How Feminization, Hypergamy, and Economic Collapse Are Reshaping Society - Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAlthHist) X Tom Bilyeu Pt. 2

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "How Feminization, Hypergamy, and Economic Collapse Are Reshaping Society"

Podcast: Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory
Episode: Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist) X Tom Bilyeu Pt. 2
Date: November 5, 2025
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist)

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Overview

In this thought-provoking deep-dive, host Tom Bilyeu and history YouTuber Rudyard Lynch dissect the societal shifts occurring as a result of societal "feminization," hypergamy (the pursuit of upward social/sexual selection), and contemporary economic pressures. Drawing on historical context, evolutionary psychology, and current sociopolitical events, the conversation explores how these forces are transforming Western culture, gender dynamics, and the trajectory of nations like the US and China.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Natural Law, Human Nature, and Modern Political Blind Spots

[01:07–04:02]

• Rudyard Lynch explains that pre-modern societies (especially in the West) were grounded in "natural law"—the idea that political and legal structures should align with the fundamental realities of human nature.
• America’s founding principles, including the Constitution, were rooted in a cautious view of inherent self-interest and greed.
• The left, in Lynch’s analysis, rejects natural law, treating humans as "blank slates" and ignoring innate behavioral differences—leading to political and social systems detached from reality.
  • "So what the left does is they just shot natural law and then laughed at its corpse..." — Rudyard Lynch [02:54]

2. Historical Analogies: Soviet Union & Paranoia

[04:02–07:00]

• The Soviet Union under Stalin exemplifies this disconnect: Stalin’s belief that all people are interchangeable led him to purge experienced officers, with disastrous results.
  • "He killed off all of the most respected members of that town... you're just destroying the society." — Rudyard Lynch [05:45]
• Tom probes whether such actions are really ideological or the result of paranoia, to which Lynch suggests it’s both: paranoia plus a deep-seated belief in human interchangeability.

3. Economic Turmoil and the Radicalization of the Left

[08:26–10:52]

• Bad economic times, Lynch argues, breed radicalization—whether leftist, nationalist, or religious.
• He references Gustave Le Bon’s "The Psychology of Socialism" to describe today’s left as being driven by "mal-educated" people—overeducated, underemployed, and status-seeking through ideology rather than achievement.
  • "...the core demographic of the left is sort of maleducated people where our education system overproduces midwits..." — Rudyard Lynch [09:41]

4. Authoritarianism, “Compassion,” and the Left’s Rule Structure

[13:03–16:52]

• Tom notices that modern leftist politics is justified by a form of compassion or empathy, but seems to breed authoritarianism and destructive policy (e.g., unchecked immigration).
• Lynch links this to Christianity’s legacy—claiming progressive politics often mimic Christian love but manifest as its shadow, envy.
• The lack of self-regulation and clear rules (“purity to vague rules”) leads to endless ideological escalation.
  • "Christianity... has a series of rules. If you break the rules, you'll get kicked out. ...The left hates rules. So they just have vague vibes, but then they have no mechanism to turn off the bloodlust." — Rudyard Lynch [14:54]
• The French Revolution is cited as a historical parallel of ideological cannibalism.

5. Feminization of Society & Its Mechanisms

[16:52–20:56]

• Tom and Rudyard discuss the mainstreaming of what Lynch calls a "female mode of living" in politics and culture—an aversion to hierarchy, rule enforcement, and overt competition.
• Lynch references a classical Greek play (likely Aristophanes’ "Ecclesiazusae") satirizing a society run by women devolving into communism and dysfunction.
  • "Women tend to not like social barriers, clear principles or rules..." — Rudyard Lynch [18:45]
• He connects this to evolutionary psychology: a risk-averse, security-focused approach preferred by women, leading to societal flattening and aversion to hierarchy.

6. Hypergamy & Its Impact on Men

[21:00–29:32]

• Hypergamy (women preferentially selecting higher-status mates) is amplified by modern technology and economic security.
  • "Most men get hypergamied out of the pool... you end up with a huge amount of dissatisfied men. And then no one has children..." — Rudyard Lynch [27:09]
• The sexual/economic structure produces declining birth rates, growing male disenfranchisement, and greater social distrust.

7. Suppression of Masculinity & Societal Consequences

[29:36–34:01]

• Tom points to statistics like declining US innovation, attributing some of it to social discouragement of male competitiveness and drive.
• Lynch pushes back on the myth of Chinese masculinity, stating China is also deeply feminized in its social passivity and governmental overreach, despite its aggressive rhetoric.
  • "When you destroy masculinity, you're destroying the very thing that would allow your society to reset." — Rudyard Lynch [34:20]

8. Totalitarianism, Historical Amnesia, and China’s Model

[36:42–41:09]

• Tom and Rudyard trace parallels between historical totalitarian atrocities (Soviet, Maoist, Nazi) and modern China.
• They agree that Western societies are naïve about predatory, authoritarian states, with Tom warning of the need for free speech and democratic mechanisms.

