Based Camp - September 19, 2025


Humans Are Different: Accepting This Is Critical for Space Travel


Episode Stats

Length

35 minutes

Words per Minute

195.1586

Word Count

6,928

Sentence Count

369

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

26


Summary

In this episode, Simone and I discuss the concept of cultural carrying capacity, which is the concept that the carrying capacity of a region is determined by the culture that lives within that region. This may seem obvious to an individual, but it is actually very spicy if you break it down.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about
00:00:04.520 one of our more controversial ideas that I had recently, and it changed the way I saw a lot of
00:00:08.780 things, which is the concept of cultural carrying capacity, meaning that the carrying capacity of
00:00:16.960 a region is determined by the culture that lives within that region. Now, this may seem obvious to
00:00:23.380 an individual, but it is actually very, very spicy if you break it down more. I think it's only
00:00:28.300 obvious from an environmental standpoint. Most people are familiar with the concept of carrying
00:00:33.040 capacity. When you think about a swamp, there's only so much water in the swamp. There's only so
00:00:38.960 much algae in the swamp. When you look at population levels of the swamp, you're either going to see
00:00:43.620 what's called an S-curve, where basically the population goes up. Oh, not enough algae is
00:00:48.920 available anymore, and it starts to go down a little bit. It regulates. In a really bad scenario,
00:00:53.260 you get what's called a J-curve, where maybe an invasive species enters the swamp.
00:00:57.560 They completely consume everything. The swamp becomes basically a dead zone,
00:01:02.300 and you have a huge population crash. But the carrying capacity is how much can this environment
00:01:08.100 sustain in terms of one population or a mixture of populations? And this came up when Malcolm was
00:01:13.960 debating- Well, hold on, hold on. Before you go further, just to summarize so that they understand
00:01:17.740 why this is spicy, is essentially what we're going to be arguing is that the carrying capacity of a
00:01:22.580 region is heavily determinate when you're talking about the number of people that can live in it,
00:01:26.680 because that's very important when you're talking about global population, demographic class,
00:01:29.680 everything like that, is heavily determined on the cultural group within that region,
00:01:34.220 which is often, culture is often heavily tied to ethnicity. So like cultural, ethno groups.
00:01:38.880 And the number of people a region can support depends on which one of those we might be talking
00:01:43.840 about, cultural groups we might be talking about. So continue.
00:01:46.060 Yeah, this came up in the context of Malcolm having a discourse or debate with some college
00:01:51.620 students on a college campus. And one of them brought this up in the context of a particular
00:01:55.640 region and was like, well, this region-
00:01:58.060 I'll tell you, I might be able to. So we were discussing demographic collapse, right? And I was
00:02:03.920 talking about my own cultural region, which is the Greater Appalachian Cultural Group. And one of the
00:02:08.680 students there was from the Greater Appalachian Cultural Group. And he was reflecting on
00:02:13.060 the poverty of the area that he grew up. And he's like, we have extended beyond the carrying capacity
00:02:21.300 of the region. There were just too many of us for the region. And we just had too many kids. And this
00:02:27.240 was a bad thing. And now it's strained the region. I remember at first, I was really perplexed by the
00:02:32.060 stupidity of this point.
00:02:33.180 I didn't even understand what he was saying.
00:02:35.580 Yeah. Basically what he was saying is, our people bred too much. And now hospitals are shutting down due to
00:02:41.900 economic collapse. And schools are shutting down due to economic collapse in the region,
00:02:46.100 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, well, that happens also because of demographic
00:02:50.180 collapse. And he goes, well, this isn't happening here because of demographic collapse. It's happening
00:02:53.320 for economic reasons because we have extended beyond our carrying capacity. And I just remember
00:02:57.120 in my head, I was very confused. I was like, first of all, cultures are not isolated to one region.
00:03:01.940 If you had outbred for your region, especially given that demographic collapse is happening all
00:03:06.140 around you, you could just migrate into adjacent regions, right? Like you're not like bound
00:03:11.640 to West Virginia, buddy. But like, like, even if that was true, what he was saying, but then I
00:03:17.080 was like, but also like, if you were to be very offensive here, because this is the group I was
00:03:22.040 using as a foil Jews, like you put a bunch of Jews and a lot more Jews and are in like, let's say
00:03:27.860 West Virginia, you know, per, per region in a desert like Israel, you know, they're able to turn it into
00:03:33.160 a thriving economy, right? Manhattan has a higher carrying capacity, right? Like they're not
00:03:37.980 farming there because we live in a world today where, uh, you can farm in other locations in
00:03:44.060 the location that you are based. Uh, you know, you can import food into that location. You're
00:03:49.860 carrying capacity of a region is not at all determined by the actual food that that region
00:03:56.040 can produce. It's no longer, and this should be fairly obvious to people determined by like the
00:04:02.200 Malthusian limits of the agricultural load of a particular region. It is determined by your ability
00:04:08.100 to buy the resources that you need to support whatever population you have and build the
00:04:12.740 operational infrastructure. Yeah. You can't even like, literally you can't even domestically produce,
00:04:20.040 even if you don't want to buy them using technology, you can domestically produce the energy
00:04:25.820 using nuclear, for example, that you need and, and the food, even in an urban area. I mean,
00:04:31.620 a lot of people are making really cool. And I'm saying all this was a disparagement to my own
00:04:38.200 people, right? Like, like, so you can't be like, I'm being racist here or something like that.
