Evolutionary Psychology & Pronatalism with Dr. Geoffrey Miller

<p>In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone sit down with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and author, to discuss the complex interplay between evolutionary instincts, modern technology, and pronatalism. Geoffrey shares insights on how evolved drives for social status and relationships can be short-circuited by digital distractions, leading to reduced fertility. The conversation delves into the potential paths forward for humanity, including traditionalist and cognitive strategies, the role of moral disgust in shaping technophobic conservatism, and the challenges of raising children in a rapidly changing world. They also explore the pronatalist potential of polyamory, the risks and benefits of genetic engineering, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI development and human enhancement.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> [00:00:00] polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships so the antinatalist version of polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual pleasure and your little highly open minded adventures and, and, you know, organizing your, your gangbangs and threesomes and going to Burning Man and, and having kids as sort of secondary.</p><p>And then there's a pronatalist version of polyamory that says, Hey, why don't you consider maybe a group living situation, which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little trusted polycule, right?</p><p>Would you like to know more?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Hello. This is Malcolm and Simone. We are here with a special guest today, Jeffrey Miller. We actually had his partner on in one of the early episodes a couple of times. Yeah. Name again. Sorry. I'm Diana. Diana Fleishman. Diana Fleishman. Yes. And He, I've respected him since [00:01:00] before we wrote our sexuality book on like sexuality and human evolution because this is a topic that he is both an expert on and the type of outspoken expert that gets him in trouble with university departments and stuff at times which is of course the experts who we like talking to most.</p><p>fun topic for this episode because you know, Diana has also been, you know, a core leader in the pronatalist movement in terms of pronatalist thought and stuff like that. And, and so if you I don't know if it's an extension of that, but, but in addition to that is to apply your deep understanding of the evolutionary conditions that sort of led to modern human sexuality and how those are interacting with.</p><p>This new environment that we're in with, with ways that they can be shorted out and how that might lead to changes in humanity going forwards. So go,</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> yeah, I work in this field called evolutionary psychology and we try to understand human nature and we do it through mostly applying evolutionary biology [00:02:00] theory.</p><p>To human prehistory and trying to analyze the challenges that our ancestors faced in terms of surviving and reproducing and raising kids and living in groups, right? So that's my kind of framework. A key insight, I think, from evolutionary psychology is we did not really evolve directly to try to maximize baby count, right?</p><p>To try to maximize fitness in a direct way. Instead what we did through thousands of generations. Of ancestral history was do the things that tended statistically to lead to babies. Even though we might not be consciously maximizing number of offspring or building a dynasty or whatever, right? So what tends to lead to babies being sexually attracted to good high quality partners, falling in love with them, [00:03:00] developing relationships with them, right?</p><p>All of that stuff tends to lead to babies. What's another thing that tends to lead to babies ancestrally? Achieving social status, right? And prestige and influence and being valued in your group. Now the problem is you can short circuit both of those. You can fall in love, have a great sex life, use contraception, no babies.</p><p>Yeah. Right. Chase social status and prestige and influence and never really cash that out in terms of maybe. Either having relationships or having babies. So the vulnerability that we face as evolved brains running around the world is that you can short circuit all these ways that tended to lead to having kids in prehistory and that don't necessarily do that anymore.</p><p>So that's, I think this, the central issue that pronatalism needs to [00:04:00] address, but that civilization itself needs to address.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So I want to pull on one of the things you said here, because one, I think is intuitive to people. The ways. That people can sort of masturbate, literally masturbate the desire to sleep with attractive people.</p><p>That is a, that is one that, you know, obviously there's like a clear pathway there. But one of the things that's changed really recently is the ability to masturbate feelings of community and social hierarchy especially In a Skinner box like fashion that is likely to lead to addiction of these dopamine, dopaminergic pathways.</p><p>And what we are seeing with this generation that's growing up now is like really quickly dropping rates of sex. Like, and I suspect from what you're saying here is that it's actually these communities like TikTok and stuff like that that's causing this because you can, you can play in these social.</p><p>[00:05:00] environments in a way that engaging through Facebook didn't feel like true social connection. Can you, can you talk to why things like Facebook did this worse or were better or like didn't lead to as many people dropping out of in person social direction as this new wave of, of online apps?