Based Camp - July 15, 2023


Based Camp: Population Collapse and The Pronatalist Foundations Real Goals


Episode Stats

Length

54 minutes

Words per Minute

190.28464

Word Count

10,438

Sentence Count

613

Misogynist Sentences

13

Hate Speech Sentences

56


Summary

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm talk about what it's like to live in a brothel in South Korea, and how they ended up there. They also talk about their own experiences with living in poverty, and what it really means to be poor in the 21st century.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. So the thing that we are most known for publicly is our stuff on demographic
00:00:07.460 collapse, collapsing populations, and the effects it'll have on society. Now, this is not something
00:00:12.040 that we have talked about on our podcast. As to why we haven't talked about this on our podcast
00:00:16.760 yet, it is because we've talked about it in a million other interviews in a million other
00:00:20.800 places. Everywhere, everywhere. Yeah, and I figured people coming to our podcast, they don't
00:00:25.600 want to see it. They've already heard this talk before. But now I am realizing from some
00:00:30.560 of the comments that some of the people don't know it and haven't seen it. And so instead
00:00:35.580 of giving our standard stump speech on this, I want to engage with this topic more conversationally
00:00:41.480 the way that we typically do this podcast. Because when I've sat down and tried to do
00:00:45.200 this iteration of the podcast before, I just end up narrating my stump speech. And then
00:00:50.500 Simone's sitting there not talking or Simone's doing her stump speech. And so let's see if
00:00:55.260 we can turn this into a conversation. Would you like to know more?
00:00:59.260 All right, Malcolm. So what happened aside from you and ending up living in a brothel
00:01:04.140 when you went to South Korea?
00:01:06.660 Well, where I always start with, and this was really where I started to panic about this.
00:01:11.240 It's actually kind of telling that you were living in a brothel and not like in a maternity
00:01:15.020 ward of a hospital.
00:01:16.500 Yeah, let's talk about living in a brothel because this is part of the story that people
00:01:19.200 don't know. I had gone to Korea after I graduated from Stanford Business School.
00:01:24.220 And I had sent my wife, we had just done a startup together, which we had invested a lot of our
00:01:30.020 money into. Google had then hired me and then waited six months to employ me. And during that
00:01:36.560 time, the little money we had left after the startup had slowly dwindled to nothing. And then
00:01:41.920 you got into Cambridge for your graduate degree.
00:01:44.160 Yeah. And I was also, in contrast, put in a, because at Cambridge, you belong to the university,
00:01:50.240 but then also you belong to a college. And I'm living in the Catholic dorm, the Catholic
00:01:56.840 college, St. Edmunds. And here you are.
00:01:59.420 Well, and it's this beautiful dorm.
00:02:01.720 Gorgeous.
00:02:01.960 Gorgeous.
00:02:02.680 Yeah.
00:02:02.940 So, I mean, I had to find a way to pay for you to go there, right? And so I ended up having to drop
00:02:08.040 the contract with Google because they couldn't find, I don't know what happened. Like they had
00:02:11.600 this system where they used to be able to hire people, but they wouldn't have a position for you.
00:02:15.900 So I left them and I ended up going to Korea, but I had to live as inexpensively as possible
00:02:22.360 to support my wife. So I was actually the director of strategy at the number one early stage
00:02:26.360 firm in the country. And this was by a government survey at the time. Like they asked all the
00:02:29.900 entrepreneurs where they most want money. Think of it like Y Combinator for Korea. And that story
00:02:34.640 actually gets really crazy and interesting. But anyway, so I chose to stay at a place that was
00:02:40.200 smaller than the room I'm in now. My entire room was really small. It was a twin and then half of
00:02:46.100 the space that a twin would be as a little walking corridor. And then they had a glass cabinet, which
00:02:51.640 was just where the toilet was. And then there was a little shower on top of you because they didn't
00:02:55.080 have a different space for the shower and the toilet. And one day I remember I was walking back to
00:02:59.320 where I was and somebody at my firm, they go, no, no, no, you've got to stop, stop walking
00:03:03.920 down into that neighborhood. It's a really dangerous neighborhood. And I was like, what
00:03:08.740 are you talking about? They're like, look, if you need to get to the subway, here's the
00:03:11.660 way you could go. And I'm like, I, this is the only way I know to get to where I live.
00:03:16.400 So I kept walking and then they're like, okay, well, you just can't walk. You cannot walk
00:03:21.140 down that particular street. And I was like, look, I know no other way. And they're like, okay,
00:03:25.800 at least I'll accompany you. And then I turned to go down this alley when they're like, actually,
00:03:30.920 like, seriously, there's got to be another way to get to where you live. I even can't
00:03:34.720 follow you down this alley. And this alley is where my apartment was. And what I realized
00:03:39.920 is in Korea, anyone who's been there, like it's such a nice, clean place that apparently
00:03:44.740 like even this like really ghetto area where I was living to me as, as a, somebody from the
00:03:50.420 U S felt like really clean and nice. I mean, I guess I should have known given how cheap the
00:03:54.640 apartments were there, but the reason specifically they said is they go, this is where all the
00:03:58.360 brothels are. This is the brothel street. And I was like, Oh, that maybe that's why everyone's
00:04:03.380 so nice to me.
00:04:06.960 And yet, and then, but what did you learn? I mean, I mean, it's, it's, again, it's telling
00:04:11.260 that you are surrounded by people who are maybe interested in sex, but not families. You weren't
00:04:17.900 enough families. You weren't in like a tenement full of crying babies. You were in just, but
00:04:22.600 anyway, so to get to the part of the story that people normally hear is I was working at
00:04:27.140 this firm and there was this one day where I've got a plan where the country is going
00:04:29.940 to be in 50 to a hundred years. So I'm, I'm, I'm making this plan and I'm looking at the
00:04:36.800 numbers and I'm like, well, shit, there's not going to be a country in a hundred years.
00:04:41.220 If you look at their current fertility rate, which is like 0.79, 0.8, depending on what you're
00:04:45.860 looking at, that means for every hundred Koreans in life today, there will be 6.4 to like 5.9
00:04:52.320 great grandchildren. And this number is decreasing almost every year. So it's almost certainly
00:04:56.540 going to be less than that. And you can't survive in the country. If you're looking at
00:05:01.740 like a 93% population collapse over the next century, your economic systems fundamentally
00:05:07.160 cease to work. And I went to the other partners in my firm and I was like, Hey, this is a problem.
00:05:14.760 Like I don't understand how there is a future to the Korean economy. And they're like, Oh yeah,
00:05:21.980 we all know this. Like everyone in the country, like in the financial class knows this. We just
00:05:26.720 pretend like it's not true because the entire economy stops working the moment we recognize
00:05:31.220 this. And this is something people often don't understand. I mean, what do you mean the entire
00:05:34.600 economy starts working? So here I need to explain how debt works because it's this miraculous
00:05:38.840 thing when things are growing. If I'm making a $10 investment and $8 of that investment is
00:05:44.700 debt and $2 of that investment is equity and it grows by just 10%, my equity investment
00:05:50.800 has actually grown by 50%. If it shrinks by just 10%, my equity investment has decreased
00:05:57.120 by 50%. We have leveraged our land, our businesses, our houses, our families, our students, our cities,
00:06:05.560 our states, our nation states. Literally, it's not like we've taken out leverage on one thing
00:06:12.160 in the economy. We have taken out leverage on literally every layer of the economy, which