00:04:41.260 I'm like, why don't we look at what the Jews are like the way that they culturally work and take
00:04:45.780 cultural technology from them to become better ourselves. Right. And people can be like, well,
00:04:52.980 what about on a global scale? Right. Like surely the earth has like a carrying capacity.
00:04:56.760 And I'm like, it just effing doesn't like, or at least we're nowhere near it right now in terms
00:05:01.560 of let's say food production. I mean, so we have a carrying capacity that can be moved on a slider
00:05:06.660 up and down based on the extent to which we're willing to use various technologies or innovate
00:05:10.580 around problems. No, but this is what I'm talking about. So, so people will, I think it's something
00:05:14.260 like 3%. If you put solar panels on just 3% of the Sahara, you would produce as much energy as the
00:05:19.780 entire world consumes on like a daily basis. So like the amount of energy. So like, suppose
00:05:24.900 you had a region that like actually had grown beyond their, their need for food and they were
00:05:29.880 very technologically adapt society. Right. And they're like, okay, we need more food. What do
00:05:34.340 you do? Well, you take a region of the Sahara, you put a bunch of solar panels down, you then use those
00:05:39.500 solar panels to like infuse, to, to, to get the energy you need to infuse dirt with various chemical
00:05:45.400 processes and stuff like this to revitalize the dirt. And then you could create like infinite
00:05:49.680 greenhouses, right? Because you've also got the sun there and you just need to darken it enough to
00:05:53.580 make it good for the plants in that region. And then you use the, the batteries that are powered in that
00:05:58.220 region to have like an endless thing of like automated helicopters going from there to wherever
00:06:02.160 you are, your little settlement is constantly bringing food or, you know, deep ocean agriculture
00:06:06.900 or stuff like that. Like we have the technological capability to do this. Like the Netherlands,
00:06:10.720 little bitty, the Netherlands produces something in like, find this in post, like 80% of like
00:06:15.400 even like large exports. I think it's like potato exports or something like that.
00:06:19.500 So it was, they produce 20 to 25% of global tomato exports. 20 to 25% of tomatoes are produced just in
00:06:28.720 the little bitty Netherlands. They produce around 20% of global potato exports. They produce around 25 to
00:06:38.240 30% of global onion exports, little tiny, tiny, tiny, the Netherlands. They are the world's
00:06:45.380 second largest exporter by value of global agricultural exports only behind the United
00:06:51.220 States. Well, and Venice was another really great early example of this. You know, you literally have
00:06:56.500 a swamp region. They don't have, they don't have the stuff they need to sustain themselves,
00:07:02.480 but they made it work. Yeah. And you see this, like, what's the carrying capacity of a spaceship,
00:07:09.160 right? The carrying of a capacity of a spaceship is determined by the technological acumen and
00:07:15.020 willingness to lean in of the culture that inhabits that spaceship, right? And it's going to differ
00:07:21.240 between cultural groups. So this is going to become like today on earth, the idea of a cultural
00:07:26.260 carrying capacity may not be an important concept, but it's going to be a very important concept when
00:07:31.080 we're talking about space travel, right? Yeah. I think with, in a recent interview with the
00:07:34.680 All In podcast, Elon Musk was saying something along those lines of like, it doesn't really matter what
00:07:39.020 happens with the first contingent that goes to Mars. What happens is, you know, when do we get to the
00:07:43.980 point where the Mars colony can sustain itself and no longer relies on resupply ships? You saw this
00:07:49.420 with the early American colonies. There were a lot that died out waiting for a resupply ship to come. And
00:07:55.240 that is because they could not sustain themselves without it. But this is about multiple things within a
00:08:01.260 cultural group. This is about not just the culture's ability to, you know, grow food and
00:08:07.320 engage with technology that can handle stuff like that or create things that people want to trade
00:08:12.020 food for. Right. But it also, when you're talking about spaceships and off-world colonies, will come
00:08:17.180 with the group's own desires for excesses, right? Like a group that overeats or a group that desires
00:08:23.300 particularly tasty foods or a group that desires, you know, the more, you know, predilections for like,
00:08:28.760 let's say recreational sex a group has, the more resources they are going to consume and the less
00:08:34.200 efficient they are going to be. Right. And these are things that might end up mattering a lot when
00:08:39.160 we can begin to edit people's genomes to like code for different preferences. So yeah, I'm, I think that
00:08:46.360 this concept is going to be critical for space travel. And as I said, the next part of this came from
00:08:52.240 the thing the next guy said in the room, because I thought that this was really interesting and helped me
00:08:55.560 move this concept forward as well. So then this black guy, very obviously woke. He was like, well,
00:08:59.980 I think it's really ignorant to say that, you know, most group differences are due to cultural
00:09:04.440 differences. And I was like, well, it's actually the best way to look at things. Right. Because you
00:09:11.360 have three potentialities, you know, I'm talking to a college class here. I'm not going to say that
00:09:15.900 genetic differences matter, but I'm like, you have only really, well, I'll give, I'll add in one
00:09:20.420 wild card. So we'll say four reasons why different groups are different. Okay. You can either say
00:09:25.060 it's completely random, which makes no sense. Otherwise you wouldn't see it consistently
00:09:28.700 across groups and across regions. Okay. You can then say, well, it's because of cultural
00:09:35.300 differences, right? Like if you watch our, you know, Asians don't actually have a higher IQ.
