Escaping The IQ Shredder: with Spandrell

Podcast: Plausibly Deniable · Lukas and Saila

Opublikowano: 2026-07-16

Spandrell joins us to explain the “IQ Shredder”: how successful cities attract ambitious, intelligent people from across the world, place them into a hypercompetitive rat race, and then make it nearly impossible for them to reproduce. We discuss why fertility is collapsing across virtually every developed society, whether Israel has escaped the trend, why financial incentives have repeatedly failed, and what governments could realistically do to make family formation prestigious again. Spandrell also explains Bio-Leninism—his theory of how political systems recruit people with few alternatives and convert personal disadvantage into institutional loyalty. We connect it to...