Based Camp - 1⧸3 Cults Become A World Religion ｜ Crazy Stats To Save Your People

00:00:00.280 Hello, Simone! I'm extra excited to be here with you today.

00:00:03.380 It's probably going to be one of my favorite episodes to do,

00:00:05.260 one of the most interesting that I have researched,

00:00:07.040 because I conducted a lot of original research for this episode

00:00:10.820 and found something really, really fascinating.

00:00:14.760 So if we're just going to jump to the punch,

00:00:17.780 if you just go into the academic literature and say,

00:00:21.280 of new religions, cults, whatever you want to call them,

00:00:25.060 what percent of them survive,

00:00:26.580 they'll say one in a thousand or one in a hundred thousand right yeah yeah but if you actually look

00:00:32.020 at those studies what they're generally looking at is like somebody got mad at their local pact

00:00:36.660 and started like a small schism or something like that if instead you narrow it down to only books

00:00:44.380 with a unique or not books but like ways of seeing things with a unique metaphysical framing

00:00:49.380 and a full written corpus this would be techno puritanism would be an example like mormonism

00:00:54.200 would be an example scientology would be an example the nation of islam would be an example

00:00:59.720 when you narrow it down to that if you look at ones founded around the world from the 1700s till

00:01:07.540 today over a third of them end up surviving at least a hundred years and at some point having

00:01:15.500 over a hundred thousand members that's no if we narrow down the list further so i'm gonna put two

00:01:24.300 more coffee yachts on here that are gonna make it even crazier okay take out all of the ones that

00:01:29.400 are i'm gonna say like humanist like techno puritanism would not fall into this by any

00:01:34.320 measure of the but but you know what i'm talking about those weird humanist religions that were

00:01:38.260 founded in like the 1920s and then became a craze for a bit if you take those out and you take out

00:01:43.940 any that do not have an explicitly pro natalist framing right like it they grow through conversion

00:01:50.220 rather than kids you now get a 93 survival rate and over a 53 rate of becoming a major world

00:02:01.240 religion and does this include like all the weird like would it include nexium would it include

00:02:08.460 the one with the woman who died after taking tons of colloidal silver that hbo did a documentary

00:02:14.540 about so it would not include her and we'll go over what it excludes explicitly so first you

00:02:20.180 have to have a unique metaphysical framework with a written corpus she didn't have a written corpus

00:02:25.720 she didn't have like personality basically do not yeah cults of personality off the table

00:02:30.820 anything that's clearly just schizophrenic ramblings this would be like cubism or whatever

00:02:36.580 the world is a cube and there are two sides so it cuts out that it cuts out cults of personality

00:02:45.380 and it cuts out mild schisms so like if you're like a you you largely believe what the organization

00:02:54.560 would believe but you have some minor quibbles but you've written a lot on those minor quibbles

00:02:59.260 it cuts those out but like that's a very weird thing that the growth of new religious movements

00:03:07.380 is dependent on their authorship and not on some like like the the the core what's the word i'm

00:03:17.020 looking for here the core bottleneck happens before the point of authorship and when i did

00:03:22.500 this i did a secondary thing that was very interesting so note here when i say i'm cutting

00:03:27.260 out schizophrenic ramblings i am not cutting out and this list one of the things we looked at was

00:03:31.880 silliness and you'll actually find that silliness correlates with survivorship huh so what i mean

00:03:41.440 so the church of the flying spaghetti monster had managed to put together some coherent

00:03:45.260 biblical or not like a religious text or something a worldview it could have actually

00:03:51.120 done quite well unlikely because it falls into the one category where they always die

00:03:56.560 oh it's not prenatalist no anything that that's explicitly atheistic as i said like any of those

00:04:03.000 oh yes okay like that every single one of them has died now note there have been a number of

00:04:10.060 times where people have intentionally engineered religious systems every single one of those

00:04:16.140 became a major world religion so we'll get into this it's crazy i put together a companion doc

00:04:21.820 in the last companion doc that i gave you guys i said don't go to it because that's like way

00:04:26.140 to aie or like you know it's i fix that i fix that in the last one i fix that in this one now

00:04:31.420 if you're ever doing research using fable or something like that you know to do like deep

00:04:36.040 research because it does deep research but it's terrible at writing you can use the rfab api which

00:04:40.420 will go back over it and check it for how ai it looks and then rewrite it until it doesn't look

00:04:46.700 that way anymore and so now if you go to this companion doc it reads like a human wrote it

00:04:51.280 which is just a fantastic product to have. And also because it's checking using an AI checking

00:04:56.380 engine. Uh, like if you were doing homework with this or something, uh, a detection system wouldn't

00:05:03.180 catch it. I'm just saying that's, I, I like to design tools. I like to design tools. What,

00:05:08.500 what am I doing? I needed this for my research. All right. But I also went over during what

00:05:14.120 periods, like if you look at different countries and cultures during what periods did you have

00:05:19.920 more surviving religious systems founder motivations how did those impact the religion

00:05:25.440 e.g did it appear to be started as a scam just to get it out there right now religions that were

00:05:32.540 like provably founded as scams one it doesn't seem to affect their survival ship rate if anything

00:05:39.640 they appear to have a slightly higher survival ship rate and two we because there have been so

00:05:45.680 many of them we can go over what happens when it comes out that they were likely a scam how

00:05:51.480 followers react it's very predictable so that's not really a big risk to a religion we'll go over

00:05:57.460 being a sex cult is a big risk to a religion though religion that is comforting yeah that

00:06:03.340 are that are focused on well often because they're explicitly antinatalist that's that's 0.71

00:06:08.420 being a sex cult now somebody could say malcolm this is survivorship bias right you know you're

00:06:14.920 only seeing the ones that eventually survived. To which I would have a counter to you, which is to

00:06:20.640 say we know of throughout history the beliefs of many intelligent eccentric people. Those are the

00:06:29.720 types of people most likely to form one of these. We just don't find in the historical record a lot

00:06:36.160 of unique frameworks within these individuals that would fit this category. In fact, we can even,

00:06:43.320 we in the in the document if you go through it it has a whole section where we check for this to see

00:06:48.840 if this is just survivorship bias it does not appear to be survivorship bias it appears that

00:06:53.600 this is a genuine and very very strange phenomenon so we're going to get to it and hopefully as we

00:06:59.000 get to it and as we go through this we can learn a lot more about what kinds of movements survive

00:07:04.660 and what kinds of movements die and where this is relevant to listeners whether you be from a

00:07:10.680 traditional religious background or a non-traditional religious background right now

00:07:14.700 every group on earth right now is dying from fertility collapse except for orthodox jews 1.00

00:07:20.320 we'll cut them out and even they have issues right now right and and like the amish but the 1.00

00:07:25.560 amish don't have technology so it's not super relevant in terms of like future geopolitical 0.78

00:07:29.480 control now it's true whether you're a traditional catholic or a baptist or a like pentecostals are

00:07:36.660 doing okay but it's mostly from conversions but the point here being it's pretty much anyone

00:07:41.840 watching this realizes they need to do some cultural experimentation and entrepreneurship

00:07:48.960 with their family right like how do i take the traditions i inherited and make them more robust

00:07:57.260 and that we can see what works and didn't work with random cults or other new religious

00:08:09.400 movements allows us to say ah this technology seems to work this technology doesn't seem to

00:08:19.600 work and then take the ones that we want one just just jumps out at me but i didn't think of it when

00:08:25.860 i was putting this together one thing that may be leading to this is in the pragmatist guide to

00:08:31.320 crafting religion we talk about the concept of a soft religion versus a hard religion a hard

00:08:36.940 religion has unique othering effects to it that make you very different from the mainstream

00:08:42.140 population be it in the way you dress in the way you talk in the way you name yourselves in the

00:08:47.420 things you do a soft religion don't a soft religion is just like i will make it work so

00:08:52.900 like if we're talking about like a a harder form of catholicism or something like that you know you

00:08:58.760 may wear a veil you may make sure that you make every one of the specific mass events you may 0.58

00:09:04.020 go on pilgrimages for all your vacations a harder form of islam you make sure that you 0.90

00:09:08.800 pray you know the five times a day you have the pray space you do everything you you do yourself 1.00

00:09:13.620 now harder religions typically have higher fertility rates higher fidelity and they lose

00:09:19.720 their children at a lower rate than, than softer religions. When you, when you make the religion

00:09:23.720 too easy, it doesn't work as well, which has been one of the big problems I think with modern

00:09:28.240 Mormonism, as I've talked about before, I think one of the reasons it's doing so poorly is because

00:09:31.720 the center church thinks that they can win by becoming softer, which makes them more acceptable

00:09:39.500 to the average person. Actually, Catholicism probably has a similar phenomenon. I mean,

