"Civil War Is Inevitable Now" - Population Collapse, Elite Corruption & Rich vs Poor | WhatifaltHist

And the greatest lie ever told is the complete fabrication on the information of human nature. When 99% of human generations disagree with us, we should think about whether or not we're wrong. Gen Z has 90% less buying power at the same age that boomers had. You can correlate inflation with social collapse. If you were to look back at 2010 and you were to write up a story, what would a 15-year period of America's descent into a civil war look like? I could not tell you how it would be different from what we've seen. What are the historical parallels that you see that make you believe that we're going to have as Americans a civil war in the next 5 years? That's a good question to start on and there are four historic conflicts that I think are proxies. And for those who aren't familiar with my work, um I predict that the world is on the verge of two crises, a political and a demographic and psychological. So, I look at for the political crisis, the thing I look at is the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the American Civil War. And the way my mind works is I have multiple simulations in my head. And then from that, I figure out which of these simulations uh the new facts I see fits into. So, I say this is a parallel to the fall of the Roman Republic, this is a parallel to the English Civil War. And through that, uh I I like one of my catchphrases I'm betting against God. And what What do you mean by that? So, the world is infinitely complex, it's infinitely big. To be able to predict facts accurately and the future accurately, you have to predict all the variables because everything's connected. That's impossible. So, my standard is I don't I'm just figuring stuff out. I'm going to be wrong and I accept that. And so, I operate under the assumption that I don't have complete knowledge. And so, I try to look at the new events that hit me every year with eyes as unclouded as possible. And so, I don't have any pretensions to getting the answer right all the time or even being correct. I'm just trying to figure stuff out. Once the mind is not enslaved to its own creations, it can be free, if you know what I mean. Okay, so with that, you're willing to be wrong, Yeah. but you're looking for these parallels in history. And I've heard you say that if you're not looking at history to know where we're going tomorrow, you're literally just making it up. Exactly. So, you gave us the events, but now connect them for me. So, if those are the events that parallel us on a demographic level, what is happening at the demographic level? What happened back then? And how does that make you draw the conclusion that civil war is inevitable? A book that really, really changed my life was The Great Wave by David Hackett Fischer. And I read it the start of 2020. And it was just it shook my world. And so, David Hackett Fischer is one of my favorite historians. His other books are brilliant, as well. And it's a history of inflation for the last thousand years of Western history. And that sounds boring, but it's actually one of the most interesting and best written books I've ever read. And he found that you can correlate inflation with social collapse. And so, every 250 years, the West goes through a period of social collapse. And with the previous example in Western Europe and its diaspora being the French Revolution, the uh Wars of Religion in the 1600s. Uh And people forget about those wars, but they killed a third of the world's population, as some historians say. Then the Black Death in the 1300s killed half of Eurasia's population. Then you have the fall of the of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Frankish Empire. And you can trace this every 250 years as far back as we have records, going to the Babylonians. And so, from Fernand Braudel and uh David Hackett Fischer, from that those authors, Peter Turchin established a computer model which can predict when these crises happen. And he ran this computer model in 2010, and it showed that the Western world and America especially would experience a social crisis on the scale of the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution, or the Black Death in the 2020s. And he If you're interested, I can talk about more, but he has three different variables that are predictive for us, where he plugs these variables into uh over a dozen historic crises. And looking at them, he can predict these historic crises to have wars the exact years they took place in. And then he's got about 20 other variables, which are also uh they're not predictive, but they are variables that you see once these sorts of crises happen. And so, all of the flares are going off right now. And the scary thing that if you were to look back at 2010, and you were to write up a story, what would a 15-year period of America's descent into a civil war look like? I could not tell you how it would be different from what we've seen. All right, explain it to me like I'm five. So, we've got the um the the demographic ties to the um areas in history that you've mentioned. We've got the predictive model that has three variables that gives us the 250-year cycle. Yes. Uh but if I were a fifth-grader, five-year-old, whatever the the statement is, how would you break it down for me? That's a good way of phrasing it, because lots of people have knowledge closer Lots of very intelligent, educated people have levels of knowledge on this topic equal to a fifth-grader. Uh I don't blame them for that. There's a lot of things like science or math where my knowledge is middle school, too. But um so, the way I'm going to phrase this is times of peace and in times of prosperity, the population grows. And that's an obvious enough thing. Um people can afford to have kids, and so they do so. But the problem is that labor, or people working, and capital, or money for investment, they're in permanent cooperation and competition over history, much like men and women. And so, once the val- once there are more people, the value of their work goes down. And from that, inequality skyrockets. So, over periods of prosperity, as the value of the working man goes down, the ability for capital to buy things goes up. This has a series of end points, where once inequality increases, competition for good jobs goes up, because there are fewer good jobs. And then, secondly, wages stagnate, so that people can barely survive. Um and then, so that's the third variable. So, you have inequality, wage stagnation, and uh competition for elite jobs. And so, these are the three variables that predict when societies have civil wars. And so, this isn't all wars. The World's Wars, for example, don't fit this pattern. The Punic Wars don't fit this pattern, but this the wars I described before do. And so, what happens once the amount of good jobs shrink, um then people start to compete for them more feverishly. So, if you lose your position, you're just screwed forever. And so, then from that, the society splits into different factions. So, for our society, it's the right versus the left. And for each of these historic parallels, they fit an underlying ethnic or class or regional interest. For us, the right and the left is college-educated cities versus non-college-educated countrysides. And so, you can add a bunch of other things that stack on top of that. You could do male versus female. You could do high agency versus low agency um or bureaucracy versus merchant class. And so, what happens is that the right will push the interests of people without college degrees and the left will push the interests of people with college degrees and they fight each other over uh which of their social groups the society should support. And so, previous examples of this are the uh Cavaliers and the Roundheads in 17th century England. That was the nobility versus the uh bourgeoisie and the merchants. Uh in the Russian Civil War, it was the uh the center of the empire, the industrial core versus the fringes. And then the fall of the Roman Republic, it was populists versus the deep state. And so, for each of these, it's these underlying interests that that split up out the population and when things get desperate enough for normal people, the active people have the incentive to start a war. Okay. Um why is it that that level of dysfunction is solved by a war? That's the part that I always find I recognize it in history but just seems crazy. Because so many people are going to die in war. I mean, war is like as horrible as it gets. People are rational in that they search for their own self-interest but you can often get horrifically irrational results from that. One of the things I read about World War I is it's a series of tiny rational steps that adds up to madness. Where World War I was the Germans thinking, "We need to fight the Russians now or the Russians will grow stronger than us." The British and the French thought we need to fight the Germans or the Germans will grow stronger than us. You add all of those rational calculations up and it was a war that killed that rendition of European civilization. The calculation going on here is that there's over competition for labor and the supply of labor has gone up and I can explain why this happened. The supply of labor has gone up 40% faster than the actual demand for labor. So that pushes that pushes the supply of labor down and um So when I grew up, I would I'm going to take go on a brief tangent which explains this point well. When I was growing up, I'd sometimes forget to feed the cats late because my parents had me feed