's it's a feature that crops up cyclically.

It's a feature that crops crops up cyclically. And I'm like, it seems reasonable that that is also deeply tied to the fall of those civilizations because when you concentrate everybody in one place, I think mimetic contagion becomes an immensely powerful force that starts to drive these sorts of weird behaviors and then maladaptive behaviors that would otherwise be excised from the population are able to propagate. And so.

The other thing that's Yeah. The other thing that's been observed as well is that um large levels of migration into big cities is also seen as a reliable precursor. So, one of the other things that that um I'm sure it was John Grub, I hope I've got his name right, um talked about in his essay, was also um, you know, looking at a lot of these big ancient ancient cities, they became very multicultural towards the end of those civilizations as well. So, you know, very welcoming and and you know, multicultural in a in a largely positive way. So, very welcoming of investors, very welcoming of foreigners, very welcoming of travelers. um, you know, that that kind of thing. So that kind of sort of, you know, bent towards multiculturalism which doesn't bode well for us again in the West, but that bent towards multiculturalism um also is is one thing that's been identified which is also not entirely inconsistent with big cities because a and population density being one of the important cues because populations can get very dense very quickly much more quickly with immigration than they can with natural, you know, birth rates exceeding death rates. So density, even if it's not about absolute density, it might be about, you know, changes in density over short periods of time because certainly immigration can achieve that in a way that natural birth rates, you know, at a speed that natural birth rates can't. So that also is a observation that's somewhat in favor of density being a key part of this process as well.

The reason I was smiling at the end of your comment, Nasio, is because you said these maladaptive behaviors, and I was like, well, the whole argument here is that they are adaptive at the end of the day, which is what's really creepy about this entire thing. Like.

I feel like that there's a there's a real it's really easy to make Darwinism a religion, too. And like think that these natural forces that are operating in our in the background are somehow value positive, too. like it it could be right. It's not necessarily just because this is the way the natural world operates that that's something that we want to lean into as well.

I just I have think we have to be really careful about that especially as scientists who who want to be like, well, this is the way it is. It's like, well.

You know that it doesn't designing our future too.

Yeah. I mean, and that's exactly right. So, one thing that's important to remember is that the only currency that evolution cares about is reproductive success, inclusive fitness. It doesn't care about longevity. It doesn't care about happiness. It doesn't care about comfort. It does it doesn't care about anything except how that thing translates into inclusive fitness. And so, the things that we care about as people are just irrelevant to evolution. And so, that that's why it's important to understand I think what's happening and the mechanisms are at play, but it's also important not to moralize those. It's you know, there's no it's not like the, you know, the, like what is it, the the what is natural is good fallacy, right? It's important not to presume that there is any intrinsic good or bad about about the way the world is. It wasn't, you know, I'm probably going to annoy a whole bunch of people here, but it wasn't designed by a benevolent a god who tried to make it wonderful for us. It just is. And it is because of a completely undirected blind process of evolution that was not designed by anybody to make people happy or to make anything nice. And so on the other hand, we we do have that benevolent ability like we actually can be that benevolent force in the universe or at least we can embody it in our best.

On a good day, right? Each of us and honestly institutionally as we reconstruct these institutions or as we look towards a future that doesn't.

Suffer the same ills, right? For as many people in the population.

Exactly.

Right. So that's why that's pretty cool actually.

Yeah.

This.

To to add uh to add a little bit of data to this this urbanization question. So uh in 1800 less than 10% of people lived in urban areas. By 1900 it was 40% and by 1920 it was 50%. And so there was this dramatic increase at least in the United States. And I think that the urbanization also continued along similar paths in countries that were being industrialized at the same time. And so like it's hard to like I wonder if there isn't some kind of density switch that happens inside of humans because it's so common in biology for there to be density switches.

I mean, it certainly could.

Yeah. Like do you know do you know the the slime mold dictyostelium discoideum?

Um, I know a few things about slime molds doing stuff. What what do they do in terms of density?

This one's amazing.

This one's amazing. So they're free living single-celled amoebas that if you seed them onto a plate, they spread out, they cover the entire plate, and when they hit a critical density, they uh get this like signal to slug and they come together into this single organism that moves around the plate like a slug and then it finds some optimal nutrient density and then it sends up this gigantic stalk that has spores on the end of it. And only the cells that are in the spore body itself are the ones. It then disperses and the entire process starts again. But they're the only ones that survive.

