Based Camp - New Data： The Genetic Effects of Conservatism & Religion

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about

00:00:03.860 a number of studies that were reconfirmed recently. So this is the third time that

00:00:11.520 these studies have been tested and reconfirmed. So this is a very robust finding at this point.

00:00:17.680 And I want to talk about them and talk about the implications of this for civilization,

00:00:23.980 strategies, culture, and how society is going to change in the future.

00:00:27.980 so a study that a lot of people are aware of is the study titled will intelligent latter-day

00:00:35.720 saints and smart conservatives inherit the earth and what this study looked at because a lot of

00:00:41.420 people were familiar that it looked at latter-day saints versus non-latter-day saints and when i

00:00:46.820 heard the results of this study initially uh some people misframed it as saying latter-day saints

00:00:53.280 are one of the few religions that has eugenic effects like the the culture of the latter-day

00:00:59.360 saints has eugenic effects on the people who follow that religion um this is not actually

00:01:05.460 what it showed it just just looked at latter-day saints versus non-latter-day saints and now newer

00:01:10.820 studies have looked at other religious groups and they have a similar effect um well at least

00:01:17.360 christian groups more than a second and and there's been some people who said that this effect

00:01:21.920 has died down in latter-day saints i we actually had a fan who did a really cool thing he went

00:01:27.500 through utah and then went by region to find the uh effects of earning and iq by looking at it

00:01:37.540 regionally and the amount that the region was the sort of fanatically latter-day saint and and this

00:01:44.400 guy can pin his results if he wants to in the in the comments he did this sort of recreationally

00:01:49.280 himself and he found something very interesting which we'll also talk about in this because i

00:01:54.300 think it adds to this a lot which is in his findings at least was in the latter day saints

00:02:00.240 the very very very most religious individuals actually began to have lower fertility rates

00:02:07.580 now they weren't below the non-religious individuals but the highest fertility rates

00:02:11.520 are in the kind of religious individuals like the the yeah i'm really into that but not super into

00:02:20.520 that um and it's interesting i point this out because at least anecdotally this is what i see

00:02:27.040 in other cultures this is what i see was like the catholics for example of the catholics i know who

00:02:33.520 are like super high fertility when i've pointed this out before it's not the fanatical ones it's

00:02:39.900 the ones who are it enjoyably culturally catholic like they really have fun being culturally catholic

00:02:46.720 but they don't really care about the theology stuff that much let's let's get into the data

00:02:51.900 here and then we can go into what might be causing that phenomenon i mean i think that phenomenon is

00:02:55.520 kind of obvious if you've seen the two groups i don't know how much i need to go into it

00:02:58.980 but well within casalism you're going to be like well obviously you know the most catholic people

00:03:03.920 are going to be nuns or priests so they're not going to have any kids at all but the fact that

00:03:07.540 you don't see that in the latter day saints and they also have a fewer number of kids i think it's

00:03:11.160 because they are just not particularly like the more you get heady about religion the less you

00:03:18.800 care about the concerns of this earth and the less interested you are in playing out those roles

00:03:25.600 you're more interested in i mean i think that the opus de are a perfect example of this like they 0.89

00:03:30.620 should be one of the the coolest and most based groups of catholics and yet 30 of them are celibate

00:03:36.400 like just to be celibate right well you can be based and celibate but yeah i mean it's or the 0.60

00:03:41.240 the i mean with the mormons like the most religious of them might have trouble operating

00:03:47.480 in society they may be too basically nerdy to date or find partners fast enough and they may

00:03:54.860 not even care that they're not finding a partner because they have so much belief in sort of the

00:03:59.920 theological backdrop is going to protect them. But let's continue with this study, because this

00:04:06.600 study didn't plot the graphs like that. It was just plotting like straight lines, like does this

00:04:10.180 matter or not? So the first study, the one that most people are aware of, it looked at expected

00:04:15.460 fertility rate versus intelligence, and then divided people into extremely liberal, centrist,