the cats. And so when I'd forget to feed the cats late, the cats would fight each other and blame each other for a mistake that I made. And so what happens when the total environment gets harder is people kill each other for resources. And so what these factions are trying to do is for the conservatives or the leftists, they're trying to control the government to first of all remove their competitors and then secondly, use the government to push their self-interest. So if the left wins, they would have the government push various bureaucracies so the college educated would get more jobs. If the right wins, they would dismantle the entire managerial system which would give jobs for their supporters. And the really unpleasant thing is that in these crises it's you you can view it in a very Malthusian way. And Malthus was a thinker who said that overpopulation happens and then it population crashes. And we're not overpopulated in that people are starving, but there is an oversupply of labor. And then in these crises, for example, the Black Death, half of Eurasia's population died. The crisis of the 1600s, a third of the world's population died. And so it's it's this natural biological rhythm that you can see paralleled in the animal kingdom. And where I grew up in Pennsylvania, this happened to the deer where the deer became overpopulated and they just started there was deer plagues, the deer there was mass deer famine. And so if it happens among the the why doesn't it happen among us? Okay, so um that all of that makes sense. The only thing is it all hinges on this idea that we have an increase in supply of labor uh that is more than we need right now, but everything that I'm looking at says that we have a massive demographic problem and that we have a ton of old people and we don't have the young people to support them. We have just rapidly declining populations. Yeah. So if you had said this is a declining population problem and we can't support the old people, I would have understood. Um but you're saying that instead it's an oversupply of labor. How's that true? So that's a great question because it leads me to the point I'm trying to get to where uh I say that there are actually two crises going on hitting us at the same time. The first is this uh demographic issue I described. Um and then the second one is uh is the population crash. And we're having both of these at the same time. And so the the crisis that I described before, it's a natural historic cycle that occurs every 250 years. I'm going to call that the secular cycle because that's the term for it. And the other thing, which is something I've teased out in the last 2 years, I call uh I give it a variety of names. I call it mouse utopia. I call it the psychological black death. I call it uh a variety of things. And what I found there is that there is that this very, very stark population crash where if the current demographic trends continue, there will be six Koreans for every 100 alive today. And that's the pattern among every single industrialized country where um the birth rate is crashing faster than anyone thought was physically possible. And these computer models have pretty wide standard deviations. And so it's crashing faster than any of the computer models predicted. And that's a scary thing in of itself that almost never no one talks that seriously in our society. And so, we are unlucky to face two demographic crises at the same time, where I say that the secular cycle is hitting because at all the variables, wages have stagnated to the point where a majority can't pay uh can't pay a $1,000 emergency bill, and 40% can't pay a uh $400 or $500 emergency bill. So, people are barely getting by, quality of life statistics have crashed, people can't afford to have families, there's massive inequality, there's massive uh political polarization. So, all of the variables that uh I would use to predict the secular cycle are happening, and we have a de facto oversupply of labor, but then aging is about to hit us like a truck. And so, both of these will get entangled inside the other. And one of the biggest issues that we would get with aging is that you have a smaller population of producers versus a larger population of dependents. And that's an ugly situation to deal with, because whenever the pie shrinks, people get violent. Yes, they do. Uh but how did we get an oversupply of labor while the population was crashing? So, we have a an incredibly bizarre demographic curve. It's like nothing we've seen before. So, the world's population in 1940 was a a little over 2 billion. We're past 8 billion now. So, what we saw was the quadrupling of the world's population in less than a century. And so, from that And so, we have our elite has done literally everything it can do to increase the supply of labor. And these are complex things that are both good and bad, but they all on a statistical basis increase labor. So, the America's population is more than doubled since World War II through natural population growth. Uh the US has taken in something like 50 million immigrants. We've globalized our economy, so we're doing labor competition with Malaysia and Mexico and China. And uh automation is one of the really huge ones that people ignore. Automation has removed a lot of labor supply. Women's entrance to the workforce is another. So, all of these variables have increased the supply of labor. And Peter Turchin looked at the statistics on this. And so, we are in this absolutely bizarre bulge that crashes. And so, the demographics are remarkable where the world's population increased on an L curve. It's insane. And then it immediately crashed. And so, we are dealing with things that historically should probably happen over the course of 500 years in like a 150-year time frame. And that's due to the social effects of the Industrial Revolution where you have rapid population increase, but then for complex reasons, urban societies can't replicate their population. So, you have these rural populations form into cities with health and infinite food and all that stuff, but then those cities can't replicate. And so, if you want to look at England, for example, England in the pre-industrial world had a population of like 10 million people. Now, it's up at like 60 million. And then in 50 years, it's going to crash precipitously. And so, things are happening so fast that you can have a labor We have an oversupply of labor now, but then it's going to start crashing very quickly. And so, there are a lot of other weird variables like AI is kicking in. A lot of automation is getting worse. And so, we're getting slammed by a change of a massive And I so, I I don't think in 20 years there's going to be there's going to be an oversupply of labor, but as of now, just looking at the wages, it's true. Okay. Uh we we are setting a very complex table. Yeah. Um so, just to plant some flags for the audience here really fast cuz I I obviously coming into this have done a fair amount of research. Okay, so what you have is the incredible population swell that you were talking about that brings in way too much labor, but on top of the population swell, we also introduce women to the labor force, which already just doubles not quite doubles, but has a massive impact on that. We're going to go through the thing you just went by quickly, which is that cities have some natural inbuilt mechanism that sort of self-destructs their population growth. Which is the whole mouse utopia psychological black death, which will be next on our list, but just for now dear audience know that the belief on the table is that as you bring people together in cities, it it is a natural occurrence, a predictable occurrence that the birth rate will begin to drop and they will create their own population. We also have something that we haven't put on the table yet, but I know is a big part of your thesis, which is as the left-leaning people take power, morality and religion, things that have kept us in check and kept the sexual tension between men and women, that goes away and is replaced with kindness and kindness oddly enough has this wildly self-destructive quality. And so we'll we'll be getting into that. Okay, so that that's the sort of looming thing so that a lot of people, certainly people my age are like, what do you mean bro? This is awesome. Younger people are like, how can that old say that like this is the worst thing ever. And so now what we have to walk through is why the discrepancy between my generation, I'm a Gen X, so why the discrepancy in perception between Gen X and Gen Z and what does that tell us about what you call the psychological black death? Yes. Um for everyone in the audience, I'm a zoomer, I'm 23. Most people overestimate my age, so I was going to throw that out. Um and I mean, there's a discrepancy because the difference is huge. I mean, you're looking at people forget charts are real. They look at the numbers in the chart and they forget that it's actually has to affect them. I see this with economics a lot. People are like, "Yeah, we can just like money printer go brr." Which is a meme of basically the government printing infinite money and they forget that there's an end result to it. Um but so the baby boomer generation has this more so than Gen X people. And I'm sure you'd agree with that. Where if you want to look at the baby boomers, uh the entire economy has been geared towards their self-interest for their whole lives. Where people forget this. In 1960, the average age was 25. Uh half the population was under 25 in 1960. Now it's around 40. And so when the baby boomers were growing up and