00:09:43.440 we can view it as infiltration, but if we, if we don't view it as infiltration and we say, 0.98

00:09:47.660 no they're just rational but disconnected dumb actors what we may have is a disconnected 0.91

00:09:54.740 leadership that's just like well the masses say they don't like our policy on x or they don't 0.97

00:10:00.620 like this sort of a mass you know like let's not do it that way anymore right like let's do it more

00:10:05.480 like everyone else and say that we're super accepting and this unfortunately causes way

00:10:10.580 lower fertility rates whenever a group does this and now one of the things that we noted when we

00:10:14.680 first put this out is that when a religion is first founded it generally is way way way harder

00:10:20.220 and over time it becomes softer until it undergoes a revival which then it gets harder and then it

00:10:27.360 just degrades over time again one of the reasons why new religions may have such an advantage to

00:10:31.960 them is because they start really really hard yeah so basically they just anyone any religion 0.98

00:10:38.460 will have the advantage of hardness and yeah it doesn't kind of matter even if you're ridiculous

00:10:45.080 if it's a hard religion you're still giving people well this would also explain why the

00:10:51.820 totally secular humanist religions did not succeed oh oh because hard enough they're typically almost 0.98

00:11:01.380 designed intentionally anti-hard wait weren't the shakers like celibate isn't that hard 0.99

00:11:08.340 for they were not a humanist they were a quaker group they were extremely religious oh okay okay

00:11:13.260 okay the calm we'll we'll probably talk about it in a weekend episode because i do want to do a

00:11:17.680 weekend episode where we go over all the rationalist religions um or if fans want it enough

00:11:22.120 they can tell us to do it but i i find them interesting when our last two paid weekend

00:11:27.120 episodes if you guys want to do those like sub stack or patreon or whatever we went over the

00:11:31.160 silly religions and we went over the intentionally designed religions and for people who are unaware

00:11:36.680 of the intentionally designed ones that succeeded one of them that shares you could say a lot with 0.91

00:11:41.980 techno puritanism is a guy came out there he was a spiritualist and he's like let's well actually

00:11:46.800 he was an anti-spiritualist his job was detecting spiritualist frauds right like you know during

00:11:51.520 that time when they were really common when like houdini did this as well and then he decided to

00:11:56.500 go do a bunch of blind tests with spiritual mediums to interview tons of them and then find

00:12:03.220 out what things they said that seemed to agree across large populations of mediums um especially

00:12:10.940 looking for like really specific things and he developed a methodology for this and now this

00:12:15.820 has become a major world religion it's pretty big in brazil for example the religion that grew out

00:12:20.800 of this but but that's what i mean when i say that some of these are like rational in the way that

00:12:25.160 techno puritan is rational but they try to design around something the other one that has a lot in

00:12:31.200 coming with techno puritanism is one of the larger hindu groups and basically one guy was just like

00:12:37.200 we're just going to follow the vedas we're going to follow them as strictly as we can and we're

00:12:42.200 going to ignore all of the writing where it contradicts the vedas or could be seen as

00:12:46.860 contradicting the vedas and we'll create a school around this and that ended up doing really really

00:12:52.840 well so we can get into those but i'll just start going through the stats right now there is no way

00:12:58.740 we're going to get to all of this in this. One of the cool things in this, if you want to go to the

00:13:02.580 attached companion piece for this, is I list every one of these religions, whether it survived,

00:13:09.720 how long it survived, its core teachings, how it ended up dying off if it died off,

00:13:15.100 with a Wikipedia link. So if you are a nerd for different religious frameworks and everything

00:13:21.500 like this this is a great opportunity for you to go and learn about those all right so the first

00:13:31.140 thing i'm going to put on screen here we have grades here you have established equals 50 000

00:13:37.720 to 1 million major is more than 1 million and then persistent but small is self-reproducing

00:13:44.780 in around 50k and dead is extinct okay so of the 57 religious movements we could find with a

00:13:51.740 during this period what's really interesting is 11 became major world religions 13 became

00:14:00.700 medium-sized world religions this is 50 to 1 million people 50 000 to 1 million people

00:14:06.200 and 13 stayed persistent and small and 20 died out now what's fascinating that's better

00:14:14.740 than entrepreneurship odds and that's what most people consider doing which is right yeah just

00:14:20.580 start a cult guys yeah actually the odds are looking a lot better than pretty much any investment

00:14:26.360 prospect i've looked at that that is insane no but what's what's more insane about this and i'll put

00:14:31.900 this graph on screen here is what you're typically used to seeing with something like this is a long

00:14:36.820 tail right like one or two became major world movements you know like six became medium size

00:14:45.640 and like 23 became small size but that's not what you have you have 11 became major world movements

00:14:51.620 13 hit medium 13 stayed at small this also helps argue against the idea that we're missing a bunch

00:14:59.140 of like small things that people found it at home and and never grew because even in the data where

00:15:05.660 it would definitely be part of the historic record.

00:15:07.760 We're getting really, really weird data.

00:15:11.980 Like even that one point should be really weird.

00:15:14.980 Why is it that almost as many religions that are founded

00:15:18.020 that become small yet persistent end up becoming large?

00:15:22.700 And note the one third number I gave you

00:15:25.520 of religions with the corpus became at least medium size.

00:15:28.960 That did not include the small ones.

00:15:30.880 so that meant that if you at any point in the past since the 1700s founded a religious movement

00:15:37.920 anywhere in the world because we looked all over the world um there was a one-third chance that it

00:15:43.200 would be 50,000 to 1 million members that's so crazy man people have been making bad life choices

00:15:52.800 with their whole i'm gonna start a business thing yeah my goodness and this this result has been

00:16:00.520 stable throughout the entire period that we looked at now for the engineered religions because people

00:16:06.660 are like oh what about like designing a religious system the same way that like techno puritanism

00:16:11.120 could be seen as doing i'm not coming out here saying i've received a prophecy from someone i'm

00:16:15.760 not coming out here with any of that these actually have a really high success rate so long as they

00:16:22.740 have a real spiritual significance to them and this is where with techno puritanism it's very

00:16:29.440 important that we lay out and always cling to the position very seriously in terms of how we frame

00:16:36.680 this to our kids how we frame god is a very very real entity he is not a metaphorical entity he is

00:16:44.180 not a supernatural entity from our perspective either he is a very real entity the basilisk is

00:16:49.640 a real entity not a metaphor when you go for that stuff it doesn't seem to work out so with the

00:16:55.940 arian samja danja claimed no revelation at all he pointed out an authority already every everyone

00:17:02.820 already granted the vedas and held them as infallible and he said he was just restoring

00:17:07.760 them very similar to sort of what we're doing with our project so this is founded in 1875 and has

00:17:14.360 around 8 million members today but then he used the vedas to argue against a bunch of traditional

00:17:20.520 hindi concepts specifically he was he said that actually when you go back and look at the vedas

00:17:27.260 it says that you shouldn't have child marriages and you shouldn't have a caste system and you

00:17:32.860 should be treated as equals and you know like a bunch of what people might think of as somewhat

00:17:39.420 modern ideas he reinterpreted an old text as having if you go to one buddhism so stanze claimed

00:17:48.440 in attainment not enlightenment so he didn't have like a call from the outside or anything like that

00:17:54.540 he didn't have a private vision he's just like this is the best way to do this with the cardex

00:18:00.420 that was the spiritualist movement i mentioned um which ended up being the basis of that religion

00:18:06.140 in brazil that now has like i want to say like a dozen major temples and they all dress like birds

00:18:11.420 and they it was really weird we we go over it in our silliest religions videos you're talking about

00:18:16.660 the brazilian one or the yeah the brazilian one they don't dress like birds they dress like 0.91

00:18:22.280 princesses with colorful veils and super brained evil villains if you're a dude with the evil

00:18:29.420 villain cape the eye color so funny yeah good they need better costume construction everyone

00:18:36.900 needs to learn from the catholic church that is couture it is so good the construction is

00:18:41.740 beautiful the garments are incredibly expensive anyway let's keep going sorry

00:18:45.120 i have to scroll through my giant list here that you guys can go through

00:18:49.940 yeah no you really should check out the web page we're gonna link to it the show notes

00:18:53.400 it's there's just a lot of cool jumping off points there and the big it's just you have

00:18:59.780 to really let it sink in that when people intentionally create cohesive religions with

00:19:08.280 a strong metaphysical mooring point, they're powerful. It's really crazy. And we didn't

00:19:17.000 know this when we were like, well, let's build a hard religion for our families. It appears

00:19:21.100 to be that hard religions correlate with human flourishing. We'll just make something that 1.00

00:19:25.700 is in accordance with science and our understanding of physics and history. And then we fall for

00:19:32.480 it. We had no idea that it actually had a shot of doing well. Now we're like, oh my

