Join Malcolm, Diana, and Simone in a stimulating conversation addressing some of the intriguing contradictions that arise from certain sociopolitical stances. They delve into complex issues like prenatal screening, abortion, and embryo selection, juxtaposing these topics against the backdrop of social biases. Listen as they highlight the inconsistencies in certain beliefs and reveal how individuals often tailor their convictions based on social approval rather than logical reasoning. Whether you're interested in bioethics, social commentary, or philosophical discussions, this conversation offers a fresh perspective that challenges conventional thinking.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] he is pro aborting. Fetuses. Yeah. If they show signs of a potential medical problem, yeah.

Malcolm: But against not choosing a pre implanted IVF embryo because they might end up showing one of those diseases. So he is more pro. Abortion, like even mid-stage abortion, then he is pro embryo selection.

Diana: That is whack,

Malcolm: well, not whack, but I think what it shows is this, and this is a wider topic I wanted to talk about here, is this insanity you get and you see this on both the left and the right, but right now the left is more in control of media, so they do it more.

Malcolm: Were they, there are individuals who clearly like put genuinely no thought into their actual beliefs about the world and they're choosing their beliefs on what they think will get them the most social

Diana: credit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's absolutely a progressive status quo bias [00:01:00] because at one point in a debate that we were having on Twitter months or years ago, Noah, Carl said, Let's say you could do prenatal screening with blood on a woman and a woman finds out that her baby's gonna have a lower IQ than she will on the basis of this genetic screening.

Diana: What do you think if that woman aborts the baby, is that eugenics? And he says, I think that's misguided, but I don't think that's eugenics. And so, because he can't say that. Any abortion is in any way bad because that is a sacred progressive cow, right? Ah, and so I remember when I used to ha teach I taught human sexuality and I taught some other Topics around philosophy of science to undergraduates.

Diana: I remember asking students is it worse for a woman to abort a baby that she finds out as a girl when she wants a boy? Or is it worse for her to choose an embryo that's a boy? Rather than choosing an embryo that's a girl and almost, I mean, it was really profound that people thought the abortion was okay [00:02:00] because abortion is a sacred value in the uk to abortion for any reason is a sacred value.

Simone: Wow. I think what that kinda

Malcolm: terrifying is the percentage of the population that are, I mean, so when we, we on our podcast talk about like this progressive mimetic somfy virus and I think that people might think we're going too far when we call it a virus that sort of whipes out people's higher order logic

Simone: hi. And we are excited to welcome back Diana Fleischmann, author of the Soon to Come Out book, how to Train Your Boyfriend, but also evolutionary psychologist, host of the Aporia podcast, an overall amazing and awesome.

Simone: Writer and reformed academic. She's made it out, ladies and gentlemen, and thank God,

Malcolm: so what we wanted to talk about today was an article that they're, they, they've actually recently written on us

Diana: it's called Bad Arguments versus Healthy Babies Rebutting Ruthford on Embryo Selection.

Malcolm: So it's about all of these deranged people who [00:03:00] attack Simone and I online. Yeah. For selecting against things like our kids getting cancer in terms of like the, the genetics of our embryos.

Malcolm: And arguing that this is just like, And Al, it'll always have terrible results to do this. Even though whenever you're doing ibf, a lot of people don't know this. They actually already sort your embryos, but by how pretty the embryos look. Yeah. Which isn't really correlated with that much, but they're still getting selected based on a, a trait like that.

Malcolm: But what I wanted to talk about this podcast was specifically like the meta around this. Why do people react like insanely to topics like this?

Simone: We can start with Adam Rath referred too. Cuz he, he presents a lot of great examples of just also being like, he conflicts in a lot of areas. It's very strange

Diana: you. I'll just give an overview of the piece really quickly. So the piece talks about polygenic embryo screening. Right now people do look at single trait or single allele diseases for their offspring.

Diana: They look at aneuploidy when they're [00:04:00] selecting an embryo. But polygenic screening is fairly new. You guys and raffles, McCrosky and some other people are, I don't know, are there 200 babies that have been polygenic screened? Something around that. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's this, this very outspoken critic who's a BBC presenter.