starting families and getting jobs, we had the highest wages of any period ever in history. And so the And that was caused by America having this huge industrial advantage due to the World Wars. Um and so over time though, as the baby boomers became adults, it continued to reflect their self-interest. Where we moved from a wage-based economy to a capital-based economy. And so we see that with the Reagan Revolution and Thatcher, the liberalization. Because when the baby boomers were growing up, uh America had an economy to the left of like Denmark today. And then we removed that. And then we saw the opening up of capital. And so 1980 until 2020, uh due to these this global huge baby boomer generation saving up money for retirement, you just saw massive amounts of money. And so this was the period the most people ever were lifted out of poverty between 1980 and 2020. And so because all that boomer capital uh supported the the Third World. And now as the boomers are retiring, the money is being taken out of the economy to pay for their retirement. So, because the boomers were in this very decisive strategic point in this demographic boom, and you guys should check out Peter Zeihan. He talks about this stuff very eloquently. Uh the boomers were able to first get good wages, then use the government to secure uh to secure uh a capital good economy, and then after that use the government to support retirement. And so, as of now, the governments of the world are doing the most money printing of any period ever in history. Or money printing and debt, where it took us all of the time from the revolution to 2010, sorry, to 2014 to reach the amount of debt we had in 2014. We've doubled it since. Because our ruling class are boomers, the incentive is let's print a lot of money so that we can retire comfortably, and then we'll be dead so our kids don't have to deal with it. It's it's incredibly cynical, but it is in their direct self-interest. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. So, buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So, how do you compete with costs that are spiraling out of control? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com/theory. Again, that's oracle.com/theory. oracle.com/theory. If you're a small business owner, there is a hidden cost to success, your time. Every hour spent managing finances is an hour not spent growing your business, but that ends today with Found. 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That obviously is brutal, especially when paired with another stat, which is whenever the average age of marriage hits 28, you're going to have a revolution, and we're 29 right now. So, this is why we have to walk through the psychological black death, Mouse Utopia, as your mental model for how all of this stuff plays together. I think this is really interesting, and this is the part that, as I was researching you, really forced me to confront in my own views of what, how the world works, basically, and this whole walk-through certainly helps me understand the left in a new light. And it will be very interesting to hear you walk through this. So, what is the psychological black death and how is it tied to the discrepancy between boomers and Gen Z? Firstly, I want to thank you that you've put the effort into actually explain the logical course of the ideas. I get that very rarely on podcast. Most podcasts I just jump around from idea to idea. Um so, the our conception of human nature is completely wrong. And the the video I I just it's being edited right now is the anthropology of the left, then I'm going to write the anthropology of the right, then the video I hopefully I'm going to write after that or maybe a video after that is the greatest lie ever told. And the greatest lie ever told is the complete fabrication on the information of human nature from what I call the blue pill era. The blue pill era is 1960 to 2020. And the blue pill era believed these like I let's say 10 things that are just completely false. Progress will continue forever at no cost. Men and women are psychologically the same. There are no genetic differences between race, sex, or class. That there is uh that human nature is naturally a blank slate that you can just write whatever you want onto. That human nature is perfectible. And that we are gradually moving towards global unity. These are things that because society was ludicrously wealthy, we believed the things we wanted to hear because there was no pressure to believe the unpleasant truths. And so, uh I've invented an acronym called SAW and SAW stands for studies in ancient wisdom. And so, there's this huge convergence of social science since the start of the 21st century with what every previous society in history believed. And when you're uh one of my friends has got a saying, "If you're the only sane man in a madhouse, you're the crazy one." And um And so, when 99% of human generations disagree with us, we should think about whether or not we're wrong. And so, what Saw has consistently found is the factors that matter the most for personal happiness are relationships and religion. And so, if you view modernity as the removal of relationships and religion, everything else is all the massive wealth, all the safety, the health, is a side effect. And it's clearly true because I mean, we are the wealthiest, or until 5 years ago or 10 years ago, we were the wealthiest, safest, most hygienic, uh whatever society in history, but our society is miserable. Listen to the pop culture, uh listen to the speeches the politicians get, read the literature. For every single cultural form you can analyze our society through, we are miserable. And so, that demonstrates that our previous assumption that if you improve people's material conditions, they're going to get happier. And I am going to jump So, actually, how am I going to say this? Would you prefer I start the Psychological Black Death or Maus Utopia? Knowing that they're nested, dear audience, we'll start with Maus Utopia. One of the things I like to say is that uh I I said before that I think there are two crises that are hitting our world, the secular cycle and Maus Utopia. And I I say that like I have made hundreds of hours of content trying to explain both of those crises. And so, you're trying to intuitively figure out an event that will only make sense in retrospect, where historians before a historic event happens, it's difficult to explain. If you explained the World Wars to someone in 1900, they think you were insane. Uh and so, that's how the world works. Uh and so, Psychological Black Death is a theory that I invented myself, uh and I found it from looking at actually Zoomers. Uh because Zoomers have such stunningly poor mental health that it scares me. And I again, I'm 23, and people my age, a lot of them, they can't go on phone calls themselves, they can't go to the doctor themselves, it's difficult for them to work a job, they can't date. It's just they're completely dysfunctional as individuals. They have crippling anxiety, and the mental health statistics for Zoomers are horrifying. I think like 80% of Zoomers are lonely, 80% have anxiety, like a quarter have a diagnosed mental condition. And for women, the numbers are horrifying. If you want to look at women at the age of 25's mental health, you need you'll need a shot of vodka. Um and and so I know a lot of these people myself, and I I've I've been in a couple different weird positions where I get to interview a lot of young people, and it's just once you interview young people with their lives, you realize there are very serious mental health issues that uh are just ignored. And no one's got a good paradigm for it. So I was trying to go back and figure out why do young people have such horrible mental health? And this is something Jonathan Haidt has looked into. Jonathan Haidt's one of my favorite authors. Uh I definitely recommend you guys read all his books. But one of the biggest issues our society has is that we think human nature is this like Roblox that you build, you put a brick here, you teach the kid algebra, the kid remembers algebra, you put the kid into Chinese classes, the kid's going to remember Chinese. And human nature is a And so we view human nature as a machine to cut up, and it's really a garden you cultivate over years. So for for people or children, you have to put them in a setting where they can play, where they can make friends, where they have a belief structure. And these kinds of structures um they create psychological stability so that people can be creative and develop. And this is something we've completely forgotten. And so when I was growing up, for example, and my parents weren't like this, not out of any principle, they just didn't, where I knew lots of kids where their parents would walk them to school every single day. They'd walk them four blocks to school until they were 18. Or they'd read their texts until they were 18. Or control their spending money. Or go They would They They were going to go to college in They were going to move to the state their children were going college to to follow them there. Or walking them to job applications. And so it This is a huge issue and it hits the um it hits the the ruling class the hardest. So these issues are the worst among Ivy League kids, among people at the top companies, etc. And so I look at this. This is something the elite Not the elite, everyone ignores. But it is For me it's it's a it's an elephant in the room that how the hell are these kids supposed to like fight against the Chinese? How are they supposed to build new railroads? How are they supposed