00:06:18.520 was beautiful in terms of the prosperity it provided while everything was growing. But
00:06:22.080 the problem is, is everything was only growing in the developed world because the number of
00:06:27.560 workers and consumers was growing exponentially, but the productivity per worker was growing linearly.
00:06:33.880 When I came back to the US, it was like traveling back in time 20, 30 years, because we in the US at our
00:06:44.060 current rate of fertility collapse are about where Korea was in the mid nineties. When I'm talking about
00:06:50.440 the rate of fertility collapse in Korea, I can use fixed numbers, the current fertility rate to talk
00:06:55.580 about how scary things get. But if I'm going to talk about it in the US, because we're still early in
00:07:00.000 the collapse process, I need to project forwards what the fertility rate is going to be. So if the
00:07:05.680 US fertility rate continues to decline at the same rate it has over the past 10 years going forwards,
00:07:13.040 and we have one generation every 30 years, that means for every 100 Americans alive today, there will
00:07:19.540 be 4.3 great grandchildren. So we are looking at an absolutely catastrophic collapse in the US if we
00:07:26.380 can't get things under control. So I think we need to ask ourselves, who has this under control? Which
00:07:31.400 groups are persistently resistant to this? And it's the groups that deviate most from the mainstream
00:07:36.900 society, but also the groups with the most hope for the future. So if you look around the world, yes,
00:07:43.560 generally the wealthier a country is, the lower its fertility rate is going to be, but you will see
00:07:48.480 some noticeable differentiations from that. For example, you have the US and Israel, which have unusually
00:07:53.760 high fertility rates. And then you have countries like the block countries in China, which have
00:07:58.120 unusually low demographic rates for their economic situation. What appears to be the case here is the
00:08:04.280 less hope a country has, and the more people feel like they are only having kids to service an economic
00:08:10.100 elite, the fewer kids they're going to have. Where you can really see this play out is the one real
00:08:16.600 counter to this rule of no country ever gets its demographics back up again, happened in Georgia,
00:08:23.320 which began to happen in 2013, after they kicked out the last of the communist former rulers and
00:08:30.920 moved to total self-management. And then you get this rapid reversal in fertility rates, because people
00:08:35.900 began to feel like they had hope again, and that they weren't just having kids to be like a grist for
00:08:40.240 some machine that didn't care about them. But I want to hear how you began to engage with some of
00:08:46.040 these ideas, Simone. What really blew my mind was when you thought to ask Spencer Greenberg to borrow
00:08:53.760 some survey data that he had to find what traits correlated with families that were having a lot of
00:09:00.000 kids. Because the big question we had was, all right, well, if a lot of cultures are just going to be
00:09:05.460 extinguishing themselves, like in South Korea, like which cultures on the flip side of that are
00:09:10.160 going to be inheriting the future? Yes, because we don't believe that just a collapsing world economy
00:09:16.060 is a reason to bring kids into the world. We also will, we also believe it's expected that there
00:09:21.180 will be a collapsing world economy. It's going to happen. So the bigger question is, okay, so that's
00:09:24.640 going to happen. I mean, ideally, nations will plan for a little bit better. We're trying to make that
00:09:29.420 a possibility. By advocating, that's a big purpose of our foundation. Yes. A lot of people
00:09:35.260 see us as, like, we're more like a climate change organization that's like, climate change is going
00:09:39.800 to happen no matter what we do. We should start planning around it at this point. Yeah. But then
00:09:44.640 on the flip side, it's also really important to just look beyond that, to look to the distant future
00:09:48.980 of what will the future of humanity look like in the face of this if there is an intervention,
00:09:53.960 if there isn't an intervention. If there isn't an intervention, what we can expect is a cultural mass
00:10:00.240 extinction. And then the question is, okay, well, if there's a cultural mass extinction,
00:10:03.680 will it lead to, like, a smaller but maybe super diverse ecosystem that then grows from there,
00:10:10.240 which is kind of what we'd be cool with? Or is it going to end up with a monoculture?
00:10:14.500 Anyway, we... Well, explain what you mean. So, I mean, first I'm going to say our naive assumption
00:10:18.460 going into this is that most cultural groups that weren't religious would die off, and most cultural
00:10:25.200 groups that were religious would stay. Yeah. And individual religiosity would be reinforced,
00:10:30.920 because the amount, not a person's religion, but their amount of religiosity is highly heritable
00:10:35.920 when you look at twin studies. So these are... So there's different ways of doing this. You can do
00:10:39.860 this using polygenic risk scores, but you can also do it using twins who are separated at birth,
00:10:45.400 identical twins. And then contrasting with fraternal twins who were separated at birth and raised by
00:10:49.000 different families. So they're the same ethnicity. They're in other ways very similar to each other.
00:10:53.380 What's... The only thing that would really cause this difference is if it was in some way associated with
00:10:57.780 genes. This is how you can get an idea of how much of a person's sociological profile within a specific
00:11:01.880 metric is genetic. Anyway, so I was like, okay, so what this is probably going to do is select for
00:11:06.860 religiosity, both culturally and likely genetically. And that's not what we found. And so up until that
00:11:13.480 point, we hadn't really been freaked out, because I like religiosity. People might... I'm fairly pro-religiosity.
00:11:20.120 I think our family, while we are technically secular, we are religious extremists, and we live
00:11:26.040 kind of like religious extremists, and we practice our life kind of like religious extremists,
00:11:29.600 and almost all of our friends are religious extremists. So... And we should be clear.
00:11:33.840 Religiosity doesn't mean necessarily that someone believes in God or adheres to a specific religion.
00:11:39.520 Religiosity is fervency of faith in something. So some of the most religious people are actually
00:11:44.400 atheists. You'll know, because they'll tell you. This is why I should have known this wasn't true.
00:11:49.080 If you hung out with skeptic communities or in online spheres, what you'll know is that many of the
00:11:54.060 the people in these communities used to be some of the biggest firebrands before deconverting.
00:11:58.860 And when I think about my daily life, when I think about like the sociological profile of
00:12:02.440 religiosity, I haven't been preached to by a Christian in like 10 years. I get accosted on
00:12:08.000 the streets by progressive extremists with their preaching every other week. So it's clear that this
00:12:14.780 mind virus in our society is uniquely good at peeling out people from these cultures with a high level of
00:12:21.940 sociological religiosity. But I'd love you to go into the data and what we found, Simone.
00:12:27.900 So what we did find correlated highly with high birth rates is outgroup hatred or dislike. So this
00:12:35.940 is people responding to questions asking if they'd be cool if like one of their kids dated someone of a
00:12:40.800 different race or cultural group. And also very keen comfort with hierarchy and like high power
00:12:47.820 distance. So really what you're looking at is xenophobic authoritarians, right? I mean, that's
00:12:53.880 kind of like the...
00:12:54.800 So if you look at it, it's something called right wing authoritarian personality. You can look it up
00:12:58.660 on Wikipedia. There's a topic of this. And it's actually highly heredible as well, which is done using
00:13:04.340 polygenic data, like all these other things. So it is something that can be condensed within a population.
00:13:09.760 If it is really genetically successful, which is showing itself to be right now.