Diana: His name is Adam Ruthford. He's a geneticist and he's written a book against Eugenics and he has a beef with Steve Sue because Steve Sue has written some blogs about making sue intelligent people. And whenever I saw him come out saying polygenic screening is terrible, he kept saying, read my book.

Diana: Read my book. So I read. The relevant, whatever, 20 pages of his book. And it was almost entirely b******t. It's like, really, it's very, very bad. And the, the evidence he uses is really asymmetrical for his claim. Of course, about seven pages of it is just like about how bad Steve Sue is and how he's friends with Dominic Cummings, and then how Dominic Cummings is associated with some other people that liberals don't like.

Diana: And the actual meat and potatoes of like what his case is, [00:05:00] is made very succinctly and not very well. In a smaller portion of, of that book. So that's there's, there's a few different arguments that I make. Go

Malcolm: ahead. Oh, no. Before you continue, I wanna pull on something you said there, which was, I just find it really rich.

Malcolm: I. That he could be arguing like that. This guy who is clearly a eugenicist , is pretending to take an antigenics position. He's the guy here saying, we need genetically pure humans? Don't alter human D N a. I want to use the government. To restrict the reproductive choices of individuals to maintain humanity's genetic purity is like, is there anything more eugenics than that?

Diana: Well, I don't actually know if he's, this is one, one thing is like, it's, it's pretty short on actual policy. Mm. So he often endorses this guy called you and Bernie who says, yes, polygenic screening should be banned. Right or not allowed in the, in the uk. And it doesn't surp, I mean, the UK is really, has very strict laws, a lot of which don't make a lot of sense about reproductive freedom.

Diana: And [00:06:00] one of the best things I think about the United States is, is, is the reproductive freedom here is the fact that people can do IVF and can do sex selection, can do polygenic screening, can do, can do what they want, but. What I thought was really weird about what, how Rutherford responded to this.

Diana: It's one thing to say polygenic screening won't work. The people who are using it are like wasting their money, whatever, whatever he called you guys, energy vampires, he made fun of your appearance. Like not once or like two or three times. Like he was like very intensely against you both. And I didn't really get it.

Diana: I know that there was a huge backlash against the Tism stuff more generally, but I think that people bristled at the idea I. Because they just read the, the title of that telegraph piece that said that you were elite. But people bristle up the idea that you guys think that you're gonna have great kids.

Malcolm: Well, here's the, here's first of all, like, that's not what we're trying to do. But one of the things that I, I read in this article, I didn't know about that just to meet like signals this guy is a complete grifter, is that he is pro [00:07:00] aborting. Fetuses. Yeah. If they show signs of a potential medical problem, yeah.

Malcolm: But against not choosing a pre implanted IVF embryo because they might end up showing one of those diseases. So he is more pro. Abortion, like even mid-stage abortion, then he is pro embryo selection.

Diana: That is whack,

Malcolm: well, not whack, but I think what it shows is this, and this is a wider topic I wanted to talk about here, is this insanity you get and you see this on both the left and the right, but right now the left is more in control of media, so they do it more.

Malcolm: Were they, there are individuals who clearly like put genuinely no thought into their actual beliefs about the world and they're choosing their beliefs on what they think will get them the most social

Diana: credit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's absolutely a progressive status quo bias because at one point [00:08:00] in a debate that we were having on Twitter months or years ago, Noah, Carl said, Let's say you could do prenatal screening with blood on a woman and a woman finds out that her baby's gonna have a lower IQ than she will on the basis of this genetic screening.

Diana: What do you think if that woman aborts the baby, is that eugenics? And he says, I think that's misguided, but I don't think that's eugenics. And so, because he can't say that. Any abortion is in any way bad because that is a sacred progressive cow, right? Ah, and so I remember when I used to ha teach I taught human sexuality and I taught some other Topics around philosophy of science to undergraduates.