They're the only ones.

The slug dies. They're the only ones that make it.

And so I'm just like.

And all the other lineages die out.

They do. They do. And so it's like it's weird because like I feel like there's this crazy thing inside of biology which is density signals. Like I studied microbiology.

For my uh doctoral dissertation and it was like astounding the degree to which there's density dependent coordination inside of organisms to the point of like fully remodeling yourself sacrificing yourself for the whole new behaviors new genetic programs that get activated. And I feel like when it comes to humans, we've been really, really, really reluctant to look into that because I think that it undermines the entire system. If you're like, hold on a second, maybe concentrating in cities is actually leading to all of these ills. There's not there's not an easy option that's available on the other side to say, okay, well, we can have civilization without cities. It's like, I don't think that you made this case about the economies of scale and distribution and everything else. Like I don't think that we've solved that. But at the same time, if that is the repetitive cycle that we always hit upon, which is that humans do have some kind of density feature that gets turned on when we get into sufficiently dense urban environments, then there's no way for us to avoid it if we don't actually look it in the eyes and start to integrate it into our models for what's happening.

Because it seems like this is the crisis that that returns time and time and time again. There's tons of ancient empty cities that anthropologists are like, it's really weird. They just left.

Yeah.

But I think it's a really good I think it's a really good observation. Um, not that I'm necessarily trying to counter it because the more I think about the more I think that density may be we know that it correlates very strongly with GDP. Um, so it is about wealth. But as I said before, it's either about wealth or it's about something that correlates very strongly with wealth. And so understanding how density correlates with wealth is probably a really important thing to understand as well. Um, and also there's a whole host of other things which doesn't mean that density is not um pretty you know, pretty kind of primary in the causal chain and these are also downstream consequences of it. But there are also a lot of other interesting differences between big cities versus regional towns that are also at least sort of coherent with the ideas that we're talking about. So the big cities are also the ones that are more progressive. And of course, it's the more progressive politics that are pushing the the more antinatal views. And so if we think of political orientation as being and this is somewhat of a simplification, but if we think of political orientation as being sort of the left progressives and the right conservatives, then there's a lot of things that progressives and conservatives differ on that is that becomes quite coherent in the context of thinking that pro that conservatives are effectively trying to slow down the civilizational kind of decline and progressives are sort of trying to speed it up. And so as you get closer and closer to it, if you sort of it's almost like if you imagine like like a roller coaster, right? And it sort of goes up and it goes over the peak and when enough of it goes over the peak, it starts falling. Which is why civilizations in total get more and more progressive as they go further and further along and left-wing governments become more left-wing or or rather left-wing parties become even more left-wing and, you know, conservative parties become even more centrist and everything shifts kind of in that direction. Um, and then of if so one of the sort of big differences between or there's a few that sort of feed into it um between the left and the right that I'm really interested in is that I think that the left encapsulates like a a strategy to minimize the price of sex and the right is attempting an antagonistic strategy to maximize the price of sex. So which is why the right and the conservatives are associated with like, you know, not wanting sex outside marriage and, you know, or sort of, you know, generally, you know, being much less in favor of um, like, you know, public nudity and, you know, television shows about sex and racy sort of stuff, and and that's all associated with progressive views, you know, movements towards really skimpy bikinis and, you know, all of those types of things, right? All of the increasingly sort of uh visibility of of the body and sexual cues and things and also the sexual obviously, I mean, the sexual revolution is an obvious one, but again, primarily in women, we're seeing much greater uh like endorsement of casual sex from liberal women than you see from conservative women and and things like that. So, you know, from from that perspective, it kind of makes sense that the political continuum is almost like a sort of like people stretched out in time. Like the progressives at the front are the ones that are kind of picking up cues of the state of civilization being mostly towards this end and conservatives are the are the ones who are picking up cues and no, civilization is still back here. The most adaptive strategy is still to be a little bit more conservative about that. And then over time, you just see that tipping down and to become ever more progressive. Um, and that then is also interesting that it's the big cities that are more progressive than the regional towns. So they're the ones where people are picking up the cues that civilization is moving further. So which is also consistent with your argument that density is a key part of it.