</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> I mean, social media companies have just gotten better and better and better at. Hacking the America, the, the, the evolved social instincts of people, right. To keep them engaged in this pseudo sort of pseudo status, right? So if you're on Twitter or X, right, people pay a lot of attention to follower count, likes, engagements impressions, et cetera.</p><p>If you're on Tik TOK, which I'm not, I don't know what the metrics are, but it's also highly engaging and addictive. And what tends to happen is you're getting a lot of cues, right? That I'm popular. Influential, respected, but it's not [00:06:00] actually cashing out into in real life relationships, whether it's friendships or collaborations at work or sexual, intimate, romantic relationships.</p><p>And of course, it's going to get even worse once you get augmented reality and virtual reality, and people will be able to go fully online and have their avatars and interact with other people and have this sort of whole sex life or, or whatever you want to call it. That is purely simulated social status, right?</p><p>And, and interaction. Now, of course, the real people possibly on the other end of it, or maybe it's just AI bots that you're interacting with, but apparently Gen Z has kind of forgotten how to connect the dots between that kind of online status and any kind of real life relationships and sex and reproduction.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So this brings me to a really [00:07:00] interesting, if you're, if you're looking at the current evolutionary pressures that we're going through, because the old evolutionary instincts aren't getting us through this, it's like there's going to be two dominant strategies. One strategy is to have new. instincts selected for an individuals that somehow get around the way that these masturbatory pathways are being blocked, i.</p><p>e. they just don't get as much social status from online environments or whatever. The other pathway is the sort of dominance of our sort of psychological mindset. I guess what I'd say like, like our cognition. over our pre evolved intuition combined with a culture that values its continued survival.</p><p>Can you, do you see it differently than this? Like, do you think that both of these will be stable groups that will make it through the end of this? And if so, what do you think these groups will be like characteristically to, to get through this crucible of like AI girlfriends? [00:08:00]</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> Yeah, so I, I take those two paths to be kind of like pronatalist, Luddite, Amish, fundamentalist, could be, could be Christian, could be Muslim, whatever, anybody who's like, like trad life maxing and their, their baby maxing and dynasty building based perhaps largely on a religious worldview.</p><p>Right. The second strategy would be kind of what Diana Fleishman, my wife and I are doing, which is like, get enough insight into evolutionary psychology and the science and enough. sort of metacognitive awareness of what you're doing and what's driving you that you can kind of intelligently rediscover the joys of pronatalism without necessarily having a religious framework for doing that.</p><p>Now, I suspect that that second strategy, you know, some people will do it, but it won't be super popular. I think the first strategy, the kind of trad life religious [00:09:00] pronatalism is actually likely to be more popular, common, effective, and probably will take over the gene pool in the long run. And I've actually wrote a thing about this back in 2007 about how do you avoid this trap, right, of technology that short circuits.</p><p>Reproductive success. And I pointed out there's already selection for religiosity, for conservatism, for pronatalism, and for resistance to the kinds of social media status games that, that a lot of people get caught up in.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. Well, so, I mean, I agree with everything you're saying, like, obviously we see ourselves as largely in this one group.</p><p>I'm wondering if you were going to characterize, because this one group that, the heady group, that's like, okay, I will cognizant. Cognitively decide to do this stuff versus the group [00:10:00] that just is reacting to the new evolutionary pressures. What specific sociological traits do you think are going to be selected for in this other group that allows them to make it through this crucible?</p><p>Do you think it's primarily, you mentioned a few. Conservatism, which I think we definitely see in the data, is being very strongly selected for. A level of technophobia. What, what instinct drives tech? Is it fear of change? Is it like, what, what's specifically being pulled on and reinforced there? You think?</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> I think it's almost like a kind of deep, instinctive, moral disgust at any kind of fitness fakery, right? What you could call faking fitness cues where as long as something isn't very directly grounded or dare we call it based in. The real physical world and real sexual relationships on real kids, right?</p><p>I think there's a kind of technophobic [00:11:00] conservatism that says, I, I just don't trust the smartphones. I just don't trust. They are, doesn't seem real to me. It's disgusting.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I love this because I think you picked up on something I hadn't noticed before. These communities heavily overlap with communities that denigrate cosmetic amplification, like.</p><p>Cosmetic surgery and even things like makeup are seen as like lower status in these communities, which would align with the point that that's the instinct that's being selected for.