Robin Hanson： Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per minute
197.9173
Harmful content
Misogyny
17
sentences flagged
Toxicity
9
sentences flagged
Hate speech
32
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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
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about to stop. To do this with our kids is put together a discord like thing with parents who have kids
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around our kids age who are like based and interesting and like the most successful people
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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
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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
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choice versus marriage. People seem to choose their careers much earlier in life than they choose
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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
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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.
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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
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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
0.97
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,
0.99
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
0.99
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,
0.85
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.
1.00
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
0.86
00:34:33.180
longer to be well-educated. So that's a driver for lower fertility is to, because the status
0.99
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
0.89
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
1.00
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,
1.00
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
0.98
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,
0.87
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,
0.99
00:46:26.380
like, you know, string them up. How do we allow, how do we dare allow Sweden to have a different
0.96
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?
0.97
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
0.93
00:47:31.660
Christian, but you can't have Muslim or Christian views about like gay people. You can't have Muslim
1.00
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
1.00
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.
1.00
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
0.79
00:56:42.380
expose babies. And I'm like, what a, what an inversion of blood libel there. Like these horrible Jews,
1.00
00:56:48.460
they don't expose babies. But you, you know, there was a cult that, that, that, that came out of
0.99
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
1.00
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
1.00
00:57:10.780
competition between the Christians and the, the military mystery cults. But I think that that's what
0.97
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
1.00
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,
1.00
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
0.99
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,
0.99
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.