00:09:39.680 The results are actually way weirder. Or we point out that like one study showing the Asians spent
00:09:43.760 like 11 extra hours a week on homework assignments, right? Like obviously they're going to outperform
00:09:48.020 other groups if they're working harder and they're studying more. Right. And then the, the final
00:09:52.940 explanation, which is the one that the Wokies default to, but is actually a very, very bad
00:09:58.020 explanation, toxic explanation to normalize is that groups are cheating. That's the reason for
00:10:03.380 differences. And those are really the only explanations. There is no other explanation
00:10:07.260 for group differences. Right. And if those are your only explanations as to like why the Appalachians
00:10:12.200 aren't doing as well. And then you look at a group that's doing better than you, like say Jews,
00:10:15.600 as I've mentioned, Jews out earn most groups. They are.
00:10:19.160 Well, and by cheating, I think he's referring to what in general, the urban monoculture would
00:10:23.740 refer to as systemic racism or like systemic inequality.
00:10:28.080 Right. They have established cultural barriers that favor their own group, right? Or legal barriers
00:10:33.440 or something like that.
00:10:34.140 Or cumulative disadvantages that cannot be overcome.
00:10:37.040 Right.
00:10:37.520 So unfortunately there's plenty of examples of cumulative disadvantages that have been repeatedly
00:10:42.340 overcome.
00:10:43.260 Yeah. Repeatedly overcome. So, so, which we'll get to in just a second, but if you, if you have
00:10:48.020 this perspective, right, then you have to assume you, you, you, as a group that is suffering,
00:10:52.940 can't say, I'm going to learn from another group that's doing better than me in some area.
00:10:57.080 Right. You have to assume that they just need to be punished because they have essentially
00:11:02.360 stolen from you. And, and, and to me, I find this to be a psychotic explanation. I wish I'd
00:11:07.040 gone over this at the time. At the time, what I said was, and why would you, it's not that,
00:11:12.700 because I was trying to be, you know, magnanimous and genteel in this situation and been like,
00:11:17.140 Hey, look, we're just looking at this from the perspective of raising our own kids.
00:11:20.500 And there's really no utility in telling our own kids that the system is rigged against them.
00:11:24.240 Because if we focus on the system being rigged against our kids,
00:11:27.480 They're going to develop an external locus of control, which is correlated with really bad
00:11:31.280 outcomes. If you want to screw someone over, give them an external locus of control.
00:11:34.400 Depression, lower academics, you know,
00:11:36.340 All you can do is deal with the hand of cards that has been dealt to you. And if you want to be able
00:11:42.120 to deal with it successfully, you need an external locus of control, meaning that you only have a few
00:11:45.680 levers you get to play. And one is culture. So yeah, an internal locus of control. The two levers
00:11:50.120 that you can play, regardless of the hand that you've been dealt with is your culture and whether
00:11:54.140 or not you want to cheat or play the game. I just think it's, it's playing the game.
00:11:57.560 Before we get to the cheating, because Simone, you had a brilliant idea around cheating,
00:12:00.240 not always being a bad thing that we'll get to, but I wanted to go over something else before we
00:12:03.580 get to that idea. Okay. Is that what you're about to get to or?
00:12:06.500 Yeah, but go ahead.
00:12:08.520 I want to go over what I, what I should have said, because I was, I don't know why I didn't think
00:12:11.680 of this at the time, but I was like, okay, so, you know, I'm a white person here. Like Japanese
00:12:16.500 people, clearly they were in internment camps. They had everything taken from them fairly recently
00:12:21.760 in American history. And now they out earn us. So should I assume that they're cheating? Like,
00:12:26.820 should I assume that they have cheated us white people because they are doing better than us?