to start families in economic situations? And so I tried to figure it out and the conclusion I came to is that um humans were very much tied to the environments we grew up in. And so for example, I when I had a researcher, I paid him to figure out the underlying statistical drivers for populations that have reproducible birth rates. And so you need to have two things to have a sustainable population. So those are you need to be a rural and a religious society. And this goes back to the ancient world. In the Middle Ages, cities couldn't reproduce. In the Roman world, cities couldn't reproduce. And so for all of history, uh keep in mind pre-industrial world, 90% of humans live in small intact social communities where everyone knows each other, where there's this shared sense of community, and the most industrial societies are the inverse. They're 90% urban. And so we as humans have never evolved for urban societies. And so what happens once you hit the urban society and you passed Dunbar's number is 130 people. It's the number at which you can um at which you know everyone in your village. And so, there's a unit in the military that's 130 people, Roman Centurion, the average company, uh the average uh church size. All of these numbers crest around 130 because that's the the size a human mind can comprehend. And once you get past that number, you can't hold people to social standards and people get very lonely. And so, there's not this Once you get past that number, it becomes impossible to enforce social standards. The cities of Italy in the 14th century were atheist. In the ancient and medieval world, um and sorry, back in the Greeks and the Romans, that was true, too. And so, cities and countrysides create this duality where the city is creativity, it's the ability to have cosmopolitanism, it's libertine. The countryside is uh stable, uh kind of bigoted, uh it's very community-oriented, uh not as creative, but they create this duality. And so, what happens when you go overnight from a 90% rural society to a 90% urban society is that you have a burst of creativity from putting all these rural people together in uh in cities and then after that, they lose the replicability. And so, you see population crash. And so, for example, we we can track this today where the reason America has one of the most stable birth rates of any developed country is America is the most rural and religious society. And those are the same things. Almost basically every urban society in history is either uh agnostic, atheist, or doubting and every rural society is religious. And so, it creates this duality. What happens once you get urban societies is you lose the ability to maintain communities, religion, um and socialization because you just end up in you end up in anonymous environments and then this results in breakdown of ability for social cooperation. It results in massive psychological issues stemming from lack of socialization and loneliness. It stems from basically humans didn't evolve to be in urban societies and so I predicted that we would see this psychological crisis and I I I've gone back in history through previous psychological plagues and so I say that our society is currently facing a psychological plague. Okay, so um give me what the psychological plague is in one to two sentences. Super tight. French Revolution, Stalin, Nazis. Okay, so you have at let's take Stalin. You have a revolution where it's like the ruling class has gotten out of hand and they're stealing from you dear people. Let's kill them all and then everything is going to be great and we will have a communist utopia and all will be well. The problem is that people end up pushing back. People don't like to be told what to do. You come in and you say, "Hey, these kulaks that are a little bit better at farming than you, they must be doing something bad so let's kill them too." So you kill the kulaks to make sure that nobody has more than anybody else. Equal outcome, everybody. But then the equal outcome becomes starvation because you killed the people that actually knew what they were doing and now you have a real problem. Yes. Okay, so now what I want to get into cuz I have drawn from you. In fact, let me lay out what I've taken from you and you tell me where I go wrong. So as I was trying to put together what exactly the psychological Black Death is, I leaned on what you were talking about with Mouse Utopia. So for anybody that doesn't know Mouse Utopia, can you give me that quick primer, and then I'll dive in with what I pulled from that? Uh Mouse Utopia was a study in the '60s that was run about 30 times by uh by Calhoun. And the study was based around the population growth of that time period. And so that was a era when everyone was terrified of overpopulation. And so what happens is they put nine mice in a container that could hold 6,000 mice. Perfect conditions, no disease, no predators, perfect temperature. What happens each time the mouse population goes from nine to 2,000. And again, the cage can hold 6,000. Then it crashes precipitously. And so with that you see um the mice start to break off into different dysfunctional communities. You have And keep in mind, autistic wasn't a buzzword in the '60s, so it was actually what clinically meant. A lot of mice become autistic, lose the ability to socialize. There's these mice that groom themselves all day, but they don't mate, called the beautiful ones. Um there's There are sociopathic mice who just kill other mice. Um Then there's other mice who uh walk lose the will to live, and they end up homeless, wandering around the the the community getting attacked by other mice. Mice refuse to have families or uh breed. And the mice lose the ability to socially cooperate with each other. Female mice become more aggressive, and they attack their own young. And male mice become more feminine. And so what you see is the mice lose the ability to socially cooperate. And each time the mouse population crashed to zero. And uh because once they stop having children, the community just dies. Okay. So uh that that is something I think people will see a lot of parallels in. But there's one quote that you have that once you pair that with what you just walked us through with the Mouse Utopia, you begin to really understand how your worldview hangs together. And the quote is, "History is a biological cycle." Now, there's something I have said many, many times to people in my university that I want on my tombstone, which is if I'm going to bring anything to the world, there's one very simple idea, and that is you are having a biological experience. Yes. And so, when I heard you say, "Hey, all these bad things, they they're actually mediated by a biological response to, call it, society at large." All right. If that's accurate, it's deeply troubling. I really hope it's not accurate, and I hope that you get proven wrong, because boy, is this horrible. Uh and at the end, hopefully, we'll have time where I can tell you where I think we go, Yeah. uh based on feelings, and then you can shoot it all down. Uh but okay, so, your Mouse Utopia, uh by the way, I've heard you say, and it's important that our audience know, this has not been replicated outside of this guy. So, this guy ran this experiment a gaggle of times, getting the same result every time. Other people have tried to replicate it. So, take it for what it's worth, a lot of these things failed to replicate. Good. Uh the reason I use Mouse Utopia a lot is that uh I I normally don't go after studies like that, because I frankly don't trust I don't trust the capability of a single study to create a coherent worldview. The thing I see with Mouse Utopia is that uh it our society has lots of parallels that don't fit historically, that do fit with Mouse Utopia. So, for example, our society is trying to commit civilizational suicide. Um nihilism. Um degrowth. Um a lot of the social movements we have in our society, like feminism or um a lot of you you don't see something that parallels a lot of the social changes we're having having today in history, or at least they're very muted form. You do see it in Mouse Utopia. So, once I got past, let's say, 2022, I started seeing things in the world that I could only find a parallel to in Mouse Utopia. Uh and so with history being biological, one of the quotes I like to just keep repeating in future videos is we're all a bunch of crazy monkeys. I mean, all of us are uh all most of most Americans are hairless albino apes. Um and so, once you see humans as animals, and we are, uh you can view human society as an animal planet thing, where I used to watch a lot of nature documentaries as a kid, and so you see there's desert in the grassland. The baboons start killing each other. They fight over mates. And humans use rationalizations to push their biological self-interests. Um and lots of ideology is basically a a masked self-interest for the group. And history is it history is biological. Everything we do is biological. Um there is also um ideas do exist, but they're I think ideas do exist independent of biology, but they are in they're Sorry, that statement's too complicated. It's both interdependent and dependent. Um and yeah, I think it's very useful to see all of human history as a reflection of the crazy animals who live in it. So, I think a quote that you've said that's really important you touched on it sort of at the edges just a second ago is society is rationalization, not rationality. Yes. And so, once you understand we're doing a thing, and then we come up with a post hoc explanation of why we did that thing, but that thing is actually driven