Diana: I remember asking students is it worse for a woman to abort a baby that she finds out as a girl when she wants a boy? Or is it worse for her to choose an embryo that's a boy? Rather than choosing an embryo that's a girl and almost, I mean, it was really profound that people thought the abortion was okay because abortion is a [00:09:00] sacred value in the uk to abortion for any reason is a sacred value.

Simone: Wow. I think what that kinda

Malcolm: terrifying is the percentage of the population that are, I mean, so when we, we on our podcast talk about like this progressive mimetic somfy virus and I think that people might think we're going too far when we call it a virus that sort of whipes out people's higher order logic in the same way that one of these funguses like replaces is an amps instincts.

Malcolm: And causes the ant to become a zombie ant that's only job is to replicate this fungus. But when you hear things like this and you see this even in majority population surveys, especially with an educated group like students I really don't think I am underselling how zombie flying this virus is because to me there's just no logical argument where you could be anti it.

Malcolm: It is, it is wrong. To, to select something at the stage of the embryo, but Right to do it at the stage

Diana: of the fetus. Yep. And not, not only that, so one of the arguments that Rutherford makes where I got, I [00:10:00] pulled a, a few quotes from Simone, is that he says that doing I V F in order to do polygenic screening is somehow exploitative of women.

Diana: That the people who talk about polygenic screening are mostly men and therefore it's a feminist. Position to be against polygenic screening. I've heard this exact same argument about a sex selective abortion or even abortion more generally, that women are gonna be pushed into aborting babies if they don't want to.

Diana: And, he talks about I v F not being fun. Abortions are also not fun. And I, I just, it, it seems very strange to me that he hasn't thought about all these alternative arguments, which is there's a ton of arguments in, in the feminist sphere, which are things like, We should outlaw surrogacy because surrogacy can exploit women.

Diana: We should outlaw IVF cuz outlaw, because IVF can exploit women. Pornography. Prostitution. Abortion because women can't make their own choices and he doesn't realize that he's actually making the same really, I think, kind of misogynistic argument.

Simone: So what I'm realizing after listening to this is that like [00:11:00] there are two elements of discourse or two spheres of discourse online.

Simone: One is just people Sending signals to rise in their own local status hierarchy and, and they're not actually engaging in discourse. And then there are people who actually enjoy kind of discussing these things or, or seeing if they can win a debate and actually engage with the ideas, but, How can one separate those out and know when it's worth it to engage or not?

Simone: Well,

Malcolm: I mean, I think the communities are pretty separated from each other. The sad thing is, is I think the first group that you're talking about controls our university system. Mm-hmm. Which many people see as the, the priest class in our society that determines what's true and what's not true.

Malcolm: But I'd love your take.

Diana: I'm not sure, but I just think that it, it that people, one thing that happens on Twitter that I see a lot is that people curate a following and then they're beholden to the, the whims of that, of that following. Right, right, right. So like, there's some people who I see bite bullets all the time, and their audience loves that.

Diana: They bite bullets. There's people [00:12:00] like Ruthford who I see attacking other people. Like, I think he called Boris Johnson like a. Like a saturated bin rag or something. He's like, got these. Really?

Simone: That's wonderful. A floored language. You do get points for that. I like him like

Diana: 10% more insult about people.

Diana: Like he's got a million different synonyms for s**t that he uses, like against people. Right? There's, there's all these kinds of insults that he used and his audience is like, they love that red meat. But one time it's was like a few years back Richard Dawkin says, you might be against eugenics, but eugenics works.

Diana: Right? Remember, I dunno if you guys saw that there was a tweet by by Dakin saying, you might be against it, but selective breeding definitely does work. Right. And and this is the only time where I was like, okay, Rutherford says you're right, it would work. And he like went through it and he said Eugenics actually would work.

Diana: Right. No, like selective breeding actually would work. And he had so much s**t and I, since then I have not seen him bite a bullet. And that was 2020, I

Simone: think. Interesting. That's, that's really, that's really sad. I'm, I'm in the middle of [00:13:00] reading how Minds Change by David Raey, cuz I think it's really interesting to go into like, the psychology of how humans are able to change minds.

