Robin Hanson： Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
197.9173
Summary
In this episode, economist Robin Hanson joins us to talk about why culture is the root cause of fertility decline, and how to fix it. Robin is a prolific economist, best-selling author, and advocate for various fertility intervention proposals. He s also an associate professor of economics at George Mason University.
Transcript
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Hello, everyone. As you can see today, we are joined by the one, the only, the incredibly
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prolific and brilliant Robin Hanson. He is the American economist author. He's also an associate
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professor of economics at George Mason University. But he is known for some of the most catchy ideas
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ranging from grabby aliens to one of the most popular fertility intervention proposals, which
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has to do with sort of like a tax bonds on children's future tax generated income. But
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most recently, on the pronatalist front, Robin Hanson's focus has been shifting to culture.
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So we wanted to have him on Basecamp to talk about pronatalist culture. Welcome, Robin.
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Hello, everyone. So as you know, culture, I mean, fertility looks like a pretty hard problem.
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Like, right? Yeah. So you guys are working hard. I hope you have success. But you get that it's
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an uphill battle, right? Yeah. Yeah. So at least I feel good about fertility that I can frame a
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proposal and say it in words and say, if only you would do this, it'll probably fix the problem.
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That doesn't mean you can get somebody to do it. But it's a nice thing to have is to be able to
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have a concrete proposal. It's like, look, if you do this, that would fix it. Yes. And that's,
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as a policymaker, I'm proud. Like, that's kind of our job. Like, okay, if you guys won't do anything,
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you know, what the hell? Yeah, that's on you. Yeah. You could have. You could have had nice things.
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We at least had an idea for what to do. Yeah. But so I thought about fertility for like eight
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months. And then, like most people in fertility, I came to see culture underlying as a fundamental
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cause of fertility decline. It doesn't mean that we have to fix it that way, right? We can fix things
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with money that are caused by culture. If you can afford it, yeah. Right, right. If you can afford it.
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But as money and culture interact and have for many centuries, like capitalism and culture have had a lot
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of influences on each other. So just because something's caused by culture doesn't mean it
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needs to be fixed by culture directly. That is, you could do a money thing that changes culture.
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And I think the money thing we talked about in our last episode is such a thing that would change
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culture. But you certainly notice that the proximate cause of the problem is culture.
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And that induced me, more of a theorist, to say, okay, why? What's causing culture to change?
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Is it just some random, you know, thing that just happens in the world? Or is there some more
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systematic way to understand why culture? So it's not, it's like a half a dozen trends I can point
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out that can, that seem to be causing fertility decline. You guys know them all probably.
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Okay, well, let's just mention them for, you know, for completeness sake.
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So obviously like longer years of education and early career prep, right? A lot of young women want,
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who are very powerful, you know, capable people want to prove that they can do well in their
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careers. And our career ladders don't give very good pauses. Yeah. And they want to show that they
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are capable and, you know, be successful. And so they want to wait to, as long as the career ladder
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requires to then consider having kids. So that's, that's one.
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Yeah. Hold on. As we go through each of these, I want to talk about how they can be addressed and
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how other cultures, their state high fertility have addressed them. The two ways that this particular
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problem I've seen addressed is one, have women not become educated or have men and women not
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become educated works really well for fertility rates. But also places like Kazakhstan, you still
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have men and women getting educated, but they're having kids in university. And this is my favorite
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solution. I think that's the best time to have kids.
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This is what Simone said is you have to change the expectation of timing. Get married, then you go to
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university or you get married in your first couple of years of university and should have a couple of
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kids by the time you graduate. This is a normal within a lot of cultures. But it's an easy thing
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to frame. I think the quiverful movement had a really good framing of this. You know, the children
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are like the arrows in the quiver of your youth, which, which points out is that children are supposed
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to be something that you sort of stock up on while you're young and, and then, and then provide
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benefit to you when you're older, which is a very different framing than children are the capstone
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That brings up a next trend, as you know, which is the switch from cornerstone to capstone marriage.
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You know, when I was young, the norm was you just marry early when you're not fully formed or you don't
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know what you're going to become. And the two of you form each other and become something together.
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Yes. Okay. And now the norm is you should find yourself and know who you are and have a stable
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position and then match with somebody who matches your stable position to what you become.
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Exactly. And that takes a lot longer. And that also puts on a delay.
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And I know with this particular trend is that it's not leading to better marriages. Like a marriage,
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marriage is actually much better. I'd argue to have a cornerstone marriage than to have a capstone
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marriage because you can one, grow together. Two, it fixes a lot of the problems with the existing
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monetary difference. So, you know, one of the things I'm sure you're going to get to
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is that women like men who earn more money than them, but they also don't like men on average
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earning more money than them, which means that on average, they're not going to be able to find a
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spouse once they've corrected and they've overcorrected. Now, if you look at young women,
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they over earn men pretty significantly. But so if they're like, oh, I'll only date men who earn more
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money than me. And on average, women earning more than men, you know, they're going to have a really
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hard time fighting a partner. And they're going to be dating a bunch of people who are likely lying
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to them about like their, their actual status. And that's why women think all men are bastards
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because they are sorting into the bastards. But the point here being is that this is a problem that
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occurs once you graduate from college. If you normalize marrying somebody going into college,
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you marry somebody at an age where neither of you has an income yet. And this is why it's so
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important to get married before you get a job, not after. Yeah. Good point. So I'm not sure of all
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these trends, but I don't need to be sure that they're just things people talk a lot about. So
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a third one is more intensive parenting. Yeah. So I think I see this. I see my son taking care of
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their, you know, our grandchild compared that to my taking care of my son compared to how I was taking
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care of. Yeah. And if I look, it's like, look at movies from the thirties and forties and kids in
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the movies and see how much parent attention parents are paying to those kids. They're not
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paying any attention to the kids. Yeah. What, what attention? Like watching them and taking them
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around and instructing them. The kids are just running around and the parents are talking to each
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other and they're just two separate worlds. That was okay back then. Yes. And this is incredibly
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important to renormalize. And I think that you really cannot have any form of pronatalism work
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without normalizing this specific thing. And it's one of the reasons why, when many people are like,
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why do you as the heads of the pronatalist movement so often, you know, get seen by reporters as like
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not really paying that much attention to your kids or, or, or, you know, being rough with your kids or
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like mostly ignoring them. And it's like, because that's the only way you make this sustainable.
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If, if you, if you like overly, and what's wild is, is that we even have AI now. Like I don't even
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need to talk to my kid for my kid to have somebody to talk to, you know, AI is infinitely attentive
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and patient with our kids. Like our kids talk with chat to PT and I love it because we'd be like,
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okay, whatever. And chat to PT is like, wow, I love that too. This is so great. It's just like,
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this is right. So another trend that certainly contributes via the school thing is just gender
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equality. Oh, interesting. If, if women just hold, hold the different life paths and that wasn't
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involving career aspirations, then there was, you know, the, the school thing would be much less
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of an issue. And obviously that did happen in the past. Yeah. So we're not saying we're definitely
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not saying we're going to reverse all these trends. Like, let's just be clear, but we do want to
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acknowledge what are the trends that have been contributing to gender equality. So just keep
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going, but I'm just going to get Indy cause she woke up. Hold on, hold on. There's actually some
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interesting data on gender equality that we went over in a few recent episodes where
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it appears that in some environments, gender inequality, and not some, I actually say most
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environments today, like in developed countries leads to much lower fertility rates.