9. Gen Z, Dating Apps, and the Erosion of Trust

[41:28–44:22]

• Lynch, as a Gen Zer, explains "Ho Math": 80% of women chasing 20% of men due to dating apps, resulting in profound social atomization and low trust.
  • "Gen Z doesn't really leave the house...most relationships are formed online." — Rudyard Lynch [42:43]
• Many Gen Zers have become disillusioned or radicalized, further splintering social cohesion and leading to plummeting birth rates.

10. How to Reverse the Crisis? Masculinity as the First Step

[44:54–49:35]

• Beyond economic reforms, Lynch recommends a cultural reconstruction, starting with a "return of masculinity."
• Masculinity, he argues, provides the frame or structure within which the feminine can exist; simply restoring religious rules isn’t enough without the underlying masculine respect and authority.
  • "The masculine sets the frame, it's like iron, and the feminine's like water; it flows through the frame the masculine sets." — Rudyard Lynch [45:44]
• He describes the phenomenon of "mate suppression"—the (often unconscious) impulse, especially among women, to prevent others from gaining reproductive advantage—showing how social rules can have hidden, pernicious evolutionary functions.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the disconnect with human nature:
  "If you're building a worldview in a way that's detached from things that are self evident, you've got a problem." — Tom Bilyeu [01:21]

• On radicalization in hard times:
  "Our education system overproduces midwits where we teach people non useful skills. And then the economy doesn't have jobs to pick up for that. So there's this huge lag... they are the people who drive the left." — Rudyard Lynch [09:41]

• On feminization and rules:
  "Women tend to not like social barriers, clear principles or rules. ...the bureaucratic machine of industrial civilization likes this feminine equality mechanism because it stops anyone from rising up and challenging it." — Rudyard Lynch [21:01]

• On hypergamy and male disenfranchisement:
  "Most men get hypergamied out of the pool... then no one has children because there's, of course, the mismatch between a few men who get a lot of selection and then most men who don't." — Rudyard Lynch [27:09]

• On masculinity and societal resilience:
  "When you destroy masculinity, you're destroying the very thing that would allow your society to reset." — Rudyard Lynch [34:20]

• On Gen Z’s sexual landscape:
  "80% of women go to 20% of men. ...Gen Z doesn't really leave the house, partly because they're not wealthy enough and partly because they have social anxiety..." — Rudyard Lynch [42:43]

• On solutions:
  "The masculine sets the frame, it's like iron, and the feminine's like water; it flows through the frame the masculine sets." — Rudyard Lynch [45:44]
  "We have to stop dehumanizing men and you have to stop dehumanizing children as well." — Rudyard Lynch [48:08]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:07 — Introduction to the biological basis of sex differences
• 02:01 — Natural law and societal structures
• 04:02 — Stalin, the USSR, and treating people as blank slates
• 09:00 — Economic downturns leading to radicalization
• 13:03 — The left’s political manifestation and concern over unchecked immigration
• 16:52 — The feminization of culture: historical and modern perspectives
• 20:56 — Hypergamy, societal feminization, and consequences for men
• 29:32 — Wealth inequality, innovation decline, and the US/China comparison
• 36:42 — Contemporary China, Mao vs. Xi, and authoritarian risks
• 41:28 — Gen Z, dating apps, and the collapse of social trust
• 44:54 — Constructive paths: restoring masculinity and the limits of religious programming
• 47:17 — Explanation of “mate suppression”
• 49:22 — Final thoughts and where to follow Rudyard Lynch

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Conclusion

In this dense conversation, Tom Bilyeu and Rudyard Lynch interrogate the interlocking forces of feminization, hypergamy, and socio-economic upheaval, articulating how these dynamics shape everything from birth rates and dating to innovation and geopolitical stability. Through wide-ranging historical and psychological reference points, Lynch argues for a cultural course correction—with a revived respect for masculinity, honest engagement with human nature, and greater social trust. Whether or not the listener agrees, this conversation is a vivid challenge to contemporary orthodoxies about gender, economics, and what holds civilizations together.

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Transcript

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[Impact Theory Announcer]

To part two of my conversation with Rudyard lynch, aka what if? Alt Hist.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Without further ado, here we go. Out of curiosity. So I like this idea of biological urges. I think that one of the things, as somebody who came to politics very, very late, I felt like I was the kid saying the emperor had no clothes. Seeing people say that men and women are the same. I was like, you guys haven't been married. Like there's no way you've been married and think men and women are the same. So on this I take a very nonchalant approach of that. Like if you're building a worldview in a way that's detached from things that are self evident, you've got a problem. So are the urges that you're referring to largely sexual in nature? Are they about aggression? Like what are the, what would be the clear distinctions that a sane, grounded person would make that the left is failing at?

