The Worst Things Women Do To Each Other - Dr Dani Sulikowski

How do you describe your area of research focus? >> So my research focus is the evolutionary psychology of human behavior. And in the last few years in particular, I've really narrowed that focus down a bit to look at female intraexual competition, which is just a a big fancy word for how women compete with each other to see who gets the largest share of the population's reproductive success. >> Okay. What is it trying to achieve fundamentally? What does female intraexual competition try to do? >> So the currency of evolution is reproductive success. The genes that promote reproductive success increase in frequency in the population. And so whatever mechanisms and behaviors they produce will also increase in frequency. So, female interexual competition is the suite of behaviors that have evolved to maximize an individual's uh relative reproductive success, not absolute reproductive success. And that's a pretty important point. So, you don't need to have as many babies as it's humanly possible to have to win the evolutionary game. What you do need to do is reproduce at a greater rate than the average reproductive rate for your population. And if that continues to happen in your lineage generation after generation, then you increase your representation in that population and you win the evolutionary game. So it's relative reproductive success that matters. So you can win by increasing your own reproductive success or attempting to inhibit the reproductive success of rivals. Both of those will increase your net reproductive success. >> Okay? So, you can put your foot on the gas of how many surviving children you have, or you can try to put your foot on the brake of how many surviving children other women have? >> Exactly. >> Okay. This doesn't paint women in a particularly flattering light. How How conscious is this? Is it Is it all women? >> Oh, excellent. You've hit on my least favorite question straight away. How conscious is this? >> [ __ ] me. Okay, [laughter] thanks. >> No, that's okay. No, that's that's fantastic. It's the question I get the most often and you'd think I would have invested some time in coming up with a better answer. I try to answer it a little bit differently each time in the hope that it's a more satisfactory answer. So, how conscious people are unclear. It varies from person to person and it's probably doesn't really matter very much. So understanding what very briefly understanding what consciousness is and for is a really difficult question and there's no consensus. How it operates with respect to sort of evolved behavioral tendencies is it's develops kind of post hawk justification for what you've done and why you've done. In fact that's sort of what consciousness does with all behaviors really. You ask people why they've done something they don't know. Right? But we can we can do an experiments where we manipulate the information that people get and they don't know we've manipulated that and then we ask them why they made their decision and they just make something up and they don't know they've made something up. Right? So people generally don't know why they're doing what they're doing. So the majority of people um not just women but people generally really don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They don't know why they find this particular person attractive. They don't know. It's because the shape of their face signals that that they have particular levels of testosterone or estrogen that contribute to fertility and predict behavior in really nice adaptive ways. They just look at someone and go, "Oh, he's hot. She's nice, right? They don't have to understand why." And so women and men, because interexual competition applies to men as well, it's just a completely different ball game when it comes to men. um they don't have to understand that the consequences of their behavior is inhibiting the reproductive success of other women. They just have to be compelled to behave that way. So it doesn't necessitate that women be sort of overtly aware of some nastiness in their behavior. Having said that though, women are definitely overtly aware of much nastiness in their behavior as most women will attest to. Most women have been the recipients at some point or another of the bullying behavior from other nasty women. So women are certainly have the capacity to be absolutely directly overtly and knowingly nasty and awful to each other. That's I mean that's a given. Um >> so maybe they're sometimes conscious of the consequences of what they're doing. Sometimes you know if you look at it through a feminist lens, this is something else that I've talked about a little bit. Um, women are very conscious of what they're doing in terms of how the ideologies affect the reproductive success of other women, but they think that's a good thing, right? They think motherhood is a form of oppression and and marriage is a form of subjugation. And so, if you can free women from from those things, this is obviously certain branches of feminism, not necessarily all. Um, but if you can free women from those things, well, that's a great thing. So they can be well aware that this is, you know, reproductively inhibiting ideology without necessarily thinking that they're being mean or nasty or whatever by doing it. >> Yeah. I think as well some women would agree that they have been mean and nasty and that other women have been mean and nasty to them. But that's almost kind of like it's not even not quite right, but that's like the proximate explanation. She's a [ __ ] I don't like her. she she's annoying, she's a [ __ ] whatever. The leap from that to some of that behavior is trying to suppress the future child having potential of that woman. The more ultimate explanation, I guess. >> Yes. >> Uh that that feels like a a big leap that I think very few women would be able to make themselves, even when they've been the recipient of it. I don't know whether many women would say, "Well, the reason that she ostracized me at work or the reason that uh she vented and did the uh bless her heart thing to a mutual friend of ours that was going to tell the rest of the world that I had casual sex last week." Like those things are it's the game within the game. It's not the game itself. Uh does that make sense? >> Yeah, it does to some extent. And I think that even though you're right that most women might not make the connection between what's happening and ultimate reproductive success, a lot of women do and very rightly make the connection between what's happening and physical appearance and physical attractiveness. So as I'm sure you're well aware, you know, as would be your listeners, I'm sure that physical attractiveness is a big part of female mate quality, right? And so that becomes a big part of your sort of value on the mating market, if you like. And women are very well aware that the way that they treat other women and the way other women treat them um is very strongly determined often by their appearance versus the other women's appearances. So that is you know that is something that women are very aware of. >> Explain how that explain what that dynamic would be. They're aware of other women's appearances. uh people are very I I mean I I I assume this is my impression but I think women are very aware of the phenomenon by which a an attractive woman introduced into a workplace or a social setting or something you know is very likely to raise the eye of you know potentially many other women simply because she's attractive and women will understand that and you know and sometimes when you know someone's being picked on or bullied or whatever they'll say look it's just because she's jealous and that's frequently correct to some extent. Um, and so I think that that there is a I think there is a sort of understood relationship between female nastiness, bullying, interactions, whatever you want to call it, relational aggression, um, and female appearance. And, and it's not just how attractive she is, but it's also how she dresses. So, >> how much skin she's got. >> Yeah. Exactly. Who did the who did the study where the participants were actually outside of the study waiting to go in? A woman comes past in one version wearing lots of clothes in one version being quite exposed asking for directions and the behavior of the women is completely different despite the fact that it's the same woman. Who who did that one? >> I I want to say Maryanne Fischer, but I don't think it actually was. She's done almost all of the great one. I don't think it was though. I think it's I think it was someone else. feel like I'm what it goes to show. >> What it goes to show is that um women respond differently to the same woman who presents in a different way. And I'm going to guess that your explanation would be the smaller clothesw wearing more skin on show woman presents more of a potential sexual rival and therefore mating threat to these women than the more demure version. Therefore, ostracizing her helps to make her more hesitant, maybe lowers her self-perception, pushes her outside of the friend group, makes guys not be so attracted to her, etc., etc., in an attempt to bring that um big advertising billboard of sexual availability down. >> Yeah, I mean, more or less all of the above. So, it's really important to understand female uh intraexual competition signaling. So most of what women do that is sort of I I guess under um you know sort of conventional wisdom thought to be done to impress men. So you know beautiful clothes, makeup, all that that dling up. Um much of that is actually not targeted towards men at all. It's actually targeted towards other women. So, it's interpreted by other women as signals of interexual aggression and social aggression, dominance, um those types of things. And if a woman is attractive, it's interpreted in a reasonably negative way. If a woman is less attractive and she's engaging in this sort of type of doullling up behavior, it's actually seen potentially a little bit more positively. Um, so it'll be seen in a sort of dominant leadership competence type of way as opposed to a a more aggressive sort of way, which is how it's seen amongst attractive women. So when when a woman turns up, you know, in a social scenario and she's signaling some level of of sexual availability and looking quite attractive while doing it, that is is itself actually a an intraexual competition signal. She's basically sending a signal of sexual aggressiveness out to the women around her. And so the women around her respond to that aggressive signal with a form of aggression, a form of counteraggression of their own. >> I wonder how many women that are listening have purposefully dressed down when they've been introduced to a new group of girl friends or have been newly placed into a different office with different co-workers and stuff like that. I I have to guess if you have recognized the game, even if you don't fully understand the ultimate explanation of fertility suppression and ostracization, blah blah. Um, you will know if I turn up with my boobs out throughout my experience of life being a woman, I've noticed that women don't seem to like it so much when I turn up with my boobs out. So, I'm going to wear something that's a bit different. So, you've just been trained like a LLM over time to behave in one one way as opposed to another. Yeah, that's right. And I I would suspect that most women, whether even whether they realize it or not, um would certainly moderate their dress in different social circumstances for the benefit of other women. Not just for the benefit of of men, but specifically for the benefit of of other women. And it's it it is no doubt uh experientially tuned. But I suspect too that this is you know these would be evolved tendencies. These is a part of the evolutionary game. you know, all evolved tendencies rely on having appropriate experiences for them to develop properly. And so I wouldn't sort of I wouldn't want to put it down to a socialization effect necessarily. >> How does female intraexual competition differ from male intraexual competition? You sort of laying at the feet of women, this fertility suppression thing, but surely the only job of men's genes, the the currency that matters is also reproductive success. So is it not just the same for guys too? >> No. So the the there's a few differences between male and female interexual competition, but I'd say that the fundamental one that matters is that for exactly the same reason that societies can send large numbers of men off to war, have them die um and recover the the population within a generation is the same reason why men don't tend to engage in manipulative reproductive suppression of rivals. So if a man seeks to suppress the reproductive success of another man of the group of another man and even say let's say he does that successfully. He convinces some large proportion of the population to effectively withdraw themselves from the gene pool. The remaining men even if he has tremendous success the remaining men will be able to pick up that slack if you like. The same thing doesn't apply to women. In exactly the same way, populations don't send 40, 50, 60% of their women off to war to fight because if they did that, they