00:12:31.340 Like that's a psychotic way to look at the world instead of trying to look at the things they're
00:12:36.000 doing well and adopt those cultural practices myself. And so this perspective where you don't
00:12:42.220 accept, and here I am saying, I think that if they could get themselves to breed, different question
00:12:50.240 here, Japanese people would probably have a higher cultural carrying capacity than people of the
00:12:55.100 greater Appalachian cultural group, my people, right? For innumerous reasons. And that's fine for
00:13:01.840 me to admit, right? Like, why is that so toxic to be like different people are different and
00:13:05.620 therefore we can learn from them, right? But I want to go to this idea that you have that I
00:13:09.960 thought was so clever because I was like, look, you know, we can say, you know, some groups cheat
00:13:15.600 and that's bad, right? And you're like, but Malcolm, it's not always bad. And I was like,
00:13:21.120 what do you mean it's not always bad? Go into it. Well, one person's cheating is another person's
00:13:26.300 looking at the system, finding an arbitrage play and making it. And I presented the example of
00:13:32.960 ethnic cartels, which we did an episode on this, this idea of that we have the Patel motels. We
00:13:38.860 have a ton of Indian owned 7-Elevens. We have a ton of, I think, Indonesian owned donut places in
00:13:46.080 California and Vietnamese nail salons. There are all these groups that are coming from very little
00:13:52.400 advantage. And this is typically these, these, these ethnic cartels as they're called sometimes
00:13:57.080 are typically started by just one man who then goes on and uses an extended family network. And then
00:14:02.900 a larger network of, of new immigrants from his, his national background to build up what sort of
00:14:09.860 becomes an empire. They're, they're, they're not advantaged. What they do is they see that, oh,
00:14:14.420 here's this industry, not a lot of capital and, and hard work is going into it because this is not
00:14:20.340 glamorous and no one wants to do the work. Well, I'm going to go into this. I'm going to utilize
00:14:26.360 basically my systematically disadvantaged group. That's willing to work below market where we have high,
00:14:31.400 high cultural and social trust. We're going to provide cheap credit to each other and we're
00:14:35.480 going to own this industry. And they do. So playing the game or, or cheating the finding
00:14:40.320 arbitrage opportunities. And this episode hasn't gone live yet, but it's like insane. Like it,
00:14:45.100 for example, what was it? Who, who owns like nails? You put it live, didn't you? No,
00:14:50.180 it hasn't gone live yet. No. Who is it? Who owns nail salons again? It was Vietnamese. And so
00:14:54.340 Vietnamese nail salons are so pervasive now that in California it can be difficult to find a class
00:14:59.700 that is not in Vietnamese because that is just how we believe the point here being is, is do we
00:15:04.160 believe that Vietnamese dominate the nail salon industry because of Vietnamese culture? No, I don't
00:15:07.580 think so. Do we believe it because the Vietnamese genetics? No, I don't think so. It is a system that
00:15:12.100 they put in place that took advantage of an industry that other people weren't as focused on.
00:15:18.120 If you, if you want to look at like Jewish groups and banking, they, they lived in environments where
00:15:23.400 the pervasive or the, the, the dominant population was unwilling to engage in various elements of
00:15:29.820 banking, like interest, interest. So here's an individual, like, like, you know, black kid here,
00:15:35.660 who's like, you know, scolding me for not being woke enough in my thinking. If he wanted to like
00:15:40.420 help the black community start one of these, there have been ethnic black ethnic cartels before,
00:15:45.020 right? Like you can do this. You just, because of your externalized focus, you refuse to, right?