[Rudyard Lynch]

In the pre modern world, you had a concept called natural law. And America was built off the concept of natural law, where it was sort of lost in the American and the French Revolution. The idea behind natural law, and it stems back originally to the Greeks, but it was codified in Christianity, is the structure of society and the legal code should be a representation of real, the real world. And so when they were doing various things like setting up the American Constitution, they were saying, we're going to build this system working with human nature. And their idea was, we're going to work with God's reality because if you lie against it, you're going to get punished. And so when they set up this, the checks and balances, their idea was that humans are naturally greedy and selfish. So let's make a system of where if humans are greedy and selfish, it works for the society in general. And that's the same with capitalism, with science. You're working with an accurate understanding of human nature. And the reason that basically every other society besides us had sexual norms is because of natural law. But it's not just that. That would be a simplification where social class is to agree. Natural law, same thing as a legal structure, same thing as how a society Wages War. Where St. Augustine had the principle of just war, which was there are certain conditions under which war is okay and others where it isn't, because they had a sense that there's human nature. And it's best to work inside the sort of like the range of human nature, because you'll actually get the result. And so what the left does is they just shot natural law and then laughed at its corpse. Where they just have no concept that there is human nature to work with. Where do they really believe that?

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Or is that one of the bullshit ones that they throw in to confuse people?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I think they actually believe it because they would make so many better decisions if they did believe it. I'm reading a really brilliant book now called Modern Times by Paul Johnson, and it's a history of the 20th century, and it's talking about the Soviet Union, where they kept on making all of these staggeringly terrible decisions. And partly, Stalin was literally a criminal before he got power. So he is sort of that backdrop. But at the same time, Stalin shot all of his officers right before the war with or 80% of his officer corps before the war with Hitler, because the Soviets thought hierarchy doesn't matter. You can replace the officers with sort of like privates, but in reality, the most important variable for a successful military is a strong officer corps. And so he shot all the people with experience, and they didn't think about, how are we going to pass on the human knowledge between these two?

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

And he shot them because he thought they weren't loyal.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, because Stalin went through phases of paranoia where he'd just kill people. He. He killed off like a dozen different groups in Russia, and each time he thought they were going to be his rivals. But in the process, he killed Russian society because he killed off everyone who could have been productive or helped Russia, where they went through a. They killed off the rich first, then they killed off the kulaks or the independent farmers. And keep in mind this is just a generation after the end of serfdom. So all of these people were new money. They would have a few more cows or a tiled roof. Stalin killed all of them.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

It's one of the most horrifying stories stories in all of history.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, because you're just imagining like I'm from rural Pennsylvania. It's like imagine going into a town and just killing off all of the most respected members of that town and most of the time the other people in the town don't dislike them and you're just destroying the society. And it speaks to your mental illness point that if you were in the Middle Ages and you had an understanding of human nature and you wanted to wield power that brutally, you'd be like Machiavelli, where Machiavelli has this highly structured and logical sense of when he's going to be brutal and Stalin is just like, kill them all. And that betrays they actually believe it. Or same thing as importing immigrants if you know enough anthropology and even left wing anthropologists agree with that.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Hold on, let's go back to that because that's a really interesting point and it's hitting me weird. Okay, so what I just heard you say was, hey, Tom, as proof that these guys really do believe that it's all blank slates, generals the same as a private. Doesn't matter. Kill them if they're not going to be loyal, just promote the next guy. Do you think that the first order of what drove him to do that is paranoia or a belief that everybody's the same?

[Rudyard Lynch]

What anthropology has found is that culture varies a lot and it's very deep and it's sort of lots of implicit stuff where there's still a significant amount of cultural differences between different sort of ethnic, different sub regions of British Americans from hundreds of years ago as well as different groups of white American. So generations later, there's still, you can still see if someone's culturally Italian or Irish American from a variety of things. And so culture is very deep and the vast majority of its unconscious. And so when the left does a lot of things, they're acting out sort of very complex subconscious beliefs which have sort of been transmitted to people unconsciously. Where children pick up all the elements of their society's worldview without being taught it sort of directly. Where a child will know, for example, that their society values equality a lot because people in that society just won't brag or, or they'll be uncomfortable with stating one group is more successful than another group. So people act out Very complex psychological principles that they don't understand the full implications of. And so Stalin's first motive was paranoia. But then inside his sort of deck of logic was everyone's interchangeable.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, yeah, it feels like mental illness is a key ingredient, but that is very fascinating. I never saw Stalin through that lens. Stalin being one of the most terrifying figures of the 20th century. Okay, so we've got the left. They believe that everybody is an interchangeable cog. This is one of the things that they actually believe and that is certainly creating the problems. Why do you think that this is gaining so much steam right now?