00:04:20.480 and extremely conservative. And what we can see very, very interestingly is that when they are

00:04:26.760 very unintelligent, being progressive actually leads you to have a higher fertility rate than

00:04:33.780 being conservative. Why would that be? Dumb conservatives have fewer kids than dumb

00:04:44.140 progressives why why why why i guess maybe to successfully marry as a conservative you have to 1.00

00:04:58.200 be smarter and then if you're progressive though you're not getting married to have like before

00:05:06.280 having kids you're just having kids kind of by mistake yeah okay so if you're conservative if

00:05:11.100 you're having kids presumably it's because you're getting married that requires that you are

00:05:17.780 attractive enough to get married you're ambitious enough to get married you have enough conscientiousness

00:05:22.900 to do it and then you're having kids oh actually that's a good point especially for conservative

00:05:27.820 men because conservatives have children in wedlock um what that means is that if a man doesn't have

00:05:33.980 money he can't find a partner and he can't get married and therefore he doesn't have kids which

00:05:38.160 is a much healthier way for society to act than just do whatever you want yeah which unfortunately 0.65

00:05:44.160 i mean i really it is so wild to me that and i think that what's his name homath has a very

00:05:53.240 interesting episode where he goes into this he talks about how basically western civilization

00:06:01.040 reached a place on like the the hierarchy of like their own thoughts and and the way that

00:06:07.400 they were structuring society where they actually thought like you could just be like yeah do whatever

00:06:12.500 you want like of course that's going to work rules are all basically bad because everybody i know

00:06:18.400 if they didn't have rules it's like when when we as a society like first had this idea

00:06:26.340 most of the places of power where it was being spewed from and even even still that that spew

00:06:35.200 it to some extent it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to say like of course we can

00:06:41.960 just have people do whatever they want and that will have no negative repercussions right because

00:06:48.020 everybody i know if you just said do whatever you want they wouldn't you know go out and

00:06:56.340 slut it up you know they wouldn't go murder people or rob stores or great children and i think what

00:07:05.000 we're seeing in our society now is like okay we unfortunately and what he pointed out there is

00:07:13.740 it's sort of ironic that it was the very level of civilizational development that we had reached 0.98

00:07:19.720 that allowed us to even conceive of such a stupid idea that caused the civilization to collapse 0.80

00:07:26.320 and he argued within that video i think very interestingly that you know this has happened 0.98

00:07:31.420 multiple times. He's like, this is basically what happened with Islam. If you watch our video

00:07:35.140 on how Islam went from one of the strictest moral cultures to one of the most debauched moral 1.00

00:07:39.600 cultures, you could argue, I mean, maybe this was part of that, right? They basically hit a point 1.00

00:07:46.560 where it was such a debauched society. And like in that video, we go over a number of examples of

00:07:52.540 this. I think people today sort of forget that Islam was ever seen as the Java, the Hatha society,

00:07:59.360 the endless harems and parties and drinking and everything like that that it basically just

00:08:05.460 collapsed out of any form of efficiency and i'd also note here that a lot of people

00:08:13.900 misattribute all of this like many of the the the falling apart of civilization

00:08:21.480 to the ideals of the enlightenment and not to the ideals of uh the 1970s and or even let's say the

00:08:32.200 1920s to 1970s is really where things begin to to break apart uh and when people began to say

00:08:40.440 oh you could do whatever you want whatever you want in the ideals of the enlightenment

00:08:44.840 for those who like haven't studied this cultural period the idea that you would give people

00:08:52.040 something for like not hard work was a complete anathema their utopias were very like many people

00:09:03.060 throughout the enlightenment tried to create utopias but you today these utopias would not

00:09:09.080 be recognizable to any modern progressive. They'd be like, I'm going to create a factory city where

00:09:16.820 every day people will spend this amount of time praying and this amount of time studying science

00:09:23.020 and no one will be allowed to drink or sing. And we're going to have no sex before marriage and

00:09:30.220 everyone will live in strict communal housing, strictly gendered communal housing and everything 0.69

