In this episode, we discuss why the Jews are the only population that seems to be resistant to prosperity-induced demographic collapse everywhere else in the world, and why this is important in terms of power projection and influence in the long term.
00:02:01.000It's also, you know, people, you know, a lot of right-wingers, they're like, oh, my God, aren't you so afraid of, like, Muslim birth rates, for example.
00:02:10.080And it's like Muslim birth rates are only high in regions that are incredibly poor.
00:02:14.700Actually, at higher rates of wealth, Muslim fertility drops faster than Christian fertility.
00:02:19.700And so really what you're seeing is just poverty and people in poverty, if that is what is motivating their fertility rate, they don't have the ability for economic or power projection, geopolitically speaking.
00:02:32.620And so they don't particularly in terms of, like, the future of humanity.
00:03:44.480And in addition to that, they're not even, they've passed these dictatorial laws that prevent their data from being used in AI training data sets.
00:03:52.380So they're not even really relevant in terms of AI influence.
00:03:55.780Europe right now is like a big ball is being rolled off of a ship and a bunch of people are chained to it.
00:04:05.360And the guy next to me is like, hey, why are you cutting that chain, buddy?
00:04:08.100It's like, I don't want to, you know, when I said this, he's like, well, then geopolitically, who should the U.S. be investing in, you know, in terms of future world power players?
00:04:22.120And so because, one, high fertility rates, but also high technology.
00:04:26.080And also a level of sort of agenticness was in the world stage that I don't think any other country shows, which, except for the United States, of course, which is really much more than something like China.
00:04:39.880Like people are like, oh, you know, you should focus on China.
00:04:43.060And it's like, one, China was in a sort of, as the world becomes more polar, one, it's got the problem with its whole economic house of cards thing around real estate.
00:04:53.540It's got a problem with its demographic situation.
00:04:56.480It doesn't really have a solution for its water situation.
00:04:59.580You can look at our what happens to the future of East Asia, but it's got a lot of problems coming up.
00:05:03.840But even if those problems don't end up sort of cracking its back, as Europe fades as a relevant world power, it leaves the world in more of a unipolar power structure between the United States and China,
00:05:17.380China, which unfortunately makes a key alliance with China much harder when you're the only two major powers in the room.
00:06:36.280Israeli Jews overall have a fertility rate of around 3, which is insane for a wealthy, technologically advanced country.
00:06:44.860Israeli secular Jews have a fertility rate of 2.1 to 2.2.
00:06:50.080So, at repopulation rate, which is wild for a secular population.
00:06:54.440Israeli traditional Jews have a fertility rate of around 3.
00:06:57.740Israeli religious Dalti Jews have a fertility rate of 4.3.
00:07:03.780Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews have a fertility rate of 6.9, only slightly higher than their U.S. brothers.
00:07:09.100And Israeli Arabs and Muslims have a fertility rate of only 2.2 to 3.
00:07:12.840So, there have been many proposed reasons why Jews have a high fertility rate, and I'm going to throw another in the ring, which is that they are better at not caring as much for their kids as other cultures.
00:07:28.580And this is going to really surprise people, but I have found a number of sources of evidence of this recently.
00:07:33.640And I think that this is actually a very important cultural trait to adapt if you are going to survive the fertility crucible.
00:07:43.740So, big thanks to Diana Fleischman, who sent this to me, knowing that we would find it really interesting.
00:07:49.280This is just like a one-off post, like not a full-out Substack essay.
00:07:52.680This person's name was written in Jewish characters.
00:07:55.260Yeah, but he's a Substack author called Moskiel Bina, who has a Substack called Non-Zionism, and it covers Israel, Britain, and broader themes around politics, Jewish identity, and ideological critique.
00:08:07.980So, he actually is really interested in this kind of stuff, and, you know, that kind of puts this into context.
00:08:14.420But he wrote in a sort of one-off Substack post.
00:11:08.520Faithful replication of elevated social norms requires a high level of parental investment, and there's no time for it.
00:11:15.120No doubt there are many other factors, too.
00:11:17.080Zionist ideology always favored casualness and informality.
00:11:21.060And that's important to your point, Malcolm.
00:11:22.840I'm going to note, the person is saying something here that I think that a lot of people get wrong about parenting, and extremely wrong.
00:11:30.620The replication of social norms requires a high amount of parental investment.
00:11:36.040It's factually, and I mean very factually wrong.
00:11:40.060I picked up on my family norms, even though my parents were basically never around,
00:11:45.600and I was almost entirely raised by nannies or staff.