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's gaining steam for the economic issues you describe.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

But why does that push people to the left?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So bad times bring radicalization. That's just a consistent principle. And that could be religious fundamentalism, it could be radical nationalism, leftism. I read this really fascinating book called the Psychology of Socialism by Gustave Le Bon and it was written in the 1880s and it's absolutely insane. He totally nailed the left psychology back in the 19th century. And it's one of the most prophetic books I've read in my life where I wrote all of the predictions he got right and it filled two pages. And he said that the core demographic of the left is sort of mal educated people where our education system overproduces midwits where we teach people non useful skills. And then the economy doesn't have jobs to pick up for that. So there's this huge lag in sort of over educated people who are taught to believe they're more important in the world than their services are. And they are the people who drive the left. What happened in the last 40 years, and Turchin talks very cogently about this is we had a huge cadre of both over and undereducated people. And due to the economic issues, they could not sort of integrate into society. So they became radicalized and they used the radical left virtue signaling game as a way to short circuit not having to deal with merit because they resent merit. So they use ideological purity spirals for status selecting. And so among young people there's lots of sort of dissatisfied elite aspirants. And the college educated ones tend to go left. And like I spent a semester in college, the non college educated ones tend to go right.

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[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, so we've got this spiraling up of what's happening on the left, overvaluing what they've achieved and what they're going to offer to society. At a time where we're having economic woes, how is that manifesting politically? Like, when I look at the left, what I see are people that are using. I'll say, is empathy the right word?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Compassion?

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Maybe closer. That's not what they would call it. So they. I don't think maybe you see something I don't. But I see them as fighting for the oppressed all the time. Like these people are legitimately having a bad time. Somebody's got to stand up for them. We've got so much to whom so much has been given, so much is expected and they're going in there trying to help people. But it does not appear to be birthing a better world that seems to be creating this. What Gadsad calls suicidal empathy. And for me, zooming in on the things that worry me about the left are authoritarianism and unchecked immigration. What do you see manifesting in your understanding of the left and all of these predictions about the Left? What does it have to say about those two things specifically?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the west was built off Christianity, and the core sort of emotion of Christianity is love. Envy is the shadow of love. So they think they're doing Christian love, but they're actually doing its opposite. Because when you love someone, you accept their issues for what they are as a person. And when you envy someone, you look for issues to tear them down. So they've created a mask of Christian love to show its opposite. And the thing we're seeing is just so you watch the Woke commercials, like the Jaguar one or whatever ones they're doing now, and you think a group of people greenlit this. You could put 10 people in a single room who did not think there was a problem here. And that speaks to a real disconnect between them and the rest of the world that they have these highly enclosed places where they constantly ratchet up ideological extremism and they don't. One of the core issues the Left has is they don't have self regulation mechanisms. Christianity as an example, has a series of rules. And if you break the rules, you'll get kicked out. That's even. Even fascism has a better rule structure than the Left does. If you follow the rules, you're fine. If you don't, the Left hates rules. So they just have vague vibes, but then they have no mechanism to turn off the bloodlust. So that's what happened in the French Revolution, which was five years of just mobs in France eating each other and it was the snake eating its own tail. So the left is stuck in these where if you don't show your purity, you're kicked out. And.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

But purity to vague rules, because you're saying they don't have like the specific.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It is purity to vague rules. Like none of it makes sense, it's all contradictory. And they're using the contradictory to prove their loyalty, where every single thing the left says, they also believe the opposite. And George Orwell articulates it very well. And so they don't really have rules and their standards get more and more extreme. But in the process, they purge anyone who had realigned them. So they're just getting crazier and crazier. And anyone who would have told them no was kicked out five to 10 years ago.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, one thing I'VE heard you talk about with the left. And my earliest like step into what's going on politically. What's going on Culture war was I was interviewing Heather Hying, this was like five years ago. And I said this sounds like basically a female mode of living. Pathologizing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

And I've heard you say similar things about there's a feminization of culture. Is that being driven by the left? And if so, what's the mechanism?

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the things I like to do to figure out how the world works is I look at what predictions that the future work because you can see what's retroactively. Making a predictive model is important because it means you're understanding the world's accurate. That's what the scientific method is. So when I look at old predictions and they did something right, I try to figure out what they did right. And there was this.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

What was the core logic? What cause and effect were they talking?

[Rudyard Lynch]

There was an ancient Greek play, I believe written in the 4th century BC by Aristophanes. And it's a society where only women could vote. And it's a society where, where they get rid of capitalism and institute communism. They destroy the family, Senators sit in the central sort of senate and then they complain about how the room's too cold and they use sex to control the men. They constantly. They can't form a coherent plan of argument and they just stay stuck arguing over the details. And so you have this author in the ancient world who said that feminization of society will produce communism in the breakdown of the family and culture because there's an innate biological self interest.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Say more because I think a lot of people would look at women and say that's who wants to have children.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Life's complicated, man. So women want to have children under certain contexts and they don't under other contexts. And there are different biological switches for both that society societies can press. This is really a sign of archetypes being real because the easiest way to explain this is the Jungian division between Mother Earth and the devouring feminine, where women tend to not like social barriers, clear principles or rules. And you can either say that side of some like evolutionary self interest or you could say it's just sort of. There's the whole argument of like the yin and the yang and like each sex has their own sort of innate character that propels them. Um, but the core logic is that because women are so biologically secure, they don't get any benefit from taking risks. So it's all risk mitigation and so when you're removing all of these social structures, you're removing potential sources of risk. And you try to make a society where to differentiate yourself is a risk where everything is as sort of undifferentiated as possible. So that's how you end up with communism from it. Did I explain that?