00:09:35.560 like that it was a societal view of order right of we can build society like that that's how they

00:09:44.220 that's what the enlightenment was was how can we structure and order society better

00:09:51.040 and when the thinkers of the enlightenment attempted to build a country on the ideals

00:09:58.660 of the enlightenment the it was a country where most people couldn't vote right like

00:10:03.180 America was not like, oh, we'll just do whatever the masses want. It was no, no, no, no, no, no,

00:10:08.560 no. Like obviously poor people are tarred. So like it should be. It was obviously, I mean,

00:10:14.940 that's what representative democracy was. It was, we will have the people vote for the smartest

00:10:21.800 aristocrats or landed gentry, essentially like in their local area and trust that person to make the 0.97

00:10:29.640 best choice for say who will be president they were never expected it wasn't the people simone

00:10:36.520 it was well okay sorry land land owning white men sorry sorry no no no no it wasn't just land

00:10:42.880 as i've pointed out catholics can only vote in two states but half the number of states

00:10:46.860 non-catholic land owning white men sorry okay um so so i'm sorry not states colonies but the the

00:10:53.480 ideal was and note here you say that in a bunch of ways that if you look at it from the perspective

00:10:58.820 of the urban monoculture ooh but no this was their way of saying what we want is society to

00:11:05.080 be structured where we take the aggregate opinion of educated people who have proven their competence

00:11:12.020 and are culturally aligned with us well i mean the the equivalent of it today if we were to sort

00:11:17.200 of apply more of our modern values would be like look i respect asmogold i'm just going to select

00:11:25.600 him as my representative and then he's just going to decide who's going to be president and who's

00:11:30.860 going to you know what laws we pass and stuff and and it has become abstracted from that like now

00:11:37.440 it's just the electoral system i'm talking about all the various colonies decided who could vote

00:11:42.520 oh and that's very different than the electoral system because i know but what i'm talking about

00:11:47.920 yeah i know you're you're changing the subject i'm just talking about i'm talking about how

00:11:52.440 democracy actually worked how it was supposed to work how american but it was never democracy it

00:11:58.840 was representative democracy right representative democracy you're getting stuck on the representative

00:12:04.060 part which i think can be used to obscure the fact that the ideals of the enlightenment were never

00:12:12.160 society should be run on the aggregate opinion of the average person because people would be like

00:12:18.320 but isn't that person average and could they be culturally misaligned with me right well i think

00:12:23.960 if we look even further in history though like to athenian democracy to other like very very very

00:12:30.200 old forms of democracy what fundamentally people came to conclude was we will give a vote to the

00:12:38.880 people we need to do important things and that evolved over time when they needed people to

00:12:44.060 help them you know row triremes in military conflicts guess who got the vote you know like

00:12:50.740 basically if you're contributing something useful to society if if you're needed to make society

00:12:56.360 work you should have a say and if not then we don't really care to hear from you was transform

00:13:03.620 and when people look for like where was the origin of the rot before i go into all the

00:13:07.580 dysgenics research the origins of the rot happened before anything that looks like modern wokeness

00:13:13.420 And if you want to trace it back, you can trace it back very easily to one of the four original

00:13:20.120 cultural groups of the United States, which was the Quakers. They always wanted the vote to be

00:13:25.100 for everyone. The Quakers did. They always wanted everything that wokes want today. Even the way 0.92

00:13:29.680 that they're, we've pointed this out, even the way that they're like celebrations happen, where

00:13:33.380 they do like the, the hand signals so that nobody feels too, or like something just moves them and

00:13:38.880 they stand up and start talking. It looks exactly like, you know, occupy wall street or something.

