The Auron MacIntyre Show - Can Modern Societies Reproduce Themselves？｜ Guest： Geoffrey Miller ｜ 7⧸25⧸25

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:07.440 We hear over and over again about the fertility collapse, the crisis of modern civilizations that seem to be able to build amazing wonders but have a very difficult time reproducing families.

00:00:19.420 Is there something about modernity that impacts human reproduction? Are there different pressures, different selection criteria that are being expressed in these situations?

00:00:29.360 Joining me to talk about that today is Jeffrey Miller. He is a professor over at the University of New Mexico. He's an author and he's also an expert in evolutionary psychology. Thank you for joining me.

00:00:41.340 Great to be here, Ron.

00:00:43.140 Absolutely. We're also going to get into artificial intelligence, which is something that Jeffrey and I have gone back and forth on a number of times. Really interested to pick his brain on both subjects.

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00:02:15.500 All right, Jeffrey.

00:02:16.600 So like I said, we have a very obvious problem, I think, to a lot of people.

00:02:21.280 We have an issue where the more we advance, the more our societies seem to get complex and create all these amazing things.

00:02:29.300 We also have a serious problem with being able to reproduce that civilization.

00:02:34.480 A lot of people look at the numbers and panic, but I guess the first thing before we decide what we should do about this problem is, is it a problem?

00:02:41.880 Is this a real phenomenon that we should be worried about or do civilizations simply go through this increase and decrease in children?

00:02:49.840 What is the problem here?

00:02:51.160 Is there even a problem?

00:02:53.420 It's a huge problem.

00:02:54.900 I mean, civilizations continue through genetic transmission and cultural transmission.

00:03:00.960 And if you're not transmitting your genes to the next generation and creating new people, your civilization dies out.

00:03:06.860 And that has happened, you know, many, many times throughout history.

00:03:11.020 The key thing now with modernity, I think contraception is central, right?

00:03:16.100 Young people are still having sex to some degree, not as much as in previous decades.

00:03:21.280 But they're still having sex.

00:03:22.600 It's just not resulting in babies because of contraception. 0.77

00:03:24.940 So we've got what we call an evolutionary mismatch, right, where we have these instincts still to find a partner, have sex, form a relationship maybe, you know, hopefully find a soulmate.

00:03:39.580 But if you're cutting the link between having sex and having babies, then fertility collapses.

00:03:47.980 And this is a problem worldwide.

00:03:50.340 It's not just America.

00:03:51.660 It's not just Western Europe.

00:03:53.440 Every single place where you get increasing education and increasing use of contraception, it's a problem.

00:04:01.380 I think this is the conclusion that Mary Harrington came to in her great book, Feminism Against Progress, that ultimately we're struggling with a technological development that has had these downstream effects on the rest of our society.

00:04:16.920 And we haven't really decided what to do about it.

00:04:19.320 The fact that we've turned female fertility to off as the default setting changes a lot about human existence.

00:04:27.740 However, I will say this.

00:04:29.520 I think there's a lot of truth to that.

00:04:31.500 It makes perfect sense on a certain level.

00:04:33.700 However, as you point out, we have seen this in other societies.

00:04:38.060 Roman society very famously had great fertility problems.

00:04:42.060 A number of Roman emperors, including Augustus, end up trying to legislate a way to have more children, right?

00:04:49.640 We have to increase virtue and make sure that Romans are producing more Romans. 0.99

00:04:53.640 Roman women are more virtuous so they'll have more children. 1.00

00:04:56.360 So while our current crisis does seem to have a large technological component, this seems to have been somewhat of a spiritual crisis or a civilizational cycle that occurs whether we have this particular type of technology or not.

00:05:12.060 I think it is partly a cultural and spiritual crisis because, look, one of the few exceptions to the demographic collapse is Israel is still doing pretty well, right, in terms of fertility rate being closer.

00:05:26.960 Even though theirs is still dropping too, right?

00:05:28.660 They're just doing better than everyone else.

00:05:30.220 It's still dropping.

00:05:30.920 But, you know, part of it is a peer pressure effect.

00:05:33.960 If you're in a society where it's normal for people to get married in their early 20s and you're kind of expected and you're under a certain amount of pressure to have at least two, three, four kids, right?

00:05:45.060 And everybody you know is doing it.

00:05:47.900 And, like, if you're in graduate school, it's normal to do that.

00:05:51.580 And, like, humans are very sheeple-like in this regard that if you go through your 20s and you're, you know, working in some career that requires a huge amount of workaholism and dedication, law, medicine, academia, whatever,

00:06:07.960 you just kind of think, oh, man, I should spend my 20s just, you know, building up my prestige, my status, my income, and not even worry about family formation until your 30s.

00:06:20.780 But that is the path towards insufficient fertility.

00:06:25.320 It just, it doesn't work.

00:06:26.860 It's, so, like, when I accept PhD students, I give them a little pep talk, right, when they come to my university.

00:06:35.560 I'm like, I'm pronatalist.

00:06:37.980 If you want to have kids in grad school, I am going to support you as best I can.

00:06:42.980 This is actually not a bad time to have kids because you have enormous flexibility if you're doing, like, a PhD to allocate your time the way you see fit.

00:06:52.300 You can get leads of absence.

00:06:53.800 You can work around it.

00:06:55.600 Whereas, man, once you get a tenure-track job in academia and you're pumping out publications, building your lab, applying for grants, you just don't have time to manage young kids.

00:07:08.660 So I think there's a mismatch, you know, of sexual instincts versus having babies, the contraception addresses.

00:07:18.080 But there's also a kind of social mismatch between careers and family formation.

00:07:23.340 It's just sort of a bad timing issue.

00:07:25.920 So you mentioned Israel being different among developed nations, and I think it is important to look at that example, though some people are going to hem and haw in the comments, because ultimately, you know, one of the issues that drives that, or at least in my mind, something that gives that a high degree of status in that society is the idea that this is a society that is fighting for its existence.

00:07:48.800 It has a specific, explicit ethno-religious dimension that allows us to say, we have to continue, and so therefore, that social duty permeates even throughout a more advanced society where other factors might drive them towards having less children.

00:08:07.200 And so, in a way, the fact that they are allowed to maintain a very particular type of identity that is taboo in other first world nations, I think drives a lot of that outcome.

00:08:20.980 I think that's right.

00:08:21.920 And, you know, in other videos that I've seen of yours, you mentioned how multiculturalism itself tends to favor the development of a bigger, more totalitarian state. 0.70

00:08:32.860 But I think another problem with multiculturalism is it sort of dilutes the concern with fertility that more sort of ethno-nationalist states like Israel, or also like, you know, the Han Chinese in China face, because they feel like we're all in this together.