00:15:51.680 Like you're not helping your own community by taking the externalized focus and focusing on
00:15:56.620 the ways that other people have wronged you. I mean, I think, I think it's okay to acknowledge that
00:16:02.220 you, a group has been mistreated and that sucks, but I think that takes all of a sentence, you know,
00:16:09.640 like, yeah, that was a dick move. You know, whoever did that, don't do that. But yeah,
00:16:14.960 to be like, and this is why I can't do anything or, and this is why it's, it's pointless for me to try
00:16:21.760 is the most harmful thing you could possibly do to this group that was disadvantaged. That's what
00:16:28.660 really gets me. Like, if you care about that, you need to care about what's going to solve the
00:16:34.000 problem, not about who did it because in the end, you know, bringing justice isn't even really that
00:16:41.900 satisfying. And, and also it's, it's kind of impossible at this point because most of the
00:16:45.980 people who are involved in this are a pretty dead. And this idea of like reparations, for example,
00:16:52.060 where like people who had no personal responsibility in making certain things happen are expected to
00:16:58.380 pay for something they never did. It's just so beyond ridiculous to me that it's just not a
00:17:04.780 productive conversation to have at all. It is, it is frustrating. I'm a little like, you didn't have
00:17:10.880 to mention that that student was black. It could be anyone. But in the context, it did matter because
00:17:16.060 he was trying to use his status, you know, in the urban monoculture, in the normative cultural
00:17:20.860 framework of our society, black people have the right to sort of shut down white people when they're
00:17:25.800 talking about stuff like this, which was what he was expecting. You know, he started the conversation
00:17:30.220 was it's ignorant of you to say X, like that there are cultural differences between groups that lead
00:17:34.980 to outcomes, clearly implying that I was being like racist or not aware of like the, the, the woke rules
00:17:42.000 around what I'm allowed to say. You're saying that he tried to undermine the open debate that you were
00:17:48.420 trying to organize. Yes. He tried to use his identity to undermine the open debate that I was trying to
00:17:55.240 organize, even when it was obviously true. And even when like, it's, it does not take a genius to
00:18:00.980 be like, Hey, the Japanese people didn't cheat their way into economic success. And I was specifically
00:18:05.620 when I was talking about all this, talking about the two groups I had talked about was Japanese
00:18:10.000 Americans. Cause I had talked about not Japanese, Asian Americans. I had talked about them working
00:18:13.320 more on homework and the Appalachian cultural group. Black people didn't come up. They were not a
00:18:18.260 part of this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, just for more context, Malcolm was sort of
00:18:22.720 midway through arguing why we think culture is so important and that it isn't actually genetic
00:18:28.760 differences that we're so interested in that. It's not like, Oh, this group's smarter than the
00:18:32.240 other, because you pointed to the anecdote that, okay, while many Asian students on average have
00:18:37.380 much higher test scores, when you look at the data, they also spend 12 hours, 12 hours per week on
00:18:42.240 average, more than non-Asian students on studying. So like, are you shocked that they're performing
00:18:48.840 better in school? Like, yeah. Yeah. And then we go over like the IQ tests and everything like that
00:18:53.140 and show that they're not like gifted, right? Like uniquely it's that they're working harder and
00:18:57.100 that's a cultural difference. Now genetics may play a role in that as well. I'm not going to,
00:19:01.080 you know, ignore that, but the reason why I don't focus on genetics that much is because you can't
00:19:05.320 change it. Yeah, not yet. And then once you can change it, then it doesn't matter because you can
00:19:09.340 change it if you want to. Genetics is irrelevant in the same way as societal, you know, sort of
00:19:15.880 structural systems are largely irrelevant because both of them are things that are baked into me
00:19:22.420 that I can't change right now. And so if I'm focused on my own children's success and my own
00:19:26.660 family's success, which should always be my number one concern. These people who try to like reorganize
00:19:30.580 society around their objectives and goals, it's so utopian and obviously doomed to fail. Everyone
00:19:37.540 who's ever tried it, like it leads to evil when you try to reorganize society in that way. So don't
00:19:41.500 focus on your family. Yeah. So I think, I guess the takeaway you want people to have is, I mean,
00:19:46.680 aside from the fact that you need to think about environments, not in terms of their environmental
00:19:50.260 carrying capacity as a human, but rather their cultural, your personal cultural carrying capacity
00:19:55.780 in that context, but also there are really out of the fact that there are quite a few levers,
00:20:00.640 you know, including randomness, including history and genetics, the levers that you can pull at this
00:20:06.400 time, our culture and playing the system. And some people are going to call that cheating. Other
00:20:11.620 people are going to call that arbitrage plays, but you just have to, you have to know that it kind of
00:20:16.780 doesn't matter what hand you got dealt. People are playing poker. They're not like, well, I'm never going
00:20:22.540 to play this game again because I didn't like the hand I was dealt. Like, I'm just going to stop
00:20:27.240 playing. Like, no, you have to like, maybe you can bluff. Maybe, maybe, you know, wait for another hand,
00:20:34.680 like fold. But think about this from the perspective of the species more broadly, right? Like, like if
00:20:39.920 you're talking about species and you're talking about carrying capacity of a region, right? The
00:20:43.660 carrying capacity of a particular region differs greatly based on the species that is exploiting
00:20:48.900 that carrying capacity that is living within that region. Carrying capacity is species specific.