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Well, you've got the first brick laid down, but I think there's more bricks to lay. So things that I've heard you talk about which are very much along these lines are when women say all women are a 10, that there's a thing that they are actively trying to pull off that female hairdressers will cut the hair of women that they believe are more attractive than them by a couple inches more than you would to maximize their attractiveness. So they're actively trying to hurt their chances on the sexual market. So it gets to this idea that women are playing a very different game from a masculine perspective. I recognize that, I see what you're talking about, I see that in women, but I don't even now talking with you, I don't know that I fully understand the end game that they're playing for.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's a great book on the topic called warriors and warriors by Joyce Benison.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Warriors and Worriers.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, it's on audible, it's very good and it talks about the negatives of female psychology. And it's funny seeing this middle aged, I would guess leftist woman write such like a cutting and good critique of toxic femininity. And it goes through a lot of evolutionary psychology. Whereas an example, unhappy women attack their family the most and then are polite to the outside society. Look at the modern west attacking our family. Polite to the outside society. Or there's in female friend groups and this is all backed by statistical evidence. You can look it up. Most women are scared to. Are scared to succeed lest their friends like them less. Where that's a very toxic dynamic or intersexual competition which we spoke about of hairdressers will cut the hair of women that are more attractive than them, a few inches shorter than women who are beneath them in attractiveness. Or there's an. In female social settings, not having the implication of equality is considered socially very dangerous. And you look at modern society, what's happening is that the bureaucratic machine of industrial civilization likes this feminine equality mechanism because it stops anyone from rising up and challenging it. It's a highly useful mechanism to keep the public in conformity. So that's why they're pushing men bad, because only men could rise out of this. And there's toxic femininity and there's positive femininity. And I want to state that because for every, like if, for example, if we said, like you look at the murders of various dictators and genocides, you say that's men. That's true. But it's also a specific subtype of men who are doing a specifically male pathology. And it's comparable with pathological femininity. And the core issue of that is the abdication of responsibility, where because the cost of child rearing is so hard that you have an incentive to abdicate responsibility, to let go of costs associated with basically having this little person attached to you for 20 years where you're physically incapacitated for months. And so if you look at the left, it's all the abdication of responsibility. If you want a single place where the left single place where the left does something that doesn't make sense, it's because of the abdication of responsibility.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

And you're saying, just to make sure I understood that, that because women have so much responsibility with child rearing, they need to get it off of them in other ways.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay. I've also heard you say that, you know, women just need to be honest. They're not going to be attracted to a man that can't dominate them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

So how do I reconcile that? Women both want to be dominate by a man in controlled circumstances. All of that's got to be somebody that they want, blah, blah, blah. But that with. And I want no rules, man.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I know the answer to that. But this has been such a complex journey of learning all these things as I stare at it in retrospect. And like, man, that's complicated. So it's, it's two different biological switches based off context. Where are there rules being enforced on me or are there not being rules enforced on me? And until there are rules enforced on me, I can, I'll sort of do. I'll push these low trust strategies until there is a social structure, because men have always been the people that have built social structures. That's true for. That's true for governments, religious institutions, corporations, militaries. And so women have been dependent on the patriarchy or the structures men build. So in the absence of a patriarchy, you'll do these low trust strategies until the context switches and then you switch behaviors where it's one of those things where it's Schrodinger's feminist. A feminist is either empowered or she's a victim. And it depends on context. Whichever one you choose.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Whichever one they choose for themselves.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, by context.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

And would that context be Whatever. Whichever one of these gets me more, gets me more control. Gets me more.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Whichever one I can avoid conflict with. Where if there's a conflict. Because the incentive structure is that women cannot win fights against men. So a lot of female behavior is offsetting their physical weakness against men. Because if you're not going to win, go with the flow. So if I'm in a context where I can get away with, I'm going to get away with it. If I can't get away with it, I won't get away with it.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It doesn't make sense to. It doesn't make sense to people like us, where you and I are both very sort of entrepreneurial and we want to enter in a situation and figure it out. It makes significantly more sense if you're like a Russian peasant or a Chinese peasant, where you have these huge governments that are utterly exploitive. And so when you can hide a little bit of grain from the tax collector, you do so.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, so you're saying that is one of the strategies that women employ?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, so as we feminize the societal structures that have traditionally been created by men, and at least in this moment are being co opted by women, what are the consequences for men?