00:13:43.420 or one of these protest movements and it's because it's the same value set so i when we

00:13:49.220 record this is from before we did the quaker episode so we did the quaker episode and i was

00:13:53.840 unaware of this just as an idea of how right we were on this quakers were actually the origin of

00:13:59.320 woke so i was like do you not know about the public universal friend and i was like i i do not know

00:14:03.780 about the public universal friend they're like i hope you go into that i was unaware of this when

00:14:08.640 we film the episode so for context the public universal friend this was someone who in 1776

00:14:17.520 the friend that means the quaker that's what they call themselves because they're psychopaths and

00:14:22.760 that's like the wokest thing you can call yourself claimed to have died and been reanimated as a 0.94

00:14:28.180 genderless evangelist named the public universal friend and afterwards shunned her birth name and

00:14:35.560 pronouns and dressed in androgynous clothes the friend preached through the northeastern united

00:14:41.960 states attracting many followers who became the society of universal friends the friend theology

00:14:47.100 was broadly similar to most other quakers and the most committed members of the universal friends

00:14:53.100 were a group of unmarried women who took leading roles in their households basically dominated the

00:14:58.100 men in their lives and in 1790s members of the society acquired land in western new york

00:15:04.980 where they formed the town of jerusalem near pen yon new york by the way still there the society of

00:15:13.580 universal friends ceased to exist around the 1860s some writers have portrayed the friend as a woman

00:15:19.200 or either a manipulative fraudster or a pioneer for women's rights while others such as scholar

00:15:25.320 scott larson have viewed friend as a transgender although note never experienced any gender

00:15:31.800 dysphoria as we've note this was never experienced before in the 1920s absolutely crazy the wokeism

00:15:38.220 very clearly came directly from this movement not like tangentially from this movement so the next

00:15:43.480 time that a quaker e.g rubyard slash what if alt hiss tries to tell you that puritans were the 0.50

00:15:51.960 creation of woke i would ask you to kindly look at your history because quakers have always 0.50

00:15:59.660 attempted to manipulate history to not paint themselves as what they truly are and check out

00:16:05.460 that episode by the way and if you're a watcher of the show and you haven't read albion seed

00:16:10.820 i would strongly suggest you read albion seed because when you read albion seed one it can

00:16:17.360 help you better understand like american culture and get in touch with your own cultural roots if

00:16:21.220 you're from america or if you don't have cultural roots look at the ways that the four founding

00:16:25.580 cultures are different from each other and it can help you model who you want to be in the culture

00:16:29.980 you want to adopt but a lot of the things that pushed the the proto movements that allowed our

00:16:36.360 society to begin to collapse in the way that it is collapsing were largely quaker movements but

00:16:44.020 that's for a different tale i i promise you guys some graphs let's get some graphs so here i'm

00:16:49.220 putting a graph on screen here of political ideology versus fertility rates and what you

00:16:53.940 can see is the fertility rate difference for intelligent conservatives and intelligent

00:16:59.260 progressives is quite extreme, which means they will have even disproportionately less power in

00:17:03.820 the future, economically speaking, because that's where they're being cleared out the most, right?

00:17:09.020 But note, even here, this is still a dysgenic pattern. Intelligent conservatives are just

00:17:15.300 less dysgenic than progressives because they are still having less kids than unintelligent 0.88

00:17:20.580 conservative and then with mormons you actually see a purely eugenic pattern in this this mormon

00:17:28.160 study that they found was hugely it's it's slight but it's definitely there right so to continue

00:17:34.960 with the new study that they have here which expanded it to other religious traditions

00:17:38.800 sometime ago ed dutton and i published a study showing that the usa being a member of the mormon

00:17:45.220 club seemed to protect one against having dysgenic fertility pattern for intelligence

00:17:49.520 In plain language, the total population, more intelligent people have somewhat few children on average, although this varies by country.

00:17:58.240 However, this negative correlation is absent and maybe even reversed positively among Mormons.

00:18:04.340 Due to the small number of Mormons and the need for complex cohort and age controls, the exact slope of the fertility intelligence for Mormons was harder to estimate precisely.

00:18:14.400 Hence, they had a big confidence interval.