00:11:48.580I, in some cases, don't even remember their names, even though they were my primary care providers for years of my life.
00:11:56.760And I never thought, oh, I'm queuing to their social norms.
00:12:01.880And so, I think that, yes, there's danger in stuff like public school and things like that.
00:12:06.400But it's not just Jews who are able to replicate social norms intergenerationally with high fidelity without a high degree of parental investment.
00:12:15.620And this parenting style that he's talking about here, I decided to go and read some Jewish parenting guides.
00:12:47.980Go forth, God told Abraham when it was time for him to leave his father's land and venture out into the unknown.
00:12:53.600This phrase, which literally means go to yourself, teaches us that the capabilities to go are precisely within ourselves.
00:13:01.780In order for our children to learn confidence in their abilities to triumph over life's challenges, we must allow them to venture out into the world and work things out on their own.
00:13:11.140In the process, we must be mindful to praise and encourage their efforts and talents.
00:13:31.000When we encourage effort, we foster what Stanford University psychologist Carol Deckers refers to as gross mindset, which results in more patience and willingness to take risks and experiment with different tasks.
00:13:43.900When our children are being rambunctious, we wish them to be angels.
00:13:47.480Yet angels are standing, stagnant beings.
00:14:11.420And so this is like active, like this is how you be.
00:14:13.620This isn't like this guy being like, hey, we're cutting corners.
00:14:16.360It's don't expect your kids to be like angels.
00:14:18.640And I'll note, this isn't true as in every culture.
00:14:21.840In some of the evangelical cultures that I am more familiar with, the idea of kids acting like angels is actually very strict.
00:14:30.480Like kids must obey all the rules at all the time.
00:14:35.060And that is, this is not my own cultural background, which is the backwoods, greater Appalachian cultural background, like hillbilly, redneck type.
00:14:41.920But this is a cultural background that was nearby where I lived in Texas, and you would see this pretty frequently.
00:14:48.680I'd also note that the hillbilly, redneck cultural background seems to be also like the Jews, particularly resistant to fertility collabs.
00:14:55.960Also, the spaghetti thing so resonated with me because, I mean, you see me, you witness me.
00:15:03.680I give forks to our children when we serve them spaghetti.
00:15:09.200I make sure that they repeat it to show that they know what I'm talking about and they can do it.
00:15:13.240And then I turn my back for 30 seconds and then I turn back around.
00:15:16.900And it's worse than with this Israeli kid.
00:15:19.020And, like, not only does the child have a fistful of spaghetti that they're eating out of their hand and there's spaghetti all over the floor, but they still have the fork in the other hand and they're using it to stab holes into the table.
00:15:33.600And, of course, it makes the world go, going, you know.
00:15:38.540Yeah, I mean, like, wow, that's relatable.
00:15:40.900No, but my point here is that if you are going to survive a fertility collapse, you, and you're not Jewish, Jews seem to have a path through this, you're going to need to adapt your culture in some specific ways.
00:15:55.640And learning from cultures that do seem to be able to get through this without sacrificing engagement with technology is really important.
00:16:02.680And one of the most important traits is to either learn how to make high control of children work with higher fertility rates or adopt to be lower oversight.
00:16:16.440Brianna Fleischman, she filmed an episode with us that I've actually never ended up airing that one.
00:16:20.460I just didn't think it would do well in the algorithm.
00:16:21.980We can send it to the Patreon or whatever.
00:16:27.420Because she was like, here are you guys so low effort.
00:16:29.480Like, she's seen us as parents, and she's like, you guys just do not, like, air that much.
00:16:35.160And we, like, I'm very much like, I watch my kid constantly, and I make sure that I'm out there with them, but they're mostly doing their own thing and playing together and playing in ways that, I mean, I remember we were punishing one kid, and we told him to stop, you know, running away and going to this other playground, right?
00:16:54.440And so, you know, I tasked his brother, I go, go get him, his older brother.
00:16:59.580And so his older brother just goes and drags him back, screaming and everything like that, and sits him in a chair, and then is like, hey, Toasty, you can't go back out there.
00:17:07.580And Torsten hops up to try to run again, and Octavian slaps him and sits him back down in the chair.
00:17:14.180And the other people, this is at a 4th of July party, gasped at the event, like, he'd just done something horrible.
00:17:32.700Like I was telling you last night, Torsten and Titan were brawling in the kitchen during dinner for, like, a good five minutes until, and I didn't do anything to stop them.
00:17:43.100Until Toasty finally clocked Titan with a toy.