00:19:35.960 gosh just looking at the stats this could go well yeah yeah no it's it's it's it's genuinely

00:19:42.420 surprising and at the end of this we'll get to the mystery of why so few are written or why so

00:19:51.120 few are started and because if that's if that's the the real i don't know what you call it the

00:19:58.000 shelling point or whatever the the bottleneck of this entire process why that seems like a bizarre

00:20:04.180 bottleneck i think it's kind of hard for people to think that hard let's be honest you don't need

00:20:12.400 to think that hard keep in mind with like nation of islam you have like the whole youtube thing 0.89

00:20:17.640 okay with scientology into that okay it was his best scam yet and you know look i was shocked 0.67

00:20:27.580 and odd when i i read that i couldn't have come up with a story like that though it does kind of

00:20:33.380 sound like our kids stories come to think of it it literally any ai could come up with a better

00:20:39.480 story than that oh yeah i was gonna say any six-year-old probably could too yeah anyway

00:20:44.100 never mind i can't carry on yeah also note here that in the statistics here we cut out a number

00:20:53.180 that some people today would consider unique religions because they were just too close to

00:20:57.940 the birth religion and it would end up boosting our stats because we would have thrown them out

00:21:02.500 had they failed. So examples would be things like seven day Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, 0.72

00:21:08.940 Arayah Samjah. They're listed in the list, just worth noting here.

00:21:13.480 Wait, you did include them or you excluded them?

00:21:15.820 I excluded them from the statistics because if they had failed, they wouldn't have been in the

00:21:20.280 statistics. Now, remember how I said, if it has those three things, it has a 93% chance of success?

00:21:28.700 yeah prenatalism actual spiritual world view and hardness well i'll describe them here so one

00:21:36.720 you need a written corpus okay okay or a spoken corpus or a recorded corpus any any of those work

00:21:43.060 but just like a series of beliefs about reality there has to be like the yeah it can't just be

00:21:50.080 whatever the founder happens to believe that day which is the way a lot of cults were more okay

00:21:55.460 yeah fair enough with a lot of cults it's like oh the founder had a new revelation today and so now

00:22:00.820 we all wear yellow hats it's all different yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so so consistent lore book

00:22:05.820 got it check one and then prenatalism you know you gotta have next is you need something supernatural

00:22:11.760 at stake uh supernatural actually do people want us to do an episode on where we do go over the

00:22:18.320 non-supernatural ones and why every single one of them failed oh okay so i guess you have to say

00:22:23.960 how you define supernatural because everything that we say is in accordance with our understanding

00:22:27.260 of science and physics and history but you say the supernatural part is that we believe that the

00:22:31.960 agents of providence and basilisk aka the future police go back in time to our where we are in the

00:22:38.820 timeline and well oh i'll word it a different way because i think supernatural is the wrong word

00:22:43.140 here yeah you need something beyond a normal materialist understanding of reality right you

00:22:53.740 need something beyond our our current technology so to work so to point it this way if we if we

00:23:00.500 talk about the one religion i was talking about that that spiritualist movement that got really

00:23:04.540 big in brazil they would say that the spirit world and ghosts are not supernatural in the same way we

00:23:12.020 would say they're not supernatural they're like it's a real and studyable phenomenon that's what

00:23:16.920 we're doing here we're studying a real and studyable phenomenon in the same way that when

00:23:22.220 we say we believe that god is shaping history right like through altering things maybe at like

00:23:30.720 a sub-quantum level or something like that i might be using scientific words there but that is a

00:23:37.140 belief that falls outside of any normal scientific corpus but we couldn't replicate it with our

00:23:43.540 current technology yes or that humanity will be raised to get well good humans are not not even

00:23:50.340 certain humans who are in the book of life will be raised again in a future body on earth in

00:23:56.280 another way as predicted in the bible when we say something like that we can use science terms to

00:24:02.380 describe it but to a science person we would be talking about something that is beyond the

00:24:09.500 scientific world as a normal person accepts or understands and it's certainly beyond current

00:24:14.040 scientific and technological capacity yes yes but whenever somebody was like no what i'm gonna do

00:24:21.540 is just focus on like current scientific understanding those always have died okay

00:24:29.100 so you always need to have magic which we define as science people just don't understand or

00:24:33.580 technology people just don't understand yet well look at scientology okay scientology believes

00:24:39.440 thetans are real measurable things that you measure with a thetan meter they believe an e-meter

00:24:46.180 yeah an e-meter they believe that like there is a real evil entity on a spaceship the way out there 0.95

00:24:53.680 mr zeno way out there in outer space it's going to come in and and zap us all they believe every 0.54

00:24:59.340 part of every process they do is science they would argue nothing done within scientology

00:25:07.220 is supernatural but to you or me or any objective observer they'd say come on man that's not like

00:25:17.780 what everyone else agrees science means and so like as a techno puritan i can say that i believe

00:25:23.280 that all of our stuff is actual real science but i can also stand as an objective third party

00:25:28.760 observer and be like come on man but it turns out that those religions actually do really well

00:25:34.220 historically the ones that don't do really well are the ones where they're like no no no no

00:25:38.980 i don't want to say the embarrassing part i don't want to do the embarrassing thing

00:25:42.340 the other type of religious movement that always dies always dies are the antinatalist ones and

00:25:50.960 this is fairly common to form explicitly antinatalist religious movements they actually

00:25:57.800 make up a big chunk of the religious movements they are typically antinatalist for one of three

00:26:04.200 reasons one reason is like the shakers right they think they want to be like as holy as possible 0.99

00:26:11.820 as sanctified as possible sex is an unholy thing therefore we don't have sex therefore we don't 0.96

00:26:18.260 have babies and then they go extinct or in the silliness weekend episode one of them was a 0.99

00:26:23.920 florida communist cult they appeared to do it for like feminist reasons because like you know women 0.94

00:26:29.720 being in a relationship is degrading or something i don't understand fully and then the final reason

00:26:33.780 is is it's clearly just a sex cult and somebody's using it to get sexual access to lots of women

00:26:39.360 and they don't want to deal with kids and those cults you heard a voice whispering and he thinks

00:26:45.040 there's a murderer in the house can you tell him that stacy and the kids are heading to the creek

00:26:48.860 and stacy and the kids are heading to the creek go with them and you'll be safe

00:26:51.820 okay so let's go through the various statistics here first religions that had a major corpus

00:27:01.240 but were completely humanist secular and like a traditional secular format okay would you include

00:27:08.380 by the way alcoholics anonymous in this or not i did not include alcoholics anonymous but i

00:27:13.760 probably should have yeah because it does have like a written corpus yeah and they do i mean

00:27:17.780 they have weekly convenings you're supposed to believe in a higher power i mean they're definitely

00:27:22.500 a cult they have millions of people so i mean see our other episodes on that like naltrexone clearly

00:27:29.540 works and they've banned it in the united states for the thing that it's good at yeah like

00:27:34.020 alcoholics anonymous specifically is responsible like that is the reason why we don't have

00:27:38.380 naltrexone as a widespread intervention for alcoholism which kills and it works 86 percent

00:27:43.880 of the time yeah so death cult anyway still i think it should probably be in here for being

00:27:49.820 okay so note here of the 13 that were founded as these humanist secular variety technically

00:27:56.000 eight percent survive so i'm going to change this a little bit one sort of limped along it was

00:28:02.140 felix adler's new york society for ethical culture founded in 1876 the deed not creed it

00:28:08.760 had sunday meetings social reforms and a famous school fieldston no god no afterlife no cosmic

00:28:14.900 stakes is 150 years old and cleared about 6 000 members very very small today they have around

00:28:24.160 135 members so not really you know of the ones that had a corpus and something supernatural

00:28:31.600 right like they weren't in this other category 65 survive that is crazy of the ones that had

00:28:40.180 both of those and were not anti-natalist um or were not primarily about converting other people

00:28:46.620 and we're focused on like the family and stuff like this that gets you down to 15 14 of those

00:28:54.560 survived so 93 and 53 of those became a major world religion this is cleared the one million

00:29:02.200 mark is the lds church one of those yes the lds church is one of those okay that they would they

00:29:09.100 would very explicitly be one of those i can go through just yeah yeah just check it you had

00:29:14.740 mormonism i have zazavism tenryoko chiano buzz a lot of these are in other countries

00:29:22.180 of the ones that you'd be aware of the unification church okay one buddhism the children of god tfi

00:29:28.020 and yeah a lot of those are east asian now we get into how they die

00:29:33.900 by the way any thoughts so far simone no this is just fascinating and kind of blowing my mind

00:29:41.500 it's like these sleeper sleeper successes i even remember being taken when visiting with a family