There's uh this makes me think of an axis that I've kind of started to notice just by watching the culture wars, which is like bio-conservatism on one hand, which is that there is this civilizational way that we ought to be, that there is a traditional mode of existence that has always served us and we should maintain that at all costs. And on the other side is the transhumanist approach, which is that the old ways of being are no longer serving us. And so we must force our evolution into some new as yet unexplored space. And it's it really is fascinating because you can really bin like left and right also into the sense of like bio-conservative and transhumanist. And that gives it this like very.

I don't know. It's an interesting like civilizational lens to it because it's like what do we what are we trying to choose between? And I think that what we're really trying to choose between is do we just try to go back in time and restart the cycle and end up exactly in the same place or are we really trying to say, okay, look, we have enough intellectual capacity to be able to like ratchet to some different starting point and I I don't I I honestly like I see it. I know that humans aren't supposed to be evolving, but I see it as a moment of speciation. I mean, humans I mean, humans, I think, really are still evolving. I've I've I've heard people say, and that's one of sort of Ed, it's not really his argument. I shouldn't sort of attribute it to him too much, but um he sort of said something similar. I could just, I'm just I'm hearing his voice in my head going, "No, I didn't. It's not what I said, but exactly what he. It's not exactly what he said." Um, sorry. Um, and lost my train of thought now. What was it? I was going to say something about something that he said that was consistent with yours.

Yeah. That Oh, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's a little bit like it almost kind of reminds me in a way like the the transhumanist not really sure what they're headed towards, but really confident that it's going to be something. And it kind of it kind of reminds me of that sort of silly old joke where like the um I don't know, there's some setup to it. Basically someone's going to see a a psychic and the psychic says, "Oh, I can't see anything beyond like next week for you. I think you know, you're you're going to die. You need to get your affairs in order anyway." So person goes and gets their affairs in order. And the week passes and they don't die. So they sort of go back to the psychic to tell them I didn't die and then they discover that the psychic died. That's why they couldn't see anything beyond next week. And I think that I think it's kind of like it's like an analog of the transhumanist thing if what if you know, they they think they're pushing towards this um sort of, you know, wonderful magnificent new thing and what their what their strategy is actually pushing towards this oblivion, but they just they're just not realizing it yet. Um, like at least societal oblivion, but certainly not genetic oblivion. I mean, they're the ones that are going to be there at the end, right? So, you know, they're not pushing for genetic oblivion. They're the ones that are going to win. But, um, but yeah, it just reminded me of that. I suppose similar kind of thing. So optimistic and and what all their strategies are leading to or at least what they've all led to in the past is like the end. So, but that's a little bleak.

Well, you know, artificial wombs, I I think that there is this great faith that technology will save us. And I don't necessarily know that that's a solid like I'm very sympathetic to the idea that.

The the transhumanist super progressive side of the scale is pushing towards something that they don't really know how it's going to work out.

And that we do have these tried and true strategies. But at the same time, I'm like thinking about the people who left the old worlds to come to the new world. And you could make the same case for that. You leave everyone you know, the place that you've evolved in for millennia, and all of a sudden you're going to get on a boat to go starve at Jonestown or or it's not Jonestown.

Bad example. Bad example.

Jamestown. Whatever.

Jonestown is not a good example. But I mean, look, Musk's try. I mean, Musk is trying to do that right now. I mean, he wants to that that's his goal, right? He wants to start an entire new civilization on Mars. I' I mean, it's an ex it's extraordinarily brave. I've got no way of judging the probability of success. I just don't I just can't possibly know that. Um, but yeah, imagine being someone who's actually going to take that like it's a one-way journey, right? You're not coming back. Oh, I I actually I find it quite uncomfortable to even think about. I guess it's not going to be me that goes. I'm not clearly not got the right personality for that. But I I I find that Yeah, it's you know how like when like I don't know if you're scared of heights at all. So maybe this doesn't apply, but I'm never used to be, but I'm as I get older I'm becoming increasingly fearful of heights and it's really getting annoying. It's stopping me from doing stuff. Um, but sometimes even if I see like a a just a picture taken from really, I'll get like almost a little adrenaline rush and I I get that when I think about people going to going to Mars as well. It's just it actually like gets a visceral response from me. The thought of it is sufficiently aversive. Um, but I mean like yeah, best of luck to them and it's you know, we're only going to leave Earth and colonize the universe if somebody's brave enough to do it. But obviously that person's not me. But yeah, I find it extraordinary.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot uh there's a lot here to think about. I think one of the things that I love about encountering theories that we haven't seen before is that they offer this lens through which to see the world because you go out and all of a sudden you can start noticing behaviors and you can start to suddenly be like, "Oh, that's really interesting. That's what that is." And it makes the world more legible. Yeah, it helps a lot to just like at least have a theory of an unseen force that's causing some phenomenon which otherwise just seems like madness. And honestly, I think that's the entire reason that we are in love with.