00:08:50.400 Our fate, our fate, the fate of our bloodline, our ancestry, our descendants, rises or falls with our local community and our civilization.

00:09:02.240 And my sense is that in modern America, like the idea that you have a moral duty to find a good mate early and have a bunch of kids would be treated as absolutely taboo, right, as it would be stigmatized.

00:09:18.180 So I think that that's what to learn from the Israel example.

00:09:23.380 If you have a real sense that you have external enemies, right, and you have a cohesive civilization with shared values, then you're just much more inclined to give respect and prestige to people who are pronatalist, who have a bunch of kids. 0.79

00:09:40.920 Yeah, well, this is, I could be wrong, but wasn't this something that Robert Putnam discovered as well, that the increase in multiculturalism drives down birth rates among the native population?

00:09:51.980 Yeah, it drives down social trust and engagement with civic society, but it also seems to drive down birth rates.

00:09:57.480 So I wonder about another factor.

00:10:01.060 I think I'd call this, you know, there's probably some social science name for it, but I'd call it the Stryver effect, where you have a large number of people in the lower classes having children and you have people in the upper classes having children.

00:10:15.260 But what you see is that a lot of people trying to make that transition into the upper middle class stop having children because it is too difficult to move between classes and they have to dedicate a large amount of resources.

00:10:28.040 The lower classes don't care.

00:10:29.280 They weren't going to ascend anyway, so there's no irresponsibility in having a larger amount of children.

00:10:34.160 The upper classes can afford additional help where they have things that are sadly now considered luxury items like the ability to stay at home as a mother.

00:10:44.260 And so it's really the people in the middle there, the wider the gap gets in the ability to transition the class, the harder it becomes for people who are trying to do so to continue to have children and you get this drop off in the middle.

00:10:56.020 Yeah, I think that's right, and you get just this whole narrative, particularly on social media that, oh, I just, I can't afford to have kids, house prices are going up, earnings aren't going up, like we're all impoverished, blah, blah, blah.

00:11:12.000 But like if you look at GDP per capita in America or Western Europe, it keeps going up, like people are still getting more affluent.

00:11:19.860 And yes, it's hard to have this sort of space that you might want if you're living in a fertility desert like Brooklyn or West Hollywood, right, where, you know, yeah, houses cost $2 or $3 million in Brooklyn. 0.81

00:11:35.480 Okay, don't live in Brooklyn, right, if you want kids, move.

00:11:40.760 I know people who have done that.

00:11:42.060 But what people seem to think is bottom line, right, for a lot of Gen Zs and millennials is my personal status and prestige is more important than my bloodline, right?

00:11:57.100 That's getting down to brass tacks.

00:11:59.880 That's the decision that a lot of people are making when they say, I would rather go into one of these kind of winner-take-all careers like medicine, law, academia, finance, whatever, and do that striving.

00:12:11.100 And, you know, try to make it.

00:12:15.340 And it's like, no, you don't have to do that.

00:12:18.440 Because look, once you have kids, you will go into parent mode.

00:12:23.800 And the meaning that you get in life will be mostly from your kids and your partner and parenting together.

00:12:30.260 And you'll reconnect with your own parents because now they're grandparents, blah, blah, blah.

00:12:35.000 And so people just have this inability to imagine, like, family life being happy and fulfilling, right, versus their status-seeking, their runaway status-seeking that they're doing in their careers.

00:12:50.520 But I think this is a problem that we see over and over again that is very difficult to solve to get people to understand that value.

00:13:00.900 And what we end up with is the situation where we have these large cities or universities, you know, just these population centers, and they skim all the IQ off of the top of the country.

00:13:12.500 They draw them into these centers, and then they just shred it, right?

00:13:15.940 These just become IQ shredders because they, you know, are financializing the economy or something rather than passing on their genes.

00:13:23.240 And so South Korea is going to make way more, have a much better GDP than North Korea.

00:13:28.820 It will also cease to exist before North Korea.

00:13:31.320 And so the economic factor, the line going up, the GDP, you know, is obviously insufficient.

00:13:37.560 I mean, you're making a point which I think is valid that, look, you know, when people were extremely poor, they had eight children, and you have much more money now, but you're saying you can't afford to have children.

00:13:48.140 However, there has to be another dynamic to this because otherwise we wouldn't see people continuously even getting ridiculously rich and still burning their IQ in these IQ shredders.

00:13:58.140 There has to be another incentive structure that's driving it.

00:14:01.780 Yeah, I like this term IQ shredder.

00:14:03.800 And, you know, I've worked in academia for a long time, and I used to think of academia as mostly it's a center for collecting and passing along and disseminating knowledge.

00:14:13.660 But if you see the dark side, right, that it attracts highly talented people, it burns through their most fertile years, right?

00:14:23.980 And it shreds their IQ at a kind of multi-generational level, right?

00:14:29.960 It's kind of tragic.

00:14:31.840 That's a very dark view of universities.

00:14:34.300 It's also a very dark view of cities.

00:14:36.880 And ever since the Middle Ages, right, as people migrate from rural areas into cities, often their fertility drops as soon as they get into the cities, right?

00:14:47.080 Survival rates all partly because of plagues and infectious disease.

00:14:51.260 So I have very, very mixed feelings about both kind of big cities as cultural meccas and universities as knowledge meccas because this is the, you know, the unintended side effect is that it just burns through fertile years at a massive scale.

00:15:11.620 So I guess the question becomes at this point, is this just the effect of modernity?

00:15:19.200 We've already talked about the, you know, contraception and that technological advancement, but whether we're seeing this as a particular instance of a technological advancement or we're seeing this as a larger life cycle of civilizations, is modernity kind of the great filter?

00:15:34.040 Is this why we're not running into aliens out there?

00:15:36.200 Because once you hit a certain complexity of societies, do you just naturally start crashing your birth rate no matter what you do?

00:15:42.980 Because I know there are governments like Hungary and others that have worked to heavily incentivize childbirth and that's had some positive effect, but nothing near what it would take to actually reverse these trends.

00:15:54.020 Is this something that we can't even change or is there a point at which intelligence or at least a level of technological advancement is actually an evolutionary downside where it actually starts working against us?

00:16:07.880 Yeah, and I've been thinking about this for a long time.

00:16:11.240 I mean, in 2001, I published my first book, The Mating Mind, which analyzed sort of how sexual selection through mate choice shaped human evolution over the last few million years, right?

00:16:20.340 And then in 2008, I published this book, Spent, that tried to analyze kind of runaway consumerism and runaway status-seeking and careerism, partly to analyze why aren't people having kids?