by a biological cycle that we call history. Yes. Okay, so looking at Mouse Utopia, your hypothesis goes something like this. Uh the reason that even though the cage would hold 6,000, and we crash every time at 2,000, is that baked into the cake of evolution is a protective mechanism against the ecosystem as a whole and that you don't ever want one organism to become too successful such that it ends up gobbling up everything and essentially killing itself. that's that's a great point and we like to think there's always easy answers, but going back through history uh there's like 10 things that could have caused the fall of Rome and what you choose is basically a Rorschach test for uh what you care about. So you could say that uh you could say that uh climate change caused the fall of Rome, changes in military structure, demographics, degeneracy uh and there's like five other things and population decline, too. Um and for Mousetopia, you can trace it on multiple levels of causation. And for example, if you want to see the Earth as a self-enclosed basically uh I don't want to say conscious, but it it is self-adaptive. You want to see it like that and there's a significant amount of evidence for that. What Mousetopia is is the natural order basically shutting down human um shutting down one species from getting too powerful, as you said. And and so it's comparable to the the body where if one let's say uh viral or cellular clump in your body is growing too fast, we call it a disease or a virus or a cancer. And then the body's white blood cells naturally crush it. And we have this um we it comes from Descartes. Uh we have this uh idea that the soul and the mind is buffered from the body. But the reality is the thoughts we think are reflections of our chemicals inside our body. And so we think what we say is objective, but the reality is that if the chemicals are changing in your body and if for people who have had physical illnesses, I know you I'm pretty sure you guys can have known this. If what's in your body changes, what's in your mind changes. And so, with Mouse Utopia, the scary thing is we would rationalize Mouse Utopia so that every single thing in Mouse Utopia would make it appear to us as if we were making the correct choice. And crazy people don't know they're crazy. That's the problem. If you're stressed, if you're crazy, you're probably not crazy. If you completely believe what you say all the time, even if it's ridiculous, then you might be. Yeah, distressing but true. Okay, so uh if that is accurate and what we have is a biological cycle, sort of a biological kill switch, if you will, that makes it hard for us to grow beyond that, then you start looking at the things that are going on right now and suddenly the parallels make sense that this is a biological response to the rapid growth. And that biological response is the thing that's creating the secondary uh crisis that's crashing. So, you get um crisis number one is is the demographic financial crisis of labor ends up becoming too abundant cuz we were just growing so fast. Becomes too abundant, it triggers some sort of well, the financial thing just triggers uh inequality, which as you laid out earlier is going to create a problem. But then also that rapid expansion trips this switch and now you begin to get a population decline, which creates a secondary problem, which is you have way too many old people, not enough young people to take care of them. But I think maybe the biggest one, and this is where I want to lay out how I've interpreted your thesis of the psychological black death, and I want to see if you uh agree or if you think I'm crazy. All right, so, you said, let's see if I can find the exact quote, that basically um I'll I'll get the quote in a second, but basically the idea being that when you start moving towards this, uh, population explosion, it means you're doing well. You don't have these outside threats. When you don't have these outside threats, suddenly the breakdown of traditional norms that we would find in the rural areas, you said rural and religious, those are the things you need for a stable birth rate. So, that begins to break down because now women can, uh, come into the workforce. They don't necessarily have to have children. And you said, uh, I don't I don't think it was an exact quote, so I'll give you the paraphrase, uh, which was women need to have kids. They don't need to be pursuing their artistic dreams. So, that's That's not what I said. That's what I said the general folk wisdom is for most societies. Say more. Ha ha ha ha. So, that's not a reflection of, uh, societies tend to develop these concepts of social norms that you should follow, uh, for society to be stable. And so, that's generally the collective wisdom over history. And the collective wisdom for most people over history, unless you're an aristocrat, is like you work and have kids. And so, once you get a wealthier society, you move past what that folk wisdom is. Um, and and so, like another thing I said in that podcast was the collective wisdom for most pre-industrial societies is is that you have rigid sexual mores to build up tension between men and women to incentivize men to work. Or you have, uh, social social institutions that make people tough. For example, uh, in Islam, they have a 1-month period where they fast. What I think's going on there is that to force people to fast for a month builds up delayed gratification. Um, and so, what cultures do normally is that they build up these uh social standards which give them a competitive advantage versus other societies. And do you think that that again, this is a part of a biological loop or is this how does that come to be basically? Yes, I think it's spiral and this is something my favorite author Amory Lovins uh says that history I call history a twisted mirror. I think of it like DNA um where it's our era of history and every era of history reflects things from the far past and the far future. Um and so for our era I gave the four different time periods that I I pull us from and I see it as a parallel and there's little bits of the parallel. And so it appears as a loop as if you get these cycles, but the world clearly does change. 2,000 years ago there was no new world, there was no anti-malaria medicine. Uh and so we do learn things as this continues. Everything we see around us this city of Los Angeles, the size of Connecticut, it was built up in the last cycle. So do you see the patterns return every moment is both its own perfect indivisible second, but it's also infinitely connected to everything else at the same time. Um and so my attitude is I don't want a strict return to the pre-industrial social norms. We've done all this crazy modern stuff. So let's find a new integration of the old pre-industrial social norms with the current thing because we've done so much learning through this process. All right, before we get to the how do we escape this, I really want people to understand your thesis on how we got here. Yes. Uh so like you, I would not just take what I'm about to say and go cool, this is what we need to go back to, but it is extremely informative if true about the way the human mind works. So you and I don't know each other so I'll tell you the way that I approach the world. I cannot fathom that people don't have one single guiding light and that single guiding light from where I'm sitting should be I want to believe things that have a high degree of predictive validity. So, if I believe this thing, it allows me like the computer simulations you were talking about, they allow me to predict what the outcome of my actions will be at a personal level, at a societal level. I'm going to believe things not that I can prove, you know, just down to the micro that this is true. I want to prove that when I believe this it has predictive validity. So, Newtonian physics is actually wrong, but has a very high degree of predictive validity. So, anybody that bought into that for however many hundreds of years that stood, I'm here for that. That made a lot of sense. Until they could get down to the quantum level, there was no way to really believe anything else. Nothing else was going to be useful. So, I don't know that what I'm about to say is 100% like this is going to stand for the next thousand years as being accurate, but this feels like it has a lot of predictive validity. That you have to keep humans in check. That you need people to have sexual roles. That for humans to thrive, and by thriving I mean fulfillment. That you are going to from an evolutionary perspective make sure that you don't get conquered and slaughtered, which if you're not a student of history you do not understand how often that happened. Where literally Genghis Khan would roll into your your city and at the end of his visit all of you would be dead except for some of the women. And your city would just be gone. Pyramids of skulls. Yeah, I just the the level of devastation people just cannot comprehend. Yes. So, there was on an evolutionary time scale it really mattered that you were having enough children that you could replace your population, that you could be strong, that you couldn't just be outbred and conquered. That very simple fact sits at the bottom of what researching your work hit me with. Okay. So, if that's true, again, we're tying this to Mouse Utopia. I know that I need a replacement rate, otherwise I get population collapse. But, no, I know waiting for me on the other side, if I grow too rapidly, too fast, I'm going to hit some sort of trigger point that causes this to collapse. Now, I don't think that there's