[Rudyard Lynch]

A lot. I mean, there's no birthright. That's a pretty big consequence. Where.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

What's the actual mechanism that's driving that down?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So it's a holistic system. So one of the core issues with modernity in the left hemisphere is you can't see the entire equation which all fits together. So if you have a sexual breakdown, that's going to have consequences on your society's political structure, on its religious structure. If the birth rate decreases, that's going to affect your society's economy. Everything's connected. And so as an example, the Industrial revolution was a huge causal variable here because you removed women's reliance on men's physical labor and you also remove the threat of starvation. So the consequences for men are most men get hypergamied out of the pool and hypergamy is the principle that women will naturally be attracted to the most powerful man. And again, that makes sense if you use the analogy of if I am a peasant in a war zone, I will pick the most powerful warlord to protect me because he is the one who is most likely to stop wandering vagrants, wandering mercenary bands from stealing my grain. Keep in mind this is operating out of an idea of fundamental weakness in a very Brutal Darwinistic evolutionary world. So it makes total sense from the sort of logic they're coming from. And when you hypergamy most men out of the pool, you end up with these sort of a huge amount of dissatisfied men. And then no one has children because there's, of course, the mismatch between a few men who get a lot of sort of selection and then most men who don't. And then these men don't have an incentive to get married and have kids because their life is pretty. It's fairly satisfying. And so you don't start families in this. And it also breeds mass social distrust.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

And.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And for every loss in sort of like if you raise taxes, you'll have exponential economic decreases, same thing as social life. If you make social interactions 20% more difficult, you're going to see an exponential decrease in social interactions. And that's why I think politeness is important to societies.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Because you're trying to alleviate some of that friction.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, so that feels like an example of wealth inequality. Wealth in this example being not. The hypergamy becomes possible because of literal wealth inequality. But then in terms of sexual mate selection opportunities, there's also a sort of wealth inequality of that as well. Okay, so that came from. I'm trying to figure out what happens when you feminize a culture. What's the pathology that we're going to start to see in men? If I just started rattling off things that I can already see right now, obviously making men and their natural proclivities problematic. So telling men not to be aggressive, telling men not to be dominant, telling men that they need to step back and let others speak, specifically women telling men that their ambition is in and of itself problematic. And one stat that I've come across recently is since I think the mid-90s, the number of patents that China has filed compared to America, China went from like less than 1% globally now to like 43% globally. I mean, it's insane. And America has gone from like 18% to 16% or 25 to 20, whatever. It was a drop. And that's where I'm like, these things matter. China believes in itself. China is encouraging its people to be aggressive, to be dominant, to be as ambitious as humanly possible, to grind, to train. And it really manifests. It manifests in gdp, it manifests in innovation, it manifests in progress. And so when I start looking at if the problems in the US like just looking at US versus China, when I look at that and I say, whoa, some percentage of this is due to the feminization of society. That's where I've started beating the drum recently, where I'm like, no, men should not make space for anybody. Men should compete as hard as they can. You should always want an equal playing field. You should never sabotage somebody or try to hold them back. But if somebody can't out compete you, tough shit. So it's like you should be going all in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I agree. I very much agree. Yeah, it's funny to talk about China because first of all, you're assuming they're telling the truth. And they normally lie about 20%. Statistically they amassed the Communist Party lying by each province and it's about 20% of stats or it's about 20% of total GDP. The. I think China in some ways is a more feminized society than America because they've just totally let themselves get walked over by the government, in the school system and like the factory system where I follow a lot of Chinese news and it's crazy. They have like 50% youth unemployment now.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Whoa.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. They have a litany of issues. They've had lots of failures of major corporations. There have been protests across the country. Xi Jinping has said a lot of just like you should literally prepare for war. And they like having really sort of like exploitive, explosive, explosive rhetoric. And people like to say that. But at the same time, the book I'm reading about the 20th century, people said that about Hitler and Stalin. And it's totally insane to speak back to your earlier point that people tried to appease Hitler. The British gave back a quarter of their fleet to Hitler and to appease him. And you don't get Hitler to compromise by giving him stuff. These people have no comprehension of how predatory actors operate. Or the Western media was just writing glowing reviews of Stalin and Mao, who are the even worse than Hitler. They killed like twice as many people at least. And so we just are so naive. And the only way to fight players like that is to sort of bring out our own masculinity because appeasing monsters is not going to work. And that's just. It's just a dangerous worldview. And I think it's. There's an element of just. There's just. There's lots of very insidious, dark, I think instincts in there. And yeah, I think it's more dangerous than people think.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

It's more dangerous from a Thucydides trap perspective. It's more dangerous from a look at. Even China can collapse if you allow that kind of thing. What do you mean?

[Rudyard Lynch]

By that, it's dangerous in a lot of levels, I think, because we're developing a lot of godlike technology now between AI, genetic engineering, the space technology.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

New.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Forms of weaponry, sort of like predator drones. I'm probably forgetting a bunch. And this technology would require a lot of masculinity to master because we've let the genie out of the bottle, we can't go back. And so we have to sort of grab. We have to sort of grab Jormungandr by its tongue, but we don't have the, the will or the energy for it because we've destroyed the same masculine impulses that would allow that to happen. Where there's all of these external threat. When you destroy masculinity, you're destroying the very thing that would allow your society to reset. I, I just also think China is very dangerous because I think they are significantly worse than we believe. I think we're going to look back on the things going on in China now and realize that it was like it was like the other totalitarian regimes we slept on. I think they're probably doing very dark things that we don't know about.