00:13:15.220 And it makes sense. Like, I mean, in the end we were like, oh, duh, like, of course it's not
00:13:18.920 religiosity because religiosity isn't going to maintain cultural fidelity. What will maintain
00:13:24.020 cultural fidelity is not allowing your people to consider outside ideas. Like that is a kind of a
00:13:30.040 big thing. More authoritarian cultures are going to keep people in, have strict rules. A degradation or
00:13:36.000 erosion of rules and discipline is one of the things that causes a hard culture to become a
00:13:41.200 soft culture. And soft cultures are those that are most likely to see their fertility rates degrade
00:13:45.860 over time because there's basically less motivation to do anything difficult.
00:13:49.280 So the right wing authoritarian personality is not actually a right wing thing. It's seen equally
00:13:54.020 in both extremists on the right and extremists on the left. This is what, if you're a left wing
00:13:59.420 person, makes you Antifa, for example. Just an extreme hatred about groups, unwillingness to listen to
00:14:04.840 anyone else. And a preference for internal hierarchical structures and the dehumanization
00:14:09.360 of people who aren't like everything that I think anyone really who is honest about what Antifa really
00:14:15.080 stands for. I mean, it's a fascist organization that just labels itself anti-fascist. It's like
00:14:19.480 the Patriot Act, blaming itself as patriotic when it is anything but patriotic. But anyway, so you have
00:14:26.040 these Antifa goon type personality clusters, which is going to increase. So why is it called the right
00:14:30.920 wing authoritarian population cluster? It's called that because it was named by professors at
00:14:35.780 universities who saw all these traits as negative and like were unable to see them in their own
00:14:40.640 ideological faction. But since then, other professors have gone, looked at this and found that it actually
00:14:47.040 is present in leftist extremists as well. So essentially what you're getting is this personality
00:14:52.120 cluster that creates dangerous ideological extremists, is what's being culturally and genetically selected
00:14:59.240 for in our society right now, not religiosity. And again, this makes sense, right?
00:15:04.900 What's really cool is you can see this phenomenon happening in real time. If you look at the period
00:15:10.800 where fertility rates started collapsing in the US, and then you lay that over voting patterns,
00:15:16.100 you can begin to see the two parties shift further and further apart due to this new pressure in both
00:15:22.840 the cultures and sociological profiles that are being selected for, which I think can give us some idea of
00:15:28.740 how quickly changes selective pressures like this can be represented in major real world events.
00:15:37.280 And this is not an older phenomenon either. It's continuing to happen, as can be seen in this
00:15:42.480 other graph here. Is it likely that selective pressures like this is solely to explain this phenomenon?
00:15:49.020 No, very unlikely. There's likely a number of other pressures that are causing this cultural drift
00:15:53.600 we're seeing here. However, it is very interesting that the phenomenon would predict that we would
00:15:59.420 see this in the data. And it's also something we see in the data at exactly the time we would predict
00:16:04.440 it. Right. So it makes a lot of sense that these cultures would be like this because cultures that are
00:16:11.080 more porous, more capable of losing people are going to lose them and degrade into other cultures or lose
00:16:18.580 their culture or lose their populations. Those cultures that kind of have these, these high walls
00:16:23.220 around them, these, these barriers are going to be.
00:16:26.300 Well, also personality wise. So you are somebody who has this religiosity thing. This seems to correlate
00:16:33.260 most with like how much you study your culture, how much you study your religion, which isn't actually
00:16:40.100 that protective of staying within a culture. Whereas not listening to outsiders and not engaging with
00:16:45.380 outside ideas, that's going to be very protective of staying within a birth culture.
00:16:50.380 Yeah. Yeah. Like I can actually think so. A lot of the most religious people I know have actually
00:16:54.340 switched across many religions over time. Like they've gone from joining the Rajneesh and wearing
00:16:59.280 orange and having really wild names to going to conservative Christian. And so that shows that the
00:17:04.220 religiosity always has been high, but they did move from one culture to another. Whereas people who are
00:17:09.900 much more closed minded or unwilling to look at outside ideas wouldn't do that kind of switching.
00:17:14.080 Right. But, but so religiosity, high religiosity of people who stay within these, these harder
00:17:18.260 cultures. So what are these hard cultures that you're talking about and why are they useful to
00:17:22.800 fertility rates? Humanity can be thought of as our sociological tendencies, the aspects of our
00:17:29.500 personality that are predilected one way due to our biology and our genes. This can be thought of as
00:17:35.420 sort of like our firmware or our hardware. Then sitting on top of that are memetic clusters. Today,
00:17:41.720 when we talk about memes, we often talk about memes as infecting an individual and then using that
00:17:46.200 individual to replicate themselves through converting other individuals. But historically,
00:17:49.640 memetic clusters function very differently than that. So what we today call religions and cultures,
00:17:54.440 which in the book, The Pragmatist Guided Craft and Religion, we call cultivars,
00:17:58.000 can be thought of as these sort of memetic clusters that sat on top of our firmware, but was also subject
00:18:04.340 to the same pressures that determined individual fitness. Because mass conversions during early human
00:18:11.020 history were actually fairly rare and occurred only during very specific periods of time. And even when
00:18:17.920 they did occur, often the culture would shift dramatically. Anyway, to get to the main point
00:18:22.360 here, the level to which a person's culture carried with their family over time was really,
00:18:28.880 really high in a historic context. And what that means is that the evolutionary processes could
00:18:35.180 apply to cultures and cultural practices, which increased individual biological fitness could
00:18:42.340 outcompete cultural practices, which did not increase individual biological fitness. This is how you find
00:18:48.580 things like Judaism and Islam figuring out handwashing literally hundreds of years before the secular
00:18:55.720 world figured out handwashing because there were selective pressures on the groups that practice
00:18:59.460 handwashing rituals that you didn't see in the groups that didn't. And this also has a play in many
00:19:03.740 psychological tendencies that individuals have, right? So by that, what I mean is wherever you look in
00:19:10.500 the world, whether it's Ramadan or Feast of the Firstborn or Lent, you have these arbitrary self-denial
00:19:15.460 rituals, which we now know strengthen the inhibitory pathways in your prefrontal cortex and make it easier to
00:19:21.480 shut down in truth of thoughts. And now the secular world is beginning to figure this out, whether it's
00:19:26.120 juice cleanses or like arbitrary fasting rituals. So these older cultural groups actually did a lot
00:19:34.540 to both increase a person's mental health while also increasing their fertility. This is why out of
00:19:40.900 pretty much all of these widely successful cultural groups in the world, almost all of them have some
00:19:45.640 level of underlying homophobia in them. It increases biological fitness, even though it decreases
00:19:51.360 individual quality of life. So we're not saying that all of these are good things, but you will see
00:19:56.720 these patterns begin to exist across cultural groups that systemically find themselves out-competing
00:20:01.740 cultural groups. So the tendency to stay within one of these cultural groups that has all of these
00:20:08.180 software patches that co-evolved with our biology over time leaves individuals to often be
00:20:15.340 psychologically healthier. That's why you see religious individuals almost always being