00:16:34.200 Why are they over-investing in conspicuous careerism and workaholism and status-seeking and consumerism and not in family formation?

00:16:46.420 And I actually published a piece in 2007 on the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, and I posited that as technology gets better and better, entertainment technology in particular, like video games or virtual reality, it will get better and better at feeding our brains what I call fake fitness cues, which is the mistaken impression that we are doing very well.

00:17:10.240 Like, oh, I'm vanquishing my enemies in Call of Duty, or I'm building fake civilizations in the game Civilization, or I have AI waifus or fake sexual partners, AI girlfriends, whatever.

00:17:24.760 And that can be a massive distraction from actually forming families.

00:17:29.440 So I think that is probably one of the great filters.

00:17:35.220 The ray of hope, the light at the end of the tunnel there, in both the Spent book and my Fermi Paradox piece was there's going to be a subset, some niche subcultures that resist that kind of entertainment technology, that resist the runaway sensation-seeking.

00:17:55.960 And they'll probably be mostly religious fundamentalists, right, or pronatalists of one sort or another, and they'll make a conscious decision to reject basically modernity, but particularly in the form of interactive, addictive entertainment systems.

00:18:12.280 And they'll go, we care more about having kids.

00:18:14.480 And then fast forward 1,000 years, right, and humanity will be descended mostly from those people. 0.96

00:18:22.600 Yeah.

00:18:23.240 No, that was going to be my next question is, are we at an evolutionary bottleneck where instead of selecting for fitness and the ability to maintain a calorie count, we're actually now selecting for the ability to reject the simulacrum, right?

00:18:37.580 To throw the Skinner box out, is that going to be the new most important thing that develops from, you know, many people look at this as the time of abundance, but will it be seen as the moment in which humanity actually pivoted the way that it selects for and understands success in mating?

00:18:56.100 Because it's got to choose not only how to make it through a specific disease or grow enough wheat, but how to actually avoid the traps that it's made for its own brain.

00:19:07.800 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:19:09.200 I think it could easily be a civilizational and genetic bottleneck.

00:19:13.300 Like one thing I loved about the TV series, The Expanse, is the notion that the people who build the multi-generational starship to get to another star system to start colonizing the galaxy are the Mormons, right? 0.96

00:19:29.260 The Mormons get their act together because they have the long view, right? 0.94

00:19:33.920 They want to be humans actually colonizing the galaxy and not just like AI robot probes.

00:19:40.200 And that's their priority.

00:19:41.980 And everybody else is kind of just running around doing their, you know, their status seeking and their conflict and their warfare and whatever.

00:19:48.320 And meanwhile, it's various forms of religious fundamentalism that provide the kind of scaffolding for pronatalism.

00:20:00.860 So anyone who's playing their Oren bingo card right now knew I was going to mention this.

00:20:05.720 So you can just go ahead and take your spot.

00:20:07.160 If you won something, let me know.

00:20:08.780 I'll award the prizes at the end.

00:20:11.140 So Oswald Spangler is one of my favorite thinkers.

00:20:15.200 And one of the things, well, I guess two things come to mind.

00:20:18.700 One is he understood us as a Faustian civilization, one which would always and ever need to expand.

00:20:25.180 And this constant drive to expand was going to take us to if we got to the end of exploring a space, we would create new spaces, right?

00:20:32.640 We would create them out of whole cloth so we could continue to go.

00:20:36.120 And so in many ways, the end of the frontier for the Faustian man required a digital frontier because we have to consume and explore and expand something.

00:20:45.060 And so I wonder if this is a specific cultural I mean, I think this is a general human trait, but it is very pronounced in a particular cultural form with a Faustian man.

00:20:56.160 And then my second question based on Spangler would be he also believed that civilizations go through life cycles, morphological life cycles.

00:21:04.600 And that in in the winter, you usually see basically the idea of motherhood fall out of fashion.

00:21:12.880 It becomes no longer something that grants status.

00:21:15.800 And once having a family becomes a conscious decision, that's basically the end of your civilization.

00:21:21.580 Like you just hit the clock starting because once it's no longer a classic rhythm of life, you're going to run into this problem until basically you run out of children.

00:21:31.600 And the only way that this ever solves itself is basically what he called a return to the land where everyone becomes simpler again, where civilization more or less unwinds itself.

00:21:41.380 People don't it doesn't necessarily have to collapse so much as people no longer attend to it in any serious way.

00:21:47.100 And it decays over time.

00:21:48.740 And people simply return back to the rhythms of life because the complex society required to create the incentive structure that reduced births basically just wears away.

00:21:57.960 I mean, if you have a society where it requires a heroic individual decision to say nobody else I know.

00:22:27.860 Nobody else I know is getting married in their 20s, but I'm going to do it.

00:22:31.180 Nobody else I know in my 20s is having kids, but I'm going to do it.

00:22:36.360 That guarantees failure as a civilization.

00:22:40.120 So you can't just rely on kind of appealing to individual decision making, right?

00:22:48.940 Because it's just way too easy for kind of neoliberal economists to go, well, having kids is really expensive and it'll interfere with your career and it'll reduce GDP per capita. 0.87

00:22:58.160 And like, here's all the economic reasons why continuing your bloodline doesn't make economic sense.

00:23:03.700 And it's hard to buck against that, right?

00:23:08.820 If you don't listen to like podcasts like yours or you, you know, don't read Spengler or whatever, we need much more of a social consensus, right?

00:23:21.640 Like existed in the 50s and 60s, early 60s, right?

00:23:26.360 That said, it's normal.

00:23:28.440 It's normal to find a mate and have kids and to do it pretty early.

00:23:33.900 So I guess the next question is, is there a solution here beyond just moving through the bottleneck?

00:23:42.160 Obviously, that selection is going to occur.

00:23:44.900 Sure, you've already said that, you know, religious fundamentalist religious communities, very serious religious communities are going to have a big advantage in this.

00:23:56.060 You're also part of a, I guess you call it the rationalist community.

00:23:59.400 Is that probably the right term?

00:24:01.400 And a lot of people in the rationalist community have had different solutions to this because in many cases they find it difficult to be traditionally religious.

00:24:10.040 And so some of them have decided to manufacture their own religion that will encourage the production.

00:24:16.940 Some have decided for alternative formations and all these other things.

00:24:21.300 Is there a way to socially engineer the birth rate or does it have to be organic? 0.77

00:24:26.320 Is it something that must come from outside the rationalist mind, something like a religion or a strong nationalist identity that creates those incentives apart from any kind of rationalist dictate?

00:24:40.040 Or is there really a way to just science yourself through this issue?