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You're right. So, but it certainly contributed early. Like, so in South Korea, they have this
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huge gender conflict. And part of it is that women want men to do more household chores and men,
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you know, don't think they should, because that's not what they used to do.
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Yeah. So specifically here, this comes from the, I don't know if you've seen this,
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this tweet, but it's really good. It's like, what makes these countries different from these
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countries? And it breaks down like Denmark, the USA, you know, I think like Israel, a few others
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all in one category. And then another category is like Italy, Portugal, Korea, Japan, China. And the
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argument presented was, is that the second group of countries modernized and became wealthy much
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later. And as such, it didn't update its views around gender norms as much. And so you had the
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economic expectation of women working without the updated gender norms within the household.
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Although I think many of these cultures were actually just more misogynistic historically.
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If you look at like Albion Seed or American nations, you can see many of the
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founding cultural groups of America were highly gender egalitarian. Like the backwoods,
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greater Appalachian culture was very gender egalitarian. The Puritans were very gender
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egalitarian. And by egalitarian, men and women were still seen as very different, but they...
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No, no, no, but they were gender egalitarian when contrasted with Japanese or Chinese culture.
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Right. But it's about these changing roles. That is, we had the expectation women go to work,
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And then they're less willing to have kids, which makes sense. But, you know, it's uneven
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So an older one that I still think is important to notice is norms of children not living with
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In the old days, people would live in a family estate with three generations.
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And that was usual. So kids didn't have to have their own place or even their own income in order
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Yeah. And you'd built in childcare and built in elder care. So big elements of our social
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It also meant that the grandparents had more control. They got to say more. But the old,
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you know, clan-based societies, the patriarch or matriarch just had more say about how everybody
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One of the things people enjoy about our world is more freedom from parental influence over
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your lives. But a big cost of that is they're not helping so much with childcare, childcare
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environment, housing, you know, everything else.
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One hundred percent. Yeah. I think people don't think about the opportunity cost as much as they
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Yeah. And I've seen this as a major fertility factor that is more addressable than many cultures
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give it credit for. Specifically at NatalCon, one couple was telling me, well, we had kids
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much earlier than we had planned on having them because we had moved to a community that
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wasn't our birth community. And the pastor at this community said, oh, well, we'll be there
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for you. Like, we'll help you with childcare. You let me know when you need it. And then they
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were like, okay, then I had a kid. And then the pastor told them when the kid was crying
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one day, he's like, you can let the kid cry. Like, we don't care. Like, and they were like,
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and I felt really self-conscious. And then I didn't feel self-conscious. So we had a second
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kid. And these things at a cultural level, like people can be like, culture, isn't something
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you can change. And it like literally is. You can just go to your pastor and be like, hey,
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can we like put together some system for like childcare sharing or something like that for
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our parishioners? Can you like call out and praise people who have children? Like that like
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increases fertility rates really dramatically. Right. Obviously you as a grandparent could
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just tell your children about how you might be willing to help, but that's an awkward
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conversation. I think that is also a lot of us can't like, I can't make my parents take
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care of my kids. And in truth, I don't think they have the, like, you've got to trust a parent
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to take care of a kid as well. Like you've got to trust like, oh, I'll leave a toddler around
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this person. And I think we're a generation that may not have a level of trust in our parents
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conscientiousness around little toddlers that would have been taken for granted in previous
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generations. So maybe a lot of that too has to do with child count and, and child rearing
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participation. So if for example, only one parent primarily raised only one child, like their
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experience with childcare is probably just. Or, or worse if they, if they had nannies all
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the time. Yeah. So our habit of moving away from home when we become adults is related
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here. That is if we stayed in the same neighborhood where our parents lived, we probably could arrange
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for more grandparent help in child rearing, but we have this habit of going to college
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somewhere far away and then going to a job far away. And that does make it a lot harder
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for grandparents to help. Yeah. Though I will say we know anecdotally, at least a lot of people
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who after having kids have moved to be closer with their parents or have parents who have moved
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to be closer to them. And it's encouraging to see that like people, I think do understand the value
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is just making it happen is a lot harder than other, like then it, than it used to be because
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in many cases, parents really prefer to live a life that doesn't involve providing free child.
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You have to be willing to make sacrifices. And part of the sacrifice is moving. I was talking
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with a reporter recently and this reporter was telling me, well, I only have one kid and I live
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in Manhattan, so I can't easily have more kids because my husband and I have jobs in Manhattan.
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And I was like, oh, that's really tough. You know, like maybe, and I was thinking, oh, maybe you get
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jobs outside of Manhattan or something like that. The conversation goes on and I realized, I was like,
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wait a second. You're a journalist and your husband runs a startup. You can move. You have jobs in
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Manhattan because you have chosen to have jobs in Manhattan. Being a journalist, you don't need to go
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to the office every week. And your husband chooses where his office is based. You have chosen to
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sacrifice the lives of your future children. And I think that that cultural framing is also really
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big. It's one that we talk about pretty frequently is for us, when we think about like, when does life
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start, the way you view life can change how many kids you're going to end up having. For fertility,
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it appears about the worst way to view life at the beginning of conception because Catholics have
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really low fertility rates when you control for income. But I think the best way is the way that we
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do, which is to say, every time you choose between two timelines, if you choose to erase a life
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within one of those timelines, you are responsible for eradicating that person. And you should
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think about the you in that timeline, how they would feel about your decision.
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So when I was talking to the journalist and she's like, well, how do I have another kid?
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Like, can you convince me? But I was like, well, you know, if you have that other kid,
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five years from now, the you in that timeline is mortified that you ever had this conversation.
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They're mortified that you ever thought even for one instance about not having that kid.
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That timeline is just as valid as a timeline in which you don't have the kid.
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So you should consider that iteration of yourself that is mortified at your selfishness for deciding
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not to bring a life into the world. And I think that when I talked to reporters about Simone,
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you know, getting, because she's the most C-sections anyone has ever had is 11.
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And Simone's going to be at five with this kid, you know, so she's getting up there.
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And so, you know, she is putting her life at risk and people are like, why would she put her life
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at risk? And I'm like, the moral equation is obvious. Like if a robber had a gun to your,
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your, your spouse's head and one of your kids head and was like, if you don't tell me to like
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shoot the spouse, I'm going to shoot the kid. Everybody chooses shoot the spouse, right?
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Like, but why isn't this the case when it's a baby?
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So one is urbanity. So we had the debate at the previous event, but I do think basically
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there's this attraction of urbanity that the city centers are full of activities and full of status.
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There's a place to meet and hang with people. Yeah. If you want to choose a high status life,
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that's the place to go, but it does cost you in terms of opportunity to cost, including in space
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and income. And so that does come at the expense, I think, of fertility. So you don't have to live
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in city centers, but people, if you want to choose fertility, you can, but often the price of that is
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to be less away from the center of activity. Yeah. What are your thoughts on the role that urbanity
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plays, however, in matchmaking? Like I think it's a lot easier to find a partner when you're in a
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highly dense area. And then it seems like, I mean, my general intuition is go to highly dense
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population centers to find your person. And then when you find them, get out of there and start
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your family. Right. But unfortunately, like we're pretty plastic culturally when we're young. So if
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you go to the city when you're 20 and you spend the next few years looking for partners, you will
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also assimilate the city values and the city practices. Yeah. It's so hard to get out of it.
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And then you will be less eager to leave the city to go have kids somewhere else.