00:20:18.140 psychologically healthier in sort of big studies done on this, unless they're like born same-sex
00:20:22.760 attracted or something like that. And then you get negative outcomes, but same-sex attracted
00:20:26.920 individuals born into religious communities have higher fertility rates even today. So it's still
00:20:33.800 optimizing for like technically what was being selected for when some cultures were out-competing other
00:20:39.020 cultures. So this tendency to not listen to outsiders and to think less of outsiders is of course
00:20:45.220 going to be protective of people in iterations of these traditional cultural groups. So the
00:20:51.180 iterations of Christianity that were more open to outsiders, more open to outside ideas, these were
00:20:56.980 the most porous to the virus and the first to die. They got infected and then the virus started using them
00:21:03.520 to just replicate the virus itself. So let's talk about this concept of the virus. If we think of
00:21:09.800 cultural groups as these sort of evolving entities, well, there's one strategy for an evolving entity that
00:21:17.400 something could optimize itself around. It could say, I actually don't care about increasing an individual's
00:21:22.880 biological fitness. What I'm going to do is I am going to convert individuals to this new cultural
00:21:27.900 practice. Then I am going to use them to just convert other individuals to this cultural practice. And in fact,
00:21:34.580 having kids is a bad thing because it lowers the amount of time they have to go out and just constantly
00:21:39.560 try to convert other people. We'll do another video on the virus and how it works and why it's best
00:21:44.960 thought of as a virus. And yeah, we'll do that some other time. But anyway, so it began to infect
00:21:50.660 these cultural groups that were more open, more pro-social, more open to outside ideas. And they began
00:21:55.960 to be mimetically sterilized. That is what caused the tendency of this strictly hierarchical,
00:22:02.900 I don't like outsiders view to be the most evolutionarily successful view within current
00:22:08.140 human context. When we found that out, that's when we began to panic. That's when we began to be like,
00:22:14.760 oh, it's not just religious people. Like we like religious people. It's a very specific sliver
00:22:20.500 of religious communities that the ISISification of the world is what we say. It's the ISIS-like
00:22:26.820 communities, not Muslim, Christians, Jews. We all have ISISs that are going to out-compete the other
00:22:34.180 groups. And that's where I began to really get worried about the future and began to say, well,
00:22:39.940 is it even possible to create an alliance of deviant cultures? So this is cultures that are
00:22:46.960 resistant to the virus, but that are also pluralistic and open to creating an intercultural
00:22:53.060 alliance to protect themselves, both from the virus, but then eventually from these other cultural
00:23:00.720 groups that once the virus is self-exterminated, because it is a self-exterminating thing, it's
00:23:05.540 culturally castigating people, can exist into the future. Yeah. So the big question is, will the future
00:23:11.560 be a coercionist caliphate of some sort, or will a future be a pluralistic, diverse ecosystem?
00:23:24.720 And we are hoping for and fighting for the latter, but we think that without intervention,
00:23:30.460 the former will form. Some of our progressive watchers, they may be listening to this, are like,
00:23:34.220 yeah, but what about a future that's like progressive and humanist? And it's like, you guys have
00:23:37.280 lost. You are so dead as a cultural group. You're like somebody who's experienced a lethal dose of
00:23:42.880 radiation and doesn't know that all their DNA has been scrambled already. Your fertility rates are so
00:23:48.400 catastrophically low. Your entire social structure, this is why the economic thing matters. Because
00:23:55.720 what it means, and this is what I really realized in Korea, is this dominant cultural group that exists
00:24:01.680 around the world today. The New York, Seoul, like these cultures differentiate a bit, or London or Paris.
00:24:07.280 It's the rural cultures that really differentiate. It's these weird, or the weird religious cultures,
00:24:11.400 like in New York, like who's really different in New York. It's the Hasidic Jews, right? Like
00:24:15.220 they're, they're from different cultural groups, but this dominant cultural group in Korea, I was able
00:24:20.500 to see how it reacted to demographic collapse. Like, does it have a state at which it realizes how bad the
00:24:27.200 situation has gotten? And what I learned is it doesn't, it does not have the capacity to react to this.
00:24:32.200 In fact, it just begins to double down on all of its positions more and more and more. Like in Korea,
00:24:37.960 what is it with women, the four nose movement. So you can see how Korea, so let's talk about how
00:24:42.220 screwed Korea is already. So not only are they in this horrible demographic situation right now,
00:24:47.780 but in addition to being in a horrible demographic situation, they're already at a point where 60% of
00:24:52.940 their population is above the age of 40. There's basically no way they could solve this. They would
00:24:56.640 need like a massive cultural push. They have spent $20 billion in like the past, how many years? And
00:25:02.240 it's, it's done almost nothing. And meanwhile, their society, if you look at the people who are
00:25:07.140 most infected with this, this sort of progressive mind virus that exists around the world, well,
00:25:12.020 now you've got the, the four nose movement, right? Which is women being like, no men, no sex,
00:25:16.980 no engagement. Like that's going to make the problem for that cultural group even worse.
00:25:21.200 And so what that showed me is, is that there is no like adaptive ability within this progressive
00:25:27.220 group. They're just going to go extinct. So when we think about the future, what we think about is
00:25:31.800 that the cultural groups that are conservative, that are fighting this mind virus, but want a
00:25:36.840 genuinely pluralistic future. And then the cultural groups that are just like progressives in disguise
00:25:41.300 and are just waiting for their turn to exercise their culture over other people and to try
00:25:47.180 their own shot. I mean, now that the progressives are done trying to erase everyone's
00:25:50.780 individual culture. They get a shot in the sun at doing it themselves. And, and they still make
00:25:55.840 good allies for now, but they're, they're clearly not long-term values aligned with us.
00:26:01.060 However, we also want to be clear that we don't see them. We don't think any cultural group other
00:26:05.280 than our own, because obviously it's our own cultural group. So obviously we're going to see
00:26:08.960 the better, but it's like a weird cultural group. It's just our family. So it's not like
00:26:12.220 anyone else, but we don't see any cultural group as being intrinsically better than any other
00:26:16.180 cultural group. Yeah. Like once someone in an interview asked me like, well, do you think there
00:26:19.880 are any groups that shouldn't be breeding? And I'm like, no, like I want everyone to be represented
00:26:24.640 in the future. I want more than everyone to be represented. I want new groups to form.
00:26:28.500 But this is, but this is really important. We do not have, if a group doesn't believe in gender
00:26:33.500 equality, we don't see that as a negative thing. And we don't see that group is needing to be
00:26:38.040 stamped out. Yeah. You do you. However, then people will be like, well, what are you talking
00:26:42.260 about? Like this idea of like xenophobic, like hierarchical groups. Why are you worried about
00:26:47.620 them? Right. We're worried about them, not because we see them as worse than other groups,
00:26:53.020 but we do have a vested interest in our own cultural group surviving for a long time.
00:26:57.760 And these groups will try to erase us. Yeah. Like it is naive to think that I could live in like ISIS
00:27:04.720 controlled territory and maintain broadly the lifestyle I maintain today. I and my kids would
00:27:10.120 be killed. I can even see this within the fact that our family uses things like IVF and genetic