00:17:47.280And then they got in trouble, because I'm like, you could have broken that toy.
00:17:51.180Like, they do get in trouble, but only for, like, a damaging property.
00:18:02.240And I will note here that the Backwoods tradition, this positive aspect of Jewish culture, which I think is protective of fertility rates, which is not being overly concerned.
00:18:13.100About kids being, you know, looked after and perfect is even higher, at least within some context, within my own cultural tradition.
00:18:21.960I remember we had some of our Jewish friends' kids over to play, and they came off as incredibly sort of timid or docile when contrasted with our children.
00:18:33.940Like, they were scared of dogs and insects and other, like, gross things in the environment.
00:18:41.280And it felt very much like that scene from Wolf Children.
00:19:03.160Now, here, I know that I think a lot of this is downstream of my kids coming from a rural-based culture.
00:19:14.300And so even if you are adopting this lower-hovering strategy, if you're doing it within an urban environment and an urban specialized culture,
00:19:22.960kids just aren't going to have the exposure to these sorts of natural phenomenon and therefore be more timid around them,
00:19:29.220which may cause this sort of illusion, like, if I put my kids in the middle of a city, perhaps they would act much more timid as well.
00:19:36.420Look it! My mom gave me her old jewelry!
00:19:59.680To be honest, in the nature of both sides and things, I think I might be underselling things here.
00:20:05.420I remember myself growing up that I, my parents told me that they'd been told that other parents' kids were told they weren't allowed to play with me anymore
00:20:13.920after they learned that, after I found out that there was this magazine that you could get that was like a science magazine for ordering scientific equipment,
00:20:22.780you could order animals to dissect, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
00:20:27.740So, I would regularly have dissections prepped in my room to learn about the natural world because I thought that that was normal.
00:20:38.200And apparently, to many other kids, this looked very scary.
00:20:41.560And so, this was just a natural part of not just my own kids growing up.
00:20:46.660And again, keep in mind, I didn't, like, teach my kids to like this stuff.
00:22:47.560Yeah, and you recognize it because it went kind of viral in like the fertility nerd space this time last year.
00:22:52.580It's, it's from a Substack essay he wrote under non-Zionism, July 24, so last year, called Why is Israel Fertile?
00:23:01.200And he writes, like it says it's all because of the Harites, this piece.
00:23:06.500Okay, it's a bad argument, but go ahead.
00:23:09.500Yeah, I liked his arguments against other reasons why people thought fertility.
00:23:13.700He would, you would actually appreciate a lot of the other things that he pointed out.
00:23:16.920One of the arguments you often find, and I think it was in this piece, but I don't remember 100%, against our claim that this is mostly a cultural phenomenon, which, despite all the evolutionary stuff we're talking about in this one, I do think that this is mostly a cultural phenomenon, and I think that it is Jewish culture that protects him the most.
00:23:33.040But they'll say something like, oh, well, look at people living in rural Guatemala, like their fertility rates are dropping.
00:23:40.600They haven't been exposed to the urban monoculture, Western cultural exports, and I'm like, what, what are you talking about?
00:23:51.860In fact, I'd argue that the rate that they're exposed to it isn't particularly, you know, when you take their local cultural colorings into account, different from people living in rural America.
00:24:02.260And a huge afterthought, and I don't know where to put this, but some people say, oh, well, Jewish fertility rates are high because they had an attempted genocide on them recently, and they're trying to get their numbers back up.
00:24:11.960And it's like, yes, that's probably a factor, but there are other groups that have recently had attempted genocides against them that actually have uniquely lower fertility rates than neighboring populations.
00:24:23.520In fact, I'd argue that most groups that have had attempted genocides on them recently have uniquely low fertility rates.
00:24:29.820Like, he points out how a lot of people point to housing policy, and that's a big bugaboo of yours.
00:24:36.860And he points out that a lot of well-meeting American writers fret about affordable family formation, which is basically about how easy it is for young people to couple up, find stable, well-paying jobs, and buy or rent child-appropriate housing in safe neighborhoods.
00:24:49.980Affordable family foundation is a good thing, but Israel is an extremely crowded country.
00:24:53.640The Bank of Israel has deliberately stoked house price inflation since 2008.
00:24:58.040The average young couple lives in a badly furnished flat on the fifth floor of a modernist monstrosity in a new-built neighborhood drawn up by town planners whose modus operandi appears to be watching YouTube videos on good urbanism, and then just doing the exact opposite.
00:25:11.900And the photo that he shares of, like, a representative Jewish young family neighborhood is amazing, because it would make, I think it would give more births in an aneurysm.