The rational method and with reason and understanding history and understanding the mechanics of nature. It's like it gives you something to hold on to in the storm. And so I I really appreciate the piece that you've brought to us about this. I don't know if you're right or wrong, Stella, but I think that it at least rationalizes some unseen element like why it seems like nobody's actually at the steering wheel in some of these movements that seem obviously suicidal. Uh, it's a really compelling.

Even if it's even if it's just partly right and somebody else hears it and goes, "Yeah, but if you fix this bit and this bit, then maybe you'll be even more correct." like even that would be um would be enough, you know, enough that it's worth kind of thinking about it for even if it's wrong, if it at least leads to something that's correct, then it's worth thinking about it from this perspective. It's interesting what you what you just said about like the unseen forces and the confusion cuz I' I've recently started a new hobby of like finding people on mostly Twitter um saying like why is this happening? I just don't understand. And like I'm sort of and then saying, well, I've got a theory. I've got an explanation. And then of course, it's like this massive long tweet that I think about three people actually read. But um, but but it is it is I'm I'm finding myself kind of increasingly surprised by the number of people exclaiming that they just don't understand stuff. Like even it's not that I would expect people to come up with like my little bit, you know, half crazy explanation, but I would have thought they'd have some explanation of their own, but people but but there are a lot of people who just see it as like, it's just crazy. I just can't explain this. Like, why are people doing this? I'm like, well, it's this thing and it works like this and it's really depressing and it's why the West is coming to an end. Have a lovely day. But, but.

Things that young people should be paying attention to like whenever some adult or professor or teacher or whatever says like this is nobody understands this or whatever and they just kind of move on. It's like I'm always like that's the dark matter. Those are the black holes of that you you should be fixated on because those are the things that really need attention. So.

Yeah.

And every time something doesn't make sense for that.

Yeah. And every time something doesn't make sense to you, it's a sign that you've that like you're missing something, right? Cuz the world does make sense. The world is coherent, you know? And so if something is like, "Ooh, that I didn't expect that to happen." Then it's time to rethink like your understanding of that particular situation. And I think yeah, if you if young people can take that view to things and maybe stop using the word random so often um and actually start understanding things that they would prefer to label as random. I think that would be that would be um a good thing for young people to do. I'm so I'm so old now, aren't I? I'm now picking on people for calling things random.

Me and it's okay us too. I was like young people these days.

No, I just.

The world does make sense. It can make sense and and it the the world should make sense. Uh, sometimes it doesn't and I think tuning into that is just absolutely the key to anything good happening in the future for anyone in any particularity of their life or the entire society as a whole. And that's probably a good place to put a pin in this conversation.

Agree.

So we will we will let you get on. By the way, if people haven't figured this out, uh Danny is talking to us in the middle of the night over there in Australia. So, thank you so so much for enduring the wee hours.

You're very welcome. I'm quite proud of myself. It's 4:00 a.m. and I'm going strong. I'm I'm very pleased.

Goodness gracious. I hope you can get some some sleep before you have to get on with your day tomorrow.

Yeah, I will. I will for sure. I've got a good 5 hours up my sleeve. That alarm is not getting set before night.

Excellent.

Goodness. All right, we'll let you get to it. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's been really.

No worries. It was an absolute pleasure. I enjoyed every second of it.

You did as well. Thank you so much. Take care. Good night. Bye everybody. [Music]