would take them generations to recover because female reproductive success is capped. So male interexual competition focuses much more on the side of the equation of maximizing your own reproductive success. It's much more just like a sprint race. Men are just like, >> they only have a gas pedal. They don't have a break. >> Yeah. They're in their lane. They're running hard and they're just trying to, you know, get to the finish line as as quickly as they can and get there faster or with more children than the other men. Women is like a running race except every competitor is spending most of their time sticking out their arms and legs trying to grab the other competitors, pull them back, trip them over, and the end result is that the entire field doesn't necessarily really go anywhere, which is why net reproductive success is so important. the entire field as a whole can cannot move and everybody can have relatively low reproductive success but whoever is at the top of that relatively low number um wins. >> So the games are very different. >> It's fascinating. Look, I've had Candace Blake, Joyce Benninsson, Corey Clark, Tanya Reynolds. Like, I've had a big suite of uh interexual competition researchers on the show, and I never realized that the asymmetry in the ability for men to reproduce and for women to reproduce means that fertility suppression for men doesn't make sense. because give a guy a a good half hour break and a new glass of water and he's probably okay to go again. Uh that's not the same for women. Uh and that means that the uh both value, potential profit and potential cost of uh improving or restricting yours or a rival's mating success as a woman is so much more valuable because you've just locked in what? That's a 2-year contract maybe of gestation breastfeeding. >> Yeah. >> But it's okay. But I mean you can have another kid like you can have two under two, right? You can have two under two, but there are still massive opportunity costs involved in the fact that you've got one under two in terms of the two under two and your your prospects of if you didn't hold on to whoever the first mate was, your prospects of >> getting another mate, your prospects of being able to actually rear subsequent children needing more resources to do that and and things like that. So even it's not even just restricted by the basic biology which is obviously a massive restriction but there's all of the flow on effects as well whereas men simply don't have those same concerns men can have you know I mean it's not quite as simple as that especially in the modern world with you know courts enforcing sort of child support payments and things like that but essentially men can have children from previous relationships and it is a much less serious impediment to them then embarking on a future relationship with that might be more long-term that might then yield more long-term children in a more familyike environment. That's not really an option that's available to women unless they're prepared to wear the massive costs that go with it. >> Yeah. I'm thinking about Tracy Vancor's work and there was that recent study that came out about um men are more accepting of their political rivals than women are of their political allies. I think maybe it was Joyce Benninsson or maybe it was Tracy that did the study looking at >> female basketball players >> sorry male basketball players showed more physical affection to opposing team members on the court than female players did to their own team members and you think like ah okay like this is you know it's an interesting data point do we really need to read into it all that much what does this mean um but when you have this underlying ing narrative of the break pedal for women being something that is really useful for them, savage and and and and mean and malignant, but uh useful from a reproductive standpoint, but it's not there for men. I think it explains a lot or it's starting to explain to me a lot of um the differences in male and female behavior. sort of this very much you said sort of a sprint race. This single thrust make self as rich, famous, well-known as possible. Must gain more muscle, must continue to go in the as opposed to this entire suite of social skills that women have that men not only don't have but can't even recognize. You know, when you you and your girlfriend go into a a workplace and she says something, she picks up on something that some girl did to and you're like, I didn't I didn't even know that there was a person here. I wasn't I wasn't even looking. I was busy having having [ __ ] pair of teeths. Um I think that it really begins to explain what what drives that asymmetry. And it is one of the sexes has a brake pedal and a gas pedal and the other just has a gas pedal. >> Yeah. And I I completely agree and I think it's I think it the intersectional competition angle I think is well I mean obviously it's it's kind of my thing so I'm going to see it as as a a fundamental explanation for almost everything and I do that. So people can level criticisms at me for that if they want to. But I do think that it's the fundamental um explanation for why, you know, it's it's kind of well understood and accepted that women have better social skills generally than men, right? So the you know socialipulation. Oh yeah, better lie detectors, better at lying themselves, better manipulation, much better at following >> um the you know the social intricacies. um like you know un you know remembering who's friends with who and who said what when and then this person that like one of my favorite little anecdotes and I I said this to a guy and his response was oh my god that happened to me too so it's not just my husband but my husband had a falling out once it's not interesting but he had a falling out once with a neighbor and then I don't know about six months later or something he bumped into him at the local supermarket and and they had a chat and he came home and he said oh I saw I saw such and such today and I went oh said oh are you two friends again. And he sort of looked at me like like like he just forgotten. He just forgotten that they hadn't spoken for 6 months because they weren't talking each other and had a falling out. That is something that that women would never do that they would simply never forget that someone is not their friend anymore. Um it just doesn't happen. And so and I do think that this intertexual competition game that women play is a fundamental organizing principle of female social behavior. I really do. I I think it dictates much of what women do much of the time, whether they realize it or not. Of course. >> In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Gym Shark, Skiims, Aloe, and Newtonic, which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best-in-class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions by up to 50%. They've got award-winning support there to help you every step of the way. Look, you are not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management. Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Newtonic on Shopify right now. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom all lowercase. That's shopify.com/modernwisdismdomd to upgrade your selling today. That's a lovely description uh an organizing principle of female social behavior. Uh I I think that's really cool. I before we even get into what are some of the different ways this behavior shows up, I imagine that there's many women listening who don't like the sound of their entire sex and much of their social behavior being painted in this kind of a light. Given that you're a woman, how have you found it best to not even soften the blow, but to explain this in a manner that women become receptive to as opposed to saying, "And you do this, and you're trying to get your friend to break up with her husband, and you she's eating herself out of a fertility window, and blah blah blah." >> Um, it's it's that's an interesting question, actually. Surprisingly, I get well I've so far and I look at so far I've been exposed I think by the nature of social media and whatever I think I've been exposed to very friendly audiences both male and female. So I think I've I've been spared not not entirely but I've been largely spared too much of vitriolic push back or even resistance. Um but actually I get more resistance from men than I get from women. Most women look at me and just nod and just go, "Yeah, that's exactly." >> Do you think that's because they've been on the receiving end? >> Yeah. And every woman's been on the receiving end. Every woman, I think, has to some extent engaged in this certainly with big individual differences, but I don't think there's any women who escape it either. And so women are very are very ready, even if they would, I imagine, would be almost definitely less ready to admit that that they do it. um and less ready to admit, you know, particular instances in which they done. Although still in conversations, most people are pretty ready to admit to rather stupid or unkind or whatever things that they did, especially when they were younger. The cover of Youth always gives you some, you know, some willingness to admit horrible things you did as an obnoxious teenager. Um but women have been the recipient of it and so women, you know, just sit many women just sit there and and just look at me and just nod and they're just like, "Yep, yep." I actually get most push back from men who [clears throat] whose impulse I guess and I sort of have this sort of verified from one man at least because he came back to me later and explained this to me that this is exactly what was going through his head. Um I get push back from men because their impulse is to defend women. Their impulse is to say you're a woman but I'm pretty sure this is sexist. I can't quite square those two things at the moment but I don't like what you're saying. um and and actually get much more push back from men wanting to just somehow not accept that this actually is a fundamental explanation of how women behave. >> I think men are going to be blind to much of this behavior because they don't pick up on the frequency at which it's happening. They are almost never going to be on the receiving end of it, at least in quite the same way. And also you've got >> like oh I guess maybe men would be on the receiving end of something but they're not going to interpret it in that sort of a manner. >> That's true. >> Um uh because they're blind to it. And you've just got the general women a wonderful effect showing up here that men and women prefer women >> uh for for all things. Okay. So talking about some of the ways that it shows up in this competition shows up in behavior. What about women's dating advice? How does it show up there? Oh, so yeah, so it it definitely shows up in women's dating advice. Um, I've done a few sort of b not boring, but some sort of, you know, formal academic studies on this showing that in a number of different scenarios, so whether it's relationship formation or deciding, you know, when to start having children, deciding whether to get married, when to start having children, um, once you've had children, whether to sort of stay home at a stay-at-home mom or go back to work. Um I have done a bunch of studies looking at relationship advice in these different scenarios and the the basic take-home finding is that uh yes or almost without exception um yes women give more reproductively inhibiting advice to hypothetical women whether these are sort of framed as friends or colleagues or whatever in in the study um they give more reproductively inhibiting advice to other women than what they say they would do themselves in those scenarios. So we use what women say they do themselves, what they say they would do themselves as like the benchmark for what they presume would be the most adaptive. And then compared against that, they give more reproductively inhibiting advice to other women. So they're more likely to tell other women the about the importance of, you know, not staying home as a mom but going back to work than they are to say that they would see it as important for themselves to go back to work. and they're more likely to tell other women that they should delay having children and invest more in their career until they build up more career success than what they would say they would invest in career success before having children. So, we we see that formally, but I think it's perhaps more more compelling or at least more interesting in the way we're beginning to see it informally sort of across mass media and and social media. So, it's been getting a lot of attention lately that I'm sure you would have seen them. The numerous articles just coming out with various titles like, you know, I had an affair and it was the best thing I ever did for my relationship and um you know that there was that um did the rounds a few days ago. Target I think have released their Valentine's Day range and there's a jumper for women that just says dump him in. Yeah, of course. in giant text and you know we're just being bombarded with the and another good one too was um I think that I think it might have been called the article something to the effect of is having a boyfriend right-wing coded >> um you know and and things like that. So we're seeing this sort of devaluing of certainly a devaluing of monogous relationships and devaluing of committed relationships in in public rhetoric. And it also translates into the uh into the sort of you know individual one-on-one advice that that women give to each other and it translates to the lab situation when we sort of try to go to formally measure it as well. [gasps] >> Okay. Many of those articles will justify the points that they're putting forward as emancipating women from relationships that they shouldn't be in. Uh encouraging their independence. Like why not go back to the workplace? 