00:25:51.080Basically, he argues, yes, that, like, the most pious, high-fertility Jews in Israel do have a trickle-down effect.
00:25:59.840But what matters is, like, you also have the Amish in the United States that are high-fertility, but they don't trickle down because they're not admired by the rest of.
00:26:08.720No, this isn't an argument against evolution.
00:26:11.340What is his argument against evolution?
00:26:15.300I remember correctly the argument against evolution he gave in this piece was that Jews in the U.S. don't have a higher fertility rate, which is factually wrong.
00:26:23.960He says, finally, right-wing futurism and some others contend that once contraception is widespread and women achieve some basic level of legal and practical equality,
00:26:35.620TFR is a function principally of genetic predisposition to want to marry and have kids, and its culture and institutions are invariant.
00:26:44.540Apparently not, because Jewish TFR in America is below replacement, even with the Orthodox bumping up the numbers.
00:26:53.380The Jewish fertility rate in the United States is incredibly high, but it's lower than it is in Israel, but you'd expect that.
00:27:00.140I still think that he's on to something with the most admired culture or, like, the most pious, most, like, optimal role model culture being one of high fertility and that having a trickle down effect.
00:27:21.940Like, the secular Jews in Israel do not admire the ultra-Orthodox Jews in the way that he is framing them as.
00:27:32.480Maybe some of the general conservative Jews are on, like, friendly terms with him, but I think that he is creating a framing that is trying to be convenient for his pre-existing worldview.
00:27:44.940Well, he also talks about how people generally just look around and see what other people have in terms of kids and lifestyle and generally copy that so it normalizes him.
00:27:55.180And here I would point out that the secular Jews' admiration of the ultra-Orthodox Jew is not higher, at least in my experience, than the mostly secular Muslims' admiration of the very conservative Muslim.
00:28:12.540Nor could you claim that there isn't a pipeline of very conservative Muslim to slightly less conservative Muslim to slightly less conservative Muslim to secular Muslim that could drive the very high fertility rate of conservative Muslims down through Muslim culture.
00:28:27.420And yet we don't see a convergent phenomenon within Muslim cultures.
00:28:31.900But when people look around in the modern world, what they're actually generally seeing isn't the people who live around them.
00:28:39.580It's what's on movies and TV, and that's not affected by ultra-Orthodox.
00:28:47.560If you're going grocery shopping or you're going out to eat or you're going to the doctor and you just see all these huge families, would that not?
00:28:55.520I could see it having some effect, but I don't think it's going to have a dominant effect in terms of what you think to strive for.
00:29:01.260Normalization is created through culture and media and stuff like that and your family network.
00:29:05.980And the thing about the ultra-Orthodox and Haridi community is they are a distinctly separate community in terms of their cultural values and norms.
00:29:14.700It would be like saying that, you know, today we saw a large Hispanic family at Walmart.
00:29:20.040That doesn't make me want to have more kids, right?
00:29:25.020Like they're a different cultural group.
00:29:26.240And he's arguing that because they're all roughly Jewish and he does seem to think that there's at least some level of respect or admiration that the less religious Jews in Israel still want to kind of be.
00:29:43.260Like his argument's not wrong that there is some degree of directionality there.
00:29:46.400I don't think at all it's the secret to why secular Jews in the United States have unusually high fertility rates.
00:29:55.460Secular Jews in the United States do not love Hasidic Jews.
00:29:58.880They don't look up to Hasidic Jews and they're not influenced heavily by Hasidic Jews.
00:30:02.880So why is their fertility rate so much higher than you would expect from a normal secular population?
00:30:08.180Why is the general Jewish population's fertility rate in the United States so much higher than you'd expect?
00:30:12.280So his answer, I just think it's baloney.
00:30:14.140I think that the actual reason is what he touched on in his daycare post of just like neglectful parents.
00:30:21.260Look, Jewish populations in the world today.
00:30:23.340I think when I ran the numbers on this list, it was something like 98% of them live in an urban center, which for a cultural group is absolutely effing insane.
00:30:40.400And in addition to that, this is, and it's also really weird in Israel, and I've noted this before, that when you go to all Jewish rural settlements, they cluster into like micro urban centers.
00:30:53.960That look really weird from the perspective of somebody who grew up in American rural settings.
00:30:59.460Yeah, unless you grew up in Korea and they do the same thing.
00:31:02.580Well, like in America, if you're out in the countryside, it'll be like a 10 minute walk to the next house, you know, or a 20 minute walk to the next house in areas like where our family's ranch was, right?
