Based Camp - Humans Are Different： Accepting This Is Critical for Space Travel

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. 0.99

00:02:33.180 I didn't even understand what he was saying. 1.00

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 0.89

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 0.81

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 1.00

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. 0.89

00:09:39.680 The results are actually way weirder. Or we point out that like one study showing the Asians spent 0.97

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 0.92

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, 0.97

00:10:15.600 as I've mentioned, Jews out earn most groups. They are. 0.90

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 1.00

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 0.79

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 0.90

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 0.99

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 1.00

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, 0.59

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, 0.99

00:16:09.640 like, yeah, that was a dick move. You know, whoever did that, don't do that. But yeah, 0.99

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 0.71

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 0.97

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 0.99

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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? 0.72

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 0.99

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 1.00

00:31:30.500 into an environment like Germany or something like that, a real, a totally different culture, 0.99

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.90

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! 1.00

00:35:21.280 Yeah, you see those plants? Yeah.

00:35:27.900 Look, those are here.

Based Camp - September 19, 2025

Humans Are Different： Accepting This Is Critical for Space Travel

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