50% of marriages end in divorce and you're going to be stuck with no money and kids to look after and all the rest of it. You need to have your own life. It's important for you to do that. Um you can you should get out of relationships that you shouldn't be in. Maybe you've got some questions about whatever it might be. I guess um there is a pretty socially acceptable positive some um almost like socially philanthropic. I I'm bestowing on you some of this interesting and and useful advice that helps you push back against these like archaic and and heavily structured restrictive ideas and norms that are holding you in place. What you're saying, I think, is that would be all well and true if the women who said that also endorsed their beliefs and their behavior. Is that so is that the sort of >> right almost? So I think so you yes you you are correct that in some senses if there was no evidence at all that there was any discrepancy in what women thought was best for themselves what was best for other women then we would just say well this is the you know this is the female judgment of the trade-offs of the costs and benefits of staying in a relationship versus deserting um yeah fair enough fine and to some extent that's true except that of course if we're if we're talking about a a game of sort of manipulative intraexual competition which we are. Then there will be winners of that game, which are the women we're talking about, the women who espouse these anti-natal, anti- relationship um ideologies, values, whatever you want to call them, um but don't embody them themselves. But there will also be the losers of this intersectional competition. And these are the women who effectively buy into these ideologies all in and both then espouse them, but also embody them. So, we would actually expect to see both because if nobody is actually falling for this stuff, that's no falling for it. Exactly. Then there's no payoff maintenance. >> I [ __ ] love when the penny drop. You have just seen a 3,000 ton penny fall into my head. Okay. Makes makes complete makes complete sense, right? that if every woman that was uh putting forward some anti-f family creation, anti-reroductive stories, ideologies and norms, if all of them weren't adhering to them, that's just another level playing field. There's no competitive advantage between that. So there have to be we could call them we could call them leaders and followers, right? There are some >> leaders and followers, winners and losers. um you know in terms of it thinking of it as a you know as a as a competition that you know there effectively there are people who are winning this competition and there people who are are losing this competition >> um and I guess the the most extreme example I think of of women who in the in in our world um of women who are losing this competition in a massive way and it is a it is a pretty extreme example I'll grant you that but more common than you might think is women who are going out and in their very young and naive, you know, early 20s, um, going out and getting themselves made sterile, getting their tubes tied or severed or or whatever. >> Um, >> yeah. Yeah. Oh my god. Yes. No, that that is a thing. Like it's not like it's not a massive thing, but Oh, no. That is that I promise you that is absolutely definitely a thing. um you know with this idea that um they're now free that they can now have all the sex in the world they want and they don't have to worry about contraception failing. They'll never be tied down. They will you know they'll never um have children. And what's interesting about this phenomenon is it again it's not just about them doing this to themselves. Clearly doing this has tremendous signaling value because once they go and do it it then gets signaled. It then gets talked about and it gets celebrated and it gets shared upon social media and all the other women come in and tell them how, you know, what a wonderful liberating decision they've made. Especially women in their late 30s with three or four kids tell them what a wonderful liberating decision it is that they've made. Um, no, this is definitely a thing. So, I had a look at I was looking up the stats on this um for a research project. I was sort of doing a talk I was doing actually um based on a research project a couple of years ago and the the tubal loation procedure is actually was sort of invented if you will because the the fallopian tubes is where is the tissue that actually is responsible for ovarian cancer and ovarian cancer which you probably know is a pretty bad one. it's really hard to detect until it's late stage. And so it's, you know, it's not good. It's not good to get ovarian cancer. And so a lot of women once they are post reproductive and they're finished having kids will just go and get their tubes taken out because that basically eliminates the risk of ovarian cancer. Um, and so that's why the procedure exists, but of course once that procedure exists, it now becomes a a tool that that can be used and it is absolutely a a thing um that women are going and getting this. And so one statistic that is quite telling that I was able to locate is that depending on the the data set somewhere between 15 and 30% which is a lot of the women who have this procedure make inquiries about having it reversed. >> So I'm guessing that none of the women who are post reproductive age who took these tubes out because of ovarian cancer fears are amongst those looking to have it now reversed. So we're talking about somewhere between 15 and 30% of women who have had this procedure. Now not all of those will have had it for some misguided form of permanent contraception. But you know some of them some people may have had this procedure for ovarian cancer reasons when they were very young thinking they wouldn't want children and now really regret it. But there is certainly a substantial proportion of of women who are having this procedure thinking that they're going to be very happy being permanently sterile their whole life only discover at some point that they're not happy with that decision anymore. >> Wow. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it really does put a different angle on articles like that Vogue one that went absolutely interstellar is having a boyfriend cringe now. Uh >> yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. Yeah. Oh, that was the one about the right wing. Is having a boyfriend rightwing? No, it was cringe. It was cringe. Which which I think is is maybe equally toxic or maybe even more toxic than being rightwing. Because at least if you're rightwing, the other right-wing chicks might like you. But if you're cringe, no other chicks like you. >> Well, have you seen this the stats on political orientation though? There are no right-wing chicks. This is the problem. >> We we're going to get on to that. 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That's rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Give me just using that is having a boy boyfriend cringe now vogue article which almost everybody saw. Is it your suggestion that many of the proponents of that perhaps even the author of that is going to endorse but not follow that lifestyle. And because of that they [clears throat] are able to gain from the relative reproductive success compared with the ones that don't get into relationships that take this dating advice. >> [gasps and sighs] >> I think that the so I think that understanding the balance of who wins and who loses I think is really difficult because this is the thing it's you know you've got that like salesman I always call it a Ponzi scheme and it's not a Ponzi scheme it's got a different name but you know that sales technique that business model where you kind of sell what's effectually effectively some form of snake oil right you sell some sort of snake oil to somebody but the people you sell it to you you convince them sufficiently well >> multi marketing. >> Thank you. Yeah, that's right. There we go. And so you convince them and they then become the sellers. So they're now selling snake oil, but they believe in the snake oil, right? So the same thing happens with these reproductively inhibiting, you know, memes, ideas, whatever you want to call them. Um, many of the people who are then promoting them have also embodied them and, you know, taken them on board and genuinely believe them. But from an evolutionary perspective, it's still, you know, their their contribution to the game has not finished. So even though they may be effectively depending on how well they actually embody this particular ideology potentially for their entire reproductive um you know capacity and and end up genuinely on zero, that doesn't mean they're they're done for, right? That they can still improve the reproductive success of their genes assuming that they have relatives of any kind. um they can still improve the reproductive success of their genes by continuing to promote this reproductive reproductive suppressive ideology to other women. >> So they would be selected for to promote it and sell it and pass it on irrespective really of whether they're a winner, someone who's not going to embody it or a loser, someone who is. I think so whether someone yeah supports this stuff doesn't tell you or says they support this stuff doesn't actually tell you which strategy they're adopting the winning strategy or that they've been manipulated and they're on the losing team. Yeah, I suppose it makes for a much better smoke screen or um it makes your argument seem like it's coming from a much more philanthropic positive some place if you believe the ideology that you're espousing, >> right? Like for instance, I don't know whether you know Alex Cooper, she does this podcast called Call Her Daddy. I've said some stuff about that I actually disagree with myself on in the past. Uh, I think it must have been a very difficult world for her to be in where she started off doing this podcast talking a lot about casual sex and sleep with him and not catch feels etc. Like the classic 20's like young girl casual sex thing. Um, and then she was having this kind of secret relationship behind the scenes and then one day kind of revealed that she was engaged and had this very big library of episodes but was like, "He proposed to me in a rose garden and it was beautiful and this is the ring and I'm now doing the family pivot thing." Uh, I don't think that for a long time she would have been thinking anything other than I believe in this. I believe in this like I she's not I don't think dece and this is where I changed sort of what I'd said retrospectively. I I I don't think that she was going I'm going to encourage women to behave in this way. It's just a pretty effective meme. Uh it it sounds very positive sum. It's much more progressive and modern and contemporary and um sort of socially acceptable than the opposite which kind of sounds restrictive and bourgeoa um like and then you get to the stage where oh I now need to embody this and my life is pulling me in a different direction and that's the point at which it becomes really interesting because you say I said all of this stuff in the past do I now still agree with me previously do I wish that I'd said something different. Was I too militant with the way that I was saying that stuff? So, all of that together I thought was was pretty interesting. But one other angle to this, I suppose that isn't necessarily dating advice for heterosexual relationships. But I wonder if the broad elite female support for LGBT or or sort of non-typical relationship preferences is also a type of fertility suppression. cuz I guess having a boyfriend or a husband might be cringe, but I bet that having a girlfriend or a wife wouldn't be cringe. >> Correct. I I agree 100%. So I've I have spoken a little bit before how I think that the not just the the sort of LGBTQ movement but the you know broadly um which I think it is but also the the transgenderism as well is also that the reason why um I think that the I mean and the you know the data on this I think reasonably well known that it is almost by and large exclusively women who are really strongly in favor of gender ideology and are the pushes of gender ideology which is why it has taken hold in industries and workplaces and and whatever that are that are dominated by women. Um and I think that too is because it has very clear reproductive suppressive um implications. It was really interesting what you were saying um about that about that podcast. If I can go back to that for just a second because that also raises a really interesting um dichotomy and that or yeah an interesting contrast and that is