00:24:50.280 That's actually a very deep question and I'm not totally sure.

00:24:53.680 I mean, there's one kind of pathway that I've seen many young men take, right?

00:24:59.440 They're smart, they go to college, they discover rationalism, they discover like less wrong.

00:25:05.700 They start reading Eliezer Yudkowsky, they become Bayesians, they start to analyze everything in very kind of utilitarian terms.

00:25:13.640 That doesn't actually work very well for them in terms of delivering meaning and value to their lives.

00:25:18.560 And then they become post-rationalist, right?

00:25:21.560 Which means they kind of rediscover tradition and conservative thinkers and sometimes rediscover religion.

00:25:27.580 I know people have gone from being like hardcore new atheists to like joining the Russian Orthodox Church, right?

00:25:35.200 And becoming preppers and moving to Kentucky and like finding a wife and having five kids.

00:25:40.820 So like that's a path that one can take.

00:25:45.240 It's not like millions of people are doing it though.

00:25:48.220 So how do you change the culture?

00:25:50.640 Well, certain people have enormous amounts of power.

00:25:53.800 Like if Elon Musk actually prioritized pronatalism, right?

00:25:59.800 Rather than prioritizing AI and X and SpaceX and all that, he could have an enormous influence, right?

00:26:09.720 Even if certain influential celebrities, right, became role models for like, I'm actually Mel Gibson, right?

00:26:21.420 He got canceled hard multiple times, but he's got like nine kids, right?

00:26:25.220 And he's worth about $400 million.

00:26:26.880 And if he wasn't absolutely kind of like stigmatized and blacklisted by Hollywood, right?

00:26:33.960 And if people have paid attention to what Mel Gibson has to say, then he could be kind of like a pronatalist icon, right?

00:26:43.380 So certain individuals have the power to change the culture.

00:26:45.900 And then others of us, like I guess you and me, are trying to do it at a kind of more grassroots, like humble, bottom-up kind of level and just spread ideas that we hope will get taken up and appreciated by people.

00:27:00.200 Do you think ultimately that this is something that governments are going to get more proactive about?

00:27:09.900 Like I said, we've seen the Hungarian government.

00:27:13.200 Other governments have pushed large amounts of immigration as the solution to this, which we've already talked about is it's just feeding the monster because not only are you reducing the chance that your native population will have children because you're increasing diversity, 0.97

00:27:30.840 but you're also importing a lot of people who will immediately drop their fertility rate the minute they move into your country and experience the impact of modernity in your country.

00:27:42.180 And so you're just importing a large number of people who themselves will cease having children. 0.52

00:27:47.340 So it's an extremely, extremely temporary solution.

00:27:50.440 Do you think that we're going to see kind of a reverse one-child policy from a number of nations as these problems build?

00:27:58.800 Or is this a problem that governments simply cannot outrun?

00:28:04.860 In principle, governments could do a good job of this.

00:28:07.940 But in practice, I think most government bureaucrats and think tanks and policy wonks are very captured by a sort of very narrow economist mindset about what really matters, right?

00:28:20.680 GDP, Uber, all is, right?

00:28:23.160 I actually know a colleague, Professor Norm Lee, who's at Singapore Management University.

00:28:28.220 And he's talking directly with Singapore government about how do we increase birth rate in Singapore.

00:28:34.560 It's been a huge problem, like Lee Kuan Yew, founder of Singapore, worried about it for decades and kind of gave up on fixing it.

00:28:42.700 They're the most classic IQ shredder available.

00:28:45.120 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:46.260 And the trouble is, I think governments are paying a lot more attention to economists than to, let's say, evolutionary psychologists or evolutionary geneticists

00:28:57.500 or people who are actually used to thinking in terms of inheritance and ancestry and descendants and the continuity of life across generations.

00:29:07.420 Economists just don't think that way. 0.73

00:29:10.280 And when they, like economist Gary Becker, it's ridiculous, right?

00:29:15.040 They just don't understand marriage, kids, family formation. 0.72

00:29:19.420 So I'm rather pessimistic about governments having the types of brains needed to solve this.

00:29:28.940 So that takes me to my next question because I wanted to think about it this way.

00:29:33.120 We know the problem is the lack of perpetuation of these societies, but the choice to slow down and deprioritize economic concerns or the geopolitical protection of power is often seen as a step away from the race to global hegemon, right?

00:29:51.180 And if there's one thing about the metaphysics of power, we know it's that power always wants to centralize power, always seeks to expand its control.

00:29:59.020 And so the short term incentive for governments is always to fight for that hegemony and ignore the long term prospects of their population.

00:30:09.020 Is there a pivotal moment at which sheer ability to reproduce is going to outrun economic success or technological advancement?

00:30:18.420 Because that seems to have been the solution so far.

00:30:21.480 I can automate my way out of this.

00:30:24.020 I can create new AI.

00:30:25.260 I can create a robot.

00:30:26.440 I can create a better weapon.

00:30:28.100 Something about financializing my economy a little more is going to bring me exponential advantages that populations simply won't leverage.

00:30:36.460 But will we ever hit a moment where perhaps the lack of marginal utility in these other advancements will fall behind the core need to produce a population?

00:30:51.020 I think you're right.

00:30:52.480 I think that's a major failure mode.

00:30:54.040 If you have governments that are run by leaders and thinkers and policy wonks who are just thinking in terms of geopolitical competition, right, in the relatively short term, like Russia, China, the US, what's going to happen in the next 10 years?

00:31:10.760 How many aircraft carriers should we build? 0.95

00:31:12.460 That sucks all the energy and time and money and thought out of these broader, longer scale, like civilizational, pronatalist issues.

00:31:26.800 And I think at a certain point, you know, you need a culture that empowers voters to rise up and say, dudes, we don't actually care about America being number one in terms of geopolitical military hegemony.

00:31:44.500 We don't care about that.

00:31:46.140 We want to have kids.

00:31:47.520 We want our bloodlines not to die out.

00:31:50.660 I want my parents to be grandparents of a lovely set of grandkids.

00:31:57.240 That's what we care about.

00:31:59.300 And your little hubris-driven fantasies of world domination are no longer of interest to me.

00:32:07.860 Now, I think to some degree, right, the election and then re-election of Trump was a push in that direction, right, to say it's okay for America to be great, but not necessarily to be the world-dominating superpower of the world's policeman.

00:32:23.200 But, man, it's hard for any individual politician to push back against the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies that are just used to sort of like, well, the serious business of government is global hegemony, right?

00:32:41.500 And if you're not on board with that, you're, you know, a trivial and superficial thinker.

00:32:48.780 Well, Tucker Carlson has been somebody who I think has been pushing this message very much among conservatives.