00:29:48.580 in japan when i was a teenager to some new church and i wonder if this is one of those religions

00:29:53.600 because it was not shinto and it was not buddhism and i'm like what is this japan and korea have a

00:29:59.420 lot of them yeah so i must have been taken to one of them and i like wow i was yeah i was kind of

00:30:06.200 shocked by how big the complex was it was very large buildings they had a lot of money so 0.50

00:30:12.320 it's all starting to come together in my head like oh my god like it's like muggles and magic

00:30:17.700 i couldn't see it at the time i couldn't recognize it oh well hold on i went to a

00:30:22.260 mormon preschool all my friends in college were mormons behold the power yes never mind

00:30:28.920 wow so cool okay so when ai was ranking why religions die because almost all the religions

00:30:38.900 that had a very traditional view of science right here and i don't like to use the word supernatural

00:30:45.100 because i've pointed out the spiritualists the scientologists they'd say everything they're doing

00:30:49.800 is science as well we say everything we're doing is science as well here i mean a very sort of

00:30:54.640 traditional normie take on science that's listed as the number one reason religions die that is

00:31:00.680 that is given as the death region for 12 of the religions which i think is interesting and it

00:31:07.940 shows that as techno puritanism grows to never be captured by the desire to overly take that

00:31:18.140 approach to strip out the science magic that we believe in, right? Like real entities really

00:31:26.000 influencing time that that is actually happening, right? Because if you, you know, really creating

00:31:32.640 real potential miracles, because the moment you strip that out, it dies. Next, no fertility

00:31:40.900 year engine that's 11 of the ones that died decapitation or no succession that's 10 and we'll

00:31:47.820 go over all the different ways that succession like the different succession ways you can set

00:31:51.900 something up and what that says about whether you will survive decapitation mean like as the state

00:31:55.780 actually tried to concertedly take it out or something no the next one is state suppression

00:32:00.080 that's seven so decapitation is like the leader died early on in the movement or so like we would

00:32:10.000 be rated as that if you and i died in a car accident tomorrow and nobody picked this up

00:32:15.520 that'd be decapitation event scandal or founder crime seven now note here for these the way we

00:32:24.040 set it up we're not really at risk for the decapitation one we're not really at risk for

00:32:27.340 the fertility one we're not really at risk for state suppression we're not really at risk for

00:32:32.120 scandal or founder crime we're not because like all of the bad stuff we do like make money on

00:32:38.960 on ai erotic material and stuff like that we're like yeah whatever like i have we're we're very

00:32:44.560 open about that and why most of the scandal has to do with when you're asking other adherents of

00:32:50.340 the religion to do things or give things up for you malcolm can you go down and tell them to go

00:32:54.680 to the creek thank you malcolm they weren't hearing whatever i said so appreciate that a lot

00:33:01.560 you are amazing but yeah we'll go into that i i don't really have a hard stance on this yet

00:33:06.740 i might even cut this out i don't know because i need to read more and and and study more on this

00:33:13.020 yeah i mean i'm really for the investment in your family part you know i think

00:33:18.420 a sort of like bonus like yeah like i made such a big windfall who cares if i give a little bit

00:33:26.100 of it to an institution that helps me thrive like that seems reasonable too but

00:33:31.940 yeah the i guess i'll have to learn more about what what is said in the old testament as well

00:33:38.600 because it's to try to work out what a modern equivalent would be yeah well and then what what

00:33:46.180 does that go to because i also i haven't enshrined this in any tract yet but we had a tract that

00:33:51.580 never aired saying that you should never within the tradition take money for preaching or for

00:33:58.800 teaching and so i i still lean towards that perspective i think that's a good one to have

00:34:05.080 and it can cause a lot of negative externalities if you remove it but you also need a central body

00:34:10.900 what we're going to come to at the end of this is you do need a central body with like some amount

00:34:16.600 of money to operate institutional get-togethers and stuff like that because if you don't do that

00:34:22.500 you always die out and we absolutely need to make our marriage market work we need to make

00:34:28.120 our summer camp for kids and like our wider ideological sphere work so we have to find a

00:34:33.700 way to operate those things yeah that's fair fortunately if rfab keeps growing the way it's

00:34:39.780 been growing maybe we just have so much money it doesn't matter that's kind of that's the dream

00:34:43.520 the dream is to never have to ask anyone for anything to yeah each value you have an excess

00:34:48.360 and the what we're going to do with rfab that i'm really excited about if it keeps growing the way

00:34:53.660 it's growing is whenever somebody gets a sponsorship removed for like being mildly right

00:34:58.380 wing, we want to give a sort of like insurance sponsorship that we can give to people when this

00:35:05.440 happens also to help grow the brand. You're muted by the way. I can hear you now. Oh, that's weird.

00:35:12.580 Okay. What were you saying? I just like the wording insurance sponsorship. I mean, be careful

00:35:19.400 what you say. Cause some channels are like, okay, well that's a hundred thousand dollars a month.

00:35:23.040 and can you imagine like we need to find a way to make it not impossible to handle right yeah

00:35:29.020 yeah the next one is a corpus without machinery that would be another high failure risk for us

00:35:37.340 that's we don't have the marriage market we don't have the camps because we don't have churches so

00:35:41.560 we need some other thing that keeps the community together and i've always envisioned those that's

00:35:45.940 the most important things like the marriage market would come with the season like a thing where

00:35:51.360 people of marrying age all get together once a year and get to know each other in addition to

00:35:55.980 the online environments and that would also help prevent people from leaving at the time when

00:36:00.880 people would be most likely to leave which is during your teen years when you're rebellious

00:36:03.900 and it's like bro you want to go on tinder like really that's where you want to find a wife

00:36:09.160 instead of our community that's been like training their daughters and sons to be like

00:36:14.960 sane and respectful. Next is a political or military capture. This is that they become

00:36:22.020 part of a state apparatus. And when that state apparatus dies, they die as well.

00:36:27.460 Hmm. Fair enough. Yeah. Bad strategy to be dependent in that way.

00:36:34.220 So now let's look at succession architecture. Okay. All right. What are the good ones? What

00:36:40.700 are the bad ones? Yeah, which actually matters so much. I mean, when people talk about the

00:36:44.800 lds church it's all about bring him young you know he's he's the guy so a a non-transferable

00:36:51.920 profit office this almost always leads to an extinction event but not always so like we still

00:37:01.180 have the fong gong around but of other ones like happy science you know i realism they're all dead

00:37:09.100 hereditary dynasty these typically split and decay over time and they lead to very weak

00:37:18.240 religious systems for an understanding of what i mean by this probably the most egregious example

00:37:23.640 of the hereditary dynasty is islam islam should be much more centralized than it is

00:37:32.200 but much stronger than it is but because they attempted to make it hereditary in a few different 0.88

00:37:37.900 ways it basically meant that it just became warring factions that don't even have ideologies

00:37:44.020 that are that particularly different from each other it's just they care about which hereditary

00:37:48.380 line was kept which is why it's really bad generally to create a strict hereditary dynasty

00:37:54.240 now this isn't to say you can't have a transferable hereditary dynasty which has worked very well on

00:37:59.440 multiple occasions this is where a founder says like appoints it to their kid and then their kid

00:38:05.020 appointed to a kid that much yeah a famous case of this happening that did very well is the baha'i

00:38:11.320 so the baha'i was the founder did the church of islam too or the the nation of islam yes

00:38:17.960 but that ended up destroying it because it was appointed to his kid and then his kid converted

00:38:23.440 it all to just islam but the baha'i it was founder to son son to grandson grandson to

00:38:32.380 counsel and and it worked that way because it didn't have to stay hereditary it was just

00:38:38.560 hereditary while it was convenient okay huh i mean that's reasonable you should be flexible

00:38:45.500 if you have a really inflexible succession plan and then something breaks you're kind of screwed

00:38:49.500 flexible good for the most part i think dynasty plus constitution hereditary figurehead wrapped

00:38:57.520 in a bureaucratic institutions that actually run things off a bridge mechanism after the first

00:39:02.200 death this has worked very well and has a near perfect survival rate designated living successor

00:39:08.140 these typically survive and they sometimes split and localize like it's not the best but it's okay

00:39:14.140 the one that has the near perfect is the elected collegiate officers these have a very oh a council

00:39:21.180 or electorate fills the office the authority is legitimate legitimated by writing not by blood or

00:39:27.880 designation for people who are wondering the answer that we chose in techno puritanism it's

00:39:31.700 none of these it's the index system you can read up on it basically the church is kept as a series

00:39:37.980 of individual families or clans which have a unique set of beliefs and their own treasuries

00:39:44.900 and then they vote on the center family slash clan that has the central figure who is not

00:39:53.520 a prophet they are an administrative lead and that it's meant to be easy to split from and