because that for the vast majority of women it would not be adaptive to reproduce when you become biologically able to reproduce. So there is this sort of tension amongst you know in the sort of human mating system that is created by the fact that women become biologically able to get pregnant long before it's actually adaptive necessarily for them to do to do do so under most circumstances. There are circumstances where it would be adaptive. Um but under most circumstances it's it's not adaptive to do that. And so women do definitely have a a a stage of life where it actually makes sense for them to engage in, you know, self-reproductive suppression and to be discouraging themselves and obviously and that used to manifest. >> That's interesting. >> Yeah, that used to manifest in encouraging, you know, young girls not to have sex effectively. Um, but now it's sort of manifest in quite different ways. And so we've actually got a situation where there is sort of already built into the system. There is this period of sexual maturity in which it's actually adaptive for women to um you know even though they are capable of of reproducing it would actually be you know in terms of their long-term lifetime reproductive success. It would under most circumstances for most women be maladapted to get pregnant during that time period. And so it's not therefore to me looking at things through an interexual competition lens. It's completely unsurprising that that is the time period that you know feminism and and women's lib has targeted as encouraging women to really really heavily engage in risky sexual behavior because that is the one time period in which you don't actually want to get pregnant. And so we then see these same women's lib feminist type talking heads when it comes to talking about sex within marriage. And all of a sudden that's unpaid labor and emotional labor and that's oppressive. And you know husbands have no right to demand sex off their wives. And yet when you're in your early 20s and unmarried sleeping with you know every single man that gets within 3 ft of you apparently that's some form of of liberation. Um it's it's an interesting it's interesting dichotomy. The other really interesting thing that it raises that's also worth thinking about is that there is actually always attention. When you want to signal something manipulatively, the best way to signal it is to is to do it or or to look like you're doing it or to appear like you're doing it. And of course, the most effective way to appear like you're doing it is to actually do it. So any kind of manipulative signal in some sense is potentially costly to the signaler because they need to do this to themselves to some extent to in order to convince their rivals to do it to themselves to a greater extent. And so there is this dangerous very dangerous sort of costbenefit payoff matrix um that that women have to navigate when they're engaging in this type of manipulative signaling. And some manipulative signal signalers might just really really get that costbenefit calculation very wrong and simply just engage in the manipulative behavior the costly signal to a much greater extent than they can tolerate and and you know effectively score a massive own goal. >> Give me an example of how that might manifest. So it's so going back to the example of women who were getting themselves sterilized in their early 20s and then shouting all over it on social media and there was there was one um instance in particular I remember of a girl who got her tubes set into resin so she could wear them around her neck as a necklace so that she could tell everybody she met that they were her fian >> Jesus Christ. >> Yeah. Um poor girl. Um anyway, but but but see I imagine that is you know that is potentially that is clearly a case of of of a woman who has now lost the interexual competition. I mean that is just a massive own goal right there that's it's finished. Um it's it's over. But um I imagine that you know the tendency to to behave in these types of ways and to do these grand social gestures of oh yes I'm never going to have children. I I'm you know children are terrible. That's not the life path that you should choose. It's not the life path I've I've chosen. The the selective pressure on women to be, you know, highly intraexually competitive women to be compelled to engage in these kinds of grand gestures would potentially lead them to do things like get themselves sterilized. >> Exactly. They massively overshoot because the mechanisms have not evolved to deal with every individual instance of signaling behavior, you know, opportunity that might present itself. And so what could be engaged in, you know, motivated by mechanisms that involved to effectively promote manipulative signaling might actually do the self a lot of harm. Those mechanisms are not sensitive to their own outcomes. >> Okay. So >> So we've got manipulated losers and we've got people who basically, you know, beat themselves in the game. >> Yeah. >> There's two types of losers. >> So you said you said it's a massive own goal. Um, again I think it's worth restating that what you mean when you say own goal is in terms of the currency that evolution cares about. Correct? Because if you take contemporary culture, people might say, "What does it matter that she's got her tubes tied? She can have as much sex as she wants. She doesn't need to worry about child care. She doesn't need to worry about a nanny. She can work and she can go out and she's never going to get pregnant." Like that sounds like liberation. >> It sounds like liberation. Um, I mean, I would argue that it's not. And and and I'm not the only person who argues that it's not. I mean, I think that I mean, I think Louise Perry has done a a pretty good job of mounting the argument that women who engage in that type of behavior are typically not actually very happy. In fact, that they're quite miserable. Um, and fast forwarding to much later points in life because this has now been going on for long enough that we have, you know, we do have cohorts of women who are at the end of their, you know, beyond the end of their reproductive years and who are now realizing that they've seriously missed a really important boat and are miserable and depressed and unhappy um, having, you know, sort of realized where this these types of life choices lead you. And so yeah, I'm speaking in terms of the you know the evolutionary consequences of these decisions and that is a reproductively speaking obviously an own goal. Um but it's not that that is just some esoteric you know evolutionary calculation. These decisions have real life impacts on women as well which we are now which I mean really I think should have predicted they weren't going to be a net positive. Um but now we are seeing that they are absolutely not a net positive. So the these are absolutely having you know real life individual approximate impacts on the women who take these decisions as well that that generally don't seem to be good ones. >> It is a fascinating duality to hear that casual sex is a form of sexual female liberation but sex with your husband is unpaid labor or it's oppressive or subjugative or whatever. Um it it is really interesting the the the duality of these things. I I have a question. Did do regardless of whether or not >> it would be uh evolutionarily useful from a resource perspective to try and do do reproductive suppression strategies work against men? >> That's an excellent question. So I would so I I think there's a there's a two-part answer and that the first part is generally no because of the reasons we've already already described. So in the limited circumstance where you where as a as a man um you are looking to actually get the partner of arrival. So you're looking to like mate poach. Um yeah, then you know harming another man's you know potential reproductive output you know and doing things to him um might help you um if it helps destroy that you know sabotaging his relationship the way women sabotage each other's relationship that that might help you. Um but but again the the reason you're doing that is not really because you care about his reproductive success. It's because you've decided you want his partner for whatever reason. Um, so you know, for the reasons we talked about before, the fact that other men can pick up the slack, the fact that there's very little men can do um within themselves to actually move the dial on the the population's background reproductive rate just means that the payoff matrix isn't there. However, um there's a second part I think to that answer and that is if we fast forward a little bit or maybe better way zoom out a little bit and instead of thinking at the moment we've we've sort of thought and spoken mostly about this being kind of you know an individual on individual interaction or you know you know many onone or a one on on many. Um, but once you reach the the stage of reproductive suppression that I argue that we're at, so you know, I I know that you're aware that the birth rate is, you know, well below replacement level and is declining. >> Um, and my argument is that is in itself is because of manipulative reproductive suppression. That that is in fact the ultimate explanation for what we're seeing. Um, and I think that once you actually reach that point, then you perhaps do get to see um, a benefit to men of engaging in their own type of >> reproductive suppression. >> Your weapon is now sufficiently powerful that you're able to do it at a broad enough scale that this might actually work. But how would that we we wouldn't have an evolved mechanism. We wouldn't have anything in our programming as men to be able to understand that. Surely we can't adapt to a novel situation that quickly. >> That's a really good point and that's why I don't that's why my argument is that this is not a novel situation. This is actually so what we're experiencing now with birth rate decline and the >> the rise of feminist ideals and the feminization of the institutions. Um all of this is part of a repeated pattern that we see in civilization after civilization after civilization. This is not a unique idiosyncratic issue that has appeared in the west as a function of the particular social and technological forces that we sort of find ourselves living with. This is actually [clears throat] this is the human mating system. It goes through these cycles and so actually yes we have been here before and there has been selection pressure operating and this is actually the system. This is not this is not a bug. This is a system operating as intended. This episode is brought to you by Gym Shark. You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym, and Gym Shark makes the best men's and girls gymwear on the planet. Let's face it, the more that you like your gym kit, the more likely you are to train. Their hybrid training shorts for men are the best men's shorts on the planet. Their crest hoodie and light gray maul is what I fly in every single time I'm on a plane. The Geio Seamless T-shirt is a staple in the gym for me. Basically, everything they make, it's unbelievably well fitted, high quality, it's cheap. You get 30 days of free returns, global shipping, and a 10% discount sitewide if you go to the link in the description below or head to jim.sh/modernwisdom. Use the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's jim.sh/modernwisdism and modernwisdom10 at checkout. When you say we have been here before, as far as I'm aware, we haven't really seen birth rates decline really ever below replacement. There's been incidents where >> No, that's not >> Yeah. No, that's not true. So certainly um declining birth rates um are part of the the sort of suite of things that are that have been sort of pointed to as things that we see in civilizations that are declining and degrading and reaching their end point. Same as you know we see like you know that the price of sex going down and and art becoming vulgar and we see marriage rates declining. We see birth rates declining. So, so Rome um towards its well not towards its very end um a little bit earlier than its very end but it had you know many policies in place that sort of what what we're sort of calling a baby bonus to try to motivate women to get married and to have children because the fertility rate was was declining so severely. Um, and what happened in in Rome, and I would hazard a guess it's a similar thing that's happening now, is the the birth rate declined um, sharply primarily because the the women were choosing to be liberated and to be free and to not be married and to not be mothers and to have careers and and everything else. Um and that left, you know, a relatively small number of women having a relatively small number of children, which meant that those women were able to have sort of their pick of men. And so reproductive success amongst men, especially to some extent amongst women as well, but especially amongst men, became restricted to the very elite of men. And the rest of men just basically got kicked out. >> Right. Okay. So women that cultural adjustment which was um anti-f family, anti- coupling, anti-mating affected women more than it affected men. Many men wanted to mate, but fewer women did. And that basically skewed the sex ratio so that women had more power, but also so that the high, as happens with the tall girl problem, the high status men also relative get more power than they would have done. Okay. So, reproductive suppression may work against men. We're not quite sure how ingrained that mechanism would be evolutionarily. So comparatively, it's easier to influence women in this regard. Why is it the case then that women haven't developed a defense mechanism to this? Like why would you leave the keyhole in there if that vulnerability we already know what is it? Uh F to M is like five times as many transitions as M to F. Uh the ROGD rapid onset gender dysphoria thing. Um, women >> eating disorder, social contagions as well. >> Yeah, the social contagion thing is there, especially during puberty, right? I'm looking around, I'm scanning my environment, I'm vigilant for what's cool, what's hot, what's not. I need to make sure that I'm on trend. Why would human evolution not patch that bug so that females wouldn't be susceptible to this? Because surely that would be the ultimate game. like I I'm just a reproduction machine and you can't limit you can't suppress my fertility no matter what you tell me >> because the because it's not a bug it's a feature and this this is the this is the problem. So it's uh it's a bug for the for the women who lose, but the women who lose, it's not their genes that get passed on. For the women who win, who are engaging in this behavior, it's a feature because it promotes their reproductive success and so the genes perpetuate. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I totally right. Yeah. >> Would that not suggest then that we are the progeny of the women who are the less or the least susceptible to these sorts of things given that they are the genes of the ones who didn't necessarily embody even if they maybe did endorse. >> Uh yes potentially. But the other the other part of the sort of system that makes this make sense is that when is that human civilizations have got like this cycle. And so we only are able to see this type of female manipulative reproductive suppression that we see now under certain circumstances. And those circumstances include affluence and safety. And so when you've got societies that are not very affluent and not very safe, then the payoff matrix isn't there. Women are investing all of the resources that they have and all of the resources that they get to acrewue um into their own reproduction and into their own offspring. It's once you get to a point where we have the the affluence of organized society that women have an opportunity to be able to acrue more resources than what they just need to pour in. you get like a a like a law of diminishing returns. You you the resources that the elite women are effectively able to acrewue. They no longer it's no longer you know adaptive to just keep pouring all of those into their own individual reproductive success. It now becomes more and more adaptive to start pouring the this time, effort and energy into manipulative reproductive suppression of rivals. And the more affluent and the safer the society gets the the more the scales tip in that way. So because this is not an adaptive strategy under all circumstances it doesn't reach fixation if you like. M >> so it's and so what you sort of end up with is well according to my theory I should probably be careful to preface that because not everything you know much of what I'm saying is not the sort of thing that you know you would be finding other people reaching any kind of consensus on right like that's I think I think most people understand that's pretty far out stuff but according to the way I see it the winners of this game enter a effectively enter a sort of genetic bottleneck so as fertility fertility rates drop and the fertility rates are well below replacement, then that the size of the mating pool is actually much this the effective population size is much smaller than the actual population size. So it may not necessarily look like a a genetic bottleneck because we're not actually necessarily seeing a massive population crash, but when large numbers of the population, large numbers of women in the population are not reproducing and that does appear to be what's happening. So I think there there might be modest falls in amongst women who have children. I think there might be sort of modest falls in the number of children they're having, but I think that's largely being maintained. What's causing or what's sort of accounting for the large fall in birth rates is the is the massive increase in the number of women having no children. So what we're seeing is large numbers of women actually withdrawing themselves from >> if you have one the likelihood is you have 2.5 but the number the proportion of women who don't have one at all that is the big cohort that's contributing to birth rate decline. >> Yeah exactly. >> Is it possible to have these sorts of conversations publicly without getting heat? >> Yes, it is it is almost impossible to have these types of conversations. And look, I think the the sole explanation I would say for me not yet having sort of really encountered any serious blowback is just lack of exposure, right? And you're right, that may well change after this. >> So be it. That's fine. That's fine. You know, my life's been boring up until now. Why not have some fun? >> Um but >> but no, you can't. And I and I think one of the reasons I think one of the main reasons why you well according to my theory one of the main reasons why we can't have this particular conversation about birth rate declines, motherhood and and reproduction you know maybe other aspects of interexual competition um speak to more women directly and and and they can um yeah they can empathize with it and they can understand it. But once you start talking about birth rate decline um and you start talking about women having children in particular, you're getting you're really just cutting straight through to the heart of the issue. Everything else is just per peripheral, right? Everything else is just in service of birth rate decline. All the other aspects of female intraexual competition, they're just ultimately in service of birth rate decline, right? So, you know, giving women poor relationship advice, that's so that they will have either poor relationships or no relationships, which greatly reduces the likelihood of them reproducing or at least reproducing successfully. Um, because, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're aware that the the stats are pretty clear on the on the costs of fatherlessness to to children, right? The outcomes are just systematically substantially worse across the board for fatherless children. And so if you can encourage women to, you know, to engage in behaviors that result in them being single mothers, that's not quite as good as resulting in them being not mothers at all, but it's pretty good. Um, it's a pretty good way to to damage their ultimate reproductive success. Um, so, you know, we can talk about all the other issues and, you know, sometimes we can have a little bit of fun with it. Um, people had a lot of fun with that haircut study that I did where, you know, women will advise other women to cut off more hair. Um, and they, you know, they focus this kind of most strongly towards women that are perceived to be as attractive as they are. So, like they're direct rivals on the mating market. And we can have a little bit of fun with these types of conversations. And I can have a little bit of fun with feminists sometimes about certain things. But once you get down to talking about birth rates in children and motherhood, now you're getting to the heart of the issue, and that's not fun anymore. Now you're a serious threat to the ultimate reason for the strategy and it gets women very angry. >> This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I have been wearing Whoop for over 5 years now. Way before they were a partner on the show. 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You can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.woop.com/modernwisdom. That's join.woop.com/modernwisdom. What is your perspective on women being encouraged to enter the workplace by other women? how that plays into your perspective here. >> So yeah, so I think that is I mean I think that you know that talk by her and then the essay she wrote, she's done a couple of podcasts. Um I mean I think that was fantastic. So she's I mean she's like almost 100% correct in most everything that she says, all of the observations that she makes about workplaces. Um what she says happens when women reach sort of a a critical mass. um you know and it's not I mean I think it's at some point she was sort of she she did I think emphasize if I remember correctly that you know the sort of the points in time where these workplaces you know became sort of more than 50% female and then she sort of pointed that as the the tipping point and we have a small point of difference there I think that you you don't need women to be at 50% in workplaces to see these to get the ball rolling to see these changes begin to emerge women don't need to be at those that that the mechanisms by which women use to make these changes in the workplace are not democratic and so they don't need a democratic majority to do it. I think the critical mass of women is actually substantially lower and their ability to manipulate both their male and female colleagues allows these types of things to happen well before you actually get to the 50%. Um so that's a small point of of difference. Um but everything that she was saying other than that I think about what's happening in these workplaces um and the the fact that it's because of the proportion of women in them I think is absolutely 100% bang on um and I think and it's fantastic that she got um you know that that got so much traction that she was able to effectively start a conversation on something which I think people had been either unwilling or unable to really get a conversation started on and I think maybe the fact that that she There's a woman coming out saying that. Um, >> oh god, [ __ ] If a man had written that article, it would have been absolute death. But I mean, look, you're you're a woman who is >> who is professionally accomplished. Uh, is it not a good thing for women to be able to get into the workplace, to be able to have their own careers, be financially independent, have a life, all of that? >> Depends what you mean by good. Depends what you mean by good. So you know if we sort of think about so if we sort of think about human societies from first principles for a moment in order for societies to grow and stay healthy they need to to reprod well in order to to exist they need to reproduce at at least replacement. Um ideally they they need to to grow right is great for prosperity which means they need to reproduce at above replacement. Now depending on the costs of reproduction um you know in a society like ours you know individual people are able to acrue the resources needed for successful reproduction quite easily. Um and in societies gone past you know reproductive success was relatively much more expensive. Um and all that excess wealth is one of the reasons why we have this massive manipulative reproductive suppression. But so if you're in a society where you you need to maintain, you know, an investment in reproduction that will ensure that the reproductive rate stays at above replacement levels in order to continue prosperity. And the women in your population who are the ones who basically are the limiters on your reproductive output decide to invest a certain amount of time and effort and energy in non-reproductive activities such that it becomes impossible for your society to reproduce at the levels required to maintain prosperity. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's the end of it is the end of the society. The society simply cannot sustain itself. >> But no individual Yeah. No, no individual is going to think I'm going to not do the thing that seems exciting and independence enabling to me in order for me to serve. It feels almost like like some kind of social reproductive conscription that you're asking me to do where I don't get to do this thing because what the the the world civilization needs me to be a birthing machine. So feminism has certainly done a really stellar job of making sure that that's the way people think. Um and you know props to it. Um but forgetting about the impositional individual people for a moment because we could say exactly the same thing. Uh in fact I think we could say much more about what's needed about the male commitment to keep a civilization profiting. Right. I mean, you think that um it's might be bad news for women that they need to have children and families in order for civilization to prosper. Well, what do men need to do in order for civilization to prosper? They need to work themselves to the bone, frequently die, get sent off to war. Like, if civilization is going to prosper, men have got a pretty raw deal. So it's it's not as though um it's not as though you know we're talking about it's you know it's all fun and games for men and women have to to carry some sort of burden. So if we're able to put that bit aside for a moment even just answering the question of is it good or is it bad if a society moves in a direction that effectively dooms that society after a couple of generations. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Um that's not an easy question to answer. If you if your argument is that well it's better for the individuals who are in that society at the moment because they'll have a more fun life um it's worse for the continuation of the society. But if we're going to prioritize the individual then maybe that's maybe that's a good thing. >> It's a very individualistic society at the moment, right? I mean, that's an awful lot of an awful lot of the uh >> well-meaning and bad meaning push back that I get online is saying something along the lines of you're trying to remove agency. Um it's taking women out of the boardroom and putting them back into the kitchen, etc. It's very much that the language is almost exclusively framed around independence. >> Yeah, of course it is. Um and it's and you know and that's a very um it's a very effective way of framing it. It's probably a little bit of a of a different um of a different conversation, but that the notion of individual um of individual freedom and decision-m around these things is also a little bit um is also just a little bit of a a little bit of a fallacy and a little bit policy. A little bit folly. It's it's it's kind of the it's the libertarian fantasy, right? that if you just let everybody do what they want, then everybody will do what they want and everybody will be happy when in fact that the vast majority of people only know what to do based on what everybody else does anyway. So if you don't actually have which we're sort of seeing now um when you abandon that the kinds of sort of you know societal institutions that you know placed guard rails on what people should do and had to do um you just end up with people being really vulnerable to manipulation by others because actually the majority of people don't sort of make their own decisions about what they would want to do anyway. They they go with the crowd and they follow the norm. Um but to get back to your question about you know is it is it a good thing or is it a bad thing to have women generally in the workplace. Um and you know it's it's hard to it depends on what you mean by good or bad. If you mean good or bad for the society well then there's definitely I mean it's definitely bad for the society if the inevitable result of it is that it's terminal. I I think we can argue that that's definitely bad at the level of the society. So then we have to move down to the level. So when we move down, we don't have to, but let's say now we move down to the level of the individual and say, well, is it good or is it bad for the individual? And so, well, have a look at the state of women at the moment. Massive mental health crisis. Um, not generally not happy. Um, ending up childless, partnerless. So we're not you know and we sort of spoke about this earlier in this discussion as well that you know the the end results of these strategies for women you know I think sensible people I think would have predicted that they may not have been very positive but we're now seeing you know that the happiest women are the women who are married and have children and the least happy women are the women who are not married and don't have children. So once again it depends on what you mean by good and >> what's the most just on that >> what what's the most robust data that you've seen around the happiness the comparative happiness levels between coupled women with kids and single women without kids. [gasps] >> I couldn't answer off the top of my head. I would have to go and look it up. I my understanding of it is that it is pretty robust and it's been out there for a while. Like it's not just like one recent study or anything. It's kind of multiple studies out for long periods of time. It's pretty well understood that in terms of life satisfaction, self-reported well-being, self-reported mental health problems, like it's not just one DV either. It's it's multiple DVs are all pointing to married women with children being happier than single women who are not mothers. the the interesting thing that I and maybe it was just because of the cohort of people that were commenting on this little storm in a teacup. What I was surprised by was in the same way as you have pro-life and pro-choice, you should still have prom motherhood and kind of anti-mhood or pro-atal and antiatal. Um, and I was just surprised at how few people stand up and say something to the extent of mothers are important and having kids is a good thing. Um, that there's kind of a soft misogyny to saying that the the highest contribution that a woman can make is behaving or working like her father and having sex like her brother. Like it is a kind of soft misogyny. Um, and I don't I don't think that that's necessarily seen as the call coming from inside of the house all the time. Okay. So, what are some of the more underrecognized methods of intraexual competition that women engage in? What are some of the the elements that people typically don't think about? So I think perhaps the least I think probably the one of the least well recognized because it's sort of framed as a a man-hating thing I would say is or is the whole kind of toxic masculinity little cottage industry that's appeared. So that's you know frequently and and you know not without good reason um is frequently framed as like an anti-male movement. It's, you know, it's the man-hating, you know, stream of feminism that wants to brand not just men as toxic, but boys as toxic. And I I don't know, um I don't know what your experiences are and and what you've seen, but certainly in Australia, um and I believe the UK, there's lots of talk and I think it's it's sort of actually happening now introducing effectively like preemptive education into schools for young boys so they can teach them not to be toxic. And these are, you know, exactly what you would imagine. Um, and you know, there was a it made a little bit of a splash um just the other week. There was a study that came out um saying, you know, talking about how terrible it is that, you know, our young boys, young boys have just got all of these, you know, toxic attitudes. It was an Australian study. young boys got all these toxic attitudes and and of course the the attitudes were were things like you know some women lie about you know sexual assault allegations like that's not a toxic attitude that's just happens to be the truth. So so you know we're sort of seeing this you know real branding of of male toxicity uh which is and I'm don't deny that that's having terrible effects on men. So, I'm, you know, I'm about to suggest that the men are actually the collateral damage of that um of that whole little enterprise. And just because it's collateral doesn't mean it's not serious. Doesn't mean I'm minimizing the impact it's having on men. >> So, explain explain to me how branding men and masculinity is toxic is female intraexual competition >> because it destroys female make choice preferences. It's what it's targeting. what what the the the toxic brand is being attached to is every aspect of men that women should actually uh that women I won't say every single aspect of men because it obviously gets targeted at actually bad behavior but most of the regular all of the regular masculine behaviors that this toxic label gets thrown at are exactly the type of masculine behaviors that women should actually be looking for in a high value partner. And so it is skewing women's mate choice. >> Can you can you uh explain how that manifests or what how that comes into land? >> Men who are who are socially dominant and socially aggressive make for excellent providers and for excellent protectors. But any kind of social dominance or aggression shown by men is uh is being completely demonized and and labeled toxic to the point where I was I won't say who but um I was having a discussion the other day um with a guy who was sort of explained that one of the things that really upsets him the most about what he sees amongst kind of you know his his peers and he was um he was American um what he sees amongst amongst his peers is the lack of men policing each other's behavior anymore. Because from where he sits, his sort of impression of what's going on is that any kind of male aggression and male dominance is so um has been deemed as so inappropriate and such terrible behavior by women or just by society at large that men don't even feel it's appropriate to be aggressive and dominant with other men who are behaving badly. So he was sort of using the example of how you know there are men who would um you know he was sort of saying that you know when he was a bit younger you know back in his day um you know men who who didn't treat women well or or men who showed any kind of inappropriate interest in children would be you know taken out a back shed and be beaten to within an inch of their life and then they wouldn't do it anymore. Um or at least would you know think really hard about about doing it again. And he said that sort of stuff simply doesn't happen now because people are as concerned or even more concerned about demonizing the behavior of taking him around the back of the shed and beating him to the inch of his life than they are about demonizing the behavior that needed to be policed in the first place. And so what we're seeing is is, you know, society, feminism, whatever you want to call it, having reshaped the positive aspects of male dominance and male strength. And, you know, even what they've decided to to label uh benevolent sexism, which just because they've called it benevolent, they don't see it as as good. Um, which is basically all of the etiquette around gender role interactions um that happen to favor women. um they've still decided that's sexism that is inherently bad for women. But even the benevolent sexism um all of that stuff has been demonized and been sort of, you know, labeled sort of, you know, not no longer socially acceptable. And so men can no longer behave in the the kinds of ways that they used to behave in order to be able to demonstrate their their quality as a prospective mate to women. And so men are responding by actually engaging in sort of what, you know, what you might call beta behavior just to demonstrate that they're not a strong masculine man. And women are being taught to reject men, you know, to be they're taught to recognize signs of masculinity and mate quality as red flags to be avoided. And I think that's if women are influencing men to be more docile and women are being taught to get into relationships with men who are more docile and less aggressive, how is this not just a changing of the mating landscape and the preferences moving over time? How does this suppress anything? It it it seems to be a set of instructions being given out and a set of preferences being adjusted. Because I don't think that where because we're not necessarily seeing the it's not as though the women who would have paired up with the high quality men who were able to, you know, uh able to signal all of those signals of strength and dominant because they're costly signals, right? They're real signals. this the the signals of effectively harmlessness uh don't differentiate between mate quality because you don't actually have to have anything or do anything or be anything in order to be physically dominant and socially dominant and be able to be aggressive. You have to be big. You have to be strong. You have to have good leadership. You have to be competent. You don't need anything to not be competent, to not be strong, to not have good leadership, and to not have social dominance. And so it's not that it's sort of one set of reliable costly signals now just having to be signaled a different way. It's obliterating all of the male ways and sort of desocializing all of the male ways of advertising their own mate quality. And it's leaving men with ways of advertising their their own mate quality that are not reliable indicators of mate quality, which makes it very difficult for women to actually choose quality mates. and any reliable indicators of mate quality that that you know do manage to to bleed through are being systematically depreferenced by women rather than being preferenced. >> Okay. Uh so it's let me see if I've got this right. You're suggesting that women are saying these sorts of traits, typically masculine, dominant, prestige, go-getter traits, are things that men shouldn't engage in and that women shouldn't like. But the problem is that women aren't as capable at getting themselves to not like those things or more specifically to like the reverse of those things. >> That's right. And so women might make these explicit sort of, you know, make choice decisions where, you know, they might be encouraged by their friends or whatever to sort of, you know, go out with this guy even though they're not especially attracted to him or to not go out with that guy even though they might be attracted to him. um and therefore they end up in relationships where the the relationships are either not um not compatible, they don't work very well, they don't last very long, and they don't end