actually a biological kill switch designed to make sure that we don't overpopulate. What I think we're running up against is you stop being rural and you stop being religious. Yes. Now, the reason I think that those things are stabilizing forces is when people have maximum freedom, they will not choose to do things that are in the long-term best interest. So, for instance, I don't have kids. Why don't I have kids? Because one, I wasn't thinking through any of these problems, and I looked at my life and I really wanted kids, but I wanted to not have kids a little bit more than I wanted to have kids. And so, not thinking there's any tie to like, oh, this will be a problem. Just like, yeah, word. This is the choice I'm going to make in my life. I know that I have to find meaning and purpose. I will find that in other ways. Okay, we'll set that aside. But, now a lot of people start making that choice. And all of the sudden, my wife, who loves that people want to be mothers and have kids, just isn't making that choice. You get a lot of people not making that choice. And the unfortunate long-term consequence of that is that you have a declining population. Now, we'll need to get into immigration at some point, but that will complicate things too much right now, so I'm just going to set that aside. So, you get a lot of people that are making different choices. That when we are freed from the shackles of a guy really wants sex, woman leverages sex to get access to protection and resources. And so, you have this forever dynamic between men and women of women going, "I'm a sexual gatekeeper. Go be cool. Go be awesome. Go be a great hunter. Be a good provider. Take care of your kids. Do all that, and I'm going to sleep with you." And for the guys, from an illusionary perspective, it's like word, that's a good trade. I'm going to go become hardcore, so that I can have sex with you. I assure you that is a huge part of why I became the person I became, because my wife was like, don't I mean, she never said this, but it was effectively, don't you want me to be impressed by you? And the things you're doing right now do not impress me. And so I went hard in the paint to impress my wife. And so I realized, wow, she actually made me a better person. Now, I always say she made me a better person in the ways that only a wife can, and by that I largely mean that she would reward me with enthusiasm and sex and all of those wonderful things, uh, when I was acting in a way that subconsciously she could see will lead us to being successful. She wasn't thinking of it like that, it was just, hey, I'm oh, when you're powerful, I find it so sexy, when you're leading, all that's so cool, right? All those things. So now you start getting a breakdown of that. So you get women coming into the workforce, you get men now having to compete with more people, you get this massive increase in labor, wages are starting to go down, equality inequality is going up, uh, the sexual gatekeeping women realize, well, hey, wait a second, I don't need, uh, to sleep with a guy. I can get my own stuff, I can make my own money, I can protect myself. The guy starts going, well, wait a second, you want me to die in a war for what reason? Like I don't get to have sex with anybody, like this is not interesting. I think people failed to understand at a biological level how driven by sex men are. And of course it's complicated. It's the love of a woman, it's the having a partner, it's children, all of it. So I'll round it to sex, but it is obviously that very complicated nest of ideas. All right, once that begins to break down, now you get the whole weak men phenomena. Women are going their own way, men are going their own way, and you are now ripe for either just population collapse, being overtaken through demographics by a different culture that doesn't have this problem, or just straight-up being conquered. And that is the loop that we see over and over and over that I think your Mouse Utopia and Psychological Black Death so eloquently outline. Thank you. I think you got that. You nailed it down, and I really want to hammer home on the point that you touched on that uh the most important thing socially is balance and having a countervailing force. And it's why America became the most successful country in history because America both has checks and balances inside its government system, but also in its social structure. America has a very diversified elite uh between different parts of the country, between different social classes. Watch my American Civilization video if you want to know more. Um and so um once people are not held in check, they subconsciously start to do crazy stuff. And you can make it too far in the other direction, though. And this is something where I disagree with a lot of conservatives, is I do think the social mores of uh the pre-Mouse Utopia world were too constrictive. And I look at Asia, and I think we need to form a new synthesis with the things we've learned now with the past. And what happened in Asia, where around 1,000 AD, Asia was the most advanced place in the world. India, China, Islam were massively economically, technologically, socially advanced. But then what happened over the course of the Middle Ages is that Asia's societies became too socially constrictive, so it became impossible to be creative. In China, China was about to have an industrial revolution in the 11th century, um and then the government over-regulated the the iron factories out of existence. Islam uh had the steam engine, they had a lot of the rudiments of science, and then the the the ummah and the church shoved shut that down. And so you need to have this duality. And the reason the West was so successful as a civilization is that it combined this balance of competing different social groups where in the West the church, the monarchy, the sorry, the church, the monarchy, the nobility, and the merchant classes all competed against each other thus forcing them to act their best. So, you have to combine enough social institutions to keep people on their toes, but not so many that you crush and oppress them under the weight of culture. Yeah, striking that balance is hard. So, given that religion has been so successful at this, what is it about religion that is the countervailing force that's been so effective? Religion accomplishes like 10 different tasks that it's There's the there's a the whole neurology to this, but modernity can only really think in boxes, and religion accomplishes lots of things outside of boxes. So, first of all, religion creates a goal through which to orient your self-development as a person or a society. Where the religion tells you what you should and shouldn't do. Number two, religion establishes communities based off social trust, off shared values, and moral prescriptions. Number three, religion establishes some I guess this is still part of one. Religion establishes some kind of social standards um that you can't cross. And so, religion mitigates the worst parts of of like tragedy of the commons behavior. Where people are behaving in short-term self-interest that hurts the whole group. Number four, religion establishes mystic paths. And this is something we forget about religion, but every religion has a mystic tradition. Where people go to the spirit world and talk to God and that stuff. And religion Religion does a variety of things between establish psychological stability where it wires people's brains. Um religion wires people's brains towards positive uh The mind's an ecosystem, remember? Ideas flow through the mind, and the mind can be filled up with ideas in the same way that the human body is filled with different germs. So, religion uh establishes good thought germs in your mind. Where for Christianity as an example, uh the idea that God loves you, um and that you you should you will fail, but uh if you fail, God still loves you, and you should keep trying because you're going to fail. That's a good That's a good mental loop for your mind to have. And so, religion is a combination of establishing good mental germs in your mind, allowing group coordination, um and also establishing uh a general framework and uh psychological concepts for how the society should be orchestrated. All right, one thing that I am now beginning to ponder is uh what huge role the dynamic between the sexes plays. Uh women anchoring men to want to be better to so that they are prepared to serve society, but really they're doing it to get laid. Yes. And then it made me ask the question, has Christianity and societies that are Christian in nature, have they been so successful because they get the most men laid? Let me think about that. So, this is a video I've been meaning to make for like a year, and I I've had the ability to write it. I just haven't gotten around to writing it. And one of my favorite books and one of my favorite books ever is Sex and Power and History by J.P. Mallory Courtois. And it's a history of the rise and fall of civilizations from the perspective of uh the relations between men and women. And so, the masculine and the feminine is a proxy for order versus chaos. How a society deals with the feminine is a proxy for how it deals with chaos. So, for example, around 1,000 AD, Asia became incredibly restrictive to women where um all the Asian civilizations, Islam, India, China, women were completely shoved out of private life. They had to basically wear burkas. They were forced in the house. And so, by giving women so little authority, these societies fossilized. They lost the ability to be creative because if you're shoving it's it's an archetypal