00:31:13.400Like, but if you go to, Jewish settlements just aren't structured that way.
00:31:17.840And people can be like, well, there's a partially religious reason why they're not structured this way, because you need the whatever, the community of 12 guys who meets regularly.
00:31:37.540So the question, so first, just framing here, Jews are urban specialists, even within a modern context, in an ultra modern context.
00:31:46.380Now, what's interesting is that they were also historically urban specialists.
00:31:51.200In the cases of the pogroms and stuff like that, a lot of these were Jewish quarters of cities where Jews were rounded up and everything like that.
00:31:58.660So in this context, this is really important, because if you look historically at the birth rates of cities, they were really, really low.
00:32:20.840Well, so basically, people, like the reason why London had more people is because the Brits, who were culturally British, who were having kids in the countryside, sent their kids to go live in the city.
00:32:34.200They weren't leaning on maintaining their urban population by getting immigrants from external rural populations.
00:32:43.700They had to find a way to continue to exist, to exist within a totally urban setting.
00:32:50.020And I'll note here as well, and we argue this extensively in the Pregmanist, Catecraftian religion, is this is not something innate about Judaism's historical ancestor.
00:33:00.580If you look at Judaism of the time of, you know, the Bible and stuff like that, it was more like other cultures.
00:33:07.720I actually argue it was a lot like modern day Islam, where it had a set of rules around how the government worked.
00:33:14.220And it had carve outs for non-Jews living within Jewish territory and how to do business with them.
00:33:18.880It was very similar to to Islam in that sense.
00:33:22.800And we also pointed out that it was actively proselytizing religion back then.
00:33:26.140Our video on the question that breaks Judaism for a lot of evidence on this particular thing, if you're willing to go into like a four hour.
00:33:33.380But what happened was, is when the Jews became stateless, they set up in a bunch of different regions.
00:33:42.480And when those regions decided to have pogroms against them, there were multiple Jewish cultural groups that we know of from this period.
00:34:54.460Lived in rural Spain and stuff like that.
00:34:56.480Anyway, they're mostly died out at this point of a distinct cultural identity.
00:35:00.660But the point here being is the non-urban-based Jewish factions died.
00:35:07.240And so Jews, through living in urban centers for very long periods of time, became specialists at these types of environments.
00:35:17.880And keep in mind, when I say became specialists, what I mean is the cultural traditions that Jews in these communities had that led to higher fertility rates and led to higher cultural fidelity ended up replicating at a higher rate than the Jews who had traditions that didn't do this.
00:35:35.680And you likely had a degree of biological specialization as well.
00:35:39.440And so what this created was sort of a pressure that no one else in the world really had to deal with.
00:35:48.360And when you had the Industrial Revolution, which is when fertility rates began crashing for everyone, what you have during that century is the urbanization of the world.
00:35:59.380The entire Western world and non-Western world was turned into something closer to what life was like in an urban center in the medieval period than what life was like outside of urban centers in the medieval period.
00:36:14.800Even a small town like where we live, like Phoenixville or something like that, is closer in lifestyle to, you know, ancient London than an ancient medieval hamlet.
00:36:27.480And it's the same with the media we get.
00:36:30.360Because the media is created within urban centers, almost necessarily, it normalizes urban cultural norms.
00:36:39.100And so, and in many ways, this is in part sort of like we are getting the media that the Jews were resistant to and made resistant to because they had much earlier and longer exposure to these sorts of cultural norms than anyone else.
00:36:54.640And so when people talk about, when somebody's like, okay, what sort of norms are you talking about here where this might be against another group's biology or ability to act?
00:37:04.960An example here that you're going to get in most city populations and you get uniquely within Jewish populations.
00:37:09.960You can go to our episode for more evidence on this called Why Do Jews Have Friends?
00:37:13.660Is the normalization of the concept of friendship and friend networks, which is not actually universal.
00:37:20.660It, for example, is not a part of my cultural tradition.
00:37:24.380In the Backwoods cultural tradition, you have friend networks, but the first network that matters and really the predominant network you focus on is your clan and your family.
00:37:33.040And this was, I remember, really made clear to me when we had an Orthodox Jewish friend over to our house and he was talking to our kid and he goes, who are your friends?
00:37:40.340And my kid's like, well, my brother and my sister.
00:37:43.280I mean, who are your friends other than your family?
00:37:45.620And I mean, why would he want friends that aren't his family?
00:37:49.540And I was like, what do you mean like brother and sister aren't the friends?