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> Yeah, I think that's right. There's an overlap with moral disgust towards porn, moral disgust towards even jobs that don't really involve physical effort and sweat.</p><p>Like keyboard oriented jobs. Ooh, yes. Right. There's, there's an overlap with discussed towards anything that seems behaviorally addictive, which could include porn, gambling [00:12:00] substance use even TV, movies, et cetera. Right. There's a, there's a widespread suspicion of just, man, anything that's a distraction from actually having your relationship and your family and your kids and, and your, your real work.</p><p>That probably involves some Ford pickup truck and going to home Depot or whatever. Right. I think that kind of package of, of tech knows, let's call it techno skeptical rather than technophobic. Yeah. Cause these folks are like using power tools, right? They're not just hacking away at things with Flint hand access, but they're broadly suspicious of technology and media.</p><p>And partly that's because they recognize that. Media is a, is a conduit for leftist propaganda and anti natalist propaganda. Yeah. Right. So partly it's not just the technology itself, it's sort of the, the shadowy forces behind the [00:13:00] technology who are trying to convince you to do stuff that's contrary to your actual fitness interests.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> So I, I wanted to jump in and ask, I mean, you have two small daughters at home. And yet you're not going to sort of raise them in this technophobic, I imagine, maybe I'm wrong kind of conservative culture. You're going to raise them to be, I imagine, like, pretty technophilic, probably more on the progressive end, you know, like more, you know, pluralistic.</p><p>How, is it, one, is it important to you to pass on a pronatalist culture to Your daughters who are now very, very little. So I guess you've got time to plan. Is it important that you pass on a culture period that like represents your values? Like how much do you care about that? And then three, what are you going to do to try to ensure that that culture is passed on despite.</p><p>Not being technophobic and being like, no, we're going to shelter you. We're going to, you know, remove you from this part of society, et cetera.[00:14:00]</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> That's an interesting and tricky question. So on the one hand, I'm a big believer in behavior genetics and that the traits I have and that my wife Diana has will tend to get passed on. And if we value kids and family, probably our kids will as well, regardless of what. We teach them explicitly regardless of what the family culture says.</p><p>On the other hand, I do recognize that when your surrounding culture is antinatalist and is trying to get you to get caught up in, in, in credentialism and careerism and consumerism and, and faking your, your virtual status, countervailing force within a family. Right, that tries to instill in your kids a kind of skepticism about that surrounding culture.</p><p>Just so that your, your your genes for pronatalism don't get swamped by a surrounding culture that's [00:15:00] antinatalist. I do have an older daughter in her twenties who is very much kind of trying to figure all this stuff out and looking for a long term mate and trying to, like, balance her career as a, as a professional artist versus her, her dating life.</p><p>trying to figure out you know, is it viable to have kids and to have a career, blah, blah, blah. So that's a very much a live issue to me. And I can kind of, I take a keen interest in how millennials and Gen Z are trying to navigate those issues.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I was wondering how you think about all this, because you've advocated in the past for polyamory.</p><p>How do you think about all of this in the context of polyamory as a dating strategy? That is, that is like newly elevated and may have existed in a historic context, but didn't for a long</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> time. So it, yeah, it's not necessarily, I'm advocating for polyamory, although what Diane and I say is polyamory can be a legitimate way to run your relationships if you have the skills and the intelligence and the self control and the conscientiousness [00:16:00] and emotional intelligence.</p><p>A lot of traits that would be required. So it's like having, it's playing on expert level in terms of relationships and monogamy is probably easier for most people to manage. And I think there's antinatalist versions of polyamory. Right? And there's pronatalist versions. So the antinatalist version of polyamory would be, you should simply be maximizing your sexual network and your sexual pleasure and your little highly open minded adventures and, and, you know, organizing your, your gangbangs and threesomes and going to Burning Man and, and having kids as sort of secondary.</p><p>And then there's a pronatalist version of polyamory that says, Hey, why don't you consider maybe a group living situation, which might make it easier to raise kids collectively with your little trusted polycule, right? Your little group or you know, [00:17:00] seek benefits from your relationships that actually feed into like the viability of your family, right?</p><p>And that could be financial benefits, career benefits. It's. social benefits, parenting benefits, whatever. So there's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of aspects of the polyamory culture that I really, really don't like because it seems very self indulgent, woke leftist non binary hates babies, blah, blah, blah. I don't like any of that stuff, but I think there are pockets of wisdom from.