up becoming long-term stable relationships in which you can in which you can raise families because the other thing that sort of happens if women make I think this this happens to to a reasonable extent to men as well, but but more so with with women. Women are by far the the sex that terminates relationships more commonly. Um, if women pair up with someone who they then later decide is not sort of their mate quality, the relationship doesn't work and they're not satisfied and they do attempt to trade up. Um, at least in those, you know, early stages before it's complicated by having children and and things like that. And so it's, you know, if you can convince women to perpetually date men that her brain is going to tell her, "No, this is not the person that you should be reproducing with," then she's going to find it very difficult to end up actually having a a a nice, you know, profitable, stable, long-term relationship that will work. I think what would be interesting would be to look at the women who are proposing whatever you want to call them. Cinnamon roll husband, golden retriever husband approach. >> Um >> look at their husbands. >> Look at their husbands. Yeah. Exactly. Like who is it who is it that you're marrying? Who is it that the women are are ultimately getting with? And you know part of this you could see is well it's people don't know what they want and they're I thought I was right in the past. I thought that the the casual sex thing, the sleep at the not catch feels thing. I thought that that was right then, but it's not right now. I think when you do see that, it it does show some women may reach like realization, escape velocity to get out of that mindset and into the one that they end up in. But other women may just cycle through a series of medium-term relationships with guys who are not a type that they want to keep going because they've seen this meme and they've committed to it and they think that that's the way. So yeah, I can see how it's difficult, right? Because I mean, one of the biggest insights that I learned when thinking about me too was that blanket advice doesn't land on people evenly. So when you say to guys, don't be pushy, the guys who really could have done with a little bit more gumption and less approach anxiety will take that to heart, while the guys that were blowing through boundaries all along don't think that it's meant for them in any case. Well, that's right. Exactly. If you're going to blow through boundaries, then putting up an extra boundary is not going to change your behavior. If you're the type of person who doesn't blow through boundaries, well, as you say, putting up a boundary just pushes you even further back. >> Yeah. Going back to the benevolent sexism thing, >> did you see there was a video, I think it might have been in a CCTV video of a girl in Vietnam. She was traveling and she got her bag tried to be taken off by a guy with a knife. It looked like there were two travelers. man and a woman, young, maybe 20s, something like that. This video was maybe a month ago, month and a half ago. >> Oh, >> and he hides. Is that >> Yes. He hides by He hides behind the pillar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I thought that was that was really fascinating looking at the response from that in particular. Um because so many of the responses were, "This guy's not worth your time of day. Men are trash. Girl, just leave him. This is what's the current generation of men and trying to square that circle with dominance in men, benevolent sexism, sort of a patriarchal, classically masculine protectionist belief about women being delicate and special and needing men to use their increased robustness and resilience to be able to wall them off from the world. In one headline it says that that's oppressive and in another headline it says that it's a marker of like uh modern men not being up to standards. Well, it feels like talking out of both sides of your mouth. >> It is. And and that's this is why men can't win, right? This is there is this is why I think many men are almost sort of self just just deciding to just self- remove from the making mating market entirely because they've seen the writing on the wall and you know they they understand in some cases perhaps perhaps misunderstand and they're perhaps overestimating the risk but I I don't know I think I think the risks are real um and and it's hard to know what what weight men should put on those but you know it's it's really difficult because there's very little that men can do that they that they're not going to be criticized for. Right? If you if you go and and approach a woman, you know that then you're you in some cases, you know, you're sort of, you know, automatically being demanding and and and sexist and presumptuous. Like I'm not sure if you remember. I remember cuz they went up around my university, that little fad where they started putting up pictures of, you know, various women's faces with statements underneath them supposedly being things that, you know, men needed to hear from women. And one of them was is, you know, I don't owe you polite conversation. So, you know, the very idea, the very idea that a man, you know, expecting that if he goes and talks to a woman, she might at least be polite, even that was a sexist presumption, right? Like there is very little that men can actually do that is not going to lead to them being potentially criticized and sometimes quite seriously by one or other branch of you know the the talking heads the progressive collective progressive talking heads you know from various feminist angles and so it has become incredibly difficult for men and then you know they do have genuine fears about you know I think you know I don't want to sort of necessarily sort of speak on behalf of men because I suspect I don't really know >> feel free Um, yeah. I suspect speaking for the male community. Speaking for the male community, sure. Let me just go right off. Um, no, I I think that there is a very real fear of false accusations of sexual harassment or or sexual assault. And I think that that is probably in a really confusing way for a lot of young men is probably blended with with, you know, sort of coupled with genuine fears of maybe actually accidentally committing a sexual offense or sexual assault. It's really difficult to tell those two things apart, I think, especially for a lot of young inexperienced men. And so that they're scared of the false accusation, but they're also scared of the, you know, accidental commission of an offense, which is a crazy a crazy position for for young men to be in. Um, >> well, on that, is it a crazy position for men to be in? There are certainly times where guys can be fumbling around and coercive, emotionally manipulative in a way that doesn't cross anything close to a legal boundary or even something that's ethical, but it's there's a bit of gamesmanship. She said no, so he took his arm out from underneath her, stopped cuddling her, and turned over on the other side of the bed and said, "Well, if we're not going to do it, I'm going to go to sleep." Like, is that like what's that? because that's an an effective strategy of kind of the retreating uh the uh removal of emotional comfort and physical touch because you didn't want to do that thing but I did like is that and you know we just create this entire spectrum I think yeah as a perfect example this was probably 5 years ago or six years ago now I was out in London with a friend who was 20 21 and there was a group of girls up by the bar and I said we should go and talk to I'm bored of you. Uh, we should go and talk to the girls by the bar. And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go and kill them, put them in a bag, and bury them in a a pond. He was like, [laughter] "You're kidding." Like, "No, they they they look they look nice. There's three of them. There's two of us. I'm sure we can take them. Like, let's [laughter] we should go we should go and talk to them." And uh he was like, "I have been told under no circumstances to ever approach a woman in public." And that was it blew my mind because I'm I'm 37 and when I was at university we didn't even have iPhones. So that was a very different sort of >> mating environment. It's the only way it's the only way that you could do it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I like I get it on the the challenges of guys sort of balancing this this new world that they're entering into and the fact that they decide to check out as opposed to potentially do something. I think it's a great point to say that guys not wanting to accidentally do something that they would later regret this the hyper sensitivity to the and less forgiveness to the sort of innate bumbly white chaotic world of young people mating. If you're 20 and you're trying to work out like you've both had a drink what like is should we I we've met before like it's all it's the devil really is in the details with these things and it as you try and navigate through all of this if you basically make the fear setting higher. uh guys as my friend I've been told under no circumstances ever go up to a woman in in public like that's a you know it's a real thing. So yeah I it does make it difficult. It makes it a difficult environment for for for men to navigate. And then unfortunately I don't I don't think that women's preferences have updated themselves to be the ones that want to come up and talk to guys. Um >> no. Of course not. Yeah. I think it's 86% of women say that they want to make want a man to make the first move. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and and this is this is why sort of one of the reasons why I'm sort of really convinced that this sort of attack on male masculinity, dominance, whatever you want to call it, is this attack on being a man, um it's been so effective in disrupting that, you know, human courtship behavior. It's been really, really effective. women are not, you know, for the most part are not going to initiate these relationships and or these interactions, I should say. Um, and so if you can stop men from initiating them, then that goes a long way towards stopping them from a long way towards stopping them from happening. And >> does that mean, just to interject that, does that not mean that you as the proponent of this idea would be on the receiving end of it, too? That doesn't seem like a particularly good thing like you're also cailing the men that would come up and approach you. >> Yeah. So, so this is a So, no, that's a that's a really good question and it's good because it gives me a chance to sort of explain an sort of an important principle that kind of wraps around all of this. So what's happening with all of of these things that the devaluation of motherhood, the devaluation of marriage, the demonization of of men that would actually make excellent husbands and fathers, the you know the the valorization of of careers for women and all the rest of it. Um, one thing that what the end result of all of these sort of individual things that are happening is that they're feeding into creating an environment that is really hostile to reproductive success. So, we just have an environment in which the the rules that we've sort of, you know, the social etiquets and the rules that we've sort of developed and built over time and over generations have all of a sudden just been thrown out. So now that the guard rails have gone and you know those rules of etiquette they were really important because people understood what you were and weren't allowed to do and people understood that you could do this and you couldn't do that and we sort of had you know a way that that two people who didn't really know each other could navigate a potentially romantic interaction with with some some certainty and some guidance and that's been chucked out the window. So, we've got an environment now, a social environment that is incredibly hostile to reproduction. And yes, that impacts everybody negatively. But all of these things will always impact those who generally have lower reproductive potential more. So if you are from a reproductive perspective an elite if you are as let's just say as a woman if you are highly attractive you can do a crazy thing like decide to get a little pixie crew cut um which for most women would massively decrease their attractiveness you can probably do that and start setting that as a fashion trend and yeah it's going to decrease your attractiveness a little bit but you're still going to be pretty hot. It's going to be much worse for all the less attractive women who are now copying this trendy pixie cut. And that same principle applies across the board to all of these things. So yeah, it hurts um everybody, but the people who can the people who have the most reproductive potential because they have the highest mate quality and they're the most fertile and they already have, you know, they're already in a position in society which gives them social access to the best men. You know, those women are hurt the least. And so they are the ones who are pushing and setting all of these trends. So if you imagine that like if you sort of think we've got this kind of linear scale and the odds of reproductive success are you know those that have the highest odds