symbol where if you want to shove the feminine, give it no power, you're going to over-prioritize order. For Western Europe, Western civilization um in the pre-industrial world, almost every Christian society treated women better than almost every non-Christian society. Um and and so, Western Europe had the best treatment of women for any pre-industrial society ever. And so, west And so, what happened was the West had this ability to deal with chaos and creativity where women were given enough social authority that they could uh that they could ask men to work harder to appeal to them. And another thing is that the Romans, the Greeks, European societies are monogamous. Uh and monogamy basically creates significantly better societies than polygamy because more guys get laid because what happens with polygamy is the emperor has 100 what women and then every other guy then there if the emperor has 100 women or even more than that, that means there are 99 other guys who aren't getting laid. So, they don't have an incentive to cooperate in the system so they could start wars or become criminals and that stuff. And so, the West was able to strike this really good balance of giving women enough social authority that women could hold men accountable, but there was also this social structure of Christianity, of the village, of uh of the village and of social traditions that could keep toxic femininity in check. All right, what is toxic femininity and how is it manifest in today's world? We can all agree that toxic masculinity is a thing and toxic masculinity is, let's say I'm a pirate and I use my physical force to beat someone up. Um or it's using social traditions to push male interests at the expense of the society. So with toxic masculinity comes toxic femininity and I boil down toxic femininity to an acronym called GSR or gossiping, shaming, and rallying. And so GSR is the use of relational warfare to get stuff. And so an example of it is let's say a woman wants to get a job and uh she's not qualified is that she threatens to say that the job hirer sexually harassed her if she doesn't get the job. Um and this is something that the clinical research has gone into and we've proven it that women will use uh basically language and shaming to get what they want. And um and so the whole thing about you should believe like with me, too. The you should believe every single thing a woman says, that's ridiculous because if you establish a principle people will abuse whatever principles you let them abuse. So if you have a social system where you can't question sexual assault allegations, you end up with just this magical wild card that a woman can pull to push her own self-interests. Um or so gossiping, shaming, and rallying where um you can you the way it works is that you establish uh these kind of ideas that exist as proxies to push your self-interest. And so um And so envy and social ostracization is another example where uh something I know a lot of women have talked about is that if you're more attractive or smart or pleasant than other women is other women will make up lies about you and tell you that you're ugly and try to ruin your life because you're competition. The women who get bullied the most are the most attractive. And um and so undermining's another aspect of it or crabs in the bucket thinking where if you see uh and I've made a video about envy, it's a a older video but it's one of my favorite where um i- if if you see someone who's doing well and you try to tear them down, that's an element of toxic talk of toxic femininity as is overconsumption for social signaling. So, if you blow all of your man's money on jewelry to make yourself look better at the expense of the whole family, that's another element of it. So, it's gossiping, shaming, rallying, undermining, envy, hyperconsumption, using emotions when logic is necessary, um magical thinking of just wishing things happen. So, it's this crystallization of negative female behaviors which are paralleled by the masculine basically being a pirate and beating people up. The the masculine's a little easier there to summarize. Okay, so uh how is what's going on today feminine uh toxic femininity? Um every single thing in feminism is pushing for a woman's self-interest. Um and feminism left behind the idea of equality like let's say 10 years ago. And I've seen the definition change. Four years ago, if you were to go on webs uh like the dictionary website, they would say feminism is pushing for a female-male equality. But now a majority of people in college are women. Uh among people under 30, women make more money than men. Um all those sorts of things. And so, once you they got past equality, it wasn't about equality. And now it's if you look at the definition, it's for female advocacy. Um and so, I mean, there's like 15 examples of it. And uh the it's funny that you said it's hard to explain toxic femininity because that's an element of toxic femininity. An element of toxic femininity is to make it impossible to talk about toxic femininity. And so we have I have to take forever to explain this because our society, if we were 200 years ago, I would just have a we would have a bunch of cultural words where I could just say the word and you'd be like, oh yeah, I understand this concept. But not being able to talk about toxic femininity is an element of toxic femininity where where if you criticize a woman for anything, you can be called sexist. Um the the welfare state and we don't see it this way, 2/3 of 2/3 of the people who take money in the welfare state are single moms. It's a form of redirecting income from male to female and you can argue about whether or not that's toxic, but it definitely is the dispossessing of resour- it definitely is the transfer of resources. Me Too is another example. If you ask, so we've reached the point where it's basically physically impossible to have expectations of socially sanctioned expectations of a man to a woman. And so a man is still really expected to make more money, to support the family, to be masculine. But if you tell a woman, I'd like you to let's say the man works a job, the woman doesn't. If you tell a woman, I want you to cook, clean, and take care of the kids, that's considered toxic in of itself. And so toxic femininity has been basically the complete abdication. Like can we think of a single social standard that it's acceptable to hold women to today? I'm too old, so I would have listed off a whole bunch of things that my generation wouldn't miss a beat on, but I certainly understand what you're saying about today. My bigger question is All right. How is it that that ideology, whether pushed by men or women, how did that take over so many institutions? Wonderful question. The bureaucracy. So one of my favorite books ever is the Leviathan and its enemies by Sam Francis. And it's So if you lived in the Middle Ages, you would not know what feudalism is. In the Middle Ages, the nobility owned the land and then they would predate from the peasants. You would just think this is how the world is. The Lord protects me. I pay my rent to the Lord. It is what it is. Leviathan and its enemies is that for modern society. Where modern society is this bureaucratic blob and every major institution is a bureaucracy. The um the government's a bureaucracy, religious institutions are bureaucracies, the military's a bureaucracy, corporate America's a bureaucracy, any single thing you could think of is a bureaucracy. And you think what kinds of people staff this bureaucracy? And the left is an ideology which rationalizes the continued growth of the bureaucracy because they the left is capable of establishing this utopian goal that's really impossible, but you can use said utopian goal to get infinite bureaucratic funding. Uh there's no amount of money that could that the West could give to Africa to make Africa wealthy because it would just get stolen by the dictators. Uh and so if you look at the funding for uh for charities that go to Africa, most of it's skimmed off by the dictators because the dictators have no interest in the people getting wealthier because then uh if you keep people in grinding poverty, they they they're not going to rebel because they're too poor to rebel. And so it the left jumps on these issues that can never be solved like male or female differences or poverty in Africa, whatever. And then if you have an issue that can't get solved, you have infinite funding forever because you just say, "Hey, I need more money." And so you can keep your job, you can hire your friends, you can raise you raise your social status. And people do what their incentive structures tell them to do and they'll develop very complex rationalizations. And in the leftist worldview, it's perfectly justified because you're you're building the utopia. And so, what happened is that and woke people are about a 10% of America's population. So, America statistically is 1/3 red, 1/3 blue, 1/3 politically non-affiliated. And the politically non-affiliated from studies aren't centrist, they just don't care. And so, woke people in that blue third of America, woke people are about 10%. The other 2/3 of the left are moderates. And that is an infinitesimally small amount of the global of the global market share for companies like Disney or Google or whatever. But that 10% are the people who run the bureaucracies. And so, they could get social authority because the bureaucracy has the power, it has the guns, or has the guns for now. And thus, the kinds of people the kinds of ideologies that rationalize the bureaucracy are the ones that win. And the bureaucracy founds