00:18:16.220 the mormon study was based on the general social survey gs c s g ss a large american data set

00:18:24.240 there were some problems with this first the intelligence measure is a poor to mediocre

00:18:29.180 being the 10 item woodrum's vocabulary test second religiousness was not measured as a

00:18:35.960 continuous construct but by self-reported membership of different religious beliefs

00:18:41.020 their subdivisions denominations thus the power is much reduced as mere membership is a proxy of

00:18:47.640 a more relevant trait of general religiousness or perhaps some specific religiously related traits

00:18:54.640 in the new study they sought to remedy this so the new study this was came out in 2024

00:18:59.460 does conservative religiousness promote selection for intelligence and analysis of the vietnam

00:19:06.340 experience study and here they say this this study was done with a data set of 4602 vietnam era

00:19:13.620 veterans so unfortunately it was done a while ago so we can't necessarily say that this was the same

00:19:18.740 trait but they actually looked at religiousness here and this one showed something different than

00:19:23.800 the mormon study that i was showing before where it showed that sort of perfectly here the less

00:19:29.600 religious you are the the fewer kids you have the more religious you are the more kids you have

00:19:33.400 and the the most religious people have the most the most kids oh yes the most kids when they are

00:19:40.680 intelligent and what was interesting about this study is it found and and statistically relevantly

00:19:46.700 too that the highest rate of religiosity was in a population was found was being strictly

00:19:53.300 eugenic it was eugenic they they the the most religious people had more kids when they were

00:19:59.780 more intelligent. How much of this do you think, though, might come down to

00:20:06.240 out-of-wedlock marriage, or sorry, out-of-wedlock childbirth for non-religious progressive people,

00:20:15.920 which I think leads to lower lifetime fertility, because it's just very difficult to raise a child

00:20:21.460 in as a single parent i mean i think one of the the things at play um is that if you are and this

00:20:34.840 i think especially in the conservative versus progressive fertility difference for poor people

00:20:40.060 is if you are conservative and you are poor you are less likely to be living off of welfare or

00:20:45.380 to be like a welfare king queen trying to maximize the number of kids you have to get more checks from

00:20:49.620 the government whereas many poor progressive people just like that's their cultural life

00:20:54.140 strategy and they've been doing that for like three generations and it's all they know and

00:20:57.940 it's literally like just how they survive so you think it has more to do with leaning on

00:21:10.780 social services and not making your own way in the world or supporting yourself financially

00:21:17.220 and less to do with out of wedlock child rearing yeah i think i think both of those things are

00:21:23.100 relevant for sure yeah i think also there's the the factor that just how i think that ultimately

00:21:33.380 affirmative action and dei not favoring a basically there's like this reverse effect

00:21:40.980 of affirmative action and dei whereby people think it's going to help the people who are

00:21:45.820 getting extra boosts or favoritism when it actually hurts them, both reputationally and

00:21:51.120 in terms of cultivating strength. And in the long run, it helps the people that it's discriminating

00:21:56.760 against, like white males, because they have to force themselves to be more disciplined, to work

00:22:02.740 harder, to be smarter. And overall, that's going to, I mean, while some people just get totally

00:22:08.460 wiped out in this equation, there is an overall, I guess you could say like per the perspective of

00:22:14.960 this kind of long-term human tendencies, it has a eugenic effect on the discriminated against group.

00:22:21.860 I think similarly, when you look at religious families, there is a eugenic element, for example,

00:22:29.620 with the LDS church or any group, for example, that tithes, because not only do you need to

00:22:34.400 be successful enough to, for example, in many cases, have a single breadwinning family. So

00:22:41.120 one man that is earning enough to support an entire family by himself god yeah two parents

00:22:47.740 who are you know both working and raising children it's not just that they are also

00:22:52.140 spending a non-trivial amount of time engaged in religious worship wherein they can't be making

00:22:58.440 money or resting really and also where they're tithing with mormons are tithing 10 of their

00:23:03.500 income so this is this is a you know you're putting a lot of spoilers on your car or you're