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I think that's true though. When like the plot of all the Hallmark Christmas movies and romances
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is girl with big power job from the city goes back home for Christmas, reluctantly, of course,
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or like to some small podunk town meets hunky man and stays there forever. Like there seems to be
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this. I, I, I think that if you approach stages, life stages, like a preset life stage model as a
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culture, like I was raised totally your life happens in stages, do this at this stage, this at this
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stage, it's, it's easier to switch between them. If you have that preset up, especially if you have
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the stage in the city framed of as like a, a, a trial in bad, if you teach your kid to think of a
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city as a place there, there's not really anything to do because everything costs a ton of money and
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it's pointless. And that you, you really only get freedom, the freedom to have the privilege of living
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in the countryside. Once you find a partner, I think that that could help them set up more,
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but I, I, I think the more options feed into the capstone marriage concept to them. That is look,
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if you just lived in a small town and those were all the people you would just pick somebody from
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among them and make do and go on with it. Yeah. The city raises your standards. Here's all these
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people. I need to pick like one of the best of all these people. I can't just pick the first person
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I like overwhelmed by the expectation that they're all around for many years. What, you know, how do
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you think you're going to leave so earlier than, than you assimilate the culture of expecting to
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spend 10 years in the city looking for the very best person. Fair point. I actually really like
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something you said there, but I, I, I change it a little for like realistic high achieving culture,
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which is you want a pool that people are dating within that they feel they can exhaust. If they feel
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that the meeting pool is inexhaustible, then they go on forever. But if you're like, no,
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this is all of the best people in the world here, here they are. Um, like that's really what caused
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me to marry you, Simone. As I went to Stanford business school, I was like, oh, this is supposed
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to be like the highest competency women in the world. They're not as good as you. So I know I've,
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I've searched the world. You need a bounded game of musical chairs and you need to know when the music's
00:19:05.200
about to stop. To do this with our kids is put together a discord like thing with parents who have kids
00:19:10.880
around our kids age who are like based and interesting and like the most successful people
00:19:14.540
in the world. And we're searching really hard to make this group as big as possible. And then we
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tell the kids in this discord, you can date whatever. And if you find someone you like,
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we'll send you to live with their family for a bit. So you can like get to know them, get to know the
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kids and date in a controlled environment so that you get this feeling of, if I don't find the person
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in this discord, I'm not going to find many people more interesting than this.
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So think about careers. I did the thing where I kept changing careers many times
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until I found a career I liked, but that was costly for me. Most people find a career that's
00:19:48.840
good enough and they stick with it. And it might be if we had that attitude toward marriage,
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like I think I had more of the attitude toward marriage. I found my wife and I said,
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good enough, let's take her. I wasn't thinking, well, is she really better than the best I could find?
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But for careers, I had this higher standard of, okay, this is okay. I like it. But like
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this other thing over there might be even better. So just think about the inconsistency versus career
00:20:12.460
choice versus marriage. People seem to choose their careers much earlier in life than they choose
00:20:16.360
their life partners. It's not clear that you actually should. I mean, you have to spend some
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time searching for each and then pick and go. Yeah. Your, your life partner matters more and will
00:20:26.880
influence your career. Like the career that they want will influence the career that you want.
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They can also help you get a career. More reason to pick them early.
00:20:34.820
Exactly. Yeah. And having a spouse can give you the security to have a career. We know so many
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people who took turns getting graduate degrees or doing the risky job so that the other one had
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the steady job and it's just, everything's better with a good spouse. Okay. My second to last trend
00:20:48.360
is less religion. Yeah. So clearly there's huge correlations with religion around the world and
00:20:54.360
fertility. Yeah. And the world has become less religious. And that just seems to be
00:21:00.280
a trend that's causing lower fertility. You don't have to understand necessarily why exactly,
00:21:05.440
but it does seem to be real. And what a lot of people miss about this is religion is dropping
00:21:10.500
in gen alpha at a much faster rate than it is in other generations. I'll try to put a graph on screen
00:21:14.700
here if I remember. And so people see that religion has stopped dropping in the United States this year.
00:21:19.780
And they're like, oh, this is a sign that this trend has stopped and maybe fertility rates still.
00:21:23.780
I don't think that that is a sign of that. I think that what we're seeing is reconversions
00:21:28.460
into religion of adults and not a drop in the rate to which young people are being torn out of
00:21:34.680
religions. And then, you know, like us or JD Vance or something like that. Like, and I don't think
00:21:39.600
that this is as positive a sign as people think it is. If I had to look for an explanation,
00:21:46.320
it seems to me that when people are really poor and in desperate circumstances, religion does comfort
00:21:51.680
them in a really substantial way. Absolutely. I don't think that's why I think the reason why
00:21:56.400
religion increases fertility rates is two reasons. One is that it provides an exogenous motivation to
00:22:01.180
have kids beyond hedonism. A lot of secularists, when they're having kids, they're like, will they
00:22:05.420
improve my quality of life? Will I enjoy having them? Will I, but in a religion, it's like, this is
00:22:09.680
the duty, you know? And so you don't even question how it's going to make you feel or anything like
00:22:13.960
that. So the exogenous motivation increases the number of kids. Two, I think religiosity is often
00:22:19.360
just a very high correlatory sort of indicator of a person's, how much they're in an ancestral
00:22:29.200
culture versus the urban monoculture. When somebody becomes more urban monocultured, more like
00:22:34.940
of this progressive cultural group that is all around cities today and it's sort of like a memetic
00:22:38.400
virus, they decrease in religiosity. And so if you look at atheists who are distant from the urban
00:22:46.300
monoculture, they're often pretty high fertility. So you can look at like Elon Musk, who's pretty
00:22:50.320
distinct from the urban monoculture, very high fertility, or some people would consider us a
00:22:53.860
form of secularists and we're pretty high fertility. So I think that there's two parts. There's what's
00:23:00.020
causing the religion decline and then does religion decline cause fertility decline? So, I mean, I think
00:23:05.900
in a modern rich world, we're comfortable and secure enough that we don't need religion so much,
00:23:13.220
but look, when you're just really poor and like your children are dying and you're in war and
00:23:18.360
whatever, religion just is an appeal much more directly. Like it gives you comfort and some
00:23:23.960
place in the world and meaning that you really want and need. And, but once you have that,
00:23:29.140
the structure that you tend to get with, it comes with structures that make you also want to be
00:23:32.720
fertile. That is the kind of meaning you get in religion is, you know, helps, is a compliment of the
00:23:37.700
kind of meaning you get in family. But there's this puzzle, why, why isn't there a modern
00:23:42.000
culture religious? And I think it's because they're just rich and comfortable and not really
00:23:46.820
very afraid of very much. Although, don't you think there's also this big correlation between
00:23:51.900
religions and the ability to delay gratification and think in terms of the longer term with the
00:23:57.280
contrast being that mainstream urban monoculture culture is about instant pleasure and you will
00:24:03.560
never have kids or at least a lot of kids if your life is about instant pleasure. Like kids are
00:24:08.880
definitely a delayed gratification thing. Strikingly, although a lot of, you know,
00:24:13.660
the urban monoculture people are willing to make sacrifices for careers. You know, they'll spend a
00:24:18.920
lot of time studying for classes. That is true. Yeah. That's a really good point. That's a really
00:24:23.320
good point. And careers suck. Yeah. They're not always the most fun. So wait, then what is,
00:24:29.740
what is the Robin Hanson solution to the Robin Hanson fertility stack of demographic collapse? Like
00:24:35.580
what would you, if you were one last trend and then let's, let's talk about the underlying problem.