that women make a very useful ally because women are naturally weaker than men. And what the bureaucracy's deal is that we will give you everything a husband would have provided in the pre-industrial world. No strings attached. Because in the pre-industrial world, your husband and your family, they protected you, they provided you resources, they provided social insurance in exchange for sex, basically. And so, the bureaucracy told women, we can set you free, we can liberate you from the tyranny of custom and culture. And in exchange, you give us your loyalty. So, the welfare state provides the insurance, the police provide protectors, and the military provide protectors. The bureaucratic governments provide work. And so, the bureaucracy built this deal with basically single women. If you look at the Democrats of the statistics of the left, it is largely single women where they would replace the role men had in exchange for unalloyed loyalty. And this deal was made about a century ago. Um and and so as this time has passed further and further on, the bureaucracy has had to entrench itself more so and more so in their base of support. So it's kind of spiraled off into greater and greater degrees of silliness over time. Okay. Uh so is it that whenever uh the feminine mode of being gets power of the institutions that that's when we have this um weak men make hard times moment where everything goes awry or have there been times in history where no no no, this is not when um the female way of being has controlled the institutions, that does not necessarily mean that something is going to be bad. And have we seen moments in history where female matriarchies have just done well by the society? There's a correlation there, but it's not causation. So there are weak societies that are hyper mas- it's funny called them call a weak society masculine, but you look at India before the British. The British were able to conquer India outnumbered 100 to 1. India was a society where women basically couldn't leave the house. And so there are so very weak societies that don't give women authority. Um every single society in history has been a patriarchy. Uh that's just an anthropological fact, and there was a lot of pseudoscience and lying that went into this in the post-World War II era. So there are no matriarchal human societies. There are strong societies that give women authority. So um Anglo-America, English-speaking societies are great example of this. English-speaking societies are the societies English speakers rule the world today, but they're one of the societies in history that gives women the most authority. Same thing with the Romans. Same thing with the Vikings Um or the Spartans. And interestingly, according to mysticism, all things lead back to their self. So, if you push a society to masculine, it will end up a feminine. And if you make a society very feminine, it can circle back to masculine. Because if you're in a society where women have a lot of authority, it it's often hyper masculine men because the men have to be hyper masculine to impress the women. Well, if you have a society where where women have no social authority, the men become effeminate because they don't have to try. And so, you have these dualities where the best system is one where men and women are both strong. And the worst system is one in which men and women are both weak. All right. It feels like we have a system right now where women are strong, they're coming into their own, they're performing very well in the job market, pulling ahead of men. There is a wage gap and it's certainly on the side of women. Uh women that have not had kids uh out earn men of the same age group. So, why then have we not made hyper masculine men? Um that's a great question. Um so, it's because there's very little incentive for the men to do so. Um and so, what we're seeing now has happened before in history. It's just we are the greatest example of it. It happened Ancient Greece had a feminist movement. Um there's a really funny story here I can get to if you'd like. Ancient Greece had a feminist movement. Um then the Romans did. Uh the Arabs had a feminist movement a thousand years ago, too. Uh we forget about that. Uh there was a moment in Islam with the society that gave women the most rights of anyone in the world. Um Unexpected. Yeah, a thousand years ago. Islam went through their whole separate arc like the fall of Rome that no one knows about. Um and and um so, what happens in a society like that is that you've removed responsibility for women inside the system. So, if you have a system where men and women are responsible to each other, they have to play into each other, but what's happened instead is that the bureaucracy has strategically enabled toxic femininity for their own benefit. And so, our society has the worst female mental health of any record we have in history because through doing so, we women have isolated themselves from their communities, families, value systems, and it's like SSRI use is super high. The female mental health has collapsed. Just if you give me a metric, it would probably be bad now. Women are less happy now than any time we've had records for going back at least to World War II. And so, it's clear that it's not a system that's working. It's a system based off a lack of responsibility. If you look at the current social order, and this is true for both men and women, there's no reward for being pro-social. If you're the kind of person who cares about your community and you want to serve for your nation militarily or invent a new scientific discovery, if you want to be earnest, our society will ruthlessly mock you. And I think that's a that's a very bad sign. Yeah, I very much agree with that. Um, none of this feels like it leads to civil war. This feels like a world that ends in a whimper. It feels like honestly, if I just step back and look, I go, "America's birth rate is plummeting. Whatever societies are keeping their birth rates high, they're just going to ride the wave of the decline, which will be ugly for everybody, but they'll ride the wave of that, and then they'll just repopulate." Um, why after hearing all of the sort of case for weakness, mental health issues, and all that, do you come to the conclusion that we will have a civil war in the near future. Yes. Uh the parallel I'm looking at here is the fall of the Roman Republic. And this is around 100 BC. And around the fall of the Roman Republic, um Rome had started out as these allied city-states in Italy, and they had conquered the known world, and they were a reluctant superpower. Uh they conquered the area from Spain to like Turkey and Syria and Greece. And with it, there's a lot of parallels to our current society. The fall of the Roman Republic saw the massive rise in inequality, the rise of mega-corporations, the death of the Roman middle class, the collapse of birth rates, um the rise of feminism, massive social liberalization, uh there was massive political polarization between the Optimates and the Populares parties. Um there was uh So, Rome spiraled into a civil war. There were the rise of charismatic cults of strongmen like uh Elon or Donald Trump or Mark or whatever. Um and and uh and so there's a tremendous amount of parallels, and what happened over time is that Rome had a series of civil wars, which turned it from a republic to a uh empire run by an emperor. And um something I should have thrown in there, too, is that Rome had a huge immigration at the time. A third of Italy's population were immigrants, mostly slaves. And so that killed the Roman middle class. And so the uh the Roman civil wars were started by uh a populist politician basically running off the let's rebuild the Roman middle class agenda and rebuild make Rome great again. And so actually he got assassinated, which is how I could have predict I predicted Trump would get assassinated or an attempted assassination 2 years in advance. And so I was looking off that parallel. Um and so Why do Why do people want that figure type dead? Uh so the left want or the left thinks that they are on the moral arc of history. The left's basically religious worldview is that the moral arc of history demands they win. And so when they see something that goes against the moral arc of history, their immediate thought is not that there's some underlying like demographic or like systemic issue that's causing it. It's that bad man stopping progress. And so the left has The left has projected all of the the reason they're not succeeding onto Trump as an individual without looking at I've never heard a leftist I'm from Pennsylvania. I've never heard a leftist talk at deindustrialization or or stuff like that or the issue the the financial issues that the left really dropped class as a social issue. Um and so uh And people are desperate. And so when you're desperate, you look for anything that works. And so I think they would see the death of Trump as a way to dis to stop the right forever. And I mean the problem is that the right doesn't actually have any coherent leadership besides Trump. When Trump dies and he's an old guy, it's going to happen sooner or later. Uh the right has no other leadership structure. Uh and so that's the answer I give. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Spain did something that's pretty comparable to what we're doing. Where Spain had all this silver from Mexico and South America. Then the Spanish hyper-inflated their currency. And this killed the economy of Mediterranean Europe. It's why Italy stopped being the richest place in the world. Most people won't want a war. Most people