00:40:00.140 rejoin if your group thinks that it has become corrupt in some way without the splitting group

00:40:07.340 being the heretic group yeah because that's not really the way it works the splitting group

00:40:12.300 wouldn't be necessarily the in the wrong group given the way the the text is written if a group

00:40:18.140 wanted to split it is proof that the central group might be doing something wrong yes it would be

00:40:24.240 more a a a negative on the central group than on the splitting group the splitting group just

00:40:30.060 wouldn't get the resources that had been accumulated by the central group constitutional

00:40:34.800 self-termination happens the founding rules accidentally or deliberately forbid replacement

00:40:41.380 this happened with the catholic apostolic church only its original apostles could ordain the last

00:40:47.120 apostle died in 1901 the last priest died in 1971 well that was really poorly planned are you

00:40:54.920 serious you can you ask ai why they did that why did the catholic apostolic church not plan for the

00:41:02.920 the founding group dying yeah and then text as a successor these ones typically do pretty well

00:41:12.080 but they don't have a lot of centralized control now earlier i mentioned the survival ship bias

00:41:18.820 test and here what we do is we have a number oh malcolm they just thought that christ would return

00:41:27.140 before the 12 restored apostles died so they were like don't worry he's coming

00:41:35.560 very poor planning guys because i'm pretty sure the bible says no one will know the time or the

00:41:41.820 well did you look at this did you look at apocalypticism because i know the seventh

00:41:45.100 day adventists managed to stick around pretty well i am i am very disappointed in the number

00:41:51.720 of christian groups that become apocalyptic when the bible is very clear that you should not be

00:41:55.740 apocalyptic i don't know jesus was like no but really like in our lifetime i'm super serious

00:42:02.580 about this no i understand that there are ways that historic jesus scholars interpret him as

00:42:08.780 saying those things but that's not really the way it comes across in the text as the text was

00:42:15.460 eventually captured which is what we think is divinely inspired so no the text the text as it's

00:42:22.280 actually captured says no one will know the time or the space okay so or place so what what that

00:42:29.020 means is if somebody comes to you and they say i know they're saying something that is explicitly

00:42:32.460 anti-biblical and like a very easy reading of it but yeah so in the survivorship bias test this is

00:42:39.060 the part of the survey you can read if you want probably uninteresting but we go over that we do

00:42:43.780 capture a when famous people have weird beliefs it just doesn't happen that often so what were

00:42:50.360 the founders actually doing was it a probable calm or scam event at founding was it an apparent

00:42:57.520 genuine vision was it a desire for a better world was it a commercial venture was it love of the

00:43:04.060 practice or was it mixed or ambiguous and the answer here is the best category with one of the

00:43:12.260 highest survivorship rates is probable scam well scam what yeah so i actually think before i go

00:43:24.380 further this in part explains why the authorship part is so rare so for a person to sit down and

00:43:33.460 say i have like suppose you're motivated by like genuinely wanting a better world right

00:43:40.080 you sit down and you say which has a really good rate as well by the way genuinely wanting a better

00:43:46.540 world has a pretty good rate as well love of the practice has a medium rate this is where like

00:43:53.060 wiccanism comes from and and theosophy and stuff like that a lot of the the new age stuff they

00:43:57.260 just appear to really love doing this stuff it's not like they had a vision it's not like they

00:44:02.280 thought this religion is going to make the world a better place they're like i like casting spells

00:44:06.400 and looking at crystals so i'm gonna do it the the apparent genuine vision also does pretty well

00:44:13.940 so let's let's go into this why why like let's get to the mystery here because i actually think

00:44:19.420 that this in part solves the mystery so i am a smart lucid sane adult okay okay not a crazy

00:44:28.100 schizo rambling or something like this what are the things that could motivate me to sit down

00:44:35.580 and say i'm gonna draft an entirely new metaphysical system well look you you did it

00:44:43.260 because you wanted your kids to thrive and i think most sane people would never want to sit

00:44:48.220 down and write a religion well that's the problem is yeah the the number one motivation for most

00:44:55.140 sane adults to do this is they want to exploit people for sex or they want to scam people for 0.94

00:45:03.120 money and that is why so many are they're just schizophrenic like the brazilian lady who kept 0.96

00:45:10.440 seeing ghosts by the roadside yeah but fortunately for her her didn't come off as schizophrenic

00:45:16.880 rambling because she had a catholic friend who tried to organize all her thoughts into a corpus

00:45:21.040 which then created a religion which people started following yeah every schizophrenic

00:45:25.620 needs their token catholic friend but this is this is actually part of it simone that you're

00:45:29.980 you're getting to here the apparent genuine visions often fail because if it's not a real

00:45:36.880 vision from god right it means the person is a little off their rocker yeah all right so and

00:45:44.240 it also means that the religion is being guided from a first principles perspective that isn't

00:45:50.480 thinking about the long-term consequences of the stuff they're thinking it's not through logic

00:45:55.880 they can write themselves into a corner because the catholic catholic apostolic church that you

00:46:01.120 were talking about right yeah like that a genuine vision says jesus is about to come back okay jesus

00:46:05.880 is about to come back we don't need to think you know that many years in the future and then you

00:46:09.200 accidentally write yourself into a corner there yeah so not ideal the the the if you get it through

00:46:19.480 a vision it leads you to craziness but if you don't have a vision well what are your your options

00:46:24.980 here to try to create one of those completely secular things which always fail right because

00:46:30.800 they just don't have the fervor or to lie right now or or to look at old text which we'll get to

00:46:40.560 in a second but if you take the lying route you can go into it and design it in a way that is

00:46:47.160 meant to be self-replicating meant to capture people's attention with the big ones here being

00:46:53.720 uh well we probably shouldn't say one of them even though it's very obvious to everyone who's

00:47:00.900 not part of this religion okay i'll tell you how i got ai to decide which religions were founded

00:47:07.120 by con artists and which ones weren't oh did they without attribution rip off another religious

00:47:14.740 system that their followers were unlikely to be familiar with and the reason why that could tell

00:47:21.920 for me is because if you believed that you were actually getting messages from god you would then

00:47:28.680 just say the freemasons oh we're just gonna do x because the freemasons do it that way

00:47:34.000 right and and you you wouldn't you wouldn't lie about that you would just be like oh yeah

00:47:40.720 because of the you know that they do it a different way and so whatever right

00:47:45.040 but it's the act of concealing where the inspiration for what you're doing came from

00:47:51.400 that to me signals dishonest intent note here i still think these guys come from some sort of

00:47:59.020 genuine like i do think god was at work in all of that but i can think god was at work in all of

00:48:05.280 that and there was some shady dealings going on at the same time but like yeah like the yakub guy

00:48:11.200 did that a lot too right like he was like stealing from other like mail-in religions and stuff like 0.88

00:48:16.240 that and like anyway the other thing that you could do is say okay i want to make the world a

00:48:21.440 better place i do not want to claim special revelation right because then that would be a

00:48:27.560 lie and i don't want to go at my project of making the world a better place through a lie

00:48:30.520 i do not want to claim that everything just works the way that old farty scientists say it works

00:48:37.020 so then what are your options you really only have three and they really tie your hands

00:48:44.380 option number one is to come up with a system for how you determine what is true this is what that

00:48:51.700 one spiritualist guy did that i think was very sophisticated and interesting as a religious

00:48:56.260 founding movement to just be like i will interview all of the different spiritualists and people have

00:49:00.940 written other books since his death that use the same method to try to find eerie coincidences and

00:49:06.700 i will say that that is some sort of genuine spiritual connection feels very earnest yes yes

00:49:12.340 and what did he come up believing by the way if everybody who hears this you know our audience

00:49:17.180 are like oh he probably came up with a bunch of satanic evil stuff it was there is only one god

00:49:23.240 that you should believe that one god there is some form of an afterlife and that the one god

00:49:29.740 is good and wants you to be good too so like maybe his message aren't that bad you know like

00:49:37.220 maybe maybe you don't get as clear of a picture by talking to a bunch of spiritual mediums

00:49:41.860 but you don't get a bunch of wrong answers either the the other option is the option that we went

00:49:47.780 with which another group has also gone with the group that decided to just go back to the vedas

00:49:52.340 and reinterpret them but in a way that went against a lot of normal hindi ways of living

00:49:58.360 at the time period when it was becoming popular and that is to just be like no let's say all of

00:50:04.580 the bible stuff is actually true we're just not understanding it right so let's go through it

00:50:09.860 again sort of line by line text by text in a historic context and try to map it to stuff this

00:50:15.600 allows for you to not lie about anything still have a a text that you can point to but it's not

00:50:23.800 your text and build from there the problem is just so few people think to do that like it's just not

00:50:31.960 an obvious thing to think to do which is why so few people have done it and so many more people