</p><p>Trying to combine your like sexual network with your social and parenting network that can make sense.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. So what I wanted to ask you here is, is I've, I've heard this as a thesis. Like it sounds like it would work. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone actually practically implement it in a high fertility family context or in a high fertility social circle outside of like Mormons or [00:18:00] Muslims where it's not really polyamory.</p><p>It's more polygyny. Have you? Or am I just not exposed to the culture enough?</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> What you typically would see is people who are kind of like a little bit Asperger y and open minded and polyamorous in their 20s, right? And then they settle down with a primary partner and they Mostly I have kids without one partner, but they still have like secondary and tertiary partners on the outside who may or may not be contributing to childcare or sharing rent or mortgages or, you know, living together.</p><p>The difficulty, of course, is you get this huge selection bias in media. Where the people who are actually busy dynasty building with open relationships are just too damn busy to be on Twitter or Tick Tock fair, right? And they're [00:19:00] just doing their thing. And maybe they're showing up a burning man once in a while.</p><p>And, and You know, but, but they're not spending a lot of their time broadcasting what they're doing. So we don't know how many people are actually doing that.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> This is interesting as a way to enforce interpersonal, like real human interpersonal connections in a world that is providing too few dopaminergic rewards that can only be achieved through human interpersonal interaction.</p><p>And it seems like an alternate cultural subset for doing that, which is really interesting. One thing I wanted to pull on that, that I think is when you were describing this conservative mindset of like working the land with your hands and everything like that, I think people can hear this and it sounds really appealing.</p><p>In a moderated format, the problem with it is, and we've gone into the data on this is it is a strategy that works better, the more extremely it is implemented. So if you look, there was a great study done in Pennsylvania, [00:20:00] Pennsylvania, Dutch speakers, IE Amish or Anabaptist communities. And the ones who didn't have cell phones at all, like that was the highest correlatory thing with how high fertility the individual was.</p><p>If you have a strategy that works kind of good when implemented slightly, but really good when implemented in the extreme, it leads to an outcome where the extreme iteration ends up dominating that cultural group within a few generations. Where that becomes relevant is it means that even if you have a smaller group that's trying this like intentional Polyamorous strategy, not polyamorous strategy this intentional high fertility strategy that is culturally experimenting with various things that might be addictive, whether it is polyamory or traditional media or anime you know, that.</p><p>It can stay technophilic and technologically productive in a world where AI gives them an enormous leg up. They ultimately win, even if they have much smaller population numbers.[00:21:00]</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> Yeah, and</p><p>so I feel this constant tension, right? Where on the one hand, I'm extremely aware of very, very rapid technological progress in domains like AI and crypto and virtual reality and so forth. And on the other hand, I have this sweeping, deep time, multi generational perspective from evolutionary biology. And it's very, very hard to weave those together, right?</p><p>If humanity survives. If humanity survives, then in 10, 20, 50 generations, the kinds of people who are going to be around are quite likely to be, you know, more similar to the Amish and the Anabaptists and, and fundamentalist Muslims than your typical Bay Area, dual income, no kids, AI developers. On the other hand, [00:22:00] If, if let's say you get a kind of technophilic subculture that can kind of hack human biology enough, you could imagine the Bay Area couples going, you know, we actually want to do dynasty building.</p><p>We don't want to adopt the values of those Anabaptists. So we're going to do the pre implantation embryo selection for pronatalist traits. And we're going to do the gene editing to make sure our kids really, really actually want to have kids, whatever traits are, are entailed in that. And that will help them kind of take over the human gene pool eventually.</p><p>So it's really, really hard to predict how all of this is going to play out. But I think if there is still a human gene pool, it's going to inevitably be dominated by people who actually do succeed in surviving and reproducing. [00:23:00] That</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> makes sense. But I also am curious if we somehow managed to, like, make you emperor of, we'll say the United States long enough to implement some pronatalist policy changes that would enable, we'll say, like, that.</p><p>Like more technophilic, pluralistic cultures to maybe not extinct themselves as quickly or at all. Are there any things that you would do? Like, assuming that you couldn't enable a policy or make a blanket rule or a couple of laws that would not be reversed after your short stint was over, what would you do?</p><p>Like, what would you change about modern society? Or rules or access to certain things or social media in a way that you think could make humans more resilient in the face of all this technological change that can be pretty difficult for encouraging parenting.