00:20:54.160 Why is carrying capacity species specific? Carrying capacity is species specific because species have
00:21:00.260 different behavior and because they have different biology, right? If human cultural groups have
00:21:07.780 different behaviors, intrinsically human cultural groups, just like different species are going to
00:21:14.300 have different carrying capacities. Yeah. And also in different environments too, depending on what
00:21:21.040 they're good at. And yeah, but the wider takeaway from this is it, I think people have a responsibility
00:21:29.740 to one sort of understand or build a cultural group, understand what is limiting that cultural
00:21:38.040 group's carrying capacity. Why is that cultural group failing or succeeding? Um, what are areas that
00:21:44.480 other cultural groups could do better, right? Like, because the, the ability of a group to export
00:21:49.420 specific things, right? Like whether it's money or banking or, or, uh, you know, call center services
00:21:56.180 or AI tech, right? Is going to differ between the group's cultural specialization. And you can look
00:22:03.540 at something like, let's say black Americans, like black Americans very clearly dominate the music
00:22:07.140 industry, right? Across musical genres, mind you, even in country music. Like I think Shibuzy is like the
00:22:12.120 number one country musician, right? So, so even in like classically white, potentially even groups that will
00:22:17.800 have like in-group racial motivation around whiteness, black people can still out-compete white,
00:22:22.900 white people in the music industry. And so if you're like, how do I get better? Like I want my
00:22:27.780 kids to be great musicians. Look at what the black community is doing, right? Like clearly they're
00:22:33.400 doing something you're not doing, right? So it doesn't just go in one direction. It's not like
00:22:38.500 always do what the Jews do. It's do what the Jews do when the Jews are out-competing you within that
00:22:43.220 domain. And it's, and it's something that you can adopt, which is funny because not all cultures
00:22:48.040 have this way. I've talked about it in other episodes, but I think it's interesting. If you look
00:22:51.020 at it in China, they're, they're very open to this. Like there's lots of books of like how to get rich
00:22:55.520 like Jew, how to raise kids like in China. Yeah. Yeah. Where they're like, oh, this, this group seems
00:23:02.700 to be out competing other groups. Like how do I do that? Yeah. And that's, that's the healthy
00:23:07.240 approach. Like we laugh at it because it's, you don't see it in the United States, but I think we laugh
00:23:12.320 at it also because it's surprising, but it makes sense. Like, oh, we, we really probably should
00:23:16.720 be asking how we can get rich, like a Jew. Like clearly they figured something out and I want that
00:23:22.340 thing. So can we maybe learn from them instead of be like, they're cheating somehow. It's not fair.
00:23:28.880 Yeah. Cause they, they've been through it and through it, Malcolm. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's an
00:23:36.840 interesting concept. And to be fair, the students in this, this, this debate also had a lot of really
00:23:42.800 interesting and insightful and eyeopening things to say, I, I enjoyed it a lot. It just happens to
00:23:49.100 tell you. You had the major interesting revelations, but you have them when you're talking to other
00:23:52.620 people. Yeah. The cheat codes can be ethical, right? Like that, that all the cultural cheat codes you have
00:23:57.980 access to are not unethical. And, and I was quite impressed with the idea of like, once I began to
00:24:03.120 think about cultural carrying capacity, it became so effing obvious to me. And it, it, all of a sudden
00:24:08.320 I started to ask, like, you're really looking at not just demographics, because we often look at
00:24:12.900 demographic collapse. How do you motivate higher reproductive rates, but you're looking at how do
00:24:17.760 you motivate higher reproductive rates alongside a culture that would have a high carrying capacity?
00:24:23.240 Yeah. What I think also is people set up their techno fiefdoms in, in an age of post demographic
00:24:30.620 collapse, techno feudalism. They need to be thinking specifically about the environments they
00:24:37.060 choose and how their unique culture is going to make it work in those environments. I'd also note
00:24:42.980 here that I would have a modifying criteria within the concept of cultural carrying capacity, as we
00:24:47.660 look at it going forwards, which I would call the technological coefficient, or let's say the
00:24:53.740 industrial coefficient. So the industrial coefficient is the modification to population number of
00:25:02.760 resources consumed, contrasted with the amount of productivity you get based on that culture. So I'll
00:25:10.140 explain what I mean by this. Okay. You could be a culture that goes into a region and can
00:25:16.660 significantly outbreed your neighbors, right? Like, like you can have X many people living in a region
00:25:22.500 because your culture doesn't mind people starving to death all the time, right? You just do not care,
00:25:27.400 right? Like whatever. I'm just going to keep breeding until I start starving and my kids start
00:25:31.180 starving, right? And there's lots of things like this. Yeah. There's just kind of a norm in-
00:25:35.480 Well, it's a norm in the animal world. It's a norm in some parts of the human world.
00:25:38.660 Well, and yeah, historically it was a pervasive norm in many parts of, if not all parts of the human
00:25:43.280 world. Yeah. But there's other cultural groups which artificially limit their sort of carrying
00:25:51.180 capacity and redirect resources, whether it is energy. Well, energy is the main one, energy or
00:25:58.360 material supplies into the production of industrial capacity. And that can be in the form of artificial
00:26:05.440 intelligence. That can be in the form of automated factories. That can be in the form of robotics,
00:26:11.240 et cetera. And that we need to keep in mind the amount of output a culture is getting as something
00:26:17.540 that is measured alongside their total population. Because you might have two of these populations,
00:26:22.760 the one that has no technology, but just breathes until they start starving. And the one that's like,
00:26:26.680 it redirects, let's say 80% of the actual energy, because that's like the core unit.