00:50:38.000 have done the scam option right which is why so many of i think why new religious movements get

00:50:45.900 the the negative connotation of a cult or scam often because so many of them just

00:50:53.800 are the vast majority are that's the main reason like a sane adult would do this secondly if you're

00:50:59.220 a sane adult it's a crazy thing to do yes yeah and i think people don't realize how crazy a thing it

00:51:05.900 is to do when people can just be like well go back to one of the traditional ones and i'm like

00:51:10.460 the traditional ones all look like they're failing and i think they're wrong like i i can't convince

00:51:17.120 myself of it i'm not going to be able to convince my kids of it yeah it's like trying to get into

00:51:21.420 a movie when you can't suspend disbelief because the, you know, the acting is so bad or the

00:51:27.900 direction is so poor or the effects are awful. Like you, you, yeah, you can't just, I mean,

00:51:33.300 I guess a lot of people do. A lot of people do choose to adhere to religions fully not believing

00:51:38.720 them because they understand the community matters. The problem is that they don't really

00:51:42.540 have faith. And then when family members or their children encounter genuine crises of faith,

00:51:49.540 they can't defend the faith. And if those people don't like the community, then they don't stick to

00:51:54.540 the community or they don't try to reform the church from within when it needs reform because

00:51:59.700 they don't believe in it enough to fight for it and try to shape its future. So you have to have

00:52:05.140 that true belief if you want to be a genuine adherent. I mean, I'm sure all the members of

00:52:11.720 the LDS church who don't actually believe in it, but tithe are nominally contributing to the religion

00:52:18.260 because tithing is very significant this is 10 of your foretac before tax income but which i see

00:52:24.360 is quite predatory it's insane yeah i've heard some horrible stories that yeah like you know

00:52:31.700 really really sick family members and they're still like so are you gonna write your check now

00:52:35.260 it's just like really poorly done you there no absolutely not but yeah i think the church even

00:52:41.420 really doesn't benefit i mean especially the lds church now that it just has that much money it has

00:52:46.220 insane ridiculous preposterous doesn't make sense anymore levels of money what they really need is

00:52:52.120 faithful adherence more than anything else because what we're seeing now is parents raising their 0.92

00:52:58.900 children in the church sending them to mormon schools living in mormon communities taking them

00:53:04.300 to church every sunday and then those kids go off to college and are like you know what i'm not a

00:53:08.640 mormon anymore i'm not i'm not a member of the church because they they just the faith wasn't

00:53:14.780 there yeah so the next category that we're going to go to here is silliness versus sophistication 0.82

00:53:23.920 and some religions i think it can be both sophisticated and silly which is why we put 0.60

00:53:29.940 these on two different metrics an example of sophisticated and silly would be mormonism for 0.97

00:53:35.020 an example i think mormonism is a pretty silly religion in in parts of its founding mythos and 0.88

00:53:39.960 stuff like this in in the category i use for silly is when you tell somebody who's not of that 0.92

00:53:45.140 religion that religion's founding story are they likely to actually lol i have the golden plates

00:53:51.580 here in this hat i need to have them somewhere dark so i can read the spiritual light oh okay

00:53:56.060 write this down christ appeared before the me fights and that's how the book of mormon was

00:54:03.700 written martin how do you know he isn't just making stuff up and pretending he's translating

00:54:09.060 off golden plates lucy harris smart smart smart smart smart and i hide these pages if joseph smith

00:54:15.360 really is translating off of golden plates then he'll be able to do it again lucy harris smart

00:54:20.120 smart smart martin harris dumb so we must now translate from the plate of nephi so it will be

00:54:26.660 the same basic story but written a little differently wow if god got angry with you then 0.98

00:54:32.780 You must be telling the truth. 0.94

00:54:34.340 And what we found is that silliness is pretty protective to a religion. 0.93

00:54:40.440 Now, the best thing you could be is sophisticated and dignified. 0.59

00:54:44.120 This has a 47% chance of becoming a major world religion.

00:54:49.000 What is an example of a sophisticated and dignified new religion? 0.87

00:54:54.140 Baha'i would be an example of that.

00:54:57.960 Cardassianism, the spiritualist one that we talked about, would be an example of that. 0.69

00:55:01.300 but i don't really like that style that ain't my style i like to have a little bit of silliness

00:55:06.760 and things where silliness is very protective is because it causes members to be shunned by

00:55:13.800 outgroups and it forces them to further identify with a no i really believe this you know like

00:55:22.060 we may not believe in the future police in a literal context but it is part of the family

00:55:26.940 lore right like the kids talk about the future police all the time they get attacked by krampus

00:55:35.740 right like a krampus is a major part of their they believe that they are possessed by the devil

00:55:41.060 right like that they call the basilisk when whenever they get in a mood where they're doing

00:55:46.480 bad things because that's what we tell them we go well you has the basilisk taken you over

00:55:50.240 and they're like yep the basilisk has taken me over and then one time toasty was like octavian

00:55:55.620 you have to slap me you have to slap out the basilisk but like they're learning how to

00:56:00.820 contextualize their negative and tantrum like emotional estates as something separate that's

00:56:07.440 not really who they are and that is their opposition the traditional meaning of satan

00:56:13.360 that's corrupting their heart right like a lot of these things that we do are objectively pretty

00:56:19.580 silly the future day where we take all their toys and we leave like silly foam and stuff and say it's

00:56:24.840 future debris like it's a silly thing to do okay and a bunch of little like party favorite type 0.80

00:56:29.920 toys as future debris which they go crazy for by the way oh they love it so much no they don't

00:56:35.920 the annoying thing is they have yet to ever miss the toys that have suddenly disappeared

00:56:41.240 and they only get super excited about the debris which is the best part yeah

00:56:48.180 the toys have disappeared but now there's little party favors on the floor so whatever like oh my

00:56:52.920 god yeah kids don't care that much about toys i think they just i don't know whatever we we built

00:57:00.280 them a life where like it doesn't the group that always fails is low sophistication or almost always

00:57:06.180 it has survived like the nation of islam kind of survived and valde amer kind of survived 0.55

00:57:11.580 the nation of islam really just become

00:57:13.900 a group of primarily black americans who just shifted to actual islam

00:57:22.580 they have like a different origin story and different cohort the nation of islam

00:57:27.660 well yeah now they dropped the yakub stuff right didn't the successor 0.65

00:57:31.800 the son of the founder who was like let's just make it like actual islam okay and then they did

00:57:37.460 right right okay who knows what if techno puritanism does that for like just mainline

00:57:43.880 they're like let's just make this mainline what calvinist christianity yeah it's probably where

00:57:51.360 they go if they were going to drop it for something very very sad if that happens but 0.61

00:57:56.020 for the sophisticated very silly category these are religions that have quite a sophisticated 0.95

00:58:00.740 belief system but are very silly you'll see a lot of heavy hitters you get mormonism 0.77

00:58:05.580 falun gong scientology theosophy salama uraneda brahma kharmas koreshla which is a major world 0.95

00:58:14.080 religion oh no it's not koreshla it's it's braham karamah which is a major world religion

00:58:19.180 and then a few i think these are dead ones ushep aran and harris but you also get but yeah it i

00:58:26.860 found that to be pretty interesting and it's why in the in the corpus here we have a little anime

00:58:31.300 cat girl future police because you know we gotta have that imagery everywhere that we do with our

00:58:37.040 stuff it's why we put like gokes into the text and everything like that like even in our track

00:58:41.380 series we have a chart here of coherence across religious institutions we have one here on sex

00:58:49.740 like did they try to create a sex cult which usually doesn't work out very well and note here

00:58:54.620 like the worst thing you can do as a cult is be super anti-sex anti-sex always kills things right

00:59:00.080 Do not go the super prude direction because they usually end up becoming, well, when you

00:59:04.880 go anti-sex, like when you start worshiping a fear of human sexuality, you begin to admire

00:59:11.520 members of your community who live celibate lifestyles.

00:59:14.540 This is something we're seeing in like the Opus Dei.