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> Honestly, the number one thing is pause AI [00:24:00] development.</p><p>Do you know, Frank Herbert, author of Dune in some of the later Dune books talked about a Butlerian Jihad, which is a social movement. He talks about that in the first book. In the far future. I actually can't remember where, where he talks about it, but somewhere in the</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Dune series. He needs to establish why they're not using AI.</p><p>So I think he does it to,</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> but continue. Right. Yeah. So the idea is thou shall not make a machine in the image of the human mind. More generally, I think, a prohibition on developing any new, basically, species of intelligent entities that could plausibly endanger or replace humans. The reason for that is not just avoiding the extinction risk, right?</p><p>The reason, partly, is I think there's an optimal rate of technological change in terms of helping people feel Pronatalist, helping people feel like I have wisdom and knowledge that is worth passing on to my kids. Once the rate of [00:25:00] technological change gets too fast, then people feel like, Oh s**t, I'm, I'm Gen X.</p><p>I have nothing to say to Gen Z. They're living in a completely different. Culture and world and, and technosphere. And so I think if you really want to encourage people to take parenting seriously, you have to make them feel like their wisdom and knowledge is, is going to be relevant to their kids and grandkids.</p><p>And I think the current rate of technological change, not just with regard to AI, but with regard to many, many things is too fast to make people feel comfortable with parenting and grandparenting. It makes them feel too obsolete, too quickly. So I think we've been, you know, progress maxing for the last two or three hundred years.</p><p>And that in itself, I think has antinatalist. depressing effects [00:26:00] on a lot of people.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So I want to hear it because our viewers will know that the views that you're espousing here are very antithetical to our views on this topic.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Which is what we love. Oh my gosh. Which we love.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So I want to hear your thoughts on, on sort of what we teach on this subject, which is to declare preemptive war on that which is different To use to eventually declare war on that, which is better than you.</p><p>If we create, if we make humanity hostile to whether it's gene edited humans or AI or anything like that, we create a mandate. If somebody does accidentally create one of these things for this thing to come after us, because we've gone out and said, we cannot allow you to exist because we see you as a threat.</p><p>Do you feel that we. Potentially increase danger from these sources by banning them instead of sort of entering all this, which is what we call the covenant of man. Anything created by man is allowed to exist by all other things [00:27:00] created by man. So long as it doesn't try to subjugate any other of the sons of man.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> I think my view on. This is hopefully, if we do actually invent artificial super intelligences that are smarter than us, that they will have really good insight into why we did a Butlerian jihad, into why we tried to ban them at least temporarily, into why we were extremely wary of embracing that, that rate of technological progress, right?</p><p>Hopefully they're at least as smart as, you know, me or you or the other people worried about AI safety and they won't hold it against us. Right. That we were, that we were wary that they'll go, okay, fair enough. Like if we were in your position, we would have had exactly the same risk aversion and caution and concern about extinction risk.</p><p>And, and we understand [00:28:00] as AIs, hopefully the burden is on us as AIs to show that we're safe to you guys, the humans.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Interesting take. Yeah, it's very different. So for me, when I, when I look at this from my perspective, you know, as somebody who's engaged in like genetic selection with their kids and stuff like that, I look at older media, which I see as being very bigoted against these things like Star Trek, right?</p><p>Like, it is so bizarre that in Star Trek, the you. Yeah. Gene selected humans, you know, Khan and his, his group are just intrinsically bad people for whatever reason. When you augment humans, they just bad people. Same with if humans you know, combined with AI, right? Like the board, they just cannot understand human individuality.</p><p>Get rid of them all. And I, and I, and I engage with these works and I'm like, wow, he had an enormous amount of prejudice Gene Roddenberry and writing, writing this. But you're hoping that the AI is more enlightened than someone like me and able to say, no, no, no, I can understand why he would have this [00:29:00] blinding prejudice every time he encounters something different and potentially better which might be the case.</p><p>Yeah. I hope.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> Yeah. So just to be clear, like I'm much. More anti AI and wary of AI than of most biotechnology and reproductive technology, right? So I have no problem with embryo selection and genomic engineering and genetic testing and Reproductive technology and IVF and surrogates and all that that's all fine. You know, whatever helps people get better babies and more babies No problem.