In this episode of Just Asking Questions, we're joined by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss the cultural, political, and demographic pressures reshaping the modern world. His recent essay, "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive," explores how digital life—from AI companions to algorithmic distraction—is accelerating trends toward social atomization, institutional collapse, and even plummeting birth rates. We talk with Douthat about how libertarians should respond to these changes, whether neo-traditionalism offers a credible path forward, and what it means to maintain meaning and community in the 21st century.

This interview was recorded on April 29, 2025.

Sources Referenced:

• Douthat's New York Times essay: "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive"


• The New York Times: "The World's Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?"


• U.S. college enrollment decline statistics


• Slow Boring: "Cities aren't back"


• Just Asking Questions with Derek Thompson: "Democrats Must Change"


• Just Asking Questions with Tim Carney: "Why Aren't People Having More Kids?"


• An introduction to G.K. Chesterton's fences

Chapters

• 00:00 Coming up…


• 00:37 Introducing Ross Douthat and the age of cultural bottlenecks


• 04:57 Are digital technologies disrupting cultural transmission?


• 09:57 How the internet reshapes politics and encourages radicalism


• 15:22 Digital media and the decline of institutional trust and localism


• 18:42 Demographic decline and the fading urgency to preserve culture


• 26:52 Free choice or social breakdown? The libertarian tension


• 34:27 Suburbs, adaptation, and the future of normie culture


• 41:12 Risk aversion, parenting, and the erosion of community life


• 47:17 Fertility, tradition, and the rise of large families as a subculture


• 54:07 Neo-traditionalism in a bespoke age: coping or coping well?


• 58:32 Can we rebuild meaningful culture in a post-traditional world?

Transcript:

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.

Liz Wolfe: What will survive the digital apocalypse? Just asking questions. Our guest today is Ross Douthat, one of the few people living openly as a conservative at The New York Times, and one of my personal favorite writers on Catholicism, faith, and forging meaning and community in an increasingly atomized age. He wrote a piece for the Times called "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive." Welcome, Ross.

Ross Douthat: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Liz Wolfe: Thank you for coming on the show.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it's great to have you because, I mean, every once in a while, you read one of these pieces that seems to capture something about what is in the air, what is in the ether. And this is just a really remarkable piece that we will definitely link to, and I recommend reading it to go along with the podcast.

It argues that the digital age is forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a bottleneck. So we can imagine this extreme, rapidly acting new evolutionary pressure, and only a tiny fraction is going to make it through that little opening in the bottleneck. So, just to set this up, what are some of the biggest telltale signs that you observe that lead you to believe we're facing an age of extinction?

Ross Douthat: Sure. Well, first of all, I should say, hopefully it's more than a tiny fraction, right? You can imagine a bottle with a thinner neck or a thicker neck. One of the points of alerting people to these realities is to try to instill and encourage habits and intentions that get more people, more ways of life, more cultures through the bottleneck.

But basically, the argument that I make is that digital life and digital existence are really, really hard on what we think of as normal, basic modes of cultural transmission from one generation to another—and then also the literal reproduction of the species. And these two things are actually connected. The way we live digitally tends to distract us from the forms of creation and educational transmission of literature, art, religion—all the stuff of human culture that people take for granted.

It also tends to distract us and separate us from the normal, in-real-life ways of hanging around with other people—making friendships, going on dates, finding romance, having sex, and having kids—that allow for the very literal continuation of the human species.

So there's a lot of things that people did sort of casually without thinking too much about it in much of human history, that people now need to do with a lot more intentionality in the landscape we're in—a landscape of constant virtual distraction.

If you don't have a certain kind of intentionality about those things—whether it's the religion you're trying to pass on to your kids, or the novel reading you take for granted as what a literate person does, or again, just the literal continuation of Spain or South Korea or Italy or Taiwan as nations—that's the most urgent part of this: the connection to demographics.

But all of that is not going to happen as automatically as it did in the past. You're going to have lots and lots of opportunities to live a virtual existence that doesn't have normal, real-world correlates. And this is only going to increase, presumably, in the age of AI. You don't have to assume that AI will make all work obsolete or anything like that to see this happening.

You just have to assume that AI is going to be especially good at generating addictive slop on YouTube, or generating artificial companions and friendships that substitute for real ones. And that's already happening. The more it happens, the tighter the bottleneck gets.

Liz Wolfe: Well, I mean, I am very sympathetic to this thesis, especially because I send Zach a replica-related rant approximately every two weeks, where I'm very worried about the chatbot girlfriends proliferating. I find it to be one of the creepiest, most dystopian things in the world. Zach is very sick of me blowing up his DMs with my worries about this.

Zach Weissmueller: I agree with you that Her by Spike Jonze is our future. That's our trajectory, for sure.

Liz Wolfe: Absolutely.

Ross Douthat: Well, and in fact, you've probably actually created your own chatbot that now sends Zach those messages, so you don't even have to do it yourself. He's communicating with Liz Wolfe Avatar. I mean, that's the alarmism bot. All of my own dystopian tech columns are themselves written by Ross Douthat AI at this point. I should just confess that up front.

Liz Wolfe: But I—OK, I want to sort of get, you know, right off the bat to the heart of what I think the libertarian objection would be to your essay, which is: Are you erroneously blaming a lot of these problems on technological shifts when, in reality, the thing that you're bemoaning is the fact that our cultural defaults have sort of gone away?

Ross Douthat: I mean, yes, I am suggesting that certain cultural defaults have gone away under technological pressure—

Liz Wolfe: Are they necessarily linked, though? Is your argument that the two are just intrinsically linked?

Ross Douthat: I mean, I guess my general view is that you should regard technological change as causi