00:27:16.060 selection. Like we do a lot of weird stuff that there are cultural groups in the U S where if
00:27:20.640 they had dominant power right now, they would try to erase us as a cultural group. And that's why we
00:27:26.840 are interested in this alliance because we understand that we need to create an alliance with the other
00:27:31.480 cultural groups that either don't exist parasitically. Like they don't just exist to take people from
00:27:37.040 healthy cultural groups that are able to motivate fertility in their populations.
00:27:39.860 But that also that we will eventually need an alliance to protect all of these cultural groups
00:27:46.960 from the next threat after the progressives have self-extinguished themselves. Yeah.
00:27:51.440 This is sort of next rise of the Nazis, basically. It's going to be bad. And it's where the future is
00:27:58.340 inevitably going because it's such a successful strategy in the world today.
00:28:01.600 But that's our, that's our tomorrow problem.
00:28:03.780 But anyway, now back to demographic graphs more broadly. So the problem that we have as a world
00:28:09.780 is we are going to see population begin to collapse within the developed world. Now people often say,
00:28:17.800 oh, well, can't you use immigrants to fix this? Right. And it's like, well, you do know that,
00:28:22.340 that as of 2019 by the UN that famously inflates these numbers, that even by the UN's own statistic
00:28:28.200 as of 2019, all of Latin America, so Central America, South America, and the Caribbean collectively
00:28:32.920 fell below repopulation rate. We're like a farmer who is taking water from his neighbor's pond to
00:28:40.180 irrigate his crops because he has unsustainable water management practices himself. And you point
00:28:44.600 out that this neighbor's pond is also evaporating. And the farmer's like, oh, I don't care. It doesn't
00:28:50.640 affect me. It'll affect future generations or something. It's insane. And then they're like, well,
00:28:54.880 yeah, but Africa still has high fertility rates. Right now in the world, countries, nations that are
00:29:00.280 above repopulation rate typically have a per capita income. So that is per person on average of below
00:29:05.780 $5,000 a year. So this is an extremely low level of earning. And basically as soon as people in a
00:29:12.580 nation start opting in to the economy, once they start getting jobs, they stop having kids. And so
00:29:19.620 that means that basically as soon as people in Africa who are in nations that are below this number
00:29:25.120 start to get access to a little more wealth, which presumably we really, really want,
00:29:31.400 because it also means better health care, better education, better gender equality,
00:29:35.360 they will stop being able to fuel the rest of the world in terms of supplying a labor force.
00:29:42.040 So it's, it's, I mean, the, the incentive that is created by someone who says, oh, we'll just rely
00:29:48.300 on immigration is basically, oh, well, okay, well, we're also kind of incentivized to keep these
00:29:53.560 impoverished nations really impoverished. Cause if we don't.
00:29:56.700 Yeah. And even if it's not what they mean to create, you're creating an environment where
00:30:00.720 the developed world's economy becomes completely reliant on preventing Africa from developing.
00:30:06.180 Yeah, exactly.
00:30:06.820 And we're using Africa, like a human, like, like a, a farm, like a human farm. Like it's
00:30:12.780 really sick when you think about it.
00:30:14.840 Not a good look. Thought we learned that lesson.
00:30:17.380 Well, it's a bad look what they're saying. Yeah. I mean, think about what you're saying in the U.S.
00:30:20.900 The progressive solution to the social security problem is because they didn't put in the effort
00:30:25.240 themselves to have kids. They're going to import predominantly black people from Africa to support
00:30:30.880 a bunch of non-working predominantly white people who didn't put in the effort to prepare for the
00:30:35.620 future themselves. Like that's not a good look. That's not the not racist plan. That's a really
00:30:42.560 bad plan. What we want is a world where somehow we can find a way to make prosperity and broad
00:30:52.720 access to education compatible with a stable fertility rate. The problem is for the progressive
00:31:01.160 mindset is this social virus that has so contaminated their thought that has so homogenized their
00:31:08.860 population. It is not compatible with that thriving, which means some other cultural group needs
00:31:15.580 to be invented and needs to work for that to happen. Or one of the conservative cultural groups
00:31:20.940 that exists right now needs to rise to dominance for that to happen. And so what you're saying
00:31:25.240 is, yes, we can win. We can have prosperity, white access to education, hopefully even gender
00:31:32.620 equality, but we can't have that. And this urban monoculture still existing. And, and obviously
00:31:40.780 that's an existentially threatening idea to the people who are benefiting from this urban monoculture
00:31:46.340 to this culture's priest cast, to the people who determine truth for this urban monoculture. And who is
00:31:52.260 that? That's the, the academics. That's the journalists that it was true. Right. And you could say,
00:31:57.600 oh, but academia, academia is getting worse and worse after academia was infected. It got worse
00:32:02.360 at determining truth. It's the replication crisis has gone up. The amount of money needed
00:32:05.880 to get individual things. It is not academia for the past 20 years is not pre eighties academia. That
00:32:12.280 was a completely different organizational structure. Heck, we have friends who've decided
00:32:16.740 to discount all medical research post 1950. So I think there's also this logarithmic increase
00:32:22.760 in, in bureaucratic bankruptcy in the academic world. Yeah. And, and I think that the scientific
00:32:28.180 method in and of itself is the correct way to approach truth. However, I think that people are
00:32:33.980 really naive and they think that's the way that academia determines truth. Academia is this weird
00:32:39.240 organic system of citations, which are used to determine your position within a status hierarchy.
00:32:43.960 And then eddies that form. So this is something we often talk about, which is academic eddies,
00:32:50.960 which is to say, if there's a concept in academia that a lot of people are writing on,
00:32:57.560 there is more incentive for more people to write on it because, well, it's what your advisor is going
00:33:01.860 to do. So you basically always do your first few research papers on what your advisor does.
00:33:06.680 Those are the conferences you attend. Those are the conferences that exist. And so there is a huge
00:33:11.660 disincentive to study anything outside of the zeitgeist. There's entire departments in universities,
00:33:17.460 like the women's studies department that are basically dedicated to getting you fired.
00:33:22.240 If you do something that goes outside of the ideological police. So why would you do that? Like,
00:33:27.860 what's the incentive to you as an academic? It can be really hard to get a job. If you publish
00:33:32.480 something like we have academic friends who have published just the data and gotten fired for this
00:33:37.260 because there is entire departments now dedicated to going over everything that's being published by
00:33:44.320 the formerly productive parts of academia and then just getting people fired. So this idea that I am
00:33:49.620 pro-scientific method. I am anti this weird, broadly new system that we use in academia. And I think what
00:33:56.440 we need is an academic reformation. This situation is what the reformation was. There was a group that said
00:34:02.520 truth should best be determined by people who spent their entire life studying it and then have been
00:34:05.960 certified by a central bureaucracy. And then another group that said that central bureaucracy is prone
00:34:09.720 to corruption. And then there was the reformation. And then I think post the reformation, the bureaucracy
00:34:15.760 cleaned itself up pretty significantly. I suspect that after the academic reformation, the academic
00:34:20.740 system might be able to fix itself. And then hopefully then we have two competing parallel knowledge.