Simone: And in this one chapter on reasoning, he goes into a lot of the research on how and why humans reason. And there's one study where it, it suggested that basically when, when. Subjects were provided with their own reasoning for coming to a conclusion as though it was someone else's reasoning.

Simone: They would criticize it. They were like, oh no, here's where it's wrong. This isn't logical, because they didn't realize that they were arguing against their own reasoning. And, and it, it indicates or suggests that human reasoning is really meant to happen in some kind of social format where people present their thoughts, they present why they came to the conclusions they came to, and those are, they can criticize others' conclusions and also their conclusions are criticized.

Simone: And then that in a. In a social environment, especially where people are motivated to be somewhat cohesive, which makes sense. And that social cohesion does play a big role in why we believe what we believe or what we choose to [00:14:00] believe. Then you, you are able to get to the truth in an interesting way.

Simone: So, I'm, I'm, I'm hearing this research. I'm, I'm interested in it. I'm reading about it and I'm like, oh, wow. I mean, you would think. Then in the right conditions, social media would be perfect for this. We would present our reasoning as to why we believe, certain things are good, like apologetic, risk score, selection.

Simone: And then some people would say, ah, here's the fall on your reasoning. And because we want to be acce accepted by them, then we would, we would do that. And yet that doesn't seem to be how it ultimately plays out at all, especially for people like David Rutherford because instead of, being able to like, Survive flaws in his reasoning being pointed out.

Simone: He's just like, well

Malcolm: here's, here's what I think you're missing. He's a high priest of the existing priest, cast of our society, given that he needs still within the university system, which Diana has escaped. And, and being within that system, given how spicy these topics are, if he deviates.

Malcolm: Even a little bit from the socially accepted norms was, was in that ideological tribe. He can lose his [00:15:00] job. Like it's not a small thing. You get fired and you're that kind of a personality. No one else will hire you because your only audience is this, you know far. He's already pushed out any other audience he may have.

Malcolm: He's got no real skills other than being in this priest class. I,

Diana: I don't know. He also works for the bbc. So I mean, when I was in academia, I felt like I could say whatever I wanted and I did say almost whatever I wanted. BARR, a certain, like certain edge cases but actually working for the BBC and so what he says reflects on the BBC and also it reflects on Humanist uk, which is where he's president.

Diana: The thing that shocked me about his attacks on you guys is that if I frame this a certain way, Which I have in this article is that he's attacking people who chose an embryo with a low risk of cancer. Mm-hmm. He's attacking people for using their reproductive freedom, a mother, for using their reproductive freedom to prevent her daughter from dying, what her grandmother died of.

Diana: Like, that sounds awful. And yet nobody gives a s**t cuz you guys are eugenic. Right, right, [00:16:00] right.

Malcolm: Again, I need to. To keep pointing this out. We do not support eugenics. I know

Diana: you don't. Exactly. But you guys are, you guys are labeled as eugenics, but we're labeled as

Malcolm: that. We're labeled as that definitionally a eugenicist if he wants to use the government to maintain the genetic purity of our species.

Malcolm: That is what

Diana: eugenics is.

Diana: So a few months back, I talked to Brian Kaplan for Aporia and Brian Kaplan, who wrote Selfish Reasons to Have more Kids, and I asked him if there was backlash against selfish reasons to have more kids because right at that time I was thinking about Tism. You guys were getting really attacked on on Twitter.

Diana: Yeah. And he said that. Yes. He got attacked a lot for selfish reasons to have more kids. It seems like Tism now is more controversial than even Antinatalism Telling people they should have kids is more controversial. Yeah. And the way he framed it was, when I tell you when I, with selfish reasons to have more kids, I said, I'm giving you a 20% coupon for having children.

Diana: Having children is 20% less work than you think it's gonna be. He's like, if I gave you a 20% coupon for chocolate, and you're like, I don't like chocolate, would [00:17:00] you, would you attack me online for having given you a 20% coupon offer for, for That's great. Putting it. Yeah. And so, obviously not, but, but when it comes to this question about child rearing and even things like the other day my husband Jeffrey asked somebody if they were gonna ha if they were interested in having more kids and we're very close to these people, so I think it was okay.