[Impact Theory Announcer]

Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Stay tuned.

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[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Thanks for staying tuned.

[Impact Theory Announcer]

Now let's get back to it.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

That would not surprise me at all. I think the big thing that's going to come out about China is that we don't understand there's a very big difference between Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. And when Mao finally died, and I don't think people realize, you know, you've talked a lot about only having lived in the 21st century. I was alive when Mao was alive. So I'm like, yo, this was recent, and he was killing people by the tens of millions. And when he died, finally the CCP woke up and was like, okay, hold on. This is horrific. We don't want to keep going through this. And so Deng Xiaoping makes his famous quote, it doesn't matter if the cat's black or white, as long as it catches mice. And being rich is glorious or wonderful, whatever he said. And so the thing I try to always remind people is, hey, capitalism is so dope that when the communists decided that they wanted to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, they turned to capitalism, literally brought over Americans to teach them how to capital, and that was what brought them out. But then when Xi Jinping came into power, they didn't realize he ended their. They had term limits, like, because they didn't want to have happen what happened with Mao to happen again. And yet Xi Jinping was able to reclaim the Communist Party, make himself supreme leader. But I am hearing. I can't validate this yet, but I am hearing rumblings coming out of China that Xi Jinping may be losing his grip on power, that he may not be meeting with Trump, partly because he's afraid he can't leave China because that they wouldn't let him back in. Now, that is wild. Now, you normally hear stuff like that and ends up being whatever. People said all kinds of crazy shit about Putin five years ago, and none of it has come to pass. So take it with a huge grain of salt. But the part that I do think we're missing is so many of us are clocking what was going on in China in the early the late 90s and early 2000s as what's happening now. And it's been a very different picture since Xi Jinping took over.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I've gone through sort of multiple phases of obsessive study on China. I've done it several times or for a few months. I'll, like, just look at everything coming out of China, and it's weird to look at the trajectory they've Been on where back in. Again in the 70s, they were hardcore Maoist. Like, it was like the Taliban. Today we would perceive them the way that we perceive the Taliban now. Then they went through this liberal phase where they're like, we're going to bring in Western companies. Our major cities can be places that Western expats can comfortably live in. We'll like, pretend to care about stuff like the UN or free rights. Then they went through this phase in the 2010s where, like I remember Fareed Zakaria made this. He made this whole thing like the rise of the west and he was championing the decline of America against the rest of the world. And there was this whole cultural moment of China is going to surpass the west and China is doing this empire building with the Belt and Road initiative. And I was kind of horrified at how complacent the American elite were that so many of the American elite were totally happy with letting a Marxist state that hates us sort of rise to global predominance. Then after 2020, we saw a totally different phase of China. And I believe Peter Zeihan is fundamentally correct. Although it's going to take longer. Where they have really high youth unemployment. The cities are getting empty, at least from several different sources I'm looking at. Because they have such high unemployment, people are moving back to their hometowns. Because in China there was this huge migration from the countryside to the cities and the Communist Party is killing a lot of people. There were 2 million unaccounted for deaths for Covid.

[Impact Theory Announcer]

Whoa.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Where there were 2 million deaths for, like, unstated reasons with coffins. And that's a lot. They're teaching children how to do military. Military sort of training. They openly say that America is the enemy in their propaganda. They've closed their borders for years. So China is in a very totalitarian place and they're cracking down on their own population. And it's just. It's scary because I see the potential in China for what America could be.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

If we keep going in a totalitarian direction.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Because keep in mind, we didn't know at the Holocaust at the time. We didn't know it's Stalin or Mao at the time. These totalitarian governments have been very good at insulating the world from what's going on. The Uyghurs too. I mean, they've experienced horrible things.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Yeah, yeah. There's. There's plenty of malice in the world. There's no doubt about that. This is why I bang on about free speech. If you're not Willing to let people say what they say. If you're not willing to be voted out of office, then the guns come out and there is no other way. And I don't know why people can't see that, but they really can't. All right, I want to ask you about Gen Z. You're a Gen zer. I want to know about what is sex like for Gen Zers. What does that tell us about either the feminization of culture, where we're headed as a society? I know you're close with the guy behind homath.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

So what are some of the most important homath equations?