00:23:10.080 putting a lot of drag on your car more accurately i think it forces the peacock feathers to have

00:23:16.840 weight yeah and well and then then you end up a lot ultimately stronger and that's that eugenic

00:23:22.920 effect we're like if you are in a very non-religious family either that's leaning very

00:23:30.240 heavily off of social benefits or both partners are working and you know your kids are going you

00:23:36.700 know going to public school and just not really spending that much time with you you're not going

00:23:43.840 to church on weekends and you're not tithing you don't have the same headwinds that are forcing you

00:23:49.700 to be stronger harder faster and better does that make sense so like because religious life is

00:23:54.360 logistically and financially harder technically speaking because i do not think that non-religious

00:24:02.340 families i mean i remember looking at the stats before i'm pretty sure from what i remember

00:24:07.480 non-religious families do not donate more religious families and especially poor religious

00:24:11.420 families donate the most which is crazy like in terms of percentage of income because they don't

00:24:17.560 have those headwinds they are not forced to become stronger and that could be an effect here as well

00:24:22.480 what do you think yes well i mean i think the way that you relate to money when you're poor is very

00:24:30.100 different from the way you relate to money when you're middle class and in a way poor people can

00:24:35.360 afford to donate more than middle class people because especially if you're on social benefits

00:24:40.860 yeah there's that sure so i i think that that's another thing is you can feel wealthier there but

00:24:48.120 that's not the case for mormons tithing is huge and and i mean the more you earn you're still

00:24:55.080 tithing 10 and then you're paying progressively more and more in taxes so you're paying

00:24:58.740 40% in taxes and then another 10% half of your income that you make because keep in mind tithing

00:25:06.840 is pre-tax it's not post-tax it's pre-tax 50% of your income functionally not yours taxes and

00:25:14.740 tithing which is crazy plus you're expected to donate a significant amount of your time

00:25:19.760 tracing wood grains has that really good subsec article that really goes into this on just how

00:25:24.880 much is expected of you from the lds church especially if you are high achieving like the

00:25:30.140 more professionally successful you are the more you're going to be promoted within the church to

00:25:34.940 be a bishop to do more and more and more i think that that's why the church compared to other

00:25:39.280 churches has been so adaptive this is one of the things that we've talked about before but like

00:25:44.080 why is it that i mean and the lds started from a much harder place than say the vatican did

00:25:50.580 in terms of like polygamy black people can't go to heaven that sort of stuff right or they turn 0.85

00:25:57.000 white when they go to heaven i think they they got black skin because they they were they were 0.90

00:26:01.940 neutral in the war between satan and jesus and oh and then so they were marked with darkness and 0.51

00:26:07.960 not white and delights yeah anyway but you know they had a lot they had a lot of differences to

00:26:14.860 start and the church was able to you know sort of build a PR campaign which has been incredibly

00:26:20.760 successful we have some other videos on this but like compared to their percentage of the population

00:26:24.840 the amount that Mormons have been able to capture the public mind share and in a way that's not

00:26:33.080 holistically negative has been incredibly impressive when contrasted with the way that

00:26:40.100 the Catholic church in the Vatican is adapting now. And I think the core reason of that is

00:26:44.900 because the hierarchy of the Mormon church is made up of people who succeeded in real world

00:26:52.260 activities and lived real world lives. Like, I don't even think you would have much of a chance 0.98

00:26:57.740 of being appointed to a high level position if you didn't have a large family in the Mormon church. 1.00

00:27:01.780 And so they're going to be able to relate to the average person more, but be a lot less 0.59

00:27:06.620 theologically rigorous. But I mean, for a long time, you could do that. That's actually an

00:27:14.120 interesting, you know, talking about democracy and different democratic institutions and how

00:27:18.820 they end up affecting things. The system that the Catholic Church versus the Mormon Church 0.62

00:27:23.760 runs on, we can see how the democratic structure of each of those led to incredibly different

00:27:32.740 outcomes in terms of like practice, right? Catholicism really tried to run like a dedicated

00:27