00:38:06.840Well, I mean, by my cultural norms, which, again, likely evolved alongside my culture's biology, friendship is not that normal a thing outside of clan networks.
00:38:20.080And I think that if you look at media, like if a kid goes to like the power of friendship and all the shows about, well, we all came together as friends and made this work.
00:38:31.340You know, you see this being this is the way you should live.
00:38:34.760This is the way when I'm perfectly normal, being a mostly Hikiko Mori.
00:38:38.280I talk to people other than my wife, like like about something other than business, maybe four people a year, you know, outside of like direct networking events or something like that, where I'm just like, oh, I have to group all the networking.
00:38:52.200OK, let's go to a city and like do all this talking.
00:38:54.220And this is shamed by society right now.
00:39:03.540But if I grew up in a culture that wasn't designed to be commensurate with the concept of friends and I have a biology that's not designed around that, maybe one, I won't get satisfaction and I'll end up neurotic and I'll end up looking for validation in places where I'm not going to receive meaningful validation.
00:39:18.720And I can just for me, either a biological or the rest of my culture isn't built around this concept.
00:39:23.220I add this concept to my culture and it begins to break a lot of other things.
00:39:27.380And I didn't and that might be true of you, for example, and you don't even realize it.
00:39:31.720Like the reason why you don't feel like you don't have time for another kid is because you're investing in maintaining this friend network.
00:39:39.700And it's not culturally normative for you, whereas Jews have, you know, 500 years of cultural evolutionary pressure around maintaining friend networks.
00:39:51.660That it's going to make it easier for them to juggle a wide friend network and a large family.
00:39:58.300And note here, like this is not like this is all I'm saying, like, it's important to stay friends with the Jews because they're powerful now and they're likely going to grow in their power going forwards, given their high technology and high fertility.
00:40:11.480But it is also saying that when people say that Jewish cultural values are being exported by Hollywood and media and the advertising agencies, they are one right that Jews disproportionately work within these industries.
00:40:24.520So it would be a little insane to say that they're not going to have disproportionate Jewish cultural values.
00:40:29.700But I think part of what they're wrong is it's not Jewish cultural values that they're seeing.
00:40:35.100It's urban cultural values that they're seeing.
00:40:38.000And Jews are just adapted much more for urban environments.
00:40:45.280It's still just so notable that there is a high fertility urban culture.
00:40:50.660Well, I mean, I think it's going to in many ways, like when I look at what does the future of human civilization look like, I think it is somewhat obvious that Jews will end up and if things are functioning correctly, given their high fertility rates and everything like that, dominating these urban settings.
00:41:09.920And something I wanted to note here is if you look at Jews and you look at like the Orthodox Jews who follow their traditions with more fidelity, these evolved traditions with more fidelity, they have the highest fertility rates, right?
00:41:22.320So the people who are following these traditions with higher fidelity, often the more conservative Jews have more kids.
00:41:26.820Of course, you see this throughout traditions, but it seems to be even higher in Jewish communities.
00:41:30.700And you actually see an antithesis of this.
00:41:33.100We've noted that in one of our users did a big study on this.
00:41:36.440In Mormon communities, the very most devout Mormons actually have less kids than middling devoutness Mormons.
00:41:42.160So the actual highest fidelity cultural conservatism doesn't always lead to a higher fertility rate.
00:41:48.020But anyway, what I was saying about the future is we might end up with a future in which the urban centers are Jewish dominated and the people who migrate to them, which isn't kind of what we may have had, historically speaking, don't really expect to continue surviving.
00:42:05.240They don't really expect to continue high fertility rates.
00:42:08.440And people can be like, what a horrible thing to say.
00:42:10.720And I'm like, but it's kind of already true.
00:42:13.520Everyone I know who lives in a city who is above replacement rate is Jewish.
00:42:18.920Like out of all of my friends, everyone who lives in a city who's above repopulation rate is Jewish.
00:42:24.380And the Jewish ones are often quite above repopulation rate.
00:42:27.180So when these other people move to the city, because I asked them, I go, why are you going to another city?
00:42:58.840This has already become sort of the norm.
00:43:00.960And then I think it can lead to good cultural partnerships for the cultural groups that are more urban special, I mean, rural specialists.
00:43:09.980And I'd also note here that the urban versus rural specialist cultural optimization function may lead to less of an intrinsic power imbalance going forwards than it led to historically.
00:43:21.720So historically, urban centers became the centers of economic and political and artistic output.
00:43:37.160But that was because the ways that cities helped speed up human interaction and communication.