00:59:16.420 Like I think the Opus Dei are really cool, but a third of them are celibus because they're

00:59:19.420 from a part of Catholicism that has a degree of worship around a fear of human sexuality

00:59:25.960 or a hatred of human sexuality or arousal patterns which means that it's cool to never

00:59:31.140 engage in it which is really bad for a religious system and generally this argues you shouldn't

00:59:37.060 incorporate well i heard and it's not exactly with celibacy but i heard that a genuine problem

00:59:43.880 with sspx is purity spirals that could just ruin the religion which is not good so it has

00:59:53.240 has its issues not they wouldn't even of course be counted among these new religions because it's

00:59:57.500 just an offshoot of catholicism but i think anything whether it be around celibacy or

01:00:05.360 anything else a religion that's subject to purity spirals is so dangerous i mean we saw what happened

01:00:10.440 with irrationalism and effective altruism when purity spirals started taking over the community

01:00:16.200 that's not really addressed in that but it is something that i've been thinking about a lot

01:00:20.200 recently a very interesting one here is what does the religion descend from what religious group is

01:00:28.280 its successor and how does that affect it where this is really interesting is for a number of

01:00:35.200 major world religions you have very high success rates ones that are descended from christianity

01:00:40.580 have very high success rates the highest success rates are actually hindu the next highest are

01:00:46.320 shintu after religion and hindu and then you also have very high ones for buddhists where you get

01:00:52.180 extremely low is islam oh wow yeah i guess the only way they got new recruits for islam is by

01:01:01.360 making up some ridiculous story about selective breeding and yeah also uh virtualist movements 0.98

01:01:10.480 very low there's only been really one big success story the one that we've mentioned a few times

01:01:15.000 here then it was in new thought you have sort of middling success and then if you go pure ufo

01:01:22.460 this is like heaven's gate scientology realismo urantra you don't get a lot of mass scale but

01:01:30.180 you get a lot of decently kind of working things so sci-fi seems to work and then designed a

01:01:36.840 naturalist zero zero in 250 years except for the one that's like kind of petering along the final

01:01:44.220 thing that we're going to go over here is what does this say to us what does this mean that we

01:01:48.040 need to do and this was the one that basically said look malcolm because you know i'm running

01:01:53.900 ai on this i'm like what's our probability here of a religion like us we're already at the stage

01:02:00.400 where and this is what gets me when we have other people watch us because i was watching one guy

01:02:03.860 watch our studying things well they don't even know if this is going to become a religion they

01:02:08.100 don't even know if they're still going to be leaving in next many years you know it's such

01:02:10.900 a far off thing and it's like we at the stage we're at right now have probably an 85 chance of

01:02:19.100 still being a religion in 100 years if we look at historical trends and correlates that's where we

01:02:25.980 are right now and and probably being at around 100 000 members isn't it gonna be so cool if

01:02:30.980 someone plays this video 85 years later whether we're right or long wrong and are like oh look at

01:02:36.380 that look at that well hi hi i ran the correlations here you've probably talked to ai's based on us

01:02:43.920 we've got enough data out there oh yeah we'll be super dead hi for ghosts i'm sure it doesn't make

01:02:50.180 that many mistakes and and just so you guys know in in the far future was i satisfied with my life

01:02:55.700 super satisfied not a lot you could do for me not a lot you could do to make it better

01:02:59.520 maybe make sure this kid takes okay yeah also by the way for all of you who've given us

01:03:07.080 hornet tips thank you so much we're working on it we had five hornets in my room right before this

01:03:13.320 yeah but we've received some excellent advice the the core thing that we're working toward here

01:03:17.160 with everything all the support both financial and informational you've given is

01:03:21.860 all the interventions cannot really be enacted until we find the next

01:03:25.860 we're still working on friends okay ai's like put a feet of me outside and then watch a hornet go to

01:03:33.360 it and fly back to the nest and triangulate the position yeah a bunch of people said that too and

01:03:38.340 it's like you know that sounds great have you ever watched an insect outside and just tracked it

01:03:44.840 for longer than like 15 seconds outside because i haven't i mean i can't keep track of a mosquito

01:03:55.020 inside for more than like you know 10 seconds and then i'll catch it again in a little bit but

01:04:00.540 that's inside a closed small room you know we've tried look we'll try but no we've received some

01:04:06.600 really helpful insights but yeah we're thank you thank you actually hornets malcolm someone pointed

01:04:13.560 out these are what bald bald headed hornets just great wonderful yeah yeah i love you caught one

01:04:22.140 on screen ones yeah right when we were sitting down to film there was five right next to my

01:04:27.020 filming chair that simone took out for us but anyway where are we with all of this if our fab

01:04:34.340 play our fab it's fantastic tons of adventures you can play it's been improved a lot recently

01:04:38.640 i suggest turning the memory feature on for narrative engines i'm going to do that with

01:04:42.700 the defaults moving forwards because it's we finally got into a part where like the lore book

01:04:47.280 in memory writing is really good for storytelling and it improves the narrative engine quite a bit

01:04:51.820 allowing it to like remember places and context so i'll do that right after we record because i

01:04:56.760 finally feel like that's working or at least if it's not working if we put it on the default

01:05:02.200 models we'll begin to get complaints about it and we can work on it but the point here i'm making

01:05:09.120 and where this all comes down to is the ai was like if you fail there is one glaring reason you're

01:05:15.740 going to fail okay it is that and i thought it was going to be that we were too like secular

01:05:24.140 and it's like no like from an outside framing you guys don't look secular at all like you may

01:05:29.500 consider yourself secular in the same way as scientologist does but nobody else is going to

01:05:33.640 say techno puritanism is secular oh and scientology was written by a literal sci-fi writer

01:05:39.460 then was just like and this time it's real i promise come on one anyway just don't think

01:05:48.640 that's fair but carry on sorry what was the thing that's actually going to kill

01:05:53.040 well i hear something tapping on the glass well if there is one you just tell me and i'll come in 0.98

01:06:01.240 and kill it see how tough my wife is this is no it just i i handle the the killing and the 0.99

01:06:08.820 the dead bodies and malcolm handles everything else okay so the thing that's going to kill it 0.98

01:06:16.060 is we don't actually put together the marriage market we don't actually put together the summer

01:06:20.320 camp for kids and we don't actually put together the online communities for younger people to

01:06:27.000 interact and find spouses i have all look look families for years now have been telling us when

01:06:34.560 they want to opt into that i have a decent collection i haven't checked count recently

01:06:38.980 but i have a decent collection of parents who have one or more children close to our children's ages

01:06:45.280 so like the age range at present is basically from like negative one to 14 basically and once

01:06:54.640 we get you know like a couple years in maybe a little more money we can start to organize things

01:07:00.100 but we're going to do it yeah one of the things that we want to do is like a season so if anyone

01:07:05.440 has like one of the ways we can get around raising money is if anybody has like a large

01:07:10.520 property they want to show off and use to gain status the idea is is like once every couple

01:07:16.900 years have all of the younger people come together for like a series of events or something like that

01:07:24.260 where they can get to know each other and then we also want to put together a summer camp so if

01:07:29.360 anyone has a property where we can do that or an idea of where would be a good place to do that

01:07:33.100 if we can't use a member's property what we'll do is we will and keep in mind there's not that

01:07:41.000 many of us so like renting out an entire summer camp for this at this stage might be overkill

01:07:45.100 but like rent out an off-season summer camp and do something at one of them what i i'm i'm not

01:07:53.140 sure yet, but I'm beginning to realize that I may be too fastidious. If we actually are as fastidious

01:07:59.700 as we had planned in being and never, ever, ever taking any money, then we won't have the

01:08:05.900 institutional bureaucracy to operate the events that are needed to keep things feeling like a

01:08:13.860 community rather than people in a podcast talking about something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, fair enough

01:08:18.800 that those things like do cost money chem counselors people to organize and execute events

01:08:24.240 i mean i think it would it can very sustainably and easily start off as groups of families

01:08:30.800 choosing to travel to the same like resort at the same time because with resorts are built

01:08:35.920 in infrastructure they have the swimming pools they have the like archery ranges or whatever

01:08:41.100 and there are lots of those in the world that we could turn to or even like a cruise at the same

01:08:47.380 time because they have a lot of that infrastructure as well and you could just kind of like raid an

01:08:52.040 area and take it over so that's i you know i think it's going to start with with people taking

01:08:58.620 concurrent vacations to places with existing infrastructure which just requires self-funding

01:09:03.660 because then you have to pay to stay at a resort which is not inexpensive especially if you have

01:09:08.600 a large family i know what there's that the the huge catholic meetup that happens every year

01:09:13.960 though that looks like it's camping and then isn't there the the huge libertarian one that's

01:09:19.380 also camping yeah i would not do camping yeah so that's i find those to be very miserable

01:09:25.360 malcolm doesn't want to do a camping one so yeah i guess until we have some kind of big

01:09:31.080 tithing base or like donor base members are going to have to self-fund their participation in the

01:09:37.280 season i guess that's just what it's going to be but we'll we'll figure that out that's something

01:09:41.900 that we need to look more in on think about more and understand that my desire to be like super

01:09:50.600 lean while it has some benefits could be what ends up killing the tradition just for reference what

01:09:58.140 the london season was it it was for a network of geographically i mean relatively speaking right

01:10:04.960 but geographically dispersed families who needed a contrived mechanism to get their children to

01:10:11.260 to mix and marry we're talking about the landed gentry in in the uk we're raising their their