00:26:31.180 That is what we are getting from the plants that we eat is energy ultimately. And if you have energy,
00:26:35.520 you can ultimately make food. It might be lossy, but eventually all food is convertible to energy and
00:26:41.300 all energy is convertible to food with sufficient technology. And they're putting the majority of their
00:26:46.080 energy, not into the creation of new humans, but into industrial capacity that needs to be measured
00:26:50.320 because that has an impact on their ability to exert their cultural will on the neighbor was a lower
00:26:57.380 industrial coefficient. When this becomes increasingly important, when you're talking about interstellar
00:27:03.220 colonies, inter spaceship competition and stuff like that, your spaceship may only have, you know,
00:27:09.420 10 humans living in it who are like genetically augmented and created. And another might have a thousand
00:27:13.940 people living on it, but they just don't have anything close to your level of technological output
00:27:17.720 because you're living in a closed system and you're always deciding, am I putting my energy into food
00:27:23.580 that humans are consuming and metabolizing, or am I putting it into industrial production?
00:27:29.920 Thoughts on that idea?
00:27:32.180 And it may make sense. I think, though, in the future, this kind of thoughtfulness is going to inherently
00:27:38.280 be built into things like space colonies where it needs to be considered more thoughtfully is in the more
00:27:44.620 grassroots communities that are arising. So someone in response to our demographic collapse video where we sort of
00:27:50.220 talk about a post-collapse world said it's all fine and well that these charter cities are popping up for
00:27:57.500 really wealthy people and groups, but what about the rest of us, right? Like, I'm not getting an invite to this.
00:28:03.520 So what am I going to do? And I pointed out that there are also city-state movements,
00:28:09.040 one example being Return to Land, where people are, they have a cultural affinity and they're
00:28:13.600 building a community around it, where it doesn't really matter that they don't have special
00:28:18.340 privileges from the state because either they're trying to work within existing laws, which is what
00:28:23.100 Return to Land is doing, or at the point of demographic collapse, no one's really going to be enforcing
00:28:29.060 stuff anyway. So, you know, if you can defend yourself and fly under the radar, it doesn't really
00:28:34.500 matter how you govern internally because there's no one else there to pay attention. But I think the
00:28:40.820 important thing for these lower tech communities to be thinking about, because they're not necessarily
00:28:45.340 coming from sophisticated resource management and business and investing backgrounds, or even,
00:28:50.100 you know, from permaculture backgrounds, they need to really be thinking about, if they're low tech,
00:28:54.860 the actual environmental carrying capacity of the land on which they're choosing to settle,
00:28:59.600 or if they're coming at this from a higher tech perspective, but just very grassroots and
00:29:03.740 bootstrapped, how to combine their cultural carrying capacity with the environmental carrying capacity.
00:29:12.140 Some people I've been chatting with are like, well, you know, maybe we'll go into mining,
00:29:15.320 right? You know, getting rare earths, because that's probably going to be a growing industry.
00:29:18.860 That is one way where they can, they can be in a more hostile environment, but still have high
00:29:22.860 cultural carrying capacity that allows them to survive and thrive, despite not being surrounded
00:29:27.720 by, you know, a very fertile permaculture friendly environment. If they combine the two of them,
00:29:34.200 then even better. Yeah. And while I mentioned this a few times, I really need to, once we begin to
00:29:40.040 think about humanity's future, and our manifest destiny among the stars, and the concepts we're going
00:29:45.760 to need to culturally normalize to when space travel becomes normal, it will become very obvious to
00:29:51.240 people that many of the cultural taboos in terms of stuff we can talk about today need to be dropped.
00:29:56.060 The idea that genetic differences aren't real, or the idea that, and note here, I'm not talking
00:30:00.900 about between us, the cities, I would never say that. That's, you know, I don't want to be pilloried
00:30:05.400 here. I'm just talking about between individual humans, that some humans are born, you know,
00:30:10.160 smarter than other humans, or with different capacities than other humans. And to not see
00:30:14.840 an advantage that you've had your entire life is not being magnanimous. You know, it's being
00:30:22.060 massively insensitive. Yeah. And, and pretending that, you know, people who were born with your
00:30:27.360 exact same background or possibly systemic privileges as a whatever class person just
00:30:33.720 didn't work as hard as you. When really, no, maybe they were born with a very different set of
00:30:38.980 genetic traits. It doesn't give them the same combination of drive and intelligence that enabled
00:30:43.160 you to perform so well. Anyone who has had multiple kids knows that their kids are gifted
00:30:47.160 with different strengths and with different drawbacks, depending on the environment. Right.
00:30:52.760 And, and so to pretend that this is a group wide thing is yeah, totally insensitive.