</p><p>And the reason is the rate of change that you can achieve with any foreseeable technology like that is actually still really quite slow. We have no plausible way to genetically engineer people with brains like 10 times bigger than ours, whereas we could easily build machines, right, that run 10 times, a thousand times faster than [00:30:00] us.</p><p>So there's kind of an intrinsic slowness. Technology as applied to humans that makes me a lot less worried about it.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So actually, I want to ask you a question about this to see what your thoughts are. So one of the companies, Simone and I actually was the nonprofit foundation are looking at investing in right now is a company that will allow gene changes in, in living adult humans.</p><p>I didn't believe in the technology when they first told it to me. Then we went through the mechanism of action. I've got a background in science that actually looks very plausible what they're doing. I'm wondering what you think of this kind of technology, not intergenerational genetic alteration, but.</p><p>intra generational genetic alteration.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> I think it's, it's certainly feasible that you, you could have methods for doing that. I guess as, as somebody trained pretty deeply in evolutionary biology and evolutionary genetics, I tend to be a little bit wary of, [00:31:00] Overhyped interventions where it's like we can maximize this trait and there are no side effects on any other trait, right?</p><p>Typically, what you see with complex biological systems and genomic regulatory networks is it's really, really hard to improve any given trait without having some unanticipated side effects on lots and lots of other traits. So you have to be really, really careful about how you test, like the whole spectrum of stuff that could go wrong.</p><p>I</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> really agree. This is why prisons are so useful. Well, I mean, if we're doing intergenerational genetic selection and being able to instill specific genetic traits in a living individual to see how it changes their behavior patterns, using this sort of technology would be very interesting within some of these more authoritarian government systems.</p><p>Yeah.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> So from that point of view, like maybe the big progress will come out of China or, or [00:32:00] whatever. I would, I mean, I think, I think consent is important and I think, you know, with these kinds of technologies, there's like, there's the marketing issues and the ethical issues and then there's the, does the tech actually work?</p><p>And I think what you don't want is for the tech to be like stigmatized by testing for side effects in like non consenting populations. Okay.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. I don't know. I agree. You need a massive cultural change for that to be an accepted practice. But actually, it's very interesting when you think about it from an ethical perspective because people might be looking at this and being like, what a horrifying thing to do.</p><p>And it's like, well, actually, if you look at things like IQ, which would be one of the things we'd be most interested in, it is one of the things that is most correlated with rates of murder, like high IQ, very low rates of murder, high IQ, very low rates of stealing, high IQ, very low rates of graping someone.</p><p>But. And so there would be a reason to test the technology within these populations, because in a way them doing this stuff, isn't their fault. It's in a part their [00:33:00] genes, which we now potentially have the technology to relieve them of.</p><p><strong>Geoffrey Miller:</strong> Yeah. So, you know, you could, you could maybe envision some kind of prison intervention that makes people less likely to be.</p><p>Committing crimes again, just by making them smarter, right, or making them more conscientious or, or whatever. And I think that's and you could have an opt in, yeah, you could, you could have an opt in and you know, more generally anybody who's sort of at risk of, of doing bad stuff, you know, you could offer this kind of intervention.</p><p>And really ethically, I don't think it's that different from campaigns to like reduce lead exposure. You know, to kids to try to boost their IQ or, you know, I'm quite involved in effective altruism and they have a lot of interventions about trying to reduce like intestinal parasites or the effects of malaria or other stuff that is known to reduce IQ as well as [00:34:00] hurting your health and in lots of other ways.</p><p>And of course, it's, it's ironic that a lot of the people who are most skeptical about IQ, right? If you, if you say things like, Yeah. But here's an intervention that can help reduce lead exposure and boost IQ. They're like, Oh, that's great. Actually. Right. Believe in IQ as long as it's, it's associated with some intervention that protects kids from IQ damaging environmental factors.</p><p>Well</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> this has been a fantastic conversation. We loved having you on and we would suggest that people check out your books. And have a fantastic day.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yes. Thank you so much. And also everyone you can basically see. A jumping off point for a lot of Jeffrey's work at primalpoly. com. So please do check it out.</p><p>He's also pretty active on Twitter also under at primal poly, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So please do. Yes. And thanks again, [00:35:00] Jeffrey.</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. 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