00:24:40.480
Yes. So one last trend is just a more integrated world. A less integrated world would just have more
00:24:46.520
variety and all these different kinds of cultures around the world and what their attitudes were
00:24:50.440
related to fertility. So a more varied world would just have some places that happen to have high
00:24:56.200
fertility and other low. And at least, you know, we'd have more overall fertility, but our dominant
00:25:02.200
monoculture is low fertility and we have all this communication and travel and trade in the world
00:25:08.560
that just merges the world together into a shared culture. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the hot, so now the
00:25:16.440
question is, okay, we see all these trends. What's the cause now first notice in our world, the most
00:25:24.000
prestigious intellectuals are the people who comment on the sort of trends we've been talking about.
00:25:28.140
They point out what the social trends were and they want to like talk about what the trend should
00:25:33.500
be. Everybody loves this culture trend conversation. It's the most elite conversation you see in pundits
00:25:39.540
and you know, everybody else. It is, it is. But, but there's also a separate group of people who
00:25:45.420
analyze how culture happens over time. They are specialists in cultural evolution and they are not
00:25:50.320
very prestigious, even among academics. And they really crave being scientific. And so they try not to
00:25:57.260
enter into these conversations about cultural trends, because that would be non-scientific.
00:26:03.900
And those are the people I turn to, to understand what's happening with culture. How does it work
00:26:09.180
and how to understand these trends, but you have to turn away from the most prestigious culture talk
00:26:14.080
because the way people talk about culture is kind of the way you guys have been here, which is as a
00:26:20.140
participant, you say, what are the trends? What do I like? What I don't, which, what could I argue for?
00:26:24.220
What could I argue against? That's what prestigious culture talk is like, is analyzing, like recruiting
00:26:30.620
allies for your direction to push culture and recruiting like arguments and things like that.
00:26:36.300
And that's what you're doing in fertility. And I'm glad you are doing it. But the key thing to notice
00:26:40.700
is that makes you somewhat blind to what's this process by which cultures change? How does that work?
00:26:47.660
Tell us, because we've written a whole book on this subject.
00:26:54.380
Well, so the basic idea is it's just randomness. That is, humanity's superpower is cultural evolution,
00:27:01.660
and it's just a different kind of biological evolution. And it's just variation and selection.
00:27:06.540
And in fact, it's simpler than DNA evolution, because DNA evolution had billions of years to collect all
00:27:11.820
sorts of like clever tricks and hooks and like fixes for things. But cultural evolution is just
00:27:18.780
new and simple. And so it's really just very basic variation and selection.
00:27:23.340
Yeah, the analogy that we use in the book, The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion,
00:27:27.420
which is 100% on this topic, is we argue that culture is an evolving software that sits on top
00:27:33.020
of our biological hardware and can adapt to environmental constraints much faster than the hardware can.
00:27:38.780
Right. Now, the framing I want you to see, though, is an analogy to driving a car.
00:27:45.020
Like, so when you're driving a car, you have a control system. You look and see the road ahead
00:27:50.300
and you see where the road turns. And then you're supposed to see the road, think about where you
00:27:55.740
want to be, tell your hands to turn the wheel, the wheel turns the, you know, the wheel turns the tires
00:28:01.340
and then the tires moves the car. And each of these things has parameters in terms of the delay
00:28:07.180
and sort of the noise. And that should be compared to like how fast you're going down the road and how
00:28:12.140
fast the road's changing. So if your parameters of how fast you notice things and how noisy you
00:28:18.140
see things are too bad, you won't be able to stay on the road and you'll just go off the road.
00:28:23.340
If you drive slowly enough and see the road well enough, you can follow the road,
00:28:27.180
but otherwise you go off. And the same sort of parameter comparison should be there for cultural
00:28:31.660
evolution. Cultural evolution is this process where there's a distribution of cultures
00:28:37.100
and there's some sort of distribution of fitness landscape. And the fitness landscape is actually
00:28:42.220
going to be moving a bit. And these points on the landscape are also going to be fluctuating around
00:28:46.620
a bit. And the cloud of points will follow the fitness landscape as it moves if the parameters are
00:28:55.900
right. That is, if you have enough points, if the pressure to like, you know, when you have the
00:29:03.420
more adaptive region that the pressure, you know, those things grow faster, those things shrink,
00:29:08.300
then the drift rate is low enough. And the rate at which the landscape changes is low enough, then
00:29:13.580
selection can follow it as the cloud of points will follow the landscape as it moves if the parameters
00:29:19.900
are right for cultural evolution. And then the thing to notice is the parameters have changed.
00:29:26.060
So three centuries ago, the world had hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures,
00:29:32.780
each of which had a thousand or two thousand people in it that were really pretty independent.
00:29:37.180
They didn't trade that much with each other or do that much. They each little cousin culture mostly
00:29:41.260
was self-sufficient and they were poor at the edge of survival. So they suffered famines and pandemics
00:29:48.220
and wars all the time. And they were conservative. They didn't want to change very much. They tried to stay
00:29:53.500
near as they were. And the environment was changing slowly. So, you know, the world economy doubled roughly
00:29:57.980
every thousand years up until a few centuries ago. And so that's a stable situation for the cloud of
00:30:05.020
cultures to follow the adaptive landscape. Slow change, conservative change, lots of variety and
00:30:12.620
strong selection pressures. And now in the last few centuries, we've changed all four of these parameters.
00:30:17.740
So we first merged peasant cultures into national cultures. So there's a famous book, Peasants into
00:30:26.060
Frenchmen describing that in France, but that happened everywhere. And then afterwards, these
00:30:30.460
different national cultures have merged into a global monoculture, as you're all aware. So the variety
00:30:36.700
has gone way, way down. And then if you look at selection pressures, cultures just don't die very
00:30:43.260
much anymore from war or pandemic or famine because we're rich, we're healthy, we're at peace. And so,
00:30:50.220
you know, there's just very little selection. And now the environment is changing very fast.
00:30:54.540
That is what behaviors are adaptive is rapidly changing as the economy grows. And then added all
00:31:02.460
to that, we have this internal random change process. We have cultural activists who are
00:31:06.780
trying to change culture, like you guys are trying to do. And they have fights over which way culture
00:31:12.940
goes. And some of them win the fights and others lose. And the winners are our greatest heroes in our
00:31:17.420
world, cultural activists who fought for cultural change. But the fights and who wins them aren't very
00:31:23.340
aligned with adaptive pressures. So from the point of view of the system, it's kind of, it's a random
00:31:28.380
drift. It's a, it's a lot of random fluctuation. So fast changing environment, a lot of random drift,
00:31:34.700
not much selection, far less variety. That's a recipe for going off the road.
00:31:40.940
It's it. So the, the, the, the addition to your model that I would add, and we talk about this a lot
00:31:46.220
in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion is culture should be thought of as broadly being in two
00:31:51.100
categories. First, we use with a lot of data to argue historically that cultures should largely
00:31:57.580
be thought of as religious groups. Like that's the easiest historically, they're mostly religions
00:32:02.620
and that they mostly grew not through conversions, but by affecting fertility rates of populations.
00:32:08.460
They literally enhance the biological fitness of their hosts. And that in modern times,
00:32:14.380
we've had cultural parasites evolve that were not that common in evolutionary history,
00:32:21.100
essentially in the same way that you can get parrot, like super bugs in hospitals where you have a bunch
00:32:25.900
of immunocompromised people all next to each other. If you have a bunch of people outside of an
00:32:30.220
environment that is anything like the environment, their culture evolved in, in like city, you're going
00:32:35.100
to get the environment of aliens, which realize that they can grow faster by motivating a person to
00:32:43.900
almost like a virus infecting an ant, ignore your own reproduction, just replicate the meme,
00:32:49.660
just replicate the meme, just replicate the meme. And we argue that this is what the urban monoculture
00:32:55.420
is. So we've got sort of a double whammy here, which is what you pointed out, which is very astute,
00:33:02.060
which is called the environment that the culture needs to optimize fertility within is entirely
00:33:09.100
different than the environment it evolved within. But now you also have these parasitic attacking,
00:33:17.340
they're not even like, it's like you're surrounded by wolves. You're basically sending your child
00:33:21.180
into like a den of wolves every day and hoping they make it back out because the wolves can only survive
00:33:26.940
because of their low fertility rate by taking the children from other cultures.
00:33:30.940
And, and that this is as bad as the change in modernity.
00:33:39.420
So this, this field of cultural evolution, these experts do find the ways that cultural evolution
00:33:44.780
go wrong. And one of them, as you say, the more you inherit from people other than your DNA parents,
00:33:50.220
the more ways that things can be inherited that aren't promoting, you know, DNA reproduction. And that's one of
00:33:57.420
the ways that can go wrong. Another way it can, it's known to be able to go wrong is the key idea
00:34:02.700
is if you just copy random previous generation people, it doesn't help. You have to be selective
00:34:08.060
about copy who you copy to be better than average. And our main simple heuristic is to copy prestige,
00:34:14.220
copy status. But if the status markers we use are maladaptive, then the whole thing can go maladaptive.
00:34:21.340
So one story is that we got into this habit of using education as a status marker.
00:34:27.820
And so we copy the behavior of the well-educated, but they have lower fertility because it takes
00:34:33.180
longer to be well-educated. So that's a driver for lower fertility is to, because the status
00:34:38.300
marker is maladaptive. So status markers can just evolve and become maladaptive. And then it takes a
00:34:44.220
longer process for, you know, the whole society to be selected out to replace it.
00:34:49.180
Yeah. Well, I mean, I could argue that education isn't intrinsically maladaptive. Education is
00:34:53.420
maladaptive in our culture because it's one, how we relate to it. And two, because it's infected with
00:34:57.580
the urban monoculture at a much higher rate than any other cultural center. And the urban monoculture
00:35:03.020
focused on evolutionary pressures, just like everything else. It overly focused on the educational
00:35:08.620
centers because the iterations of it that did were better at spreading themselves. If you have access to
00:35:13.020
young minds, people generally convert from their birth culture between the ages of 13 and 22.
00:35:18.380
And so if you have access to them during those age ranges, like a lot of people have been with
00:35:23.180
the urban monoculture, like, Hey, trans people lay off kids. Like, why are you being so creepy about
00:35:27.020
this? I mean, it's because the iterations of the trans culture that weren't didn't spread and don't
00:35:32.620
exist anymore because you can really only get someone at that very young age range. In addition,
00:35:38.220
they started to focus on tactics that we see was in cults due to cultural evolution.
00:35:42.700
Like convincing people to hate their support network, like their parents to their family,
00:35:47.740
their, their ancestors, because it's much easier to, to, to convert them into a different religion.
00:35:52.380
If you, if you do this, but anyway, continue. I'm interested.
00:35:55.820
So I want to make a distinction here that like takes a little work, but it helps us to think about
00:36:00.140
these things. So think about species and biology. Okay. There's two levels of evolution that happens
00:36:06.860
in biology with species. There's evolution of features within a species, things that can change within a
00:36:11.660
species. And there's evolution of the features that define a species. Now, when you have large
00:36:17.420
habitats, like a big ocean region, you have fewer, bigger species, and they have faster evolution of
00:36:24.700
the features that can vary within a species because the species is bigger and innovations can appear
00:36:28.780
anywhere and spread to the whole rest. But you have less innovation of the features that define a
00:36:33.260
species because there aren't so many. In a fragmented habitat, like a river, a rainforest, or, or a coral
00:36:40.380
reef, you have lots of little habitats. And so you have lots of smaller species and that makes less
00:36:45.500
evolution within the species, but better evolution of the species of the features that define a species.
00:36:50.540
Now it turns out life on arts today, it came more from the fragmented places, which means that
00:36:57.580
evolution of the features that define a species actually matters more than the evolution of the features that
00:37:02.620
can vary within a species, surprisingly. Interesting. The same thing homes for corporate cultures.
00:37:08.220
So corporations, you know, some innovations can spread within a company, and then the bigger the
00:37:12.780
company is, the better you can evolve those iterations. And many kinds of things that can be
00:37:17.260
patented are of that form. So bigger companies have more patents. And so an industry that has fewer
00:37:23.340
bigger firms is better at patenting and producing the innovations that can vary within a firm. But industries
00:37:30.380
that are more fragmented, that have more smaller firms, are more innovative overall, because they can better
00:37:38.700
innovate in the corporate culture features that define the whole corporation, that you need a whole new
00:37:45.180
corporation to experiment with those. And so the same thing should happen with macro cultures. And you see, many
00:37:51.580
people are fooled by the fact that we have record economic growth today, say. But that's because when we merged the
00:37:58.380
entire world into one big monoculture, we have great evolution of the things that can vary within the monoculture,
00:38:04.940
like technology and business practices. So those are going gangbusters. We have record ever rates of
00:38:11.660
innovation and business practices and technology. But at the expense of much weaker or even regressive
00:38:19.260
evolution of the features that are shared across the culture, like the ones we were going through.
00:38:23.660
The major cultural features that are causing fertility decline are the kind that it's hard for a small
00:38:29.100
group to deviate from the world consensus on. If you say you don't want to value education, but the world
00:38:35.020
does, you just get less education. But now the world disrespects you and you suffer. You can't just make
00:38:40.940
a group of people who all say, we don't care about education. We're going to care about each other.
00:38:44.220
That's hard to me. That's interesting. Yes. So if you were going to craft a culture to combat this,
00:38:54.620
what features would it have? Well, I like the analogy of you're on a ship heading to an iceberg.
00:39:01.340
You've got two choices. You turn the whole ship or you get off on icebergs.
00:39:06.940
I'm not an iceberg. Off on icebergs. Sorry. Off on icebergs. It won't make any sense.
00:39:13.420
So if you are mixed in with our global culture, you need to help us change the whole global culture
00:39:21.740
in order for us to not fall off the cliff, hit the iceberg. Or you need to form a new subculture
00:39:28.780
that's insular enough to actually deviate from the dominant culture. And that's hard. So that's,
00:39:35.020
for example, what the Amish or Heretim have succeeded in doing, which is really amazing.
00:39:39.100
They've created not only insular, they've created subcultures that only have high fertility and
00:39:43.180
double every 20 years, they're insular enough to be able to resist the outside influence.
00:39:46.940
And that's in part by foregoing many kinds of technology and contact. And that's a really high
00:39:52.220
bar. So if you have a small, if you have a small group of people saying, we want to make a new
00:39:55.580
subculture here. The key question, as I've talked to you guys about before, is how insular do you think you
00:40:02.140
could actually be? Well, I think that it's possible, and this is a hypothesis, that it is
00:40:08.060
possible to craft a culture that can interact with technology and mainstream culture and not deconvert.