00:34:25.260 All the better. Yeah. Because competition breeds strength. It's good.
00:34:30.100 But I want to know your broad thoughts on what this means for the future of our species.
00:34:35.280 What I think people discount, because a lot of people kind of don't care. They may not be long-term
00:34:40.760 oriented and that's not logically inconsistent. I mean, maybe you just don't really care that much
00:34:44.300 of the future or you just are more oriented around problems right now. But I think the important thing
00:34:50.040 to remember is a lot of the problems that you may care about right now, be it feminism or animal rights
00:34:55.320 or the environment or overall suffering will also be problems in the future. And if you do not ensure
00:35:02.020 that your culture is somehow represented in the future, those problems won't be solved after
00:35:07.500 you die. And so there's a lot of environmentalists to say, I'm not going to have kids or I'm not going
00:35:12.280 to have more than one kid or two kids because that's going to hurt the environment. But if they end up
00:35:16.940 not just having few kids, but also raising kids to believe that the world is falling apart,
00:35:23.000 to give them a sense of hopelessness that almost ensures that they won't have kids or at least have
00:35:27.360 very few kids, you're basically doing what you, Malcolm, have been describing this whole time,
00:35:33.980 which is you're creating a sterilizing culture, a culture that will self-extinguish. And those
00:35:38.700 values just won't be represented. So we often, for example, get accused of trying to broker in some
00:35:44.360 kind of a handmaid's tale future or coerce women into having kids, which is totally not true.
00:35:49.240 We really care about reproductive rights and freedom. But what we want to turn around and say is,
00:35:55.380 listen, the future that we'll get if people like you who hold views around reproductive rights,
00:36:01.020 who hold views around women's rights, don't choose to have kids, don't choose to pass your culture on
00:36:06.000 in a sustainable way, that's what we're getting. Which is, it's really, it's very frustrating because
00:36:11.900 the very people who care about these things are, to a great extent, the very people who truly are going
00:36:18.520 to be responsible for this future. It's on them. And of course, like we feel it's on us because we also
00:36:23.900 want to, we want to protect this. Well, I can keep taking kids from conservative groups.
00:36:28.920 I can keep poaching kids. My culture can survive entirely parasitically off of nearby healthy
00:36:36.020 cultures. What is your response to that? What that's going to do is ultimately breed cultures
00:36:43.900 that are more resistant to outside incursions, to people taking away or picking off their young,
00:36:52.300 essentially. So imagine that there's a herd of rhinos and poachers come out. And if they can
00:36:57.580 sneak up to a rhino and grab it and take it away and sell it or whatever, eventually all of the
00:37:03.020 friendly, docile rhinos are going to be removed from the gene pool. And you're going to end up with
00:37:07.260 super aggressive, super paranoid rhinos that charge at everything that moves. And that's what we're
00:37:12.880 creating. Yeah.
00:37:14.240 Yeah. Like where you have these deer that will like, just come up and eat out of people's hands.
00:37:17.240 That's because in Japan, they didn't kill the deer that went up and ate out of people's hands.
00:37:21.640 Whereas in Europe, they did. So our deer are... You can do this to a human population and you can
00:37:27.300 actually see this in Amish populations. There's been some interesting studies where they show
00:37:30.300 that the longer an Amish family has been within their culture, and you see this intergenerationally,
00:37:36.060 fewer and fewer of their kids leave the culture.
00:37:38.320 Ah, so there you go. That's our tomorrow problem. We have a today problem.
00:37:43.120 But no, we live in the last prosperous age for a while. Humanity goes through cycles.
00:37:49.260 Like people are like, why can you so confidently predict a downfall scenario? It's like, you know
00:37:52.900 that this happened before. Like you look at Athens. We entered this period where LGBT began
00:37:58.940 to become accepted more. Women would get more equality. You look at the height of the Roman
00:38:03.080 empire. Hedonism would begin to become more common. And then you'd have this collapse.
00:38:07.120 We keep seeing this in history. You see the end of the Renaissance. We are heading towards
00:38:13.660 another collapse and we're seeing all the signs of it. And a lot of conservatives, I think
00:38:18.000 they take this and they say, well, that means that like acceptance of LGBT groups is what
00:38:22.780 causes the collapse. And I'm like, no, a collapse is definitionally a decline from a cultural
00:38:26.940 height. Okay. That doesn't mean that those things are causing the collapse, but it would
00:38:31.600 be nice. I do think the rise in hedonism, I do think the rise in a lack of self-control
00:38:37.080 does lead to classes.
00:38:39.380 Well, I mean, isn't it just the suggestion that like when people are given an excuse to
00:38:44.520 go soft and they're given the technology and the amenities by a city or a civilization to
00:38:50.160 go soft, then they go soft. And then when you no longer have humans essentially holding
00:38:55.900 up that civilization, then that civilization crumbles.
00:39:00.180 Yeah. No, I mean, I think, I think you're right. And so what we're trying to do is, is
00:39:05.060 we know that like we are in one of the last prosperous eras, which means we need to accumulate
00:39:09.520 resources for our kids, but also use things like the technology we have that can access
00:39:14.720 large populations to begin to build this cultural alliance network that can ensure, because my
00:39:19.800 kids, they're like, you know, in a supposed future, a free internet doesn't really exist
00:39:23.240 anymore because either the virus has taken it over or some fascist group has taken it
00:39:26.600 over. Well, then they'd say, why would you, when you still had the free internet, did
00:39:30.360 you not use it to broadcast this signal? Did you not use it to begin to collect people
00:39:33.820 together? What we're trying to do is create parallel networks, parallel communication
00:39:38.660 channels that can begin to function after things do begin this, this process of decline
00:39:44.000 so that the next time we have a civilization, so that the next time we have one of these
00:39:50.260 periods of Renaissance, it can be perpetual. Yeah. The iteration that our culture creates
00:39:55.020 and, and one of the things that we're very fortunate about, and this is always one of
00:39:59.720 our biggest quotes is thank God the forces that are arrayed against us are not as competent
00:40:06.980 as they are malevolent because the progressives are self extinguishing. Like we basically need
00:40:11.660 to do nothing other than protect our kids from them. The fascist groups are dangerous. Like
00:40:17.340 they do want to see people like us extinguished eventually. They do want to take our kids often
00:40:22.700 just as much as the progressives do, but they're often technophobic as well. They're often very
00:40:28.560 conservative in how they relate to technology, which makes them outcompetable by technophilic
00:40:34.240 populations. Well, yeah. I mean, I, I think one of the futures is a future in which kind of like with
00:40:40.800 Jews, they need us because of certain like economies or businesses that like we do. And that they,
00:40:46.640 for some moral or cultural reason cannot do, if that makes sense by that.
00:40:52.000 Well, so like, like many Jewish groups became powerful because they, for example, were capable
00:40:58.000 morally, religiously of, of being bankers in, in civilizations where the mainstream culture could
00:41:05.260 morally not earn interest on lent money, for example. I mean, obviously cities benefit when they
00:41:12.380 grow at least from, from debt and leverage. So we hope to be, to find a way with these little
00:41:18.560 niche cultures that will not be part of the dominating culture of that, that inherits the
00:41:24.120 future that will have some kind of technology that is, that is maybe, maybe morally repugnant