00:43:43.780You needed the cities to be at companies, to be at one of the big studios, to be at one of the...
00:43:49.420When we look at the ways the internet has changed this, changed the way people make friends, they build interpersonal relationships with people outside of their networks, the ways that they build wealth.
00:44:01.980I don't think cities are as big an advantage today as they were historically to power or wealth accumulation.
00:44:11.760Accumulate that perfectly fine outside a city even today.
00:44:16.840Interesting thing I'd note about rural specialist cultures, we've mentioned this before in other videos, is that it's very normal for rural specialist cultures when they live in a city to often have, as my family did growing up,
00:44:28.520a separate rural property that they commute to regularly, like a ranch or a lake house or a...
00:44:35.520And I've seen even families of fairly modest means have these sorts of things.
00:44:57.120Having the camper or having the ranch or having the...
00:45:01.840So much of that's because, like, if you are employed, you're spending your weekends and the Sabbath with your community and your communities in your rural area in the city.
00:51:20.720Again, we think that there might actually be a big genetic component to that.
00:51:23.780Specifically, the lack of forced marriages and their commonality in historic Asian population.
00:51:30.780Because they were incredibly common in Asian populations historically.
00:51:33.760And so if you have co-evolved with a culture where, you know, the way people bred was the wife is put in the house one day.
00:51:43.560And then you tell the guys, OK, now you need to go out and find a wife.
00:51:47.980When you tell the women, OK, now you need to be horny enough to, you know, find a guy and accidentally sleep with them and stuff like that.
00:51:53.820They're going to be like, no, why would I do that?
00:51:55.500I'm not I'm not particularly driven to because they didn't need that drive for the past 10 generations.
00:52:00.740You know, so of course that's going to hit their fertility rate, you know, uniquely badly.
00:52:05.880So here what I'm saying, and this is why the fertility, fixing it for you needs to be such a personal thing.
00:52:13.380This is why when people can say, well, if the urban monoculture, if this sort of attempt to culturally unify all of humanity is the core thing that is upstream of declining birth rates.
00:52:26.180Why do some areas in the world that appear to be have lessened this urban monoculture appear to have a more of an impact on declining fertility rates?
00:52:35.280So here I could point to something like South Korea.
00:52:38.820Somebody could say South Korea is affected less by the urban monoculture than the United States.
00:52:44.880So why do they have a higher crashing fertility rate?
00:52:47.900And I would say it's because the native Korean culture that they evolved alongside is less adapted to urban monocultural norms than the cultures in the United States.
00:53:02.120This is actually widely why cultures remember I said like the Jews have lived alongside the urban monoculture for a long time and it's helped them adapt to it.
00:53:10.080So have the backwoods tradition, but they've stayed in the outskirts.
00:53:15.060So have a lot of Northern Europeans, which is why they've been more resistant to fertility collapse than other groups.
00:53:21.860Whereas, you know, groups like Koreans and Japanese and Chinese haven't and they're being hit much faster by fertility collapse, which is important to remember.
00:53:32.620While the threat, this urban monoculture is the same all over on Earth, the way that you adapt to it and patch your culture for it is going to be completely unique to your cultural and biological history.
00:53:46.560So this explains the mystery of, oh, why is it that, you know, people in rural Guatemala, that their fertility rate is falling so much faster when they have so much less exposure to the urban monoculture?
00:54:00.040And my response to them is, yes, but what is their ancestral rate of exposure to urban culture versus or the urban monoculture versus what they're being exposed to right now?
00:54:12.160Oh, it's incredibly low and they just haven't had to deal with this at all.
00:54:16.880OK, well, then that explains their falling fertility rates.
00:54:19.600It's a bit like saying, oh, well, explain to me why when there's so much less smallpox disease in the Americas than in Europe, are Americans dying at such a higher rate?
00:54:30.880It's like, well, because they have no resistance to it.
00:54:33.640Also here, when I know when I say, oh, you know, it needs to be unique, the solution, even though the threat is the same.
00:54:40.020If it turns out that our hypothesis that one of the reasons for uniquely falling fertility rates within Asia is the norm of arranged marriages within that region, historically speaking, if erasing that norm through the urban monoculture is what's causing their fertility collapse.
00:54:59.620And then you could say within, you know, sort of the backwoods fertility collapse, if that's caused by being forced to have these large friend networks, well, the solution is technically the same in that it's adopt your ancestral culture to work with in the modern context rather than homogenizing yourself.