00:40:14.300
And if anyone can do this, that person owns the future. Because that person is going to have
00:40:20.140
automated drone swarms and everyone else is going to have AKs. So like the Amish do use technology,
00:40:27.180
they just resist the technology that would put them in cultural context. So they have like,
00:40:31.340
they switch to small businesses, they use machines in their small businesses, they use, you know,
00:40:35.500
tractors, they use trucks, they use, you know, all sorts of machines that don't threaten to give
00:40:41.500
them cultural influence. Some, some do, some do not, not all. But yeah, right. So interestingly,
00:40:48.700
like far, the Amish were farmers up into a generation ago. And then the last generation,
00:40:52.380
they made the switch to be mainly rural small business, which is quite a substantial change.
00:40:56.620
And it does risk their insularity and fertility, but they seem to be making a go of it.
00:41:02.220
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm concerned about that. I I've read that
00:41:06.220
from some people who've had more exposure to the communities than we have, that those who are
00:41:10.940
adopting more technology are also seeing a fall off in the stability of their communities,
00:41:16.620
their marriages, their, their birth rates. That's the risk to worry about. Yes.
00:41:19.820
Yeah. There's a great study on this, Simone, that looked at Pennsylvania and Dutch speakers in the,
00:41:24.060
in the U S and then whether or not they had cell phones. And if they had cell phones,
00:41:28.780
they had fairly low fertility rates. And if they didn't, they had fairly high fertility rates.
00:41:32.940
So like their community, isn't that resistant to, to cultural mimetic viruses.
00:41:40.460
So I watched some videos on like Hutterites. And one of the stories you see over and over is that
00:41:45.500
like, if you want a local doctor, then he has to be sent off to a medical school. And then when he
00:41:51.420
comes back, he's less likely to stay. And so I think that's really the main reason they are pacifist.
00:41:56.860
They just don't want their young men to go off and mix with other young men in the military. I
00:42:00.380
think when they're big enough to have their own military units, they'll be fine.
00:42:03.980
I mean, from a cultural evolution perspective, it would be the iterations of the Anabaptist traditions
00:42:10.060
that weren't pacifist had their men interact with other men in militaries and disappeared.
00:42:13.500
Right. I never thought why so many of them were, that makes sense.
00:42:19.420
So it's almost like the same as avoiding university, you're saying?
00:42:21.900
Yes. Right. Like avoiding being a medical student. So they actually have trouble getting their own
00:42:26.140
doctors. They were going to go to a non-Amish doctor or Hutterite doctor, because it's hard
00:42:30.140
to have their own doctors because to send their own boys off to medical school and get them to actually
00:42:35.820
Okay. That makes sense. Wow. Okay. That's super interesting.
00:42:40.940
That's really clever. Yeah. Okay. But it shows you what you're up against here.
00:42:44.940
Trying to have a small subculture. Let's call it cult. The world actually could use more
00:42:48.860
cults and let's just call it cults. It really could. Yeah.
00:42:51.740
But it's hard to maintain a cult. Most small cults just die and don't last very long.
00:42:55.580
Yeah. And the hard part here, if you want to do the lifeboat strategy, as opposed to turn the ship,
00:42:59.820
you've got to find a way to keep the lifeboat intact and away from the ship. And that's quite
00:43:07.660
I might push back against the concept. A lot of people are like, oh, you know, you guys are starting
00:43:12.140
your own weird religion or whatever, like that, that most of those die. I'd actually argue if you
00:43:17.260
look historically, that's not really true. Most religions are, if you look at like cults, cults,
00:43:22.940
if they were founded for like personal gain or something like that, most of them die.
00:43:27.180
But the ones that were not founded for personal gain, actually fairly frequently are persistent.
00:43:34.380
There is not a, unless, now there's a few, unless it's here, unless they were celibate,
00:43:41.020
Or they were founded around a fad that was temporarily locked. So these are often tied to like
00:43:50.940
There's a literature that I recall on, looks at communes in the United States from the 1800s.
00:43:56.620
Yeah. And how they varied in the intensity of the religions that were organized around.
00:44:02.780
Right. High ask religions lasted longer than low ask religions.
00:44:07.660
Yeah. And so basically, don't be afraid to do a strong ask
00:44:12.540
in terms of what the cult or culture is asking of its participants, because that's in fact,
00:44:17.580
high asks will make you people more stay with religion.
00:44:21.020
Yeah. In the privateist guide to crafting your religion, we compare them from like hard to soft
00:44:25.580
to super soft cultures with hard cultures, making the most asks, doing the most othering,
00:44:30.860
but also having the most cultural amenities that are really beneficial because often the hardness of
00:44:35.580
these cultures is accompanied by really helpful amenities like, okay, an ask might be a lot of
00:44:41.820
fasting days, but those fasting days help you develop inhibitory control. And there are other
00:44:45.900
health benefits as well. A big ask might be, well, you have to communicate, you have to contribute
00:44:49.900
all these things to community, but you may be contributing childcare to families that enables
00:44:53.180
them to have more kids, which is a huge amenity for them. And they wouldn't want to leave that
00:44:56.300
vaccinated childcare. So that there's that, that weird correlation that also that the more weird
00:45:02.940
you are in your culture, we really like this concept of othering is I think, you know, because
00:45:07.260
we like our weird names and weird dress and weird behavior because it stops you. It makes you see
00:45:12.940
yourself as distinct from mainstream culture and have some pride in that negative emotional
00:45:17.740
moments with mainstream culture. Like people are like, oh, you name your kids weird things.
00:45:21.180
Won't they be mocked in school? And I'm like, that's a good thing. You want them to dislike
00:45:26.140
the urban monoculture. Yeah. So I did some surveys a while ago and had some conversations with some
00:45:32.540
people who are into multicultural. And I think people agreed with the following description.
00:45:36.940
A lot of people in our world like the idea of multiculturalism when they think of it as different
00:45:41.340
foods and dress and holidays and myths. And, you know, in ways you build your houses,
00:45:47.020
they love that kind of multiculturalism and different TV shows, different, you know,
00:45:51.500
different song genres. Right. Yeah. When you talk about multiculturalism as having deep values of the
00:45:57.100
sort we talked about that are driving fertility change, like gender equality or war or democracy,
00:46:01.980
people hate the idea of that kind of multiculturalism. They don't want that kind. They're
00:46:07.020
particularly against it. So that's, you know, the kind of the obstacle here is the world is so
00:46:12.140
into shallow multiculturalism and really aggressively against deep multiculturalism.
00:46:17.980
So I think about COVID, there were one or two nations in the world that deviated from the world
00:46:22.380
consensus about how to do COVID. And everybody else in the world is like heretics, terrible,
00:46:26.380
like, you know, string them up. How do we allow, how do we dare allow Sweden to have a different
00:46:30.380
COVID policy than everybody else? Because, you know. Oh, that was such a thing.
00:46:34.540
No, I love this, but we have a theory on this. So if you look at the urban monoculture,
00:46:39.100
which is, I think is what's driving this view of multiculturalism, they will say above all else,
00:46:44.300
like multiculturalism is good. And then I'm like, okay, so like in Africa, are you okay?
00:46:49.980
Was there like marriage structure? They're like, no, their gender roles are all wrong. Are you okay?
00:46:53.900
Was there sexuality? No, no, that's all wrong. Are you okay? Was the way they view morality? No,
00:46:58.300
that's all wrong. Are you okay? Was the way they view religion? Oh, well, that's all wrong.