00:41:29.820 to the future dominating civilization, but still necessary to it. So they, they need to keep us
00:41:34.220 around for something. They may hate us. They may pogrom us, but they will keep us around.
00:41:37.980 Well, I think what you're missing here, and it's really important to clarify this is every
00:41:42.820 cultural branch. Like if you're looking at a cultural evolutionary tree has one of these
00:41:48.260 fascist factions within it. We call it the ISIS because ISIS is like a, an evoked, like it has
00:41:54.580 a lot of emotions evoked where that people can imagine what we mean by that.
00:41:56.840 It's an easy shorthand for a religious state that scares people.
00:42:01.240 Right, right. But what I'm, what I'm saying is, well, specific type of religious state that scares
00:42:06.800 people, which is the type of religious state that is out competing others right now. Right.
00:42:10.940 Yeah.
00:42:11.400 So the point that I'm making is it's unlikely that any one of these is going to dominate the
00:42:15.400 future. It's likely you're going to have a number of them fighting amongst each other.
00:42:18.920 And that was also true historically. If one of them ever conquered the entire world, they,
00:42:24.260 they don't have to worry about the inefficiencies of not allowing bankers, right?
00:42:28.820 Yeah.
00:42:28.980 Because they control the world at that point. The reason why, for example, all of the European
00:42:33.620 powers still needed the banking class was because they were competing against other cultural
00:42:39.060 groups at the time. And so it mattered much more to them that their group won than the
00:42:44.500 cultural purity of their group. And this is why you had this thing where you'd have a
00:42:48.140 pogrom, they'd kick out the Jews and then they'd bring back the Jews when they needed money
00:42:51.420 or something like that. But, but so like, we'd love our cultural specialty to be, for example,
00:42:55.560 genetic technology, repro tech, artificial wombs, stuff like that.
00:42:58.820 Yeah. Because as society becomes more and more infertile, all cultural groups will need
00:43:04.660 that more and more.
00:43:05.860 They'll secretly slink over to us when they have their Henry VIII moment.
00:43:11.800 But yeah, I mean, what other thoughts would you have on this right here that you'd want to
00:43:16.580 make sure people understand about our organization?
00:43:18.680 Basically that, that one day you stumbled into a brothel and that led you to understand that
00:43:27.320 the future of the human race, that the future of anything you value depends on your ability
00:43:32.480 to love.
00:43:35.220 Well, so what she means by that, and this is also something we can talk about was in our
00:43:39.640 broader framework, which I think is really important to understand how we see the world.
00:43:44.780 When I was in Korea, something that kept shocking me is I'm like, this population will be 6% of
00:43:50.160 what it is today in a hundred years. Like, how are they going to deal with all of the empty
00:43:53.420 buildings? How are they going to deal with all of that? Are they going to import people? Are
00:43:56.060 they going to, it's like, well, they can't import people from Japan because they're also collapsing.
00:43:59.260 They can't import people from China because they're also collapsing. And less than a hundred
00:44:03.140 years ago, Japan went in, killed millions of people to try to push their culture because
00:44:08.900 historically that was the way you pushed your culture.
00:44:11.440 Through war, through conquest, et cetera.
00:44:13.040 Through conquest. And you can see Russia attempting something like this. Now, this isn't the only
00:44:17.280 reason that they're in this war right now, but the last time that they controlled Ukraine,
00:44:21.840 they did make everyone speak Russian. That is what they taught in the school system. They did
00:44:25.160 teach that you are actually Russians. Like Ukraine is a fictional concept. This is something Putin has
00:44:29.880 said, which is basically saying, I want to push our Russian culture on this actually very closely
00:44:35.920 aligned cultural group, which is an insane way to try to spread your culture when both Russia and
00:44:41.060 Ukraine have desperately low fertility rates. The groups that are going to win in the future are
00:44:45.940 not the groups that are best at war, which historically was a successful strategy. Actually,
00:44:52.540 many of the most successful groups right now are staunchly pacifist. Look at the Amish,
00:44:58.360 look at the Haridi, in Israel at least. Most pacifist groups, most very high fertility rates.
00:45:04.240 But to an extent, those groups only survive because they have pro war groups around them
00:45:10.240 to protect them. Yep, exactly.
00:45:12.300 And so that's not going to be a long-term successful strategy. But the point being that in this future
00:45:17.800 that we're going into, you really need to completely change the way you think about
00:45:21.840 geopolitics, the way you think about immigration. Even if you're thinking about your own independent
00:45:26.920 cultural group, you are typically better off for anything that increases the economy of whatever
00:45:33.780 countries you are most present in, and anything that decreases the amount of government control
00:45:40.420 those countries try to exercise over your country. Things like cultural projection through war and stuff
00:45:47.040 like that, they're really largely irrelevant now in terms of an intergenerational cultural victory.
00:45:53.160 And the groups that are still thinking in those mindsets, they're going to go extinct.
00:45:57.460 This reminds me, because a lot of people, when you talk about accelerationist versus non-accelerationist
00:46:01.660 cultures, cultures that try to move forwards, I mean, we saw this was the collapse of the Western
00:46:05.740 Roman Empire, right? Which was, as Rome collapsed, some people said, we want to go back to the old
00:46:14.040 ways of doing things. And some people said, well, we shouldn't be hedonistic. Like, obviously,
00:46:19.440 this sort of broad hedonistic culture that's dominating our urban centers is stupid.
00:46:23.160 But we do need to culturally innovate. That was the Christians. This was this new religion,
00:46:28.860 this new cultural group that was innovating in all these sorts of cool ways, that was defining
00:46:33.200 themselves, that was defining what they were, that was having councils, that were thinking about
00:46:38.200 cultural innovation. And then the mystery cults really exploded during this period. And these were
00:46:43.940 individuals who were going back to the more pagan ways of doing things. And actually, both the
00:46:49.860 Christian groups and these mystery cults were growing in the same communities, they were growing
00:46:53.600 among military organizations. And so they were both actually working with the same populations. But
00:46:58.480 the groups that said, we need to go back to the old ways of doing things, they died, because the
00:47:04.160 technological and cultural context that they were in had shifted. And I think that that's what we're
00:47:09.680 going to see in the future, is I think that the groups that are most interested in innovating
00:47:13.740 themselves to deal with this new cultural context that we're dealing with, are going to be the groups
00:47:18.400 that are ultimately victorious. And what we hope is that there's as much pluralism within those
00:47:23.600 communities as possible, and some sort of pluralistic alliance can form within those
00:47:27.260 communities. Yeah. And I think it's possible. I think today we have technology resources,
00:47:32.640 the ability to spark something that didn't exist in the past. So odds are looking good. There's lots
00:47:37.740 of hope. Yeah. And I can say that the one thing that our organization, we were like, oh, the
00:47:41.720 pro natalist, he wants to move out, getting fertility rates up. We're like, that is so done.
00:47:44.760 It's not going to happen. No one's getting broad fertility rates up. And the problem isn't solved
00:47:49.900 by doing that. I solve nothing by convincing somebody from an iteration of progressive culture
00:47:56.480 that doesn't want to have kids to have kids. I have solved nothing. Where I have solved something
00:48:00.840 is if there's some weird iteration of progressive culture that for whatever reason is resistant to