00:55:16.720The the particularities of the fix go back to arrange marriages or find some other solution that Paris people better find some other solution to not have to maintain big for networks or find a way to make big for networks cohesive with your cultural tradition is really divergent.
00:55:35.000And be done with in the context of who are you really like and person be like, I don't know that much about my ancestors.
00:55:43.540You don't need to know that much about your ancestors.
00:55:45.260Sit down and think about yourself without the context of the society being the waves of society crashing upon you.
00:55:53.600Think, do I actually want friends, for example?
00:55:58.020You know, does love need to be part of my relationship?
00:56:07.340What's the utility in sleeping in the same room?
00:56:09.100You know, there's actually a ton of utility from rural cultures in history to sleep in different rooms.
00:56:14.240So the people are rising at different times and you have kids in different rooms.
00:56:17.880So it's totally normal within many cultures throughout history.
00:56:21.560But today it's just like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:56:22.920We're going to have one culture and one way of doing things.
00:56:26.120And the reason why Jews have been resistant to this is twofold.
00:56:29.840One, their culture was already more like this one culture that's being enforced on everyone now.
00:56:35.200And two, their culture had a long time to adapt and evolve strategies to maintain its fidelity, uniqueness, and high fertility rates in spite of that one culture because they have been adjacent to it for so many generations.
00:56:55.540And I mean, I think people can, they don't seem to be able to wrap their heads around this as easily.
00:57:00.960And yet anyone can understand that if you move from a very hot climate to a climate that gets to below 20 in the winters, you're probably going to die if you don't change your outfit and make sure that you live in an insulated home.
00:57:17.260Like, you can't sleep out under the stars at night.
00:57:20.260And this is just how it is with modern culture and society.
00:57:25.380People are walking into cities, which are the equivalent of, like, super hot weather climates, you could say, wearing stuff for the winter tundra, like all these layers of furs.
00:57:38.260And they're just expiring and wondering, why am I expiring?
00:57:48.560Well, I'd also note that one of the cultural trends here that I think can be pretty toxic for individual decision making is the fetidization of humanity that happens in urban centers.
00:58:03.340So by this, what I mean is this elevation of humanity is this, like, ultra special thing.
00:58:10.060You know, people get offended in our videos where we say LLMs function very similar to the way the human brain functions.
00:58:16.720Textually speaking, you can look up our video on this, that, you know, and I was thinking today, LLMs are thinking machines and humans are thinking animals.
00:58:25.460And within a world cultural group, or at least the one that I'm from, the sort of clan-based backwards group, this is a very normal sort of a thought.
00:58:34.280Like, yes, we are but a degree from the world of tooth and claw.
00:58:39.060You know, humanity is just a thinking animal.
00:58:43.280And this really frames the way I see things like LLMs quite differently than the way I see things like humanity.
00:58:50.760And no one here is going to be like, oh, well, LLMs are just token predictors.
00:58:53.660You can go to our episode on this, and we argue with extensive neuroscience evidence that the human brain works on a token predictor model as well.
00:58:59.920But for some cultures, they really struggle with this.
00:59:04.340Like, Catholics hate the idea of saying, like, humans are just thinking animals, right?
00:59:08.920Like, they believe that there's this big difference from the external world and other individuals.
00:59:13.540And if you're like, well, Catholics only think because the Bible says that.
00:59:17.360And I'd point out, I'd be like, well, no, it's one interpretation of the Bible that says that.
00:59:22.300I would argue that Ecclesiastes 3.18 to 21 pretty clearly says the exact opposite.
00:59:28.420That we are tested by God to make sure that we do not think of ourselves as different from animals, even if we are above animals.
00:59:38.160You know, when they look to me, and they're like, oh, like, also a clan-based focus.
00:59:42.860They're like, don't you care about people?
00:59:46.360Very soon, I was talking to somebody, and they were saying, hey, don't you care about, like, the people in Africa who are going to get AIDS and die because they don't have these programs that U.S. AIDS was providing?
01:00:12.980And I'm like, because they are relevant to me and my descendants, right?
01:00:15.820Like, this is an incredibly high-technology society that is going to continue to be impactful going forwards that we are in active economic engagement with.
01:00:27.040I'm not, like, engaged with these cultures in an economic sense.
01:00:31.060I'm not engaged with them in a cultural sense.
01:00:33.620I'm not, like, why would I be sending my money to them?
01:00:37.240And they're like, well, you know, everybody matters.
01:00:39.520I love the people who are like, everybody matters.
01:00:40.940I'm like, okay, so when this program was shut down, you started donating to them, right?