00:47:02.300
And what I realized after a while, and I always was like, why, why even does diversity have value
00:47:06.940
if everyone's secretly the same? Like it wouldn't. What they mean by valuing diversity is that they
00:47:13.420
value a diversity in victims. They value a diversity in people that they convert to their
00:47:20.220
imperialistic cultural practices and not in maintaining actual diversity. Because the odd
00:47:26.540
thing about the urban monoculture is it lets you superficially identify as like a Muslim or a
00:47:31.660
Christian, but you can't have Muslim or Christian views about like gay people. You can't have Muslim
00:47:36.780
or Christian views about like a wife's role in the family. So yeah.
00:47:41.420
So in the long run, we have the success that if we eventually spread across the stars,
00:47:47.420
the distances will ensure cultural diversity. Thank goodness.
00:47:50.780
The long delays will in fact mean that different places have different cultures and they just can't
00:47:54.940
stop that. But if that's several centuries away, the question is how can we manage between now and
00:48:00.060
then? Because in the next time, we will have, again, the high rates of communication, trade, talk,
00:48:07.660
trade, you know, travel are just seem like those costs are not going to go way up anymore. And so you
00:48:13.580
have to artificially limit them if you're going to. And most people really enjoy all the, you know,
00:48:19.980
connection with the world that we have. So even if I try to imagine asking a few friends to like,
00:48:25.820
can we, you and I just like isolate ourselves and live on an island and not talk to anybody else.
00:48:29.660
Yeah. That's going to, that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we even have so many friends
00:48:34.460
who've been like, Hey, let's all just like move to this one place and build a community together.
00:48:39.100
And people have even started that they've purchased property and they can't get anyone to move out.
00:48:42.860
Or people are like, ah, you know, it's, oh, I don't really feel like it.
00:48:46.620
I'm sure you've seen this a hundred times. People trying to start coming in.
00:48:49.340
I actually joined a cult when I was a tween. So I have an emotional inside view of, of cults.
00:48:58.300
Did they live together? I was in San Diego and it was a local Pentecostal religious cult. And I sort
00:49:04.940
of attended their meetings and they had meetings at group houses and they had some compound in Iowa
00:49:09.420
that I never went to, but basically I could feel emotionally what it was like to be in a cult.
00:49:15.820
And I can see the appeal. So I think ever since then, I understand at a visceral level,
00:49:20.540
what is, what the appeal is. Well, what was it that drew you in? I mean, especially as a teen boy.
00:49:25.900
Tween, really. Tween boy. Yeah. Right. Well, the idea was just, they included you. They loved you.
00:49:33.740
They wanted the best for you and they were going to, you know, help you if they could. That sense of
00:49:39.020
belonging and mutual support was very attractive. And then of course they had a mission and they had a,
00:49:44.300
a reason they were special and that, that motivated them and gave, gave them meaning.
00:49:50.300
And that's all very attractive, even to like, you know, 12 year old me who grew up in our
00:49:55.500
shared culture, but we don't offer that so much to most people.
00:50:00.060
Yeah. And that was just appealing. But you know, after, I don't know, six months or a year,
00:50:03.980
my parents said, you can't go there anymore. We don't like them. And I just, okay, fine.
00:50:07.820
So I didn't fight my parents or rebel too much. I'm, I'm, but I, but basically I still remember
00:50:13.740
what it felt like. And it is a strong appeal, but you can see most people just, yeah.
00:50:20.700
The very idea of what I'm saying for most people goes, that sounds pretty icky. Yeah.
00:50:24.540
And that's part of the modern culture is that is to disapprove of that.
00:50:27.820
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't just simultaneously love bomb you with their tactics. And if you joined
00:50:35.260
their process. Interesting history is that roughly a century or century and a half ago,
00:50:42.860
cultural elites in our societies realized consciously that they had drifted away from some
00:50:49.340
more stable culture that they had come from. And they then called themselves modernists.
00:50:54.540
And they said they were in a modern era. What they meant by that literally was
00:50:58.140
the one thing we're sure of is we don't want to go back to the culture of a century ago that our
00:51:03.260
grandparents had. That's clearly what we don't want. We want to go somewhere new. We don't know where
00:51:06.780
that is. And we're going to explore the space of possible writing styles and paintings and
00:51:11.180
architecture and songs and everything else. And they celebrated this search for something new,
00:51:16.460
but they were, they knew they were unanchored. And that was part of their description of,
00:51:20.060
we don't know what we really value here. And then in the middle of the 20th century,
00:51:24.780
World War one and two became a moral anchor for a lot of the world.
00:51:28.620
That's the one thing they decided they knew we are anti-Nazi. We don't know what else,
00:51:32.700
So we're more American. And then it became capitalism?
00:51:34.700
And then there was anti-sexism, anti-racism, and lots of things like there, but also anti-communism
00:51:42.780
But still, a lot of our world is still modernist in the sense that we value this idea that we are
00:51:47.260
just moving in the space of possible cultures, and we're not saying still. And that's what gives a
00:51:52.060
lot of energy to cultural activism is this idea that our current culture couldn't possibly be the
00:51:57.900
right one. Surely we need to find a new one to move to because that's who we are. We're the
00:52:05.420
I feel like that even might have started with deism. And then you sort of see this,
00:52:11.100
like with a lot of the founding fathers being deists, if I'm not completely misremembering
00:52:14.940
everything terribly. And we kind of had this vision and it kind of also dovetailed with the
00:52:19.420
development of American democracy, representative democracy, but it just never, the follow through
00:52:25.420
just fell apart and it was sort of allowed to degrade. And it was never really, it never really
00:52:30.540
turned into the thing it was roughly in some fever dream meant to be. I would argue that
00:52:37.820
what Malcolm is trying to create with techno puritanism is very much driven by that. It's
00:52:41.740
like this idea of the belief in an Abrahamic Christian Judeo God, but just technically scientifically
00:52:49.980
correct that like Malcolm's trying to pick up where the deists left off, even from a governance
00:52:54.140
perspective of like, let's also try to create the most optimal governance format. I just think that
00:52:59.180
it's really hard to do these things on a societal and especially collaborative level, because what
00:53:03.340
you saw with the founding fathers is like a couple of great minds came together. You know, you had a
00:53:07.340
lot of people sort of like, like these battling sub stacks with the federalist papers and all these
00:53:11.500
like thought leaders being like, Oh, I think this, and I think this, and they're all talking about it.
00:53:15.100
It's just that there wasn't this ability to take all these threads and knit them together.
00:53:19.900
And I still don't know how that is going to happen. But it could be that in the face of demographic
00:53:25.900
collapse and the civilizational collapse that we see as a result of a fumbled demographic collapse,
00:53:31.100
you know, like countries basically not being able to handle their crumbling infrastructure and social
00:53:37.180
systems that we will see city states that do have enough of a coherent narrative and grip of what
00:53:43.100
they want their deism or like religion or culture to be that they can actually pull it off and build
00:53:49.580
a city upon a hill that actually sticks. I don't know.
00:53:54.780
I think a lot will have to be some level of believing in things that's just not really
00:54:00.060
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I feel like we've, there was certainly this era for the past decade or
00:54:06.620
so where everyone had to be ironic because to be too earnest was seen as cringe. I feel like we've
00:54:13.100
come into a new era where earnestness gets a premium and people are getting social credit for
00:54:19.500
that even when it is very cringe. So maybe now is time for faith. Now, now is our comeback.