00:48:05.640 most of the viral forces and does believe in having kids and does believe in self-denial rituals and
00:48:10.560 does believe in sort of many things that would lead themselves to be natural cultural allies with us,
00:48:15.820 they would make a useful ally. But the people who are just completely brainwashed, they're
00:48:19.680 completely useless to me. But I think that that's a message that people aren't used to hearing is
00:48:23.340 to say, you just don't matter to us. They're like, well, don't you? How do you convince this
00:48:28.140 progressive woman to have a lot of, I don't care. If she's already from this cultural group that
00:48:34.180 sees their entire reason detra as surviving through parasitizing nearby healthy cultural groups,
00:48:40.560 I, again, we're not like judging them. Like we're not judging them in the context of
00:48:45.840 that's a worse way of doing things, but it's an unsustainable way of doing things that makes all
00:48:51.600 of the cultural groups around them worse intergenerational. Yeah. Yeah. You're actually
00:48:56.560 quite right in that they really do kind of poison the other groups around them in a way that's really
00:49:00.880 messed up. When I say worse, I don't mean like worse in an objective sense. I mean more dangerous to
00:49:06.540 my group and more dangerous to a pluralistic mindset because they teach all of the cultural
00:49:11.660 groups around them that pluralism is threatening essentially, that accepting of outsiders is
00:49:17.060 threatening. And that's why they are like the ultimate dangerous force from our world perspective.
00:49:23.500 But it's also why we don't have really any animosity towards any cultural group, even if they're very
00:49:30.040 different from us, even if they're like, well, we don't like LGBT populations. We don't like women.
00:49:34.500 Those are things we believe in, but even groups that don't feel that way, we're like, do what works
00:49:39.880 for you so long as your culture is thriving and you are not using force to force people into your
00:49:46.560 culture, because that's where it gets really dangerous. And that's something we're really
00:49:48.680 against or using force to keep people in your culture. That's another thing that we're quite
00:49:52.900 against. So if we could live in a society where everybody's just completing on an equal playing field,
00:49:57.780 the government isn't trying to use its powers to take money from one cultural group and then use that
00:50:02.600 money to convert people to this sort of dominant monoculture, but also nobody is with guns forcing
00:50:07.280 people to convert or threatening people to convert or threatening to stay in their culture. I think
00:50:11.220 that's the ideal cultural ecosystem that we're trying to create because we believe that our culture can
00:50:16.820 survive within that ecosystem and thrive within that ecosystem. And we would encourage every culture
00:50:22.160 that thinks that they can thrive within an equal playing field, that they should want to join this
00:50:26.480 movement. I'd be delighted if they did. So we'll see. We'll see how well we're able to evangelize
00:50:33.200 all this, get other people on board, get some good competition going. But it's an interesting
00:50:38.520 philosophy. We'll see. And I do think one person was like, oh, you don't believe in state services.
00:50:43.420 I think that we should rely on our cultural groups to provide much of our services, right?
00:50:47.360 So the reason why progressive groups so ardently advocate for state services is because if you want to
00:50:53.200 convince somebody to leave one of these harder older cultures, most of these cultures offer a lot of
00:50:58.020 what are state services. They offer social safety nets when you end on hard times. They offer services
00:51:03.760 that help care for elderly individuals. They offer all sorts of services. And so if you want somebody
00:51:09.760 to leave one of those cultural groups, but your group is parasitic and it's not willing to supply any of
00:51:14.200 these services itself, well, I mean, obviously you need the state to supply those services. So what you do is
00:51:20.840 you take money from all cultural groups so that you can more easily deconvert people from the
00:51:24.880 cultural groups that are supplying these services to people, which is just really predatory and
00:51:30.200 twisted. And so I think that, I guess my view of state services would be, it should be an opt-in thing.
00:51:35.440 You should be able to opt into the state service system, or you should be able to like the Amish do
00:51:39.780 with social security. Amish don't pay social security because the state understands that their culture is
00:51:45.780 actually very effective at supplying social security to Amish individuals.
00:51:48.800 I'd love to be able to opt into that. And then people are like, yeah, but then all of these
00:51:53.220 systems wouldn't work. And it's like, have you noticed something there? Is it that the cultural
00:51:59.860 groups of this sort of degraded cultural group that you've created that doesn't actually care for its
00:52:05.320 own members? Is that a problem? Nobody would want to join it. If they had to, everyone would start
00:52:10.500 going back to these older cultural groups that do provide all these services. If you took them away from
00:52:15.340 the state, it's like, ah, maybe light bulb there. You've realized what it means to be parasitic.
00:52:21.280 But anyway, we are so excited that you guys joined us. Hopefully we got crazy here,
00:52:26.620 but it's something we really did need to talk about at some point.
00:52:30.480 Yeah. Here's hoping it turns out well. Save a copy of this video. Wait, 200 years and have you're
00:52:37.520 either totally non-existent because you failed or existent great grandchildren. Check it out and
00:52:44.800 tell us if we were right or not. I mean, I think it's an existential quest to create a pluralistic
00:52:51.560 alliance of conservative cultures that can fight both this sterilizing mind virus, but also fight the
00:52:59.560 cultures that are just progressives waiting in the wings to erase every culture they come across the
00:53:04.320 moment they gain power. And I do think that now we're in this position, very Emperor of Dune,
00:53:11.220 where all of the conservative cultures finally have a reason to band together. So the plot of
00:53:16.440 Emperor of Dune is this guy basically says, how do I get these groups that have always been at each
00:53:21.240 other's throats? Well, I need to create an authoritarian force so evil that they'll finally
00:53:26.160 have a reason to build structures to work together. And they'll remember how bad it is to have one
00:53:31.120 culture sort of ruling all other cultures dictatorially. I hope that this progressive
00:53:35.940 mind virus has created that so that iterations of all of the conservative traditions can understand
00:53:42.240 why they're better off in pluralistic ecosystems and why they're better off building cultural
00:53:46.840 infrastructure that helps defend those pluralistic ecosystems. Because right now, if we don't band
00:53:52.920 together, we all lose. Big stakes. Good luck. I love you, Malcolm. Hopefully we all have a lot
00:53:59.700 of successful grandkids and they with a bunch of other families save the world. Hey, we need people
00:54:07.060 for our kids to marry, right? That's what we got to bring this group together. Yeah, that's the real
00:54:11.520 long con here. So guys, hurry up because our kids need to not be single forever. All right. Thanks.
00:54:16.980 Okay. Thanks. Bye. Yeah. Cool. Love you, Malcolm. Speaking of which, daycare pickup time. You're
00:54:22.660 doing leftovers, right? I'm stir-frying. Yeah, you made great. She did tacos yesterday. They were
00:54:27.380 fantastic. She did it for a guest. She was telling me today that she was diluting the meat with onions
00:54:32.660 to make it last a bit longer. Gotta stretch it. Yeah, I gotta stretch it. I'm making taco leftovers,
00:54:38.700 getting a little glimpse into our life here. Yum. Okay. Mix it with some curry spices, create something
00:54:43.540 really special with it. Then eat it with chips. It'll be quite good. Cool. I'll get it ready
00:54:47.520 for you while you pick up the kids. Will do. Have a good one. You too, Malcolm.