00:30:57.100 We're going to have to drop that. We're going to have to drop the idea that culture isn't
00:31:00.620 different. Culture is different. And not every cultural group can get along with every cultural
00:31:04.060 group. You can import people willy nilly into your country that think that people should be
00:31:09.320 able to force a nine-year-old girl to get married to someone she doesn't want to.
00:31:13.080 And that's culturally normal. See our video on, because we're not arguing this as outsiders.
00:31:17.920 This is something the Pakistani Islamic court argued. They said it was Islamophobic to ban
00:31:21.240 this, to ban child forced marriage. They, they, they, they, and they're at least within their
00:31:27.840 own cultural concept are right about that. But when you import those people willy nilly
00:31:30.500 into an environment like Germany or something like that, a real, a totally different culture,
00:31:34.240 like both groups have a right to their own culture, but they may not be compatible.
00:31:37.940 It can be right now. We can pretend that they're actually incompatible, but when you put them
00:31:42.100 on a spaceship together, it can, it'll become obvious real quick that these two groups cannot
00:31:47.680 live alongside each other. And then you get a genocide, right? Like that's what happens when
00:31:52.160 you force groups that are incompatible with each other to live in enclosed spaces. But this is
00:31:57.780 also true with countries, right? Like one of you have this reporter that's recently, and she's
00:32:01.840 all throwing this big fit about like ice and everything like that, you know, taking people out of the
00:32:06.060 country. And I think you see this with Germany, right? Germany's in a worse situation.
00:32:09.840 You know, they're taking even more incompatible immigrant groups and filling their country with
00:32:12.960 it, right? You know, to try to spam the vote in their favor. And they, they other side is eventually
00:32:19.580 right. Like this group coming into the country, it's like, I don't want to acclimatize to your
00:32:25.340 culture. And, and, and, and given that, that means you only have one, two options. You either
00:32:29.340 culturally genocide them by erasing your group that doesn't want to have their culture erased by
00:32:32.040 taking their kids and adopting them into your culture. Or you keep a group there that is actively
00:32:36.720 hostile to your interests in your cultural system and wants a different government under
00:32:40.420 due to their religion under Sharia law in the case of Germany. And, and, and, and, and so
00:32:45.200 you're either eventually going to get cultural conflict between the two groups, which means
00:32:47.820 killing and murder, or one of the groups eventually has to be expunged, right? Like moved out of the
00:32:52.440 country. And what we're seeing in the United States, it's not the fault of Trump that this sort
00:32:56.800 of dragnet approach is happening. It's the fault of the group that the analogy I used to Simone
00:33:01.340 earlier is it's like somebody invited a bunch of homeless people into my house while I was gone,
00:33:05.420 when they were supposed to be homesteading for me. And I come back and a portion of the homeless
00:33:09.500 people are like hostile and breaking things and stealing things. And I'm like, I need to expel
00:33:13.140 those people. And they're like, well, if you expel them, you have to expel all of us, which is
00:33:17.540 really the position that left is taking is I was like, well, then I need to expel everyone. And
00:33:20.680 frankly, I never consented to this in the first place. Right? Like, yeah, well,
00:33:27.740 interesting stuff, but the important stuff to think about as you build communities for the future,
00:33:33.020 I'm going to go pick up Toasty for his, his APA therapy question on dinner tonight.
00:33:39.680 Yeah. Would you like we have anything frozen or should we be going to like the tons of,
00:33:45.180 of curries? Yeah. Could I do a curry of some sort? Yeah. Absolutely. Rice. Cause it's been a long time
00:33:53.740 and I really like it. Good. Let's do it. All right. I love you so much, Malcolm. I love you so much,
00:33:58.780 Simone. Thanks for giving me a palate cleanser. Um, I, by the way, thank you for being okay with me
00:34:06.420 pulling the trigger on a pretty big decision that we're going to be making tomorrow. Just.
00:34:11.260 Oh, I didn't have a good feeling about this from like for a really long time. So what was it the
00:34:17.580 team that you didn't have a good feeling about or? Yeah. The team, the direction, the lack of
00:34:21.740 transparency. Yeah. Wasn't, wasn't, I mean, I like the people individually, but they were never
00:34:30.660 doing anything. They never indicated anything to me that implied that we were on the same page
00:34:37.280 in terms of, Hey guys, this is our mission. Our goal is to promote long-term human flourishing,
00:34:43.280 raise awareness about demographic collapse and spark important debates. And
00:34:48.160 yeah, I'm not getting that read. So anyway, let's go.
00:34:56.720 Hey guys, what are you doing?
00:35:00.240 Oh my gosh. Do you think that they might eat you?
00:35:08.700 Cause they're in a container.
00:35:09.760 Those are, uh, Dewey ducks, I think.
00:35:19.440 Hey mommy!
00:35:21.280 Yeah, you see those plants? Yeah.
00:35:27.900 Look, those are here.