#1064 - Dr Dani Sulikowski - The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition | Modern Wisdom

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 intersexual competition, which is just 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 intrasexual 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 intrasexual competition is the suite of behaviors that have evolved to maximize an individual's relative reproductive success, not absolutely productive 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 conscious is this?

Is it all women?

Oh, excellent.

You've hit on my least favorite question straight away.

How conscious is this?

Fuck me.

Okay.

Thanks, Dani.

No, that's okay.

No, 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.

Unclear, it varies from person to person and it 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 develops kind of post hoc 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, we can, we can do an experiment 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 that 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 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 they have particular levels of testosterone or estrogen that contribute to fertility and particular behavior in really nice adaptive ways.

They just look at someone and go, oh, he's hot.

She's nice.

But they don't have to understand why.

And so women and men, because intersexual competition applies to men as well.

It's just a completely different ballgame when it comes to men.

They don't have to understand that the consequences of their behaviour is inhibiting the reproductive success of other women.

They just have to be compelled to behave that way.

It doesn't necessitate that women be overtly aware of some nastiness in their behaviour.

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 certainly have the capacity to be absolutely directly, overtly and knowingly nasty and awful to each other.

I mean, that's a given.

So maybe they're sometimes conscious of the consequences of what they're doing.

Sometimes, If you look at it through a feminist lens which is something else that I've talked about a little bit 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 marriage is a form of subjugation.

And so if you can free women from those things this is obviously certain branches of feminism, not necessarily all, 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 quite right, but that's like the proximate explanation.

She's a bitch.

I don't like her.

She's annoying.

She's a slut, 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.

That feels like 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, 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 is very strongly determined often by their appearance versus the other women's appearances.

So that is something that women are very aware of.

Explain what that dynamic would be.

They're aware of other women's appearances and People are very I mean, I assume this is my impression, but I think women are very aware of the phenomenon by which an attractive woman introduced into a workplace or a social setting or something you know, is very likely to raise the ire 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 oh look, it's just because she's jealous.

And that's frequently correct to some extent.

And so I think that there is a sort of understood relationship between female nastiness bullying, interactions whatever you want to call it relational aggression and female appearance.

And it's not just how attractive she is, but it's also how she dresses.

How much skin she's got.

Yeah, exactly.

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 did that one?

I want to say Marianne Fisher, but I don't think it actually was.

She's done almost all of the great ones.

I don't think it was.

I think it was someone else.

I feel like I'm wrong about that.

What it goes to show is that 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 clothes 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 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, intersexual competition signaling.

So most of what women do, that is sort of 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 dolling 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 intersexual aggression and social aggression dominance, 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 dolling up behavior, it's actually seen potentially a little bit more positively.

So it will be seen in a sort of dominant leadership competence type of way, as opposed to a more aggressive sort of way, which is how it's seen amongst attractive women.

So when a woman turns up in a social scenario and she's signaling some level of of sexual availability and looking quite attractive while doing it, that is itself actually an intersexual 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 counter-aggression 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 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 way as opposed to another.

Yeah, that's right.

And I would suspect that most women, even whether they realize it or not, would certainly moderate their dress in different social circumstances for the benefit of other women.

Not just for the benefit of, but specifically for the benefit of other women.

And it is no doubt experientially tuned, but I suspect too that these would be evolved tendencies.

These are part of the evolutionary game.

All evolved tendencies rely on having appropriate experiences for them to develop properly.

And so I wouldn't want to put it down to a socialization effect necessarily.

How does... female intersexual competition differ from male intersexual competition?

You're sort of laying at the feet of women, this fertility suppression thing, but surely the only job of men's genes, the currency that matters is also reproductive success.

So is it not just the same for guys too?

No.

So there's a few differences between male and female intersexual 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 and recover 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 or 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 intersexual 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 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 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 Candice Blake, Joyce Benenson, Corey Clark, Tanya Reynolds.

I've had a big suite of intersexual 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 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 uh 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 two-year contract maybe of gestation breastfeeding yeah 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 things like that.

So 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.

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 that might be more long-term.

That might then yield more long-term children in a more family-like 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 Vianco's work.

And there was that recent study that came out about men are more accepting of their political rivals than women are of their political allies.