00:32:57.020 You know, for a very, my entire life, I was a talk radio conservative.

00:33:00.000 I believed all the things you would expect from a Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Sean Hannity listener.

00:33:06.320 And I spouted all of those, you know, bromides.

00:33:09.400 And one of the things that, you know, Tucker Carlson has been pointing out, if you want to conserve anything, you have to care about families.

00:33:16.340 You have to care about the ability of your children to have children.

00:33:18.860 That is actually the only thing that matters.

00:33:21.040 It is the only thing worth conserving.

00:33:22.500 And so I think that message is starting to really speak to people.

00:33:28.220 However, we're running into a serious problem.

00:33:31.320 A lot of people are looking at, you know, these successful quasi-communist politicians like, is it Zoran Mamdani in New York and others, you know, talking about the need.

00:33:47.240 And yeah, exactly.

00:33:48.540 Yeah, many others.

00:33:49.640 And so they're starting to panic and they don't understand because they say, look, we know communism fails.

00:33:54.800 We know communism fails.

00:33:56.560 How could you support this?

00:33:58.000 How could you go after this?

00:33:59.280 And, you know, the answer that Tucker Carlson has given, and I agree with, is, look, if you create a system where people cannot have children, it doesn't matter how irrational the other systems are.

00:34:10.700 They will overthrow your system and they will embrace those systems because what they do know for sure is that the system they are in right now is not producing the outcome necessary for them to perpetuate themselves, which is like the most basic drive of most human beings.

00:34:25.620 And so is a big part of the attempt by young people to explore socialism and communism, are they just economically naive, are they brainwashed by the progressive system, or is this a deeper revolt against a system that is keeping them from reproducing?

00:34:41.980 I mean, to psychoanalyze Gen Z and younger millennials a little bit, and I can do that because I'm a psych professor, so I am a licensed psychologist, right?

00:34:52.960 A lot of young people are like, there's a hole in my soul.

00:34:55.920 There's a dark patch in my life.

00:34:59.720 There's a lack of meaning, right?

00:35:01.680 And I am told that this is because of, what, some external enemy.

00:35:08.040 This is because of capitalism.

00:35:09.640 This is because of careerism.

00:35:10.940 This is because of, you know, runaway environmental degradation.

00:35:14.440 This is because of climate change, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:35:17.400 And they don't realize if they have kids, surprise, surprise, that wound in their soul would heal, right?

00:35:25.760 And their drive to be useful, to be empathic, would finally get channeled where it's supposed to be channeled, to their kids and their mate and their extended family.

00:35:38.640 And voila, meaning flowers in their lives.

00:35:43.480 Now, if you don't do that, if you go through your 20s and you don't have kids, you don't find a mate, yeah, it's not fulfilling.

00:35:51.100 And so you're extremely susceptible to any cult out there, right?

00:35:56.600 And the first rule of every cult, right, is you, at least short-term cults, you discourage marriage and kids because you want all energy to be directed into proselytizing the cult, right?

00:36:12.320 You don't want it to be, and same with communism, right?

00:36:15.240 One-child policy, or preferably no kids.

00:36:18.840 Just spread the ideology instead of spreading your genes.

00:36:23.260 So, yeah, I think there's a susceptibility to extremist ideologies, and I think the counterweight to that is pronatalism.

00:36:31.940 So, speaking of adherence to radical ideologies, one of the most concerning trends, and again, this is not just America, South Korea famously has this very badly, men and women basically separating into different political parties, right?

00:36:47.420 We're creating this scenario where, and I've said this, you can tell me if you think there's any truth to this, I think men are trying to replace women with technology and women are trying to replace men with the state. 0.68

00:36:58.440 And so this is why you're seeing the extreme split into these different political parties, again, not just in the United States, but other developed nations as well.

00:37:07.080 There seems to be an incentive, especially in these kind of liberal democracies, you need to divide, right?

00:37:15.200 The political incentive is to wedge, wedge, wedge.

00:37:17.440 Every time you break apart a classic traditional bond, you release energy that can then be consumed by the state and by other entities inside society to maintain the things that were once functions of traditional units like the family.

00:37:30.940 And so by dividing families, and this was, you know, a lot of anti, anti, why can I suddenly not remember it?

00:37:41.300 Anyway, those who opposed the 19th Amendment who were female said the issue, suffragettes, there we go. 1.00

00:37:46.360 So the reason that they voiced was they were afraid that it would break the family apart, that it would divide the family, that the men and women would have different interests.

00:37:55.180 This was, of course, seen as quaint and backwards at the time.

00:37:57.320 But it's very clear that we are manifesting this by no longer understanding the basic unit of society as the family, but instead the individual.

00:38:07.060 We've created an incentive structure where individuals go to separate political parties and lobby them to replace the other sex rather than taking the time to invest in and build those structures that undergrids society. 0.95

00:38:20.680 Yeah, so I think that's partly right.

00:38:23.440 I think the young women are going to anti-Trump rallies while the young men are going to OnlyFans and Pornhub.

00:38:30.120 I mean, I think it's great women have the vote, but it is kind of funny that, like, my own parents spent 50 years canceling out each other's votes.

00:38:38.060 They voted every single election.

00:38:39.940 My dad was staunch anti-communist Republican.

00:38:42.340 My mom was kind of a bleeding-heart liberal Democrat. 1.00

00:38:45.520 But at least they provided a role model of civic engagement for me.

00:38:49.560 I think a particularly toxic thing, though, is, like, the actual differences between the sexes, yes, they're significant and they're growing, but there's still a large number, tens of millions of young people who could actually get along with a mate if they found one.

00:39:11.020 And, yeah, maybe the male, on average, is a little more conservative on lots of issues than the woman, but instead we get the polarization amplified on social media with the manosphere preaching to young men that all women are insane, woke, liberal AOC supporters, right? 0.76

00:39:31.200 And the gender feminists preaching to young women that all men are witless Trump MAGA supporters, right? 0.92

00:39:38.260 And that's just not true.

00:39:40.320 So, you know, one problem, I don't know if we can pivot a little bit to, like, dating apps, but some dating apps exacerbate this problem, right?

00:39:50.740 Like, OKCupid used to be a great dating app about 10, 12 years ago, but then 2015, 2016, the owners of OKCupid basically said, we hate Trump.

00:40:03.460 We are going to game the algorithm and game the preferences that you can express on this dating app to make it very, very easy for young women to avoid any conservative men, right?

00:40:16.260 We're going to make it possible to politically filter in the dating app for anybody who's, like, MAGA supporter.

00:40:23.360 And it succeeded, and it broke OKCupid, and now it's, like, dropped in its ranking as a dating app.