the highest likelihood of the most reproductive success are at the top and you can line everyone up right down to those people that have really low prospect of reproductive success. The more hostile you make the environment, the higher you lift the bar along that linear scale to a point where people are not having any reproductive success, which is exactly what we're seeing, right? More and more people are just not able to navigate their life to lead to reproductive success in this really antiatal environment that we that they find themselves in. Whether it's because they devalued finding a mate when they were at their peak mate quality and it should have been the easiest. Whether it's because they delayed having children when they at their peak fertility and that would have been the easiest. Whether it's because they made bad mate choice decisions, bad uh life choices, ended up investing a lot in their career thinking that they would somehow magically find a partner and be able to have a family between the ages of you know 38 and 39 and then that didn't happen. um you know we have a social environment that is very hostile to reproduction and therefore the only people in there who are able to reproduce are the ones that have the most reproductive capacity to begin with by virtue of a whole bunch of factors that contribute to that. So yes it hurts everybody but the ones who benefit are the the the relatively small number of those who survive it and successfully reproduce and they benefit because large numbers of their competitors simply can't reproduce in such a hostile environment. So that's your line from the very beginning saying that running the race results in everybody moving more slowly. >> Yes, exactly. The female race slows everybody down, but someone still wins and so that doesn't matter that that the whole reproductive output has dropped for for the fact that they still continue to win this individually based race. The genes aren't smart enough to realize that if there is no future civilization, your progeny have a bad future. We've evolved under circumstances where that hasn't been an issue. Therefore, if you relatively have more kids than the next woman, that's good for you. When you start to scale this across an entire civilization, what ends up happening is it's good for you, but over time this is going to become very bad for everybody, including you. >> Yep. That yes, you're correct, but with one with one caveat, though. >> I always get something wrong. It's okay. >> Yeah. No, no, no. You didn't get anything wrong. You're correct so far. But um except that here's so here's the kicker, right? So you you you would be correct if the end point of this was actually that it's just bad for everybody because you're right evolution is not it's not teological and it cannot see the consequences. If a if an individual population finds itself in a local you know a local maxima some sort of local adaptive thing it will be selected for to stay there even if the inevitable outcome of of that trait or that behavior is that the entire species goes extinct. You know evolution has no mechanism for protecting against that. So you would be right if the end point of this manipulative reproductive suppression was in fact just the end of all of these lineages, but it's not. And this is where it gets perhaps even well I think I think gets even more interesting. So this is what I so what what happens at the end of you know when civilizations crash and fall the you don't actually see an end to those genetic lineages. what you see is those genetic lineages, some of them, a small number of them, those who are there at the end um actually becoming the founder population or a part of the founder population of what rises. So you can sort of think of it as like almost like this really kind of dire game of musical chairs. >> Now if you can sense now the musical chairs play and each round, you know, someone doesn't get a chair and a lineage drops out. You know, each round somebody doesn't reproduce and a lineage drops out. If you can sense that the end is near, then you actually want the end to come before you end up being the one that doesn't find a chair in one of the rounds. So once female behavior reaches this really intense reproductive suppression stage and we start seeing all of the social signs that this is happening like a massive drop in the decline of sex I'm sorry massive drop in the price of sex um increased casual sex vulgarity decreasing marriage decreasing birth rates and a whole bunch of other social factors that all point to this being the stage of society where we're at. They all act as cues to sort of intensify this behavior as everybody ves for a a chair at the end. Everybody wants to be one of the lineages left standing because what's the genetic prize if you are one of the lineages left standing is that you get to be part if you're a woman you will get to be because when you get invaded it's the women who survive and reproduce. It's not the men. um you get to be part of the founder population of a new society that will go through a large expansion phase. So you may have started off your lineages may have say like you know it's lineages are not this separate but for sake of argument your lineage may be you know one of 10,000 in the population at the start of this game but if you're you know one of just 50 lineages >> that are left and you become that as part of the founder population then your representation the population went from one in 10,000 to one in 50 >> and this is why it's the winners that just become they you know the winners of this game become the founder population and so it is in the interests of these winners to maintain genetic capacity for there to be losers so that they can win in the end if that makes sense. It's a little bit like >> as the competition >> almost like a kin selection strategy. >> Yeah. As the competition gets more fierce you behave more fiercely because the gains relative are going to be greater because there are fewer people to compete with. So in in some ways it's >> and you want the game to end too. You know once it gets down to a relatively small birth rate you you want the game to end. You want the society to collapse and the next society to come in and start growing. You don't want your lineages to fall out two or three rounds from now because the game went on for two or three rounds longer. You begin to want it to end. And that's what we're seeing. I sorry I'm getting a little bit off topic but um jumping back to Helen Andrews great feminization. And I think that greater representation of women in society's institution as opposed to pouring their efforts into society's reproduction is an inevitable result of this female interexual competition and manipulative reproductive suppression. And then an inevitable result of that is the the gussing and the decline and the eventual collapse of these institutions. And so these things follow on necessarily from each other. And this this is where I think this is the bit that I think Helen doesn't get quite right. Um she attributes as as do many other people. I'm not sort of trying to single her out here, but she attributes female behavior in the workplace to these misplaced motherhood motives. And I've got a few kind of theoretical problems with I don't think it to me I don't think it looks like motherhood behavior. And I don't think that that argument sort of works especially well once you sort of scratch the surface of it. But I think an argument that does work very well is if we think that what women are actually selected for to do in these institutions is to actually completely flatten the meritocracy and to depprioritize productivity because that's actually what explains female behavior in these institutions. Um and that I think is part of women realizing that the game of musical chairs is nearly at the end and they want to hasten the end before they end up finding themselves in a losing route. That's what I think is happening in the great feminization of the institutions. It is actually the the systematic dismantling of those institutions. >> Right? So Helen's perspective is that this is a quite pro-social or at least pro-child maternal instinct that's being applied to the workplace erroneously. Your perspective is that it's much less pro-social than that. It's actually highly competitive. It's into intraexual competition and this is happening almost as designed as opposed to a misfiring. >> Exactly. Right. I think I mean so a a big central sort of part of what I'm proposing is that what we're seeing now across the board is not is not a misfire. It's not it's it's not something going wrong. This is actually how human societies play out. This is actually what happens again and again and again. And so it can't be a misfire again and again again. This is how the system operates. And so what I've tried to do is come up with an explanation that actually explains why it operates in this way and who actually would win such a a genetic race in such a way that this kind of a system could then perpetuate cycle after cycle. I suppose one perspective is um the the environmental mismatch is so great that a effective strategy is being applied erroneously and yours is that the mismatch is still great but the system is sufficiently adaptive and and uh able to adjust that it's still performing kind of as intended even under novel circumstances. >> Exactly. And I look I I will um I will sort of say that I I am much less uh amendable I think than perhaps a lot of people to the basic idea of this evolutionary mismatch. um this idea the idea that that that we have changed the world so much that it now somehow is just you know it is somehow no longer adapted to us or us to it. And so we just see all of this you know we just see all these things happening that that can't really be sensibly accounted for because we've just got a a human you know a human system operating in an environment where you know it just doesn't work. It just as though they weird things you know unselected for maladaptive things just happen. I'm not I'm not especially amendable to to that basic principle because the everything about the world that we live in can be sort of you know can be sort of seen and considered as the human extended phenotype. The world did not just grow up spontaneously around us completely independent of our own biology and psychology and behavior. This is the world that we created. And so, yes, it has changed quite quickly, but it's changed in ways that we that our own evolved psychology and evolved biology decided to change it and responded to certain things. And so I'm much less um you know I think the types of things that that you know took off that became popular that became part of how we live versus those things that didn't itself was very strongly influenced by our evolved biology and psychology. So I'm just much less amendable to this idea that we can safely assume that there's just this massive m mismatch and that allows us to write off a whole bunch of human behavior is just oh that's just because we've got smartphones now and that's just because we've got the internet that's just because we've got the pill and that's just because just because just because >> um I don't you know I've never really seen that as a very profitable way and I think one of the main problems with that type of thinking is it just makes it too easy to write off anything that you can't sort of explain as part of a adaptive, you know, functioning complex system as, oh yeah, but that's just because the world is weird. Um, you know, I much prefer a an argument where you at least try to not give anything that you see a free pass to not require an explanation for what's going on there. You've got to at least try to see. And I think if you do try to apply explanations, you actually find a lot of coherence in what has previously been dismissed as, oh, you know, this is just this new evolutionary thing we've got, and so now people behave like this. But, you know, there's no function to that behavior. There's no other explanation behind it. It's just because the world is different. Now, I'm not really amendable to that to that approach at all. So, I don't really have a lot of sympathy. I think they're kind of, you know, people who are trying to understand behavior dealing themselves get out of jail free cards. Um, yeah. >> Well, we'll see how much sympathy the internet has for the things that we we've we've talked about today. If my recent track record is anything to go by, I'm I'm already have a [ __ ] career. Uh, Dr. Danny Silicowski, ladies and gentlemen. Danny, uh, you're fascinating. I really appreciate you explaining this stuff. Uh it's there's a lot of conflicting narratives at the moment and someone who's spent so much time thinking about this is uh is really cool to to get some time to dig into. Uh where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you do? >> Um follow me on Twitter. So Dr. um Dr. Danny S. And anything else I do always gets put up there. So if you just go there and you just follow me, then you get to see everything that there is to see. >> Heck yeah, Danny. I appreciate you. Thank you. >> Brilliant. Thanks very much. >> Congratulations. You made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.