00:54:25.980
So I want to summarize what I've been arguing here because I hear a new argument. So I said
00:54:31.660
fertility is being caused by a number of cultural trends and that plausibly is caused by this larger
00:54:36.700
cultural process of drift away from what was used to be adaptive culture. And that's a really hard
00:54:42.060
problem to fix. We can understand in terms of these parameters, but it's really hard to change
00:54:47.020
these parameters. One would be add more cultural variety. And I guess that's the one you're pursuing.
00:54:52.140
Like, can you make just separate insular subcultures and produce more variety that way? And I definitely
00:54:57.820
hope you succeed, but it does seem like a difficult thing to do. The other solutions we can try to think
00:55:03.820
of to change these other parameters are also just big asks and difficult. So my overall conclusion is we
00:55:09.740
actually don't know how to solve this problem and plausible. If we don't solve this problem,
00:55:14.380
our civilization just does decline until if something else rises again. And that's happened
00:55:23.180
many times before. So we shouldn't think we're that special that it can't happen to us.
00:55:27.100
We should hope to try to prevent it and see what we can do instead. And I, you know, I wish you all the
00:55:33.180
luck in producing some insular subculture that can rise like the Amish and Haredim are doing and
00:55:39.020
replace the current culture. And look, in some sense, if some of these, if a proven successful
00:55:44.460
culture would be willing to take on, you know, converts, I might consider converting because I think
00:55:49.980
I don't want to fall down with the world culture and collapse. I want to be part of something that's
00:55:54.540
rising, even if I have to compromise for it, you know, tell me what the compromises I have to make,
00:55:58.940
but they're not really open to converts. That's part of the wise choice they have to say this is
00:56:05.100
I would argue that the last time this happened, when they had the collapse last time, there was
00:56:10.460
this successful new culture and it's what today we call Christians. And it was just like a cult.
00:56:15.580
Everyone thought of them as like a cult. Until they got too big to call them names.
00:56:19.820
And they, they had like crazy ideas. They, they would feed themselves to lions. Like,
00:56:24.700
come on. Like that's a cult by modern standards. And they, they took the babies. Other people left
00:56:29.180
for exposure to the animals and they took and raised them. Yeah. Like they were weird. These
00:56:34.220
crazy people. We, we often, one of the lines I love is tacticus. He complained that Jews wouldn't
00:56:42.380
expose babies. And I'm like, what a, what an inversion of blood libel there. Like these horrible Jews,
00:56:48.460
they don't expose babies. But you, you know, there was a cult that, that, that, that came out of
00:56:54.460
Judaism and they took over the world. And that I think when we look at what does the group that's
00:57:00.860
going to replace the urban monoculture look like, we should look at what were the ways that the early
00:57:05.980
Christians were different. And it wasn't like the Amish or something. You basically had a big
00:57:10.780
competition between the Christians and the, the military mystery cults. But I think that that's what
00:57:16.220
we're going to have within our time. The mystery cults are the people who are like, let's go back
00:57:19.420
to tradition. And the Christians are the people who are like, no, here's this new thing. Let's like
00:57:24.060
meet and innovate. I don't know how to predict what's, who's going to win, but I can look the
00:57:31.820
insular fertile subcultures have a number of interesting features in common. At least today,
00:57:35.820
they're all heavily religious. They're also very decentralized. I think that's an important thing
00:57:39.820
to notice. They each have governance of a scale of roughly a hundred people and there's no higher
00:57:43.500
governance that can control them. And I think that's, that protects them against some of them
00:57:47.340
making mistakes. Say the Mormons did not do that. They had more centralized governments.
00:57:52.060
And then when they centralized governments make a mistake, it takes them all down. So
00:57:55.580
they're also, you know, pacifist, which I think is keeping them insular. They're also relatively low
00:58:00.060
tech. They don't let their kids go off and learn very specialized tech. That means they have to go to
00:58:03.580
some separate schools to learn it. And they are very egalitarian, honestly. And you know, they,
00:58:10.220
they put that people, they don't wear extra fancy, the higher status people don't wear extra fancy
00:58:14.460
clothes or things like that. And I think that also is, you know, so just looking at the correlation,
00:58:19.740
it seems like don't deviate too far from what's working, make your own special formula, but like
00:58:26.540
take most of the stuff that seems to be working and try to just innovate in a few areas. That would be
00:58:31.740
my main, my main recommendation for all innovation is that there's a pile of innovators who have to
00:58:36.060
innovate on every dimension. And that's crazy. So I was, I was a part of a group called Xanadu
00:58:41.820
a long time ago. And there were all these very creative people who were inventing the worldwide
00:58:45.900
web. And then they had to be creative about everything. And that just took them down.
00:58:51.020
Yes. I remember that was the Silicon Valley group, right?
00:58:58.540
Well, at one point they might've, it was a company to make the worldwide web. It was before the
00:59:02.620
worldwide web. This was the late 1980s where my web showed up like in the 90, you know, 93,
00:59:09.340
and they were trying to create an alternative version of the worldwide web. And I went off to
00:59:12.620
Silicon Valley to hang out and be with them in 84. And, but they just had to be creative about
00:59:17.580
everything. And later on, I've gone back to Silicon Valley, see some other groups like that. They,
00:59:21.420
they just, they're so creative, have so many ideas that they want to just try new ideas on all the
00:59:26.140
different aspects of their organizations. And if you think about it, that's just not going to work.
00:59:30.060
Yeah. The follow through is, is very important.
00:59:32.460
You need to pick your few best ideas to for change and package that with conservative
00:59:37.740
choices on the other dimensions. Yeah. Commit then and follow through.
00:59:41.660
And then that gives you your best shot. You might, you know, it may still be a long shot,
00:59:45.180
but your best shot for any idea is to package it with conservative parameters on all the other,
00:59:50.300
on the other dimensions you have. So I said, that's what I suggest for you choose your key
00:59:55.500
radical things, but then go along with the way the Amish are right. Do it on the
00:59:59.900
other ones. Don't deviate too far. Like be pacifist, perhaps.
01:00:03.580
It makes sense. Well, we won't be pacifists. No, I think we need to, I mean, I think if you go
01:00:10.300
the pacifist route, when the Pax de Romana of the urban monoculture falls, you get wiped out.
01:00:14.780
Well, you have to be ready to switch when you're big enough.
01:00:18.700
Armed pacifists. Sovereign armed pacifists is the key, I guess. Don't send out your people. No,
01:00:25.820
no outsourcing, no integrating. That's an interesting concept is, is defensive pacifism.
01:00:30.780
I've never heard of it before, but I think it's, it's a, it's a clever one.
01:00:33.980
But I just never thought about what you pointed out, Robin, that was like
01:00:37.500
medical school or military. This is probably going to cause some problems. That is, that is
01:00:41.580
so fascinating. It has been wonderful to have you on.
01:00:44.300
Yes. Thank you so much. Every time you tackle something, it's so brilliant. And we were just
01:00:48.940
talking about this. Like, it's very, it's people like you who come across with these theories that
01:00:53.900
are not only like cross disciplinary and all over the place, but like memeable and understandable
01:00:59.900
are so rare. So it's, it's a privilege and please keep going. Keep, keep coming up with new stuff.
01:01:04.940
All right. Well, thank you. I'm honored. And until we talk again, I guess.
01:01:09.180
Looking forward to it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Okay.