[Rudyard Lynch]

The core variable, I'd say is just lack of social trust. And that operates across the entire pyramid.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Between men and women?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, just in the entire equation. And so you have the hypergamy system, where I always forget your audience is probably a different demographic than. Because for the spaces I'm in. We've had this discourse for a while and everyone's seen the whole math chart. And I realize a lot of your audience might not have seen the homath chart.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Yeah, my audience is older than yours.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So 80% of men. 80% of women go to 20% of men. And that's due to the structure of the dating apps, where a majority of sort of relationships among Gen Z are formed online. And it's an important thing to realize Gen Z doesn't really leave the house, partly because they're not wealthy enough and partly because they have social anxiety or everyone's on their phone. So most relationships are formed online.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Online.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And that's a fairly. How do I explain this? That's very shallow and dehumanizing. And with the way it works as well with the inequality is you have a lot of incentives for low social trust, even either between sort of the Chad guys who have lots of options. And then that brings down the value of the individual women who they're cycling through. So you have a large disenfranchised population. You have a loss of social trust due to sort of the incentive structure. And because there's no community with the way social media works and dating apps work. And then you just have mouse utopia eating at the equation where you have a significant portion of Gen Z women. I think some men too, who have basically just checked out, who are radical left or lesbian or something like that. And no, I'm not making this up. So that's why young people don't have children.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

That is. That's wild. Okay, so if you were gonna try to unwind some of this, like if, I don't know, if you just are black pilled and it's like there's nowhere we can go or if you feel like, like is this, we got to re champion religion, is this. Obviously we've already talked about economics, so I'll assume you'll say we got to resolve some of those issues. But other than the economics, like how would we unwind this? If you gave us a generation or two generations, what are the things that would need to be true for us to renormalize?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I agree. In the economic after that I'd say just a return of masculinity. Because the issue with a lot of sort of religious conservatives is they want to bring back a rule structure for religion without really reference to God or sort of the masculine enforcement. Because the way, if you study sort of like I have multiple sources of information, but like if like conservative authors of a century ago or ancient wisdom would say that the first step in this is to increase masculinity and then that has a frame for femininity because masculinity is based off masculinity will create.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

A frame for the feminine to basically live inside of.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Okay, sorry, you were about, about to think, I think you're about to go into more detail on that. Please explain.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the masculine sets the frame, it's like iron and the feminine's like water. It flows through the frame, the masculine sets. And so this is why women don't build social institutions or why they don't sort of drive the course of human history directly in the way men do. But they do drive it indirectly. And there are exceptions like Joan of Arc or Catherine of Russia. And so just trying to enforce religious rules without masculinity means no one will respect them. But I'd say two things. First, increase masculinity because like, how do we do that?

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Like eat more Brazil nuts? Like what are we doing here?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it's a difficult question because industrial civilization solves so many of our problems. But we're going to have a lot of problems very soon. And the masculine is doing and the feminine is being. And so when men do things that garner respect because the masculine is formed by respect and the feminine is garnered by love. So women will love men they respect. But the issue is that in our current society we make it nigh impossible to produce men that women respect because the feminine group sort of herd mentality is envious that other women may get men they respect. And this is my mate suppression video. So they stop men from Rising to positions of respect.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

That's wild. Give people a quick primer on mate suppression. It's a great video.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Thank you. So this is one of the very twisted parts of human nature. And one of the things I've learned in the last few years is that we think evolution's simple and we think that life is sort of. It's rational, it fits in a spreadsheet. But life can periodically be very twisted. Where you've got the fungi that go into an ant's brain and eat it and take control of the ant. You have horrible diseases that spread through, like syphilis is pretty twisted. And mate suppression is one of the most twisted biological impulses where it's. And it's. It exists across sex, both sexes, but it's have more heavily a part of toxic femininity. And it's the impulse to hurt other people who are potentially doing better than me by lessening their fertility.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Jesus.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And examples of it include, I mean, the. Easy this. There was so much of this stuff when I was growing up. I mean, the, the second point I'd say for fixing the sexual duality is you have to stop dehumanizing men and you have to stop dehumanizing children as well. Because when I was growing up like you, there were. People had pressure, put their kids in after school programs. And if you didn't watch your kids play all the time, you could have the police called on you. Or there was the whole thing. Like there was the government passed a bill, you had to put in a certain type of car seat to have children. And it saved an amount of lives I could count on one hand. And it stopped like 200,000 births because the cost of having the car or the seat for that, people couldn't afford it. And if you want other examples, socialism is taking from others, putting it in the central pot. It's just. Or trying to make silly rules about, like silly dating rules. Or like when people make silly rules, they're normally for mate suppression because if the rule doesn't serve an actual purpose, the purpose is to hurt you.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

That is a very dark place to end this interview.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Rudyard.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Where can people follow along with you?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Check out my two channels. Whatifalthist in history. 102 and. Thank you. This was a wonderful episode.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

Dude, you are a fascinating mind. Every time I have to recheck your age because I am aghast each and every time I was like, yeah, he really has only lived in the 21st century. It is wild. I cannot wait to see where you're at in 10 years, 15 years. Your ability to sponge up knowledge, historical context, frameworks is really incredible, man. So I love being on the timeline with you. Thank you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm honored.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

No man, my pleasure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

All right everybody.

[Interviewer (Host of Impact Theory)]

If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

[Impact Theory Announcer]

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