01:10:16.920 children on country estates who didn't see other people unless they were visiting as as you know

01:10:22.540 hunting party guests or something so they they realized that how important it was to to get

01:10:29.080 everyone to mix so instead of just husbands going into london for the parliamentary season if they

01:10:36.440 were in the house of lords that they decided to host a circuit of parties and bring their entire

01:10:41.860 families to london with them and then they would host take home turns hosting parties

01:10:47.040 during the london season basically during parliament or the parliamentary season

01:10:52.200 after debuting their their children who are basically open to being married

01:10:57.320 their daughters specifically to the queen and i said like out here well i mean that's why i'm

01:11:04.660 saying we would take inspiration from that the point i'm making is that was an institution for

01:11:09.280 disparate families that was however also an institution where those disparate families at

01:11:13.520 non-trivial expense personally both traveled to be in one area and hosted well yeah it was about

01:11:21.240 showing off which could be a way that you do it that's what i'm saying like if anyone has a

01:11:24.400 property or something like that we could do it in that mechanism it's not just the one family who's

01:11:28.640 hosting everything so when you fly to the one person's event other families will host various

01:11:36.940 events that happen during that season you're not flying from one location to another in that same

01:11:43.140 area in that same venue event whatever the idea being is that the person who's operating the

01:11:50.640 property isn't putting on the cost for the individual events those are put on by different

01:11:57.400 families as a way to sort of show their one dedication and two the status of their family

01:12:03.880 relative to other families in the community the secondary thing to consider about this

01:12:08.340 a place like cape cod or something like a nice vacation area i guess right you might have multiple

01:12:17.460 families doing it that way but i think an easier way to do it is likely a rural property and then

01:12:22.300 you have multiple families host different things but outside of that because then the families can

01:12:27.600 host each thing their way and show off their own family host something your way when you don't have

01:12:33.400 your own space or when you don't get to choose your hamstrung are you out of your mind you go

01:12:39.700 to a wedding venue and every wedding is different done that person's way but it's at the same venue

01:12:45.960 as 20 other weddings that week, Simone.

01:12:49.380 The venue doesn't control the style of the event.

01:12:53.600 You can do an event or a get-together or a party

01:12:56.600 in one of a billion different ways

01:12:59.020 with a billion different flavors.

01:13:01.600 Okay, we're going to have to have a whole debate episode

01:13:04.100 on how we think this will work most efficaciously.

01:13:06.500 We'll have a weekend debate episode

01:13:07.760 right after this one on this topic.

01:13:09.940 The core thing she wanted to add,

01:13:11.480 and I don't know why she didn't just say it,

01:13:13.000 was that she thinks it would work better,

01:13:14.800 and I agree.

01:13:15.440 if only the young people who are dating went and not the full families and that they were the ones

01:13:21.900 who put on the many events within the location which i also agree with but before we get into

01:13:26.980 that the second thing is if you look at all of this and your takeaway is but why are all the

01:13:34.780 techno puritan stuff why is the marriage market why is the kid get together stuff why is the season

01:13:42.180 event why is it all about getting people married and why is that reproducing yes right and the

01:13:48.120 answer is is because that is the key framing within our entire life cycle story everything

01:13:54.580 like that and it used to not be weird i like reading old european romance books right

01:14:01.220 this was everything all the adults are doing is talking with the other families trying to find

01:14:06.300 their kids a good marriage match and then the kids get married and then all they're trying to

01:14:10.260 do is find their kids a good marriage match that's like one of like that should be right now it's

01:14:14.580 like college is like the big thing in life or like you know your first job no it's who you marry

01:14:20.580 right and so building out a network to help with that and also help our kids with nepotism

01:14:25.760 that's really advantageous to helping the movement grow and stay cohesive especially for kids but

01:14:34.480 also frame life in a sane way to the next generation again yeah yeah fair love you and

01:14:43.800 now we will have our argument for people who want to be on patreon or sub stack subscribers

01:14:48.320 and it's great to see you guys and it was kind of crazy for me when i did this this study because

01:14:54.000 i was like whoa we've actually passed a lot of the big hurdles already yeah i'm and our corpus

01:15:00.420 by the way is 50 larger than the mormon corpus what do you mean oh you mean that the like all

01:15:07.300 of the techno puritan tracks and writings it's longer than the all the mormon and all the other

01:15:14.580 stuff yeah the pearl of great price and then the whatever yeah the expensive pearl that's sorry

01:15:22.660 sorry to put you guys through all of this with these insane tracks i really like them i think

01:15:27.620 think this is so cool i i would not have even thought to look at this and i'm so impressed by

01:15:31.880 what you did it's just super cool and you should really check out the page if you find this stuff

01:15:36.420 interesting because you can go you can click through to the wikipedia pages of these religions

01:15:41.720 if you're like i've never heard of that what on earth and then you can see the little logos because

01:15:45.600 every religion has to have a logo and i don't know i really like it i think it's it's super cool

01:15:51.600 and i want to be honest i love our gear logo i mean would you would you encourage therefore

01:15:56.620 people to build their own religions or like what is i mean what is the point you're are you trying

01:16:02.020 to say like yeah actually you should do this are you just trying to say actually somebody should

01:16:05.440 probably create a wikipedia for techno puritanism if you're like a wikipedia editor we're probably

01:16:10.800 at a stage where that makes sense oh where we have our page with our logo yes yeah with our

01:16:15.880 little logo and our weird beliefs in the progress guide to crafting religion you prompt people

01:16:20.480 to either make their inherited religion or chosen religion capable of withstanding the additional

01:16:31.100 and new and different pressures of modernity, or to make a new religion that will work in our

01:16:36.800 context and reconcile all the differences that they have with their otherwise chosen religion.

01:16:43.340 Do you still hold that they should do that? Or do you think now that it's actually better to

01:16:47.540 try to create a wholly new religion if you're able to meet the criteria that you you've

01:16:51.980 discovered well i mean i think all of the traditional religions are dying to an extent

01:16:57.240 where i think creating a version of them that does well is going to look like a new religion

01:17:00.820 so a version of catholicism i've said could do really well it's something that takes ideas from

01:17:06.200 the opus day about dedicating your life to something but dedicate your life to the next

01:17:09.420 generation yeah yes and none of this whole the celibate opus day nonsense yeah but if you if

01:17:16.020 you do that i mean the opus day are unique enough that most other groups would call them a new

01:17:21.960 religion especially if you combine the beginning was like a bunch of writings now if you're a you

01:17:27.940 know a traditional christian or a traditional you know baptist or something i i do think you need

01:17:32.300 some some reinterpretation to protect against many of the bad things that have happened within

01:17:36.880 the protestant community the number of scams that have been run out of you know pentecostal churches

01:17:42.580 the number of bad theology that is seeped in i think that that takes an amount of hardening

01:17:49.880 and sort of puritanism that's that's going to look and feel very different than what you're

01:17:59.200 going to find in a church today in any church you go to today and i've one of the things that

01:18:03.800 we keep hearing is people go to church and they're just like it doesn't feel right like every church

01:18:09.460 I go to feels hollow now. And that will be the focus of our next tract is what does the Bible

01:18:16.080 actually say about churches? And a lot of people, well, frankly, they mistranslate the word

01:18:23.160 gathering as church when everywhere it happens, it's not a church. And through that, they don't

01:18:32.960 notice that whenever it's talking about an actual church church, it's usually not in a positive

01:18:38.780 context which was interesting to me i like it was actually like rereading it more critically and i

01:18:45.000 was like oh is that why they became corrupt so quickly but anyway fun talk and and not just not

01:18:51.940 in a positive context with a ton of warnings attached but i love you some and have a spectacular

01:18:57.880 day you too i had no idea who it was and you were just like i guess that's normal somebody running

01:19:06.160 around open doors it sounded like they were having fun yeah obviously i do realize that after

01:19:14.480 you have a certain number of kids you can no longer expect any privacy in your house like

01:19:19.760 everyone will just come and go stay see fit okay so that's fine okay ish what is so funny

01:19:30.320 Can I have my brush back?

01:19:40.460 What if I gave you this instead?

01:19:44.980 This is actually for babies.

01:19:46.840 Yeah.

01:19:49.220 Isn't that so much better?

01:19:50.560 Oh, thank God.

01:19:54.160 Oh, my God.

01:19:56.280 It's going to make you throw up.

01:19:57.960 No.

01:19:58.320 I love you Tex

01:20:12.100 I love you so much

01:20:15.460 okay is this really what you want

01:20:21.000 oh for the love

01:20:23.740 that really

01:20:25.300 really

01:20:27.080 you

Based Camp - August 18, 2026

1⧸3 Cults Become A World Religion ｜ Crazy Stats To Save Your People

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