I think maybe it was Joyce Benenson 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 narrative of the brake pedal for women being something that is really useful for them, savage and and and mean and malignant, but 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 the differences in male and female behavior.

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 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 even, I wasn't even looking.

I was busy having, having fucking aperitifs.

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.

Yep.

And I completely agree.

And I think it's, I think the intersexual competition angle, I think is, well, I mean, obviously it's, it's, it's kind of my thing.

So I'm going to say it as, as a fundamental explanation for almost everything.

And I do that.

So people can level criticism at me for that if they want to.

But I do think that it's the fundamental explanation for why.

You know, it's kind of well understood and accepted that women have better social skills generally than men.

Right.

So the you know, 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, remembering who's friends with who and who said what when, and did this person that like one of my favorite little anecdotes?

And 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 they had a chat and he came home and he said oh, I saw, I saw such and such today.

And I went oh, I said oh, are you two friends again?

And he sort of looked at me like like he'd just forgotten.

He'd just forgotten that they hadn't spoken for six 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 intersexual competition game that women play is a fundamental organizing principle of female social behavior.

I really do.

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 Gymshark Skims, Allo 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 than on average, compared to other leading commerce platforms.

And with ShopPay, 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 backend 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 shopifycom.

Slash modern wisdom all lowercase.

That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today.

That's a lovely description, an organizing principle of female social behavior.

I think that's really cool.

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 she's eating herself out of a fertility window and blah, blah, blah.

It's an interesting question, actually.

Surprisingly, I get well so far and look 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 been spared not entirely, but I've been largely spared too much of vitriolic pushback or even resistance.

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.

Do you think that's because they've been on the receiving end?

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, very ready, even if they would, I imagine, would be almost definitely less ready, to admit that they do it.

Um and less ready to admit.

You know particular instances in which they've 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 just look at me and just nod and they're just like yep, yep.

I actually get most pushback from men 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.

I get pushback 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.

And actually get much more pushback 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're 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.

Because they're blind to it.

And you've just got the general women are wonderful effect showing up here that men and women prefer women.

Yeah.

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?

So, yeah, so it definitely shows up in women's dating advice.

I've done a few sort of 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 once you've had children, whether to sort of stay home at a stay-at-home mom or go back to work.

I have done a bunch of studies looking at relationship advice in these different scenarios.

And the basic take home finding is that yes, almost without exception yes, women give more reproductively inhibiting advice to hypothetical women, whether these are sort of framed as friends or colleagues or whatever in the study.

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 about the importance of, you know, not staying home as a mum, 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 see that formally.

But I think it's perhaps more compelling or at least more interesting in the way we're beginning to see it informally, sort of across mass media 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.

Um, you know that those that um did the rounds of 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 yeah and, and things like that.

So we're seeing this sort of devaluing of certainly devaluing of monogamous 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.

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, encouraging their independence.

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.

Almost.

Yes, 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 female judgment of the trade-offs, of the costs and benefits of staying in a relationship versus deserting.

Yeah, fair enough.

Fine.

And to some extent that's true, except that, of course, if we're talking about a game of sort of manipulative intersexual 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 intersexual 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 right.

If no one's actually falling for it exactly, then there's no payoff.

Oh, that's so good.

So there are winners and there are losers.

I fucking love when the penny drops.

You have just seen a 3,000 ton penny fall into my head.

Okay, makes complete sense, right?

That if every woman that was putting forward some anti-family creation, anti-reproductive 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 leaders and followers.

Leaders and followers, winners and losers.

In terms of thinking of it as a competition, that there are effectively people who are winning this competition and there are people who are losing this competition.

And I guess the most extreme example, I think of women who in our world, of women who are losing this competition in a massive way, And 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, going out and getting themselves made sterile, getting their tubes tied or severed or whatever.

That's happening?

Yeah.

Oh, my God, yes.

No, that is a thing.

Because it's not a massive thing, but, oh, no, that is –

I promise you that is absolutely definitely a thing.

You know, with this idea, that 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 have children.

And what's interesting about this phenomenon is that 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 signalled, 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.

No, this is definitely a thing.

So I had a look at.

I was looking up the stats on this for a research project that 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 ligation 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've finished having kids, will just go and get their tubes taken out, because that basically eliminates the risk of ovarian cancer.

And so that's why the procedure exists.

But of course, once that procedure exists, it now becomes a tool that can be used.

And it is absolutely a thing 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 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 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 women who are having this procedure who, 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.

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, what was that's the one i was thinking of?

Yeah oh, that was the one about the right wing.

No, it was cringe.

It was cringe, which which i think is is maybe equally toxic or maybe even more toxic than being right wing, because at least if you're right wing, the other right wing chicks might like you, but if you're cringe no, 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're gonna get into that.

So i guess yeah, In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength.

This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now.

It's designed by Dr Mike Israetel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs, 250 technique videos.

Takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout.

It guides you on the exact sets, reps, and weight to use.

Most importantly, how to perfect your form so every rep is optimized for maximum gains.

It adjusts your weights each week based on your progress, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.

So you can buy it, train with it for 29 days and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back.

Right now you can get up to 50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrengthcom slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout.

That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout.

Give me, just using that is having a boyfriend cringe now vote 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 are able to gain from the relative reproductive success compared with the ones that don't get into relationships, that take this dating advice?

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 a 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 effectively some form of snake oil, right?

You sell some sort of snake oil to somebody, but the people you sell it to you convince them sufficiently well.

Oh, it's an MLM, multi-level 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 memes ideas, whatever you want to call them.

Many of the people who are then promoting them have also embodied them and taken them on board and genuinely believe them.

But from an evolutionary perspective, it's still – 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 capacity, and end up genuinely on zero, that doesn't mean they're done for.

They can still improve the reproductive success of their genes, assuming that they have relatives of any kind.

They can still improve the reproductive success of their genes by continuing to promote this 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.

So whether someone 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 smokescreen or 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.

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 20s, like young girl casual sex thing, 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.

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 she's not, I don't think to see it.

And this is where I changed sort of what I'd said retrospectively.

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.

It sounds very positive.

Some it's much more progressive and modern and contemporary and sort of socially acceptable than the opposite, which kind of sounds restrictive and bourgeois.

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 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 sort of non-typical relationship preferences is also a type of fertility suppression.

Because 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 agree 100%.

So I have spoken a little bit before how I think that not just the sort of LGBTQ movement but broadly which I think it is, but also the transgenderism as well, is also the reason why I think that I mean and the data on this are, I think, reasonably well known that it is almost, by and large, exclusively women who are really strongly in favour of gender ideology and are the pushers of gender ideology, which is why it has taken hold in industries and workplaces and whatever, that are dominated by women.

And I think that too is because it has very clear reproductive suppressive implications.

It was really interesting what you were saying about that podcast.

If I can go back to that for just a second, because that also raises a really interesting dichotomy or an interesting contrast.

And that is because that for the vast majority of women it would not be adaptive to 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 so under most circumstances.

There are circumstances where it would be adaptive.

But under most circumstances, it's not adapted to do that.

And so women do definitely have 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 that used to manifest.

That's interesting.

Yeah, that used to manifest in encouraging, you know, young girls not to have sex effectively.

But now it sort of manifests 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, you know, even though they are capable 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 maladaptive to get pregnant during that time period.

And so it's not.

Therefore, to me, looking at things through an intersexual competition lens, it's completely unsurprising that that is the time period that feminism and women's lib has targeted as encouraging women to really, really heavily engage in risky sexual behaviour, 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 husbands have no right to demand sex off their wives.

And yet, when you're in your early 20s and unmarried, sleeping with every single man that gets within three feet of you, apparently that's some form of liberation.

It's an interesting dichotomy.

The other really interesting thing that it raises that's also worth thinking about is that there is actually always a tension.

When you want to signal something manipulatively, the best way to signal it is to do it, 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 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 cost-benefit payoff matrix that women have to navigate when they're engaging in this type of manipulative signaling.

And some manipulative signalers might just really really get that cost-benefit calculation very wrong and simply just engage in the manipulative behavior that the costly signal to a much greater extent than they can tolerate and effectively score a massive own goal.

Give me an example of how that might manifest.

So going back to the example of women who are getting themselves sterilized in their early 20s and then shouting all over it on social media,

And there was one 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 fellow kids.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Poor girl.

Anyway, but.

But see, I imagine that is – that is potentially – that is clearly a case of a woman who has now lost the intersexual competition game.

I mean, that is just a massive iron goal right there.

It's finished.

It's over.

But –

I imagine that the tendency to behave in these types of ways and to do these grand social gestures of oh yes, I'm never going to have children

Children are terrible.

That's not the life path that you should choose.

It's not the life path I've chosen.

The selective pressure on women to be, you know, highly intersexually competitive women.

To be compelled to engage in these kinds of grand gestures would potentially lead them to do things like get themselves permanently 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.

Because those mechanisms are not sensitive to their own outcomes.

Okay.

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 it's a massive on-goal.

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.

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 childcare.

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.

I mean, I would argue that it's not, 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 pretty good job of mounting the argument that women who engage in that type of behavior are typically not actually very happy.

In fact, they're quite miserable.

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 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 having, you know, sort of realised where 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.

But it's not that that is just some esoteric, you know, evolutionary calculation.

These decisions have real-life impacts on 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 these are absolutely having you know, real life, individual proximate impacts on the women who take these decisions as well, 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.

It is really interesting, the duality of these things.

I have a question.

Regardless of whether or not it would be evolutionarily useful from a resource perspective to try and do do reproductive suppression strategies work against men.

That's an excellent question.

So I think there's a two-part answer.

And the first part is generally no because of the reasons we've already described.

So in the limited circumstance where, as a man, 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 really are 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, is because you've decided you want his partner, for whatever reason.

Um So, 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 within themselves to actually move the dial on the population's background reproductive rate, just means that the payoff matrix isn't there.

However, there's a second part, I think, to that answer, and that is if we fast forward a little bit, or maybe a better way to zoom out a little bit.

And instead of thinking at the moment, we've sort of thought and spoken mostly about this being kind of you know an individual on individual interaction, or you know many on one, or one on many.

But once you reach the stage of reproductive suppression that I argue that we're at, so you know, I know that you're aware that the birth rate is, you know, well below replacement level and is declining.

And my argument is that in itself is because of manipulative reproductive suppression, that that is in fact the ultimate explanation for what we're seeing.

And I think that once you actually reach that point, then you perhaps do get to see a benefit to men of engaging in their own type of manipulative 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 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 my argument is that this is not a novel situation.

This is actually what we're experiencing now, with birth rate decline and the the rise of feminist ideals and the feminization of the institutions.

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, 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 a bug, this is the system operating as intended.

This episode is brought to you by Gymshark.

You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym, and Gymshark makes the best men's and girls' gym wear 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 ever. on the planet.

Their crest hoodie and light gray mall is what I fly in every single time I'm on a plane.

The Geo Seamless t-shirt is a staple in the gym for me.

Basically everything they make is unbelievably well-fitted, high quality, it's cheap.

You get 30 days of free returns, global shipping, and a 10% discount site-wide.

If you go to the link in the description below or head to gymsh slash modernwisdom, use the code modernwisdom10 at checkout.

That's gym.sh slash modernwisdom 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, am I wrong?

Yeah, no, that's not true.

So certainly declining birth rates are part of the sort of suite of things 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 art becoming vulgar, and we see marriage rates declining.

We see birth rates declining.

So Rome towards its well, not towards its very end a little bit earlier than its very end, but it had, you know, many policies in place, that sort of 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 declining so severely.

And what happened in Rome and I would hazard a guess it's a similar thing that's happening now is the birth rate declined sharply, primarily because 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 everything else.

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.

All right.

Okay.

So women?

That cultural adjustment, which was um anti-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?

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 that, 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.

I'm just a reproduction machine, and you can't suppress my fertility no matter what you tell me.

Because it's not a bug, it's a feature.

And this is the problem.

So it's a bug 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.

Would that not suggest – Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Totally right.

Would that not suggest then, that we are the progeny of the women who are 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?

Yes, potentially.

But the other part of the sort of system that makes this make sense 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 accrue, into their own reproduction and into their own offspring.

It's once you get to a point where we have the affluence of organised society that women have an opportunity to be able to accrue more resources than what they just need to pour in.

You get like a law of diminishing returns.

The exhausts that the elite women are effectively able to accrue.

It's no longer adaptive to just keep pouring all of those into their own individual reproductive success.

It now becomes more and more adaptive to start pouring this time, effort and energy into manipulative, reproductive suppression of rivals.

And the more affluent and the safer the society gets, 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, 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 will 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 effectively enter a sort of genetic bottleneck.

So as fertility rates drop and the fertility rates are well below replacement, then the size of the mating pool is actually much – the effective population size is much smaller than the actual population size.

So it may not necessarily look like 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 might be modest falls amongst women who have children.

I think they're 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 massive increase in the number of women having no children.

So what we're seeing is large numbers of women actually withdrawing themselves.

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 almost impossible to have these types of conversations.

And look, I think the sole explanation I would say for me not yet having sort of really encountered any serious blowback is just lack of exposure.

And you're right, that may well change.

Good luck after this.

So be it.

That's fine.

You know, my life's been boring up until now.

Why not have some fun?

Wonderful.

But no, you can't.

And I think one of the reasons, I think one of the main reasons why well, according to my theory, one of the main reasons why we can't have this particular conversation about birth rate declines, motherhood and reproduction, you know, maybe other aspects of intersexual competition speak to more women directly and they can, you know, they can empathise with it and they can understand it.

But once you start talking about birth rate decline and you start talking about women having children in particular, you're really just cutting straight through to the heart of the issue.

Everything else is just peripheral, right?

Everything else is just in service of birth rate decline.

All the other aspects of female intersexual competition.

They're just ultimately in service of birth rate decline.

Right, 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.

Because you know, I mean.

I'm sure you're aware that the stats are pretty clear on the costs of fatherlessness 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 behaviours 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.

It's a pretty good way to damage their ultimate reproductive success.

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.

People had a lot of fun with that haircut study that I did, where you know women will advise mothers other women to cut off more hair.

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 and 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 five years now, way before they were a partner on the show.

I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane.

And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with, because it tracks everything that matters sleep workouts recovery breathing, heart rate, even your steps.

And the new 5.0 is the best version.

You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable 7 smaller, but now it's also got a 14-day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging.

It's got hormonal insights for ladies.

I'm a huge, huge fan of Whoop.

That's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with.

And best of all, you can join for free.

Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 50 strap Plus.

You get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee.

So you can buy it for free, try it for free.

If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back.

Right now you can get the brand new Whoop 50 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to joinwhoopcom.

Slash modern wisdom.

That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom.

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, 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 critical mass, You know, and it's not.

I mean, I think at some point she was sort of she did, I think emphasise, 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 that she sort of pointed that as the tipping point.

And we have a small point of difference there.

I think that 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.

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 in their ability to manipulate both their male and female colleagues allows these types of things to happen long before you actually get to the 50.

So that's a small point of difference.

But everything that she was saying, other than that I think about What's happening in these workplaces and the fact that it's because of the proportion of women in them, I think is absolutely 100, bang on.

And I think it's fantastic that she 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 she was a woman coming out saying that Oh, God.

Fuck.

If a man had written that article, it would have been absolute death.

But, I mean, look, you're a woman who is professionally accomplished.

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.

Yeah.

If we think about human societies from first principles for a moment.

In order for societies to grow and stay healthy, in order to exist, they need to reproduce, at least replacement.

Ideally, they need to grow.

Growth is great for prosperity, which means they need to reproduce at above replacement.

Now, depending on the costs of reproduction.

In a society like ours, individual people are able to accrue the resources needed for successful reproduction quite easily.

And in societies gone past, reproductive success was relatively much more expensive.

And all that excess wealth is one of the reasons why we have this massive manipulative reproductive suppression.

So, if you're in a society where 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.

And Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It's the end of the society.

The society simply cannot sustain itself.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Yeah, 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 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 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 imposition on 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.

If civilization is going to prosper, men have got a pretty raw deal.

So it's not as though we're talking about it's all fun and games for men and women have 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 that effectively dooms that society after a couple of generations,

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

That's not an easy question to answer.

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.

It's worse for the continuation of the society.

But if we're going to prioritise the individual, then maybe that's a good thing.

It's a very individualistic society at the moment, right?

I mean, that's an awful lot of the well-meaning and bad-meaning pushback that I get online is saying something along the lines of you're trying to remove agency, taking women out of the boardroom and putting them back into the kitchen, etc.

The language is almost exclusively framed around independence.

Yeah, of course it is.

And that's a very – it's a very effective way of framing it.

It's probably a little bit of a different conversation, but the notion of individual freedom and decision-making around these things is also a little bit – is also just a little bit of a fallacy and a little bit quality.

It's kind of 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 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 when you abandon the kinds of sort of you know societal institutions that you know placed guardrails on what people should do and had to do, 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 go with the crowd and they follow the norm.

But to get back to your question about you know, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing to have women generally in the workplace?

And, you know, 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 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 of the individual?

And so well.

Have a look at the state of women at the moment massive mental health crisis, not generally not happy, 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 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 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.

What's the most robust data that you've seen around the comparative happiness levels between coupled women with kids and single women without kids.

I couldn't answer off the top of my head.

I would have to go and look it up.

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 wellbeing, self-reported mental health problems.

Like it's not just one DV either.

It's multiple DVs are all pointing to married women with children being happier than single women who are not mothers.

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 pro-motherhood and kind of anti-motherhood, or pro-natal and anti-natal.

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, that there's kind of a soft misogyny to saying that 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 under-recognized methods of intrasexual 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 one of the least well recognised because it's sort of framed as a man-hating thing, I would say is the whole kind of toxic masculinity little cottage industry that's appeared.

So that's, you know, frequently and, you know, not without good reason. 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 don't know what your experiences are and what you've seen, but certainly in Australia and, I believe, the UK, there's lots of talk and I think it's sort of actually happening now.

They're introducing effectively pre-emptive education into schools for young boys so they can teach them not to be toxic.

And these are exactly what you would imagine.

And it made a little bit of a splash just the other week.

There was a study that came out talking about how terrible it is that our 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, of course, the attitudes were things like you know, some women lie about, you know, sexual assault allegations.

Like that's not a toxic attitude.

That just happens to be the truth.

So, you know, we're sort of seeing this, you know, real branding of male toxicity here.

And I don't deny that that's having terrible effects on men.

So I'm about to suggest that the men are actually the collateral damage 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 to me how branding men and masculinity as toxic is female intrasexual competition.

Because it destroys female mate choice preferences.

It's what it's targeting.

What the toxic brand is being attached to is every aspect of men that women should actually 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 has been completely demonised and labelled toxic, to the point where I won't say who.

But I was having a discussion the other day with a guy who was sort of explaining that one of the things that really upsets him the most about what he sees amongst kind of his peers and he was American what he sees 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 will be hating badly.

So he was sort of using the example of how, you know, there are men who, would you know he was sort of saying that, you know, when he was a bit younger, you know, back in his day, you know men who didn't treat women well, 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, or at least would you know, think really hard 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 demonising the behaviour of taking him round the back of the shed and beating him to the inch of his life than they are about demonising the behaviour that needed to be policed in the first place.

And so what we're seeing is people society feminism, whatever you want to call it having reshaped the positive aspects of male dominance and male strength, and even what they've decided to label benevolent sexism which just because they've called it benevolent, they don't see it as good which is basically all of the etiquette around gender role interactions that happen to favour women.

They've still decided that sexism that is inherently bad for women, but even the benevolent sexism, all of that stuff has been demonized and been sort of you know labeled, sort of you know no longer socially acceptable.

And so men can no longer behave in the kinds of ways that they used to behave in order to be able to demonstrate their quality as a prospective mate to women.

And so men are responding by actually engaging in sort of 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.

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 seems to be a set of instructions being given out and a set of preferences being adjusted.

Because I don't think that we're, 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, able to signal all of those signals of strength and dominance, because they're costly signals, right?

They're real signals.

The signals of effectively harmlessness.

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 de-socializing all of the male ways of advertising their own mate quality.

And it's leaving men with ways of advertising 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 de-preferenced 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.

And therefore, they end up in relationships where the relationships are either 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 raise families.

Because the other thing that sort of happens if women make.

I think this happens to a reasonable extent to men as well, but more so with women.

Women are by far the the sex that terminates relationships more commonly.

If women pair up with someone who they then later decide is not sort of of their mate quality, the relationship doesn't work and they're not satisfied.

And they do attempt to trade up, at least in those early stages, before it's complicated by having children and things like that.

And so 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 nice 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.

Look at their husbands?

Look at their husbands.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, who is it that you're marrying?

Who is it that the women are ultimately getting with?

And, you know, part of this you could see is, well, people don't know what they want.

I thought I was right in the past.

I thought that the casual sex thing, the sleep with them and 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 does show some women may reach 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.

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.

Yeah.

Did you see, there was a video, I think it might have been a CCTV video of a girl in Vietnam.

She was traveling and she got her bag, tried to be taken off her by a guy with a knife.

It looked like there were two travelers, a man and a woman, young, maybe 20, something like that.

This video was maybe a month ago, a month and a half ago.

Oh, wow.

And he hides?

Yes, he hides behind the pillar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I thought that was really fascinating looking at the response from that, in particular 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 modern men not being up to standards.

It feels like talking out of both sides of your mouth.

It is.

And this is why men can't win.

This is why I think many men are almost just deciding to just self-remove from the mating market entirely because they've seen the writing on the wall and You know they understand.

In some cases, perhaps misunderstand and they're perhaps overestimating the risk.

But I don't know.

I think the risks are real.

And it's hard to know what weight men should put on those.

But you know, it's really difficult because there's very little that men can do that they're not going to be criticized for.

If you go and approach a woman, then in some cases you're sort of automatically being demanding and sexist and presumptuous.

I'm not sure if you remember.

I remember, because 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 you know, quite seriously, by one or other branch of you know, 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 to.

Yeah.

Speaking for the male community.

Speaking for the male community sure, let me just go right off.

Um no, i think that there is a very real fear of false accusations of sexual harassment 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 yeah, a sexual offense.

Let me, let me give you and it's really difficult to tell those two things apart, i think, especially for a lot of young, inexperienced men,

And so they're scared of the false accusation, but they're also scared of the accidental commission of an offense, which is a crazy position for young men to be in.

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 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 like, is that, you know, we just create this entire spectrum.

I think as a perfect example, this was probably five years ago, 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 them.

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 pond.

It was like you're kidding, like no, they they look.

They look nice.

There's three of them, there's two of us.

I'm sure we can take them, like 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 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 that you could do it.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I get it on 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 the hypersensitivity 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 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 public.

That's a real thing.

So, yeah, it does make it difficult.

It makes it a difficult environment for men to navigate.

And then unfortunately, I don't think that women's preferences have updated themselves to be the ones that want to come up and talk to guys.

No, of course not.

I think 86% of women say that they want to make, want a man to make the first move.

Yeah.

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

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 not mean that just to interject that?

Does that not mean that you are, 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 curtailing 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 a sort of important principle that kind of wraps around all of this.

So what's happening with all of these things?

The devaluation of motherhood, the devaluation of marriage, the demonization of men that would actually make excellent husbands and fathers, the valorization of careers for women and all the rest of it?

One thing that 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 rules that we've sort of, you know, the social etiquettes 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 guardrails have gone and those, 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 two people who didn't really know each other could navigate a potentially romantic interaction with some certainty and some guidance, and that's been chucked out the window.

So we're in 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, 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, 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 everybody but the people who have the most reproductive potential, because they have the highest mate quality and they're the most fertile and they're already in a position in society which gives them social access to the best men those women are hurt the least.

And so they are the ones who are pushing and setting people 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 prospective 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.

More and more people are just not able to navigate their life to lead to reproductive success in this really anti-natal environment 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 were at their peak fertility, and that would have been the easiest.

Whether it's because they made bad mate choice decisions, bad 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.

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 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 it doesn't matter that the whole reproductive output has dropped 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 that, 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.

Yes, you're correct, but 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 except that here's the kicker, right?

So 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 teleological and it cannot see the consequences.

If an individual population finds itself in a local maxima, some sort of local adaptive thing, it will be selected for to stay there, even if the inevitable outcome of that trait or that behavior is that the entire species goes extinct.

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 it gets even more interesting.

So this is what I so what happens at the end of you know, when civilizations crash and fall, 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, 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 that 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 behaviour 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 sorry, a massive drop in the price of sex, 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 behaviour as everybody vies for 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.

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 10000 in the population at the start of this game.

But if you're no 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 10000 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 and for there to be losers so that they can win in the end, if that makes sense.

It's a little bit 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.

And you want the game to end too.

Once it gets down to a relatively small birth rate, 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.

Sorry I'm getting a little bit off topic, but jumping back to Helen Andrews' great feminisation, 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 representation, intersectoral competition and manipulative reproductive suppression.

And then an inevitable result of that is the gutting and the decline and the eventual collapse of these institutions.

And so these things follow on necessarily from each other.

And this is where I think this is the bit that I think Helen doesn't get quite right.

She attributes, as do many other people I'm not sort of trying to single her out here, but she sort of attributes female behaviour in the workplace to these misplaced motherhood motives, and I've got a few theoretical problems with that.

To me.

I don't think it looks like motherhood behavior and I don't think that that argument works especially well once you 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 deprioritize productivity, because that's actually what explains female behavior in these institutions.

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 systematic dismantling of those institutions.

Right.

So Helen's perspective is that this is a quite pro-social, or at least pro-child, movement.

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 intersexual competition.

And this is happening almost as designed as opposed to a misfiring.

Exactly right.

I think I mean.

So a big central sort of part of what I'm proposing is is that what we're seeing now across the board is not a misfire.

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 and 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 genetic race in such a way that this kind of a system could then perpetuate cycle after cycle.

I suppose one perspective is the environmental mismatch is so great that an effective strategy is being applied erroneously.

Yours is that the mismatch is still great, but the system is sufficiently adaptive and able to adjust that it's still performing kind of as intended, even under novel circumstances.

Exactly.

And look, I will sort of say that I am much less amenable, I think, than perhaps a lot of people, to the basic idea of this evolutionary mismatch.

This idea, the idea 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 can't really be sensibly accounted for, because we've just got a human, you know a human system operating in an environment where you know it just doesn't work.

It's just also the weird things, you know. unselected form, maladaptive things just happen.

I'm not especially amenable to that basic principle, because everything about the world that we live in 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 behaviour.

This is the world that we created.

And so yes, it has changed quite quickly, but it's changed in ways that our own evolved psychology and evolved biology decided to change it and responded to certain things.

And so I'm much less you know.

I think the types of things 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 amenable to this idea that we can safely assume that there's just this massive mismatch and that allows us to write off a whole bunch of human behaviour as just oh, that's just because we've got smartphones now, and that's just because we've got the internet, and that's just because we've got the pill, and that's just because, just because, just because.

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 an adaptive.

You know functioning complex system as, oh yeah, but that's just because the world is weird.

You know, I much prefer an argument where you at least try to not give anything, that you seek 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 amenable 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've talked about today if my recent track record is anything to go by i'm i already don't have a fucking career uh dr danny solikowski ladies and gentlemen danny You're fascinating.

I really appreciate you explaining this stuff.

There's a lot of conflicting narratives at the moment.

And someone who's spent so much time thinking about this is really cool to get some time to dig into.

Where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you do?

Follow me on Twitter.

So 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.

Dani, I appreciate you.

Thank you.

Brilliant.

Thanks very much.

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

That's chriswillx.com.

Slash books.

[The Evolutionary Mechanics of Female Intrasexual Competition]-[#1064 - Dr Dani Sulikowski - The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition]

📋 Summary

The Evolutionary Mechanics of Female Intrasexual Competition

The Currency of Evolution: Relative Reproductive Success

The Asymmetry of Reproductive Strategies

Signaling and Social Aggression

Reproductive Suppression as a Social Strategy

The Feminization of Institutions

Conclusion: The Systemic Nature of Behavior

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Evolutionary Mechanics of Female Intrasexual Competition]-[#1064 - Dr Dani Sulikowski - The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition]

📋 Summary

The Evolutionary Mechanics of Female Intrasexual Competition

The Currency of Evolution: Relative Reproductive Success

The Asymmetry of Reproductive Strategies

Signaling and Social Aggression

Reproductive Suppression as a Social Strategy

The Feminization of Institutions

Conclusion: The Systemic Nature of Behavior

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning