Based Camp： Is a Secular Religion Possible？
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Malcolm Gladwell to talk about how to create an intergenerationally durable culture that is resistant to the current technological environment that we live in, and why no one has ever done it before.
Transcript
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And this has happened throughout histories where people essentially deify the secular
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understanding of the world at the time and our understanding of the world moves forwards.
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It begins to look ridiculous and it gets thrown out.
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This is why only the most conservative in terms of sticking with the original way of
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viewing the text or the original way of practicing a religion.
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Typically those are the iterations that survive rather than the ones that try to adapt.
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But then there's the other problem, which was the other thing that some groups did is
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they say, well, we will just outsource our metaphysical understanding of the universe
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to the scientists, the scientific institutions.
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But after the scientific institutions became infected with this progressive memetic virus,
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And it basically became a tool for just infecting and injecting other cultures with this progressive
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Engaging with technology is intrinsically caustic to systems that try to tell people about
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a metaphysical framework for reality that's wrong.
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I think that many of these older systems that can only compete by telling people not to engage
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with technology, which I think is going to be an increasingly successful strategy.
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Yeah, they'll continue existing in the future, but they won't have economic power because technology
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is critical to massive economic power and military power to an extent.
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So even if you're a smaller cultural group, if you're the cultural group that is engaging
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readily with AI in a way that isn't decreasing fertility rates, you are going to just dramatically
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outcompete cultural groups that have been able to keep their fertility rates high by disengaging
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from the internet, disengaging from AI, disengaging from cell phones, disengaging from genetic
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Okay, but Malcolm, I still think you're totally missing the beat here.
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I am keen to talk with you today about maybe one of the stupidest projects we've ever taken
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on in our lives because we are trying to do something that it doesn't seem anyone has really
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Well, one of my pushbacks is going to be, I think you're wrong there.
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Okay, but what we're going to talk about is, to save society, one of our theses is you need
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to create an intergenerationally durable culture that is resistant to the current technological
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environment that we live in, whether it's online dating or modernity or the mimetic viruses
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And the initial pushback we often get from conservative groups is, why don't you just
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adapt one of the existing conservative traditions that has been able to do this historically?
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The first is that I don't think I've seen any other than maybe Judaism that seems durably
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resistant to the current social and technological environment that doesn't have quickly falling
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But even they, the parts of Judaism that have the highest fertility rates still are often
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So they are the least engaged with industry and technology, which is not something I want
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I mean, many people would say you can't have these two things together, right?
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No, I just think no one has intentionally created a culture that can work alongside this.
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But then the question becomes historically, well, why haven't intentionally created, and when we call
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a culture secular, what I mean is it has broadly concurrent views with the scientific community
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about how sort of metaphysics in the world exists.
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It believes in evolution and particle physics and the Big Bang and all of that, and it updates
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So first, this idea that no one has done this before, I think, is wrong.
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I think, in many ways, you could think of the Catholic Church as one.
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The Catholic Church had a system for recognizing scientific discoveries, even when they were initially
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declared to go against biblical doctrine, you know, whether it's the earth isn't the center
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It took them a really long time to recognize them, longer than it probably should have, and
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it slowed down the advancement of these types of scientific inquiries through generally offering
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no reward mechanism for updating these heuristics.
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But it did have the ability to eventually incorporate these scientific discoveries.
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You could even argue, actually, that the slowness of adoption was a feature, not a bug.
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Because if you are having a culture adapt with the times or adapt with science, it's important
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that you not jump on every latest potential discovery or trend, right?
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I mean, that could be really damaging, I'm sure.
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But to be a culture that has any level of adaption to this, if you are a traditional religious
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group, you typically have to be a centralized and hierarchical religious group.
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So, for example, both Catholics and Mormons would be able to incorporate new discoveries
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into their religion pretty easily if they wanted to.
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And in many ways, you know, they benefit from being conservative in how they do this, but
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Whereas most Protestant traditions, because they're decentralized, most Islamic traditions,
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because they're decentralized, and most Jewish traditions, because they're decentralized,
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if they are of the stricter iterations of those, they're not going to be able to.
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Because they are basing their tradition on older texts.
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Now, there are some cultural groups that are more accelerationist within these decentralized
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I mean, if you read Puritan Spotting, which Scott Alexander wrote, which is about Calvinist
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And this is the older form of Calvinist, not this newer cosplay, I'm theologically Calvinist,
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You know, he'll say things like, oh yeah, plus one point if they're an atheist, deist, or
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free thinker, plus three points if they wrote a book about their heterodox religious views,
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plus three points if they invented a new religion, plus three points if they invented a new Christian
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heresy, plus three points if they're obsessed with religious tolerance, plus three points
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if they wrote a list of virtues, plus three points if they had plans to anestimatize the
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eschaton that's trying to create a utopian society.
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Okay, but the point I'm being is this is a cultural group that you and I are part of,
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and a lot of what we do can look really weird to outsiders, when it really is just, we're
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But the point being is, these cultural groups have historically failed.
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You know, Calvinists went from being around 50% of the American, at least the American
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white population at the time of the founding of the country, to now being like 0.5% to 0.2%
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And your argument broadly is that Calvinists were really, really big about each person
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has to find truth on their own, and they have to really ardently search for it, too.
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So as soon as people did search for truth that came into conflict with, say, the Bible, they're
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Well, yes, and that's the problem with this, right?
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Is if you force this sort of independent truth thinking and engagement with science, but then
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you also have this background doctrine, which to some extent this is in disagreement with,
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This is why, you know, if you look at like the Calvinist founders of America, many of them
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would do things like try to update their Bible or edit it to be more in line with the science.
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And that works for a generation, but then people stop obeying the stricter rules, which are really
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important in terms of intergenerational cultural transfer.
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And keep in mind, science is two things, right?
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One science is this broad institution, which is controlled by the progressive urban monoculture,
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Just falsify data, just do whatever it needs to to enforce its cultural hegemony on other groups.
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And the other science is the scientific method, like the ability of having a hypothesis, going
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out and testing that hypothesis in the world, something you can do yourself.
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And what we're talking about is just this broad idea that you have predictive knowledge, right?
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You can predict, oh, there's planets out in space and I can go visit them.
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And those might not be in text, but I can, you know, that's what I'm talking about when I'm
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So historically, I think one of the reasons why one of these groups never really survived is because
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as science moved, our metaphysical understanding of major parts of what it means to be human
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and reality more broadly was shifting to an extent that any religion or culture that was
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created to align with a current scientific understanding was going to be crushed by time.
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Here you could think of belief about the humors in regards to what was the doctor who did that?
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So it's Hippocrates who, who, you know, developed this, this humorous system, which was essentially
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building into theology and metaphysical understanding of the world, current science,
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which then led that science to advance incredibly slowly because it became a metaphysical truth
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And then as soon as people accepted that humors don't exist in the way that they said they existed,
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basically you had to throw out that entire system and it was now useless.
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And a lot of the surrounding culture that had evolved alongside it ended up getting thrown out.
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And so a lot of times when people will look at a group, you know, you've mentioned this in a few
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times in the past, Judaism, and you've described this system within the Horeiti groups of debate to
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determine one status within the hierarchy and debate that requires intense knowledge of the
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But it is, it is, it is debate of an unchanging text.
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And I think people have argued to us that if you don't have that unchanging base and you're
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working on a moving foundation, you are going to have a culture that crumbles.
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I was making that exact point, which is historically when you abandon these, these systems that evolve
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for a reason, you know, like the reformed Jewish movement, you just get completely taken over by
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this progressive urban monoculture very easily.
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But even groups that historically did what was best given scientific information at the time.
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So I think a great example of this is Christian scientists.
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So today, when people look at Christian scientists, they see them as, oh, they're the people who
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like don't touch modern medicine and don't engage with like blood transfusions and stuff like that.
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Like that they're, they're a very backwards group is sort of the way that people think of it.
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But what most people don't know is when the movement was founded,
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they had higher survival rates than people who were going to doctors at the time.
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Because doctors would do things like, you know.
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Well, worse than that, they were running postmortems on dead patients with diseases and then without
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washing their hands, delivering babies and then killing mothers and babies doing so.
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I mean, it made sense how at the time not going to a hospital left you better off.
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So that's an example of building modern, like currently existing scientific knowledge into
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a movement and then having that movement fall apart.
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And this has happened throughout histories where people essentially deify the secular
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And then our understanding of the world moves forwards.
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It begins to look ridiculous and it gets thrown out.
00:12:06.140
This is why only the most conservative in terms of sticking with the original way of
00:12:10.540
viewing the text or the original way of practicing a religion.
00:12:13.420
Typically, those are the iterations that survive rather than the ones that try to adapt.
00:12:17.740
But then there's the other problem, which was the other thing that some groups did is they
00:12:23.420
say, well, we will just outsource our metaphysical understanding of the universe to the scientists,
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And this is where I'll get to an instance where people did this before and it was successful,
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But after the scientific institutions became infected with this progressive memetic virus,
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And we will do another video on how academia basically broke and fell apart as a mechanism
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But it basically became a tool for just infecting and injecting other cultures with this progressive
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So, and anyone who's looking at science today, I think broadly can see, you know, we had Spencer
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Greenberg on the podcast, when you're dealing with a 50% replicability crisis within studies,
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they are not really investigating truth anymore.
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And there was a great study that was done that showed that the replication crisis
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was actually specifically tied to only studies that pushed either progressive agenda or a neutral
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But when a study was released that supported a conservative position, the replicability
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And so basically what it is, is it's just the way that this memetic virus is able to insert
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ideological conformity into what it's trying to broadcast with the academic system.
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So let's get back to where I think this has been done successfully before.
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America was created by Christians, mostly Calvinists, well over 50% Calvinists.
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There were other people involved, and this is by the Heritage Foundation.
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So a conservative foundation that is not a Calvinist foundation says, yes, America with 50%
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Calvinists, if you're talking about the population of America when it was founded.
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Um, so it was created as this sort of cultural experiment and it worked really well for a while.
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But it had some major flaws and it was secular.
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It was a genuinely secular super government governing institution that allowed for pluralistic
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If you look at the colonies, when they came together, yes, they may have been dominated
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by the Calvinist cultural group, but there were, you know, the Quakers and the Catholics and
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many other cultural groups at the time, the Cavaliers, the Backwoods people.
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And when you say work really well, what do you mean?
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Well, so it stitched multiple cultural groups together in a way that instead of leading to
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conflict between those groups, made all of the groups stronger.
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It showed that a pluralistic, largely secular or not necessarily secular, secular society.
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It said, we're going to have this secular super governing institution, the federal government.
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What it said is you, Catholic state, Maryland, you can create a, you know, you can build Catholic
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You, Calvinist state, you can build Calvinist rules into the way you're doing things.
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You, Cavalier state, you know, Pennsylvania, you, Quaker state, you do things in your way,
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Pennsylvania should be thought of as more of an Anabaptist state than a Quaker state,
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but the Anabaptists never really strove for political power.
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So we misunderstand many of the political movements in Pennsylvania as being Quaker driven
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instead of Anabaptist driven when they're actually more Anabaptist driven.
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The point being is for a system like this to work.
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I think what you need is sub-governing institutions, which are culturally dominated.
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And historically in America, many of these people were geographically locked.
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Most of the people who thought this way moved to this city.
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Most of the people who thought this way moved to this city.
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And I think that that was a fairly good system that showed one way you can have a multicultural
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And this is where I want to get to something else, which is to say, you know,
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Simone, you and I see ourselves very much as contiguous with our ancestors and contiguous
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with our descendants, you know, getting to try things again.
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And so when people look at us, they're like, you guys are insane for trying to start a country.
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Yet we have had many ancestors who have tried to do this in the past.
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If I go way back, who I don't really consider myself that contiguous with, you know, I could
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get someone like Robert the Bruce or Charlemagne, who I'm a direct descendant of both of those,
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but pretty much every Scottish person of descent I know from the Southern United States is a
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But if you look more recently, I mean, Simone, through two different pathways, you are a descendant
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of George Washington and not George Washington himself, but his siblings, because he didn't
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But as close as a living descendant of your generation can be to him.
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So you are a descendant of two of his siblings.
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And he was one of the people who tried to start a new country.
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And I think it was a fairly successful experiment.
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You look at my groups that the two more recent ancestors would be Oliver Cromwell, who I learned
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from, he tried to create a Calvinist, many people would see as dictatorial state, but it wasn't
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He really wanted to leave monarchy and create a democracy.
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But every time he would, the people he would put in power would start bickering with each other.
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And he lacked the moral constitution to allow that to happen.
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And so then he'd come back in and take over as like a fascist dictator for a while.
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And then he'd try to set up an elected government system and they'd start fighting with each other.
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Whereas someone like George Washington, your ancestor had much more patience with people.
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And he saw the two factions that succeeded him fighting bitterly.
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And they, various people asked him, come back into power, come back into power.
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And I think what we see in the difference between these two characters is you, you got to expect
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any system you create to be dominated by infighting in the early days and have the decency to step
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I think the other thing I learned from Oliver Cromwell is, yes, I think the sort of Calvinist
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tradition and the secular Calvinist tradition that we're a part of is the correct way to structure
00:19:00.860
You know, he's particularly known for his atrocities against Catholic groups in Ireland,
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who he didn't understand why they didn't just agree with him.
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His way of living life was better than their way of living life.
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And I think that part of that knowledge might be why I am so pro-pluralism in a way that other
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A different iteration of me from the past had a chance to try to enforce my cultural views
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I look at a more recent iteration of my family that tried to start a new country.
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The Free State of Jones, 15 of the 50 founding members of the Free State of Jones, there's
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I guess you could just watch the trailer, were either siblings of my ancestors or kids
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That's just basically my cultural, very recent cultural group.
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Okay, but none of them have created anything that lasted.
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And I think I have, I have a feeling that something that's missing from all of these
00:19:59.660
I mean, I know you, you know, America worked for a while, but you know, I wouldn't say that
00:20:03.340
there's any cohesive culture that has, has survived.
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You know, I mean, there's, there's like general trends and stuff.
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The American cultural export is now the world's dominant culture.
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Various American subcultures have inspired other, other cultural movements, but I wouldn't
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say that there's any sort of cohesive worldview or mindset.
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And I think this is one reason why we're seeing...
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The super virus is an American, we may hate it because it's...
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It's not, it's not going to be intergenerationally durable.
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I think my intuition is that if you have a secular culture or religion, you need to have
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something that is unchanging or a set of values that is cohesive, a set of traditions that
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is cohesive, because there does need to be something consistent for a group to cling to,
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or hold to, or say, this is what makes us different.
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Because if you don't have something that says, this is what makes us who we are, it's going
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And I think that even happened with the colonies and with the early Americas is, well, a lot of
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people I think would like to argue, oh, this is America.
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There's a lot of disagreement over what that is.
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And there are plenty of arguments about, oh, America is this and America is that.
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But there is, there is no sort of standard agreement and there is no cohesive sense of
00:21:20.540
Like, it's very different if you go to a nation like Japan and people will actually say things
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People might be like, well, this is America and we do things this way.
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And they might all like consistently talk really loudly and wear shorts and stuff.
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You set up the problem, which is to say no one has durably accomplished this before.
00:21:43.900
But I think America as a cultural institution came the closest to doing this.
00:21:48.300
Now, the question is, how do you, we set up the way that various groups fail by saying,
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What you need to do is you need a mechanism for determining what's true that is strongly
00:22:02.940
culturally adhered to, but that is not based on a static text, basically.
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So the criteria for authenticity we lay out in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion could
00:22:14.380
be an example of one of these, where it is clearly differentiated from what is quote unquote,
00:22:22.060
We believe a lot of things that the scientific community doesn't believe, right?
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We doubt a lot of what the scientific community says, but it is a different cultural institution
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But a cultural institution that doesn't say truth is X, it says, this is how you determine truth.
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And I like that, but I think you're totally missing the beat here, which is that the standards
00:22:53.180
What makes a culture special is a sense of belonging, a sense of pride, a sense of identity.
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I mean, that's what makes kids want to raise their children in that culture.
00:23:02.060
You honestly think that people of a certain culture are going to raise their kids with a
00:23:06.940
And those kids are going to be like, oh yeah, it's that standard of truth.
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You have to create cultural pride and cultural identity, which are two things that we work
00:23:18.060
You need a lifestyle, you need a psychology, you need tradition, and you need a sense of
00:23:24.860
But the point being, okay, is historically, right, there are cultures that have came very
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close to being true, I would say, secular religions.
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I'd actually argue that early Judaism very much was a secular religion.
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It was a cultural system, a system of laws for how humans interact with each other and
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And this I'm talking about pre-Second Temple Judaism, you know, when the temple and the
00:23:53.180
It was a religion and a state and a, and it adapted to current, at the time, understandings of reality.
00:24:02.140
The problem is, is it encoded some of those and said, this is what you must believe in the future.
00:24:10.460
And I told my kids, axiomatically, evolution is something we believe in.
00:24:16.780
Our current understanding of physics is something we believe in.
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Instead of saying, no, here is a system for how you should investigate reality.
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And this is how, and I think another thing that you mentioned here, culturally and psychologically,
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we are very different from the mainstream population.
00:24:32.860
And we engage disproportionately with people of our cultural and psychological systems.
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Now, fortunately, I think our psychological systems are fairly intuitive to people of a
00:24:44.860
And we've been able to build up a network of families with that sociological disposition
00:24:50.140
to the extent that I am very confident that our kids will be able to find wives within that community
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and husbands within that community, and that they will be able to feel this is who I am.
00:25:00.140
And this is how I'm different than the world at large.
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But that does require intentionally othering them to an extent through the ways that they're named,
00:25:09.340
through the ways that we, we raise them through the holidays we raise them with,
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through the ways we tell them to engage with concepts like, you know, trauma, sadness, et cetera.
00:25:17.420
These are sinful from our cultural perspective, which is considered pretty weird and distasteful
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So through creating these strong differentiators, but very carefully not encoding science accidentally,
00:25:31.980
like modern understandings of the world into the core belief system,
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we can create something that other existing religious cultural traditions can't do.
00:25:45.660
So yes, historically, always going back to the old texts allowed for more intergenerational
00:25:52.540
fidelity of information transfer, cultural transfer, and allowed these cultures to out-compete
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other cultures that were more open to adapting.
00:26:00.140
And the problem is, is the internet exists now.
00:26:04.700
And the problem is, is that certain scientific facts are really, really hard to ignore.
00:26:12.540
Whether it's, you know, the earth, it revolves around the sun and there's planets,
00:26:18.700
I mean, there's not like a dome over us with holes poked in it or evolution or dinosaurs or,
00:26:26.220
These are becoming increasingly hard to teach your kids these things aren't true
00:26:32.540
and still have those kids stay with your tradition.
00:26:35.020
They are basically big holes that allow any sort of engagement with the outside world or
00:26:43.580
But Malcolm, I still think you're totally missing the beat here.
00:26:46.300
You've spent the vast majority of this entire conversation obsessing over standards of truth.
00:26:50.940
And I get that this is, we're talking about secular religions, but what you're totally
00:26:54.620
missing here is I think even in super faith-heavy religions, what they actually believe about
00:27:05.340
I mean, I'm sure that there are some people who are deep in the doctrine, but really this
00:27:11.260
They stay in it, they raise their families in it, and they have their own kids and raise them
00:27:20.300
And I think that what you're missing here is the true key.
00:27:23.660
What you're missing is the levels of deconversion within the LDS church.
00:27:30.060
Because we're talking about a secular religion.
00:27:31.820
So I think the point is have strong criterias for truth.
00:27:34.940
Don't be married to any particular scientific doctrine.
00:27:38.940
And the rest of it is, and the reason why no other secular experiment has really succeeded
00:27:46.780
They all had broad concepts, but they didn't have othering, like you were pointing out.
00:27:52.780
They didn't have a sense of pride and cohesion.
00:28:03.820
And that is how we will outcompete previous secular experiments.
00:28:07.420
I guess the difference between our conversation here is you wanted to highlight, and I think
00:28:13.500
you highlighted it very eloquently, why we will outcompete previous secular traditions.
00:28:19.580
And I was trying to highlight the advantage that we have over current religious traditions.
00:28:25.500
Which is to say that if you leave these vulnerabilities in your system, to you, they might be trivial.
00:28:31.260
You might be like, oh, secular things don't have these vulnerabilities.
00:28:33.980
But most of the future, like most secular traditions are going to die out of the near future because
00:28:40.300
they're not able to motivate reproductive capacity.
00:28:42.940
So I personally, like when I'm looking at the future, I'm not asking how are we going to
00:28:48.940
compete with or outcompete secular society because most of secular society is going to die.
00:28:54.060
I'm asking how do we compete the religious frameworks?
00:28:57.820
How do we outcompete the religious frameworks? And if we are able to do that, if we are able to have
00:29:03.420
rapid technological advancement, right, and technological engagement from our descendants,
00:29:09.180
if, as many people say, engaging with technology intrinsically calls its birth race to collapse.
00:29:14.860
That's what they tell us, right? I don't think that's true.
00:29:17.660
Engaging with technology is intrinsically caustic to systems that try to tell people
00:29:23.100
about a metaphysical framework for reality that's wrong.
00:29:25.820
Well, I think what the problem that we're seeing, too, is is engaging with technology
00:29:30.380
is highly correlated with the lifestyle of someone who doesn't have a religious tradition.
00:29:35.340
And so people just assume, oh, well, it is therefore causational,
00:29:38.700
that engaging with technology causes you to lose your faith.
00:29:42.140
Whereas really, we just this is actually on easy mode.
00:29:45.100
No one has tried to combine secularism with a strong, cohesive culture before.
00:29:53.980
Which actually makes things really exciting, because basically,
00:29:57.500
if you want to create a new secular dynasty, you know, in culture, whatever.
00:30:00.300
Well, what happened before was a very specific caveat, which I've mentioned,
00:30:03.580
and I don't think that you realize how important this caveat is.
00:30:06.220
All right, play it up again. Use different words.
00:30:08.140
They do not encode current scientific dogma into their beliefs about the metaphysical nature of reality.
00:30:16.460
And they do not outsource how they search for truth to the quote unquote experts or scientific community.
00:30:24.540
So because there have been previous attempts that have done that.
00:30:27.660
I think that you might not have read as many Victorian like weird family experiments as I have,
00:30:33.820
but there have been a few attempts to do that, and they've fallen apart.
00:30:38.060
But they haven't done all of these things together, which I think is where the power of this comes from.
00:30:44.220
When people have done these sort of secular experiments before, they focus on one concept, like evolution.
00:30:49.260
And they've tried to build the entire religious system around the concept of evolution.
00:30:53.580
And that just leads to everything falling apart.
00:30:56.380
What you need is a system to be based around a differential from mainstream scientific consensus system for determining what is true,
00:31:05.580
but that is able to quickly adapt and do so in a non-hierarchical fashion.
00:31:14.140
Because again, like to some extent Catholics and Mormons have figured this out,
00:31:18.220
but they're just very slow to adapt because of the hierarchical organization and they slow down technological progress within these institutions.
00:31:25.340
And they're hurt through technological engagement.
00:31:28.060
You know, a Catholic who uses cell phones is going to have way less kids than a Catholic who doesn't.
00:31:34.220
I mean, you could just look, even if they're conservative, I'm sure you can just look at the data on this and you'll see this.
00:31:38.220
Whereas if you create a cultural institution that tells people what they're meant to optimize for and adapt using current information on the world,
00:31:48.140
you might be able to have a cultural group that does not, like cell phone use, AI use, is not going to decrease the number of offspring people have.
00:31:58.460
And this is really important when you consider that the difficulty level that our kids are going to experiment in terms of cultural temptations is going to be higher than our generation's difficulty level.
00:32:10.620
They are going to have to be able to engage with AIs that can be the perfect girlfriend or husband, right?
00:32:17.340
In a world where it is likely even harder to build sustainable relationships.
00:32:22.460
So what motivates them to do that? What motivates them to breed in that environment?
00:32:27.340
I think that many of these older systems that can only compete by telling people not to engage with technology, which I think is going to be an increasingly successful strategy.
00:32:36.540
Yeah, they'll continue existing in the future, but they won't have economic power because I think technology is critical to massive economic power and military power to an extent.
00:32:47.660
So you're engaging with these systems, even if you're a smaller cultural group,
00:32:52.540
if you're the cultural group that is engaging readily with AI in a way that isn't decreasing fertility rates, you are going to just dramatically outcompete cultural groups that have been able to keep their fertility rates high by disengaging from the internet, disengaging from AI, disengaging from cell phones, disengaging from genetic research.
00:33:11.740
So obligatory shout out, we're creating essentially a show us yours and we'll show you ours index of different cultural experiments in which various families of cultural entrepreneurs basically share their metrics, you know, like how many members you have, what's your birth rate?
00:33:30.020
What, you know, is your income rate, you know, like what level of security do you have, et cetera, educational outcomes, like a lot of different measures, mental health, et cetera.
00:33:38.960
Because over generations, we want a lot of these independent cultures, religious and secular, that are trying to endure into the future to be able to compare notes and cultural technologies, meaning that if one culture notices it like, oh, this culture over here, like really great birth rates, amazing mental health, a lot of security and stability.
00:33:57.300
Like they seem to be killing it, like they seem to be killing it, hey, what are some traditions we can learn from here, you know, that we might adopt, like for our own people.
00:34:04.700
It allows a memetic lateral gene transfer or memetic horizontal gene transfer, whichever example you want to use.
00:34:12.400
Yeah. So, I mean, we don't think that we necessarily have the answers, but we also think that this experiment is something that should be run.
00:34:18.800
Obviously, we will not know what cultural technologies will end up working in the long run.
00:34:23.580
Only our descendants will know. But if you're interested in joining us in this experiment, please email us through our foundation.
00:34:31.200
We will add you to our growing, essentially, list of people who are entering this.
00:34:36.180
And then as it grows and as we get off the ground and get started, we'll start sending out these initial reports and surveys so everyone can report on where they are and what they're doing.
00:34:44.680
Well, I mean, so the index, the point of it, that's what this institution is called, it really only has two rules for people who join or cultural groups that join, which is you get your kids until they decide to get married.
00:34:58.760
And when they're married, they get to choose what culture they create for their family and for their kids.
00:35:04.620
Basically, that means up to 18 years of age, right?
00:35:07.100
So the first 18 years of a person's life are your chance to culturally pitch them, but you cannot mandate that they stay in your culture.
00:35:13.060
If they don't agree that the culture they were raised in was a good culture, they get to choose to leave.
00:35:17.400
And this is, you know, a lot of people sometimes will ask us questions when we have this sort of radical, you own your kids to an extent as a culture.
00:35:26.100
They're like, yeah, but what if a culture abuses their kids or what if a culture disfigures their kids or something?
00:35:31.080
Yeah, well, then their kids will leave that culture at disproportionate rates.
00:35:34.400
You know, historically, kids weren't able to do that.
00:35:36.540
But today, yeah, especially within an institution like the index.
00:35:39.640
And the other thing is that you record this information and you allow your kids to record, you know, how they did as an adult.
00:35:45.280
And you can have all your kids say, oh, yeah, that thing my family did really messed me up.
00:35:49.980
Let's look for different cultural practices within the index system that we can adapt.
00:35:54.740
And when I'm talking about lateral or horizontal gene transfers, so people know what that is, that's like in a bacteria where a bacteria might exchange genes with another bacteria that end up being useful to both bacteria without needing to actually breed with them.
00:36:07.660
A lot of people can be like, this is a weird system to build is we allow for some intercultural practices that require economies of scale.
00:36:18.260
So examples of this would be things like marriage markets, which require economies of scale to work or, you know, dating markets, stuff like that.
00:36:27.800
You know, we're developing our educational system, but in a way that won't ideologically indoctrinate kids.
00:36:32.680
Everyone who's part of the index would gain value from a system like that.
00:36:36.740
So there is value in everyone who's part of the index, whatever weird culture they're experimenting with to engage with us.
00:36:43.420
And it raises our kids within this mindset and this knowledge that, you know, when they have kids, when they start a family, they get to choose to massively adapt whatever systems we raise them with, which leads their culture to be very accelerationist.
00:36:59.400
But again, you know, if you look at Puritan spotting, traditionally Calvinist cultures have done that.
00:37:04.740
So it's, it's, it's, it's, again, it's weird, it may sound weird to people, but it's not that weird from the perspective of our cultural tradition.
00:37:11.760
We're just adding a few additional rules to see if we can stop this death spiral our culture has been in basically ever since America was founded.
00:37:23.960
I think it's pretty fun for a culture that doesn't believe in happiness or fun.
00:37:31.760
But yeah, we have a lot of fun and I love you so much, Malcolm.
00:37:40.440
You're going to make burgers for the family and they're going to be delicious and the kids are going to enjoy them.
00:37:45.060
And then we're going to go play with our chicks in the bar.
00:37:47.500
And we are so excited that we get to cosplay a trad lifestyle.
00:37:57.680
Well, that's the thing you cos, what's the difference between living something and cosplaying it?
00:38:01.380
But yeah, we're just, it's like this weird kink where we're like 24-7 trad cosplayers.
00:38:10.320
What is the difference between cosplaying and reality in the end?
00:38:14.340
It's just we're pretending we're doing it ironically.
00:38:16.180
Yeah, that's a thing people do a lot these days.
00:38:21.620
Because I don't want people to judge me for not doing it perfectly.
00:38:27.080
We have chickens and lots of kids and a weird religion.
00:38:33.820
It's actually not far from where your ancestor, George Washington, fought the battle right next to the-