Diana: But questions like, are you planning on having more children? How many children do you wanna have? What kinds of conditions are keeping you from having kids have become really touchy. Oh yeah. And that maybe it's because people are waiting to bear children. Maybe cuz people who are infertile see it as like a form of inferiority.

Diana: You guys grapple with all of this stuff. But it's it's a very tricky for me to untangle why this is such a dumpster fire. Well,

Malcolm: yeah. So, there's a few subjects I wanna touch on here. One is you said that he was like, because he was able to frame us as eugenic, the whole eugenic thing really had nothing to do with it.

Malcolm: From his perspective, it's that we are conservatives and he is a progressive and therefore he can call us any slur no matter how illogical [00:18:00] and his side will buy that. And I think it's the same thing with like the coupon argument. Like if somebody was giving out coupons for like 20% off a gun or something like that.

Malcolm: Progressives are like, guns are evil. And, and the reason why the mind virus went to this position of kids are evil is because people who are quote unquote from the virus's perspective Yeah. Wasting their time not proselytizing and instead caring for kids. They, they are not. Following the sort of reproductive strategy of the virus and therefore are, are less efficient at it.

Malcolm: And those brands of progressivism are out-competed by the other brands of progressivism. And so I think what you're really seeing when you talk about Antinatalism versus Tism I, is, it's really just in the same way that if I went to a, a conservative event and I said something like, About global warming being a problem or like pro environmentalism, I might be immediately attacked, even though there's no reason for them to really be intrinsically anti-environmental.

Malcolm: It's more just that this would become a calling card of people who they see as their enemies.

Simone: So I get it. And let me, yeah, let me build on that actually. I mean, Malcolm argues that [00:19:00] the key differentiating point between progressives and conservatives is that progressives are optimizing for.

Simone: Intergenerational fitness and wellbeing. Also for like minimizing in the moment suffering or discomfort, whereas conservatives are not really caring about in, in the moment suffering and discomfort. And they're more optimizing for intra generation. So from generation to generation wellbeing.

Simone: And there, there's basically, I mean, having kids. Inherently means in the moment suffering over comfort. Right? It's the hard choice initially. And for like a good, 18 to 30, to 40 to 50 years, however many years it is. And it is definitely not about having like an easier time in the moment or a more pleasant time in the moment.

Simone: It is really about In in intra. Sorry. And

Malcolm: I think it also to, to something else you pointed out is I, I think that people, and this is an issue that's just not as talked about as it should be talked about, given that it, it, it's, it, the progressive, like the super virus doesn't really care about this as the concept which [00:20:00] is the increasing a fertility of our species.

Malcolm: And, and this is causing a lot of heartache for a lot of families. And, and it requires the use of, unfortunately, I think, a lot more aggressive fertility technology than was needed in the past.

Simone: Yeah. Which, which still runs counter to the progressive thing. If the progressive thing is, oh, if this hurts your feelings, don't engage with it.

Simone: If this hurts your feelings, look the other way. Give up, stay inside. Don't go outside. Don't do that hard thing. They don't mention it

Malcolm: in front of somebody. If it could hurt their feelings. Even if it, even if you're talking about technology like you, you couldn't go to someone and be like, Hey, there's this technology you might not have tried yet that would be seen as, as wrong and, and unethically how much you actually, it

Simone: shows up in Rutherford's argument, right?

Simone: Like one of his core arguments is, oh, I V F is hard and it's painful for women. Mm-hmm. Like, how dare you imply that women should go through ivf And that I think that that is fairly indicative of this, this general theme that anything that. That requires, a suffering or discomfort or obligates.

Simone: It is therefore bad. And, and having kids is kind of it. I mean, obviously like the joy you get from kids is so much more right, and, and, and the [00:21:00] meaning in life and all this amazing contentment. But definitely like the in the moment, convenience and comfort. Does take a ma major hit with like,

Diana: everything.

Diana: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I've been through IVF lots of times cuz I'm an altru. I was an altruistic egg donor and I just, in the piece I say like, I'd rather do IVF than have four hours of, of early labor. And I've been through totally early labor. Early labor is no fun at all. And also the actual.

Diana: Sleep training or the early whatever, months or weeks. Like, to me this is like, complaining about traffic on the way to a 10 year prison sentence. Oh. Like, yeah. Seriously. Although that frames it all very negatively, but like, nobody, nobody would do that. Right. Yeah. This is the, another thing about, demographic collapse.

Diana: This idea of demographic collapse being incredibly controversial is that you're saying a variety of things that are, anti progressive views, which is they're interested in doing things for the greater good. So to speak, like recycling or not flying or being vegetarian or whatever the case may be.

Diana: And so what you're saying is like you guys are doing the opposite of what you should do for the greater good, [00:22:00] but another one of their key tenets is that immigration can solve all these problems. And by saying that we should have our own children, what you're saying is that immigrants can't solve this problem.

Diana: So it's like implicitly an anti-immigration sentiment.

Malcolm: And, and for our listeners, I just wanna touch on this point really quickly cuz a lot of people in the US don't know this, but as of 2019, by the UN's own statistics, And they are famously, really aggressive with these. So, so it's almost certainly worse than this.

Malcolm: By 2019, all of Latin America, so Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell below repopulation rate. So we are, are, are draining from an evaporating pond and they refuse to look at that.

Diana: Yeah, I mean I just, I don't know how much, brain drain. I tried to do a deep dive on brain drain the other day.

Diana: I don't know how much that's the case. I know that you guys say when you import people from other places, they acquire the sterilizing meme. They do. And so then they, they end up having fewer children, although apparently Japanese people have more children when they come our career. Well,

Malcolm: this is really interesting.

Malcolm: So actually, I wanna touch on this a little bit. So one of the things that I think goes against the [00:23:00] conservative meme, which is. That typically the more diverse an environment someone is in, the more children they will have. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons why in prosperous countries the US and Israel have some of the, the lowest cases, the fertility collapse, whereas monocultures like Korea have some of the highest levels of fertility collapse.

Malcolm: But if you take a Korean immigrant and they come to the us. Their fertility rate actually increases by, I think around 50% on average from when we were doing the statistics, which is just insane, but obviously they're in a much more diverse environment. Now, if you're talking about first generation immigrants on average to the us the fertility rate is 1.7 right now, which is around the US average.

Malcolm: It's a bit higher. It's like 0.5, I think, is US usaver. I mean, 1.5 is US average right now. Okay. But what's really interesting there is it's not that much above the US average, even when people come from really high fertility rate cultures. So what you were seeing there, Is that there's all of these talks about like we're not good at adapting people to our culture or whatever, but in terms of fertility rate, it actually happens really, really, really quickly.

Malcolm: And what that means from a [00:24:00] progressive standpoint is you can't like bring in an immigrant population that's high fertility and have that work. You need to continually import these people for it to be a solution. And the only way that you are able to continually import them is if their countries stay high fertility.

Malcolm: And on average, a country only has above repopulation fertility rate right now if the average citizen is earning less than 5,000 u s d per year. So you basically need to keep these other countries poor,

Simone: not optimal.

Diana: Yeah. Yeah, it's, it is, it is interesting in terms of the. Yeah, the incentive structures and how all these things don't work.

Diana: And I, I'm really interested in digging into the immigration debate. I just feel like I need to devote like a two solid weeks to it cuz you know, Richard Hania and Noah Carl and all these people, Garrett Jones have been writing about immigration and whether or not it's it's good or bad. There was a very funny tweet about, basically about how confederate whites moved up north and about how they changed the culture of, of the north throughout the United States.

Diana: And Philip Lemo who's on on [00:25:00] Twitter was like, yes, of course. Confederate Whites changed the culture of the North forever when they immigrated there. But of course that would never happen with immigrants coming to the United States today. And so, he was, he was basically making fun of this idea that this was actually a very It was a progressive talking point, was about this historical yeah, this historical phenomenon, which is something that they would never extrapolate towards the future.

Diana: Right.

Malcolm: Well, I mean, for our listeners, our position on on immigration, cause I bet they're wondering here, I, we, we are very pro policies that Let in productive individuals to immigrate. I'm really, yeah, in no way against productive immigration to the United States because we live in a different world today.

Malcolm: If something makes the US as economy strong, we need to focus on individual cultural group thriving, and your individual cultural group is going to die. If you, if you seal it off from the world, I mean, look, what do you want? What's your best case scenario? You're like, okay, one country, one people.

Malcolm: So you end up like Korea, like a, a desperate old man in a hermetic tube who's slowly dying keeping immigration immigrants out because you're weak. It just [00:26:00] allows you to die in peace. Either strengthen yourself or don't.

Diana: For me, there's two different arguments that are very compelling that pull me and diametrically oppose directions.

Diana: Mm. So there's this Peter singer, utilitarian child in the pond thing that Brian Kaplan talks about, which is like, why wouldn't we take anyone and everyone who wants to come to our country, we make their lives better, they increase our gdp, they increase their country's gdp. It's a win-win. Not even selecting people, just letting anybody in.

Diana: Mm-hmm. And he also says, that immigrant. Crime stats are overblown, that's very anti-conservative kind of talking point. Mm-hmm. Even though Brian Kaplan is, is quite conservative in many ways. There's this other kind of IQ realist idea that I have. Also, I think that people are often happier in more homogenous societies.

Diana: It can be very difficult to get along with neighbors and people that you have nothing in common with. Yeah. But I. I also wonder, what is the tipping point? Is there a tipping point in terms of people who are from very culturally diverse backgrounds? What is the tipping point in order to being able to sustain the civilization and [00:27:00] institutions that we have come to enjoy and rely on for prosperity and stability?

Diana: Yeah. Like, is, is that, is that a possibility that you can That, that, that there could be some kind of voter base or letting in certain number of immigrants. To me, I was looking at this stat the other day, the idea that a Sweden with 40% Muslim population and a a Sweden with 5% Muslim population are going to sustain the same institutions the same way without any difficulties.

Diana: Right. Seems really farfetched to me. So these are all difficult questions, I think to grapple with.

Simone: Yeah, they really are. It's gonna be interesting to see it play out.

Malcolm: We can do an immigration po po podcast sometimes, cuz we have a lot of thoughts on that, that are very controversial. You guys should

Diana: talk to Kaplan about cuz he is like, yes, he knows everything and he's just the, the best faith interlocutor about immigration that I've ever heard.

Diana: He's just amazing. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Simone: Yeah. Although, Diana, I have to say, I'm already like dying to talk with you again. When you're ready, when your book is closer to coming out, will you come back on and talk about how to train your boyfriend? [00:28:00] And

Malcolm: you can check out her podcast right now. Which is similar.

Malcolm: How we divided the world into two spheres. One is people just trying to ideologically signal to their tribe, and the other is people trying to get to the truth. They're very much in the, get to the truth camp. And it's,

Diana: Aporia is is is really great. And, and I'm grateful that, given that I have a, a small child and another on the way that I managed to find a place with them because I really feel good about what I'm doing.

Diana: So yeah, my most recent interview was with. With Paul Bloom. I recorded an interview with Simone. That's gonna be great. And there's, there's a, some on the back burner, Ayla, Mike Bailey. Those people are all coming out at some

Simone: point. Oh good. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm looking forward to those. That's really exciting.

Simone: And where else can people find your work, read more of

Diana: what you write? I'm on se I'm, I'm on Twitter too much. I'm at Sentient. And yeah, check me out there.

Simone: That's great. Oh, Diana, you were such a delight to speak with. I'm looking forward to all of your upcoming podcasts and articles. I just love every time something from you comes out. So everyone check out Diana's work if you haven't already, and hopefully we'll have you back on the podcast soon.

Diana: Love to talk to you guys again. Thank you.

Simone: Thank you. [00:29:00] Woohoo

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