00:40:30.240 And I think we need maybe to discover new ways using technology to kind of allow the centrist or at least reasonable young people to find each other more effectively.

00:40:46.260 Well, that's a good thing to move to because, you know, I wonder, as you point out, the majority of mate finding has now moved to these apps.

00:40:59.020 And, you know, it used to be that there was a large amount of intermediate institutions where people would pair up.

00:41:06.460 Obviously, arranged marriages existed, but also you had churches, you had civic organizations, you had all these third places that people would regularly congregate in, and those would normally create some sort of sorting mechanism that would then allow people to find people of like mind, like values, similar goals, these kind of things, and allow them to move forward in a positive way in their dating experience.

00:41:32.680 Because today, we have stigmatized almost all public approaches when it comes to dating.

00:41:39.520 You're not allowed to talk to each other.

00:41:41.260 You're not allowed to look at each other.

00:41:42.660 If you do, you might end up on social media because you were looking at a girl at the gym or you were embarrassing yourself by talking to a man who wasn't interested.

00:41:50.700 Like, these are all, you know, this constant surveillance and this constant ability to be rejected, not just by the individual who you were pursuing, but society at large for trying to, you know, show interest is itself just this devastating thing.

00:42:06.400 And so everyone has been driven to these dating apps, especially because most people now would have met people through work.

00:42:12.380 But even that is now so incredibly taboo because one slip up at work and now you've destroyed both of your careers along with your dating life.

00:42:20.780 And so the dating app is kind of the only place to go.

00:42:24.720 But I'm very worried about this.

00:42:26.260 I'm sure some dating apps are better than others.

00:42:28.540 And perhaps this is just old man shaking fist at sky.

00:42:31.720 But I do feel like this is another instance of the simulacrum, right?

00:42:36.020 If we place an algorithm, no matter how ethical we try to pretend the algorithm is, between us and mate selection, we're putting an artificial intelligence between us and our actual choices here.

00:42:48.520 We're putting someone else's influence.

00:42:50.260 We're putting a hyper agent between us and where we're going to move both genetically and socially and spiritually.

00:42:57.180 And I don't know if this is an actual solution so much as a temporary band-aid and a problem that's going to continue to be exacerbated by the way that we're managing our society.

00:43:08.840 Yeah, I think those are legit concerns.

00:43:10.920 And most dating apps so far have, like, economic incentives that are not at all aligned with the, you know, reproductive interests of their customers and users and clients, right?

00:43:22.200 So if you sign up for a Tinder or a Hinge and you're paying your monthly fee, right, they have an incentive for you not ever to find a marriage partner, right?

00:43:30.320 Because that means you're no longer a user.

00:43:32.200 You're not in the mating market anymore.

00:43:33.780 They can't monetize you.

00:43:34.800 So you need a dating app that has economic incentives on the part of the actual app, you know, developers that are aligned with the interests of the users in much the same way that when parents were kind of scouting around the neighborhood and the church looking for, like, a possible future son-in-law, daughter-in-law for their own kids, right?

00:43:59.140 They have their genetic interests very much aligned with those of their kids, right?

00:44:04.640 And, of course, the kids never really appreciated that, right?

00:44:07.520 But what you ideally want is a kind of return to both real-life matchmaking in the sense that parents rediscover, right, their agency and their wisdom in terms of helping to guide their kids into finding a good mate.

00:44:29.500 And they use their social network and their professional network to, like, identify those potential mates and make introductions, right?

00:44:38.560 And this isn't arranged marriage.

00:44:40.500 This is facilitated matchmaking, right?

00:44:43.600 It's nobody saying to the daughter, you have to marry this, like, old wealthy guy so this family can inherit the land or we can make a medieval political allegiance, right?

00:44:54.180 It's just, like, the people who care about you, your family and friends are kind of your scouts, right?

00:45:00.860 They're looking out for potential mates out there.

00:45:04.440 And the great advantage parents have, right, compared to, like, a 22-year-old looking is the parents know their own kids better than the kids know themselves at that point, right?

00:45:16.220 The parents often have a much more accurate view of, like, the actual intelligence level, the personality traits, the mental health quirks, the objective attractiveness of their own kids.

00:45:29.720 And the kids are often just actually quite delusional about a lot of these things.

00:45:35.640 So I think, you know, part of the answer is encouraging extended families to be more assertive and support your kids' marriage and family formation and not just support their education and careers.

00:45:52.080 Well, we are already stacking up a number of questions, and I haven't even gotten to the other subject I wanted to discuss with you, which is artificial intelligence.

00:46:02.040 So maybe we have to break that.

00:46:04.080 Maybe we can do this again and break that into its own discussion, because I definitely wanted to pick your brain on this.

00:46:09.420 We've crossed paths in that discussion many times, and that is something that I definitely want to explore, but we might have timed out on this one.

00:46:16.980 And so before we go to the questions of the people, is there anything you want people to check out?

00:46:22.560 I know you've got several books.

00:46:24.800 Is there anything you want to direct people towards?

00:46:28.520 Yeah, I've got a bunch of six books or something.

00:46:31.960 I mean, the things people might be interested in most is if you're kind of into where did humans come from and why did we evolve the way we did?

00:46:40.540 The Mating Mind book from 2001 is good.

00:46:43.020 If you're curious about how could you take a kind of evolutionary psychology perspective on careerism and consumerism and kind of modern culture, my spent book is good.

00:46:54.800 If you want dating advice, I did a book with Tucker Max called Mate in 2015.

00:47:00.780 And I also did a little edited collection of essays called Virtue Signaling, Darwinian Politics and Free Speech.

00:47:08.300 So you can check those out.

00:47:09.580 I'm also doing some consulting work with a new dating app called Keeper, and Keeper is explicitly about helping young people find serious marriage partners and having kids.

00:47:22.020 And it's like the anti-Tinder, right?

00:47:24.400 It's really trying to solve this demographic collapse problem.

00:47:29.420 Well, certainly hope that you are successful there.

00:47:31.360 Like I said, I don't know if those are ultimately the solution, but if there is at least one app that is aligned properly, that certainly can't hurt in that regard.

00:47:40.120 So, guys, please make sure that you are checking out Mr. Miller's work.

00:47:43.520 And let's head over to the questions of the people real quick here.

00:47:47.500 Philosophical Thirstworm says, it's rough out there.

00:47:49.680 I'm well off with a house, but I've lost two girlfriends, two millionaires.

00:47:53.560 And one of those guys lost her to a richer millionaire.

00:47:57.120 Yeah, no, nothing.

00:48:00.480 It's, of course, a lot of this is who you're reaching out to, of course, again, you know, but yeah, it's it's obviously a situation where I mean, we didn't even get into all the incentives there.

00:48:13.840 But there are very few guys competing for a larger pool of women at this time.

00:48:20.780 The dynamics have changed with the breaking away of, you know, kind of a more culturally asserted monogamy.

00:48:27.740 And so that I think that's an experience a lot of men are having these days.

00:48:31.280 Yeah, I think it's it's just important to remember that, you know, for both men and women, wealth was only invented a few thousand years ago.

00:48:44.180 And when our ancestors were choosing their mates, they were focusing on traits that actually predicted, like long term ability to survive and raise kids, which were like intelligence, conscientiousness, emotional stability.

00:48:57.820 In the modern world, to some degree, right, the ability to earn income is a signal of those traits.

00:49:06.180 Right. And that's one reason why it's valued.

00:49:08.060 So it's it's not fair to say women are just, you know, materialistic gold diggers. 1.00

00:49:13.280 Often what they're doing is like they're using wealth as a proxy for those other traits.

00:49:17.640 But one thing we emphasize again and again and again, really hard in the mate book is there are other ways to show those desired traits beyond wealth.

00:49:26.500 And a lot of young men, it's weird, like they'll put huge amounts of effort into maximizing their future expected income.

00:49:34.420 And they'll put like zero effort into their artistic skills, their sense of humor, their musical skills, their conversational skills, all the stuff that's like ordinary, everyday indicators of intelligence and talent.

00:49:50.100 George Hayduke says it is to be understood as an essential metaphysical turn towards death.

00:49:55.280 Nothing availed to check the process.

00:49:57.760 Oswald Spangler.

00:49:58.620 Yep, that was the passage that I was referencing there.

00:50:02.360 Yep.

00:50:02.500 Florida Henry says, is it now better for North Korea as a people to not join South Korea?

00:50:10.680 I mean, I know this sounds like a joke, but it's it's something I think about a lot.

00:50:14.020 You know, we have a society that is far more liberal, far more wealthy, far more, you know, the rights of the people respected, all these things, all the things that you and I would probably select for when selecting a society to live in.

00:50:29.420 And it's losing and it's losing badly.

00:50:31.920 Exactly. And so, you know, I have to, you know, wonder, you look at these different societies and I wouldn't want to live in them, but who's going to win Afghanistan or the UK? 0.98

00:50:42.140 Right. Who's going to win North Korea or South Korea?

00:50:45.460 All of these things that we think of as indicators of civilization and affluence and, you know, being a productive society.

00:50:53.860 And it is the gradient at which we want our society to move towards these things.

00:50:58.420 They're all the things that ultimately seem to bring about ruin in this way, at least to some degree.

00:51:02.920 Yeah, I mean, you could imagine a very edgy propaganda campaign against immigration like to America that says to like the middle aged and grandparents in other countries.

00:51:18.140 Just be aware, if you send your young people to America, we are the IQ shredder, we are the gene shredder. 0.64

00:51:24.260 You will not have nearly as many grandkids or great grandkids as you would if they stayed near you, right, in your local village where there is support and there's more of a pronatalist culture. 0.94

00:51:35.940 And in a way, it's unbelievable to me that so many middle aged parents in these developing countries are like, oh, I want a better life for my kids, so they should go to a first world country. 0.65

00:51:49.460 Well, yeah, a better life, but then no more next generation lives. 1.00

00:51:54.920 Right.

00:51:55.740 Yeah.

00:51:56.240 No, it's a continual problem.

00:51:59.760 And again, you don't want to say, oh, well, you're better off in these scenarios.

00:52:04.160 But, you know, on the long term, what will be around?

00:52:07.760 You know, just the basic question, not would I even want to live there, but just will that civilization continue or not seems to be a real question for many of the civilizations that we think of as the most advanced and the ones you would like to live in the most.

00:52:21.020 Machiavelli sucks, says we have to stop caring too much on how women feel.

00:52:26.100 Of course, having a baby is inconvenient and takes a year. 0.99

00:52:30.180 Well, I don't think that's going to be a message that sells.

00:52:32.580 So you might we might want to rethink your pitch on this one.

00:52:36.440 If anything, I think the way that you'd want to phrase that and, you know, Jeffrey can tell me if I think that's right or not.

00:52:41.720 You need to elevate the status of women having children. 1.00

00:52:44.640 You need to start having caretaking motherhood, you know, the binding of social activities that women often fulfill. 1.00

00:52:51.240 Well, you have to you have to find a way for that, because all of this is status at the end of the day.

00:52:55.960 Right. The women, the reason that men and women don't have children. 1.00

00:52:58.600 Yes, it's hard and everything else, but they would do the hard things.

00:53:01.120 They do other hard things if they think it's going to get them status.

00:53:03.660 The reason they don't have kids, the reason they go out of their way, they act as if having a child is like cancer.

00:53:08.460 It's because it reduces their status and their earning potential, which also reduces their status.

00:53:13.600 And so I think rather than just being like, well, don't cry, women, this is going to be inconvenient for you.

00:53:19.000 Of course, you have to find a way to properly incentivize women. 1.00

00:53:22.580 And that's going to come in some way tied to elevating the status of women who do go through this process. 0.99

00:53:29.520 Yeah, I think the collapse of babysitting as something that teenage girls do is partly responsible for this. 0.68

00:53:35.640 Like when I was growing up, I'm Gen X, right?

00:53:38.380 So I grew up in the 70s and 80s.

00:53:40.840 Every girl I knew in high school, every girlfriend I had, had been a babysitter.

00:53:45.140 They'd had experience taking care of babies and toddlers.

00:53:48.200 They knew like, oh, it's challenging at first, but you do get used to it.

00:53:52.420 It's a skill that you can master.

00:53:54.640 It's not some scary alien thing, right?

00:53:58.840 And but a lot of young women have like zero experience of child care. 1.00

00:54:03.500 And they're not exposed to kids.

00:54:05.620 One of my other radical and very cheap, but I think possibly effective ideas is every college campus should have more children's playgrounds on it.

00:54:14.940 Young women should get exposed to seeing kids playing, right?

00:54:19.720 Most campuses have wonderful green places.

00:54:22.320 My University of New Mexico campus is one of the more beautiful areas of Albuquerque.

00:54:26.680 But the local parents never take their kids there because there is nowhere to play.

00:54:30.460 There's no playground equipment.

00:54:31.580 So if you wove together kind of the parenting life and like educational life so that young women get to see, oh, there's other women out there. 0.97

00:54:43.400 They're only a few years older than me.

00:54:45.100 They have kids.

00:54:45.940 Maybe I should talk to them.

00:54:47.040 They look happy.

00:54:48.120 Like maybe that's something that's achievable that I could do, right?

00:54:51.860 So I think telling young women like it's really hard and it's expensive, but you need to do it anyway for the good of your bloodline, that's not nearly as compelling as just seeing, oh, there's other people doing this successfully.

00:55:07.900 And they seem like they're still happy and they're still smart people and they have interests and it's working out okay for them.

00:55:13.840 Yeah, you're really talking about what Spangler said.

00:55:16.700 Make it a rhythm of life, right?

00:55:18.160 Make it something that is, of course, you walk by and there are children around you.

00:55:22.440 Of course, there are children in public events.

00:55:24.780 Of course, public events are oriented towards people who have families and are bringing their children to those events.

00:55:31.200 And make that something that is no longer isolating you away from society, but instead is introducing you to a wider part of society.

00:55:39.860 I think that reorientation, I don't know if it's the ultimate solution, but I think it is certainly something that can change the dynamic in an important way.

00:55:50.220 I don't know how to say that.

00:55:52.140 Panoid news?

00:55:52.940 I figured this out.

00:55:54.460 It's called Communitarianism out of the Appalachian Gorilla on Substack, Local Agriculture and Community Rights.

00:56:03.380 Well, I will say that I think that scale is a huge problem with this.

00:56:10.200 I think that people who are way above Dunbar's number in their average everyday interactions who never bind with a certain number of people are always going to have a problem with understanding this need to perpetuate a community.

00:56:24.460 Having a duty to continue a way of life.

00:56:27.800 I think that there is a maximum number of people that you can try to share an existence with and still want to continue that existence.

00:56:35.460 And so I do think that along with the either highly rationalist incentive structure or the highly religious incentive structure, scaling down is going to be a critical part moving forward.

00:56:50.260 Because I think smaller intentional communities are going to be far more interested in supporting each other, creating the environments that Jeffrey and I are talking about, and ultimately wishing to pass that way of living on to the next generation.

00:57:02.280 Yeah, and I mean, people also need to rethink issues like housing law and zoning rights, and you need to be able to allow like-minded people, you know, to form cohesive communities that they want, rather than this kind of isolated single family house system where it's extremely hard to put together a cohesive neighborhood of like, you know, if you want, like, we want to take this whole street and kind of turn it pro-natalist.

00:57:31.280 Like, oh, no, like, oh, no, you're not allowed to discriminate about who lives next to you.

00:57:35.700 It has to be a completely atomized set of families.

00:57:38.080 I think that's a real structural problem.

00:57:40.840 I'm going to ask you a very spicy question here.

00:57:42.940 You don't have to answer it.

00:57:43.880 But how big of the problem is a civil rights act to actually creating these kind of communities?

00:57:50.120 It's a huge problem.

00:57:51.560 I mean, it's part of the multiculturalism problem that if you look, from my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, right, who's read a lot about hunter-gatherers and tribal societies, small-scale societies.

00:58:07.740 The fundamental right of a tribe is to determine who is in the tribe and who isn't, to determine who gets to live near you and who doesn't get to live near you.

00:58:19.420 And if you can't do that, you don't really have a community, right?

00:58:23.260 If you can't determine geographically who is permitted to live next to you and who isn't, and there's no structure of local organization above the level of the nuclear family, right?

00:58:37.700 That's voluntary-based, that's community-based, then it's really hard, A, to have any sense of cohesiveness and kind of authentic connection to your community, right?

00:58:54.840 B, it's hard to feel safe, right, if you have no say over who your neighbors are.

00:58:59.160 And C, it's hard to find people with shared values, like, let's all raise our kids together and trust that if they play with each other, that those other parents, like, will be responsible adults, right?

00:59:15.560 Trustworthy and safe.

00:59:17.020 Right, if they'll even share your standards for what a trustworthy adult is, right?

00:59:21.840 Yeah.

00:59:22.500 Yeah, and so that's ultimately a huge issue.

00:59:24.820 And I just don't, you know, I don't see the ability to build the type of communities you're talking about without addressing that at some level.

00:59:32.580 But obviously, one of the huge problems is that the state can't scale if you have strong tribes, if you have strong communities, which is why the state's incentive is always to destroy tribal and communal loyalties, because otherwise they're going to have a hard time building you into a larger infrastructure.

00:59:48.260 So good luck trying to talk the state into adjusting any of those understandings.

00:59:53.700 Let's see.

00:59:56.780 Amasio Currency says, save the country and abolish the 19th. 1.00

01:00:00.640 Well, best of luck.

01:00:01.860 That's not how the incentive structure for the franchise works.

01:00:08.080 Once you have an expanded franchise, the only thing that ever happens is you expand the franchise more.

01:00:14.020 I have a hard time thinking of anything that didn't evolve a revolution in which the franchise was radically scaled back.

01:00:20.240 No matter how you feel about that particular expansion, it's probably here until the vote itself is gone.

01:00:27.040 Yeah, I mean, my radical idea for expanding the franchise is every kid should get a vote, but until the kid is 18, that vote is kind of split between the biological parents who can do like a proxy vote on behalf of their kids.

01:00:41.360 I think that would be a very interesting direction to go, and I think it would help reduce the impact of childless libs on the political process. 0.95

01:00:53.860 Yeah, it's basically a modification on the old patriarchal ability to vote for the family.

01:00:58.320 But, you know, and then Matt Gredir says, great work, Oren and Jeffrey.

01:01:04.420 Well, thank you very much, man.

01:01:05.380 I appreciate you supporting the show.

01:01:07.500 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wind that one down, but it was great speaking with you, Jeffrey.

01:01:12.400 Really appreciate you coming on.

01:01:14.420 And of course, we will probably try and do another one of these because, like I said, didn't even get to touch the AI topic at all.

01:01:21.800 But, guys, make sure you're checking out his work, several books, and everything else that you can look at.

01:01:26.380 If it's your first time on this channel, please make sure that you subscribe on YouTube.

01:01:30.560 Click the bell, notification, all that stuff, so you know when we go live.

01:01:33.600 If you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

01:01:39.500 Thank you so much for watching, and as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - July 25, 2025

Can Modern Societies Reproduce Themselves？｜ Guest： Geoffrey Miller ｜ 7⧸25⧸25

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Auron MacIntyre Show - July 25, 2025

Can Modern Societies Reproduce Themselves？ ｜ Guest： Geoffrey Miller ｜ 7⧸25⧸25

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Can Modern Societies Reproduce Themselves？｜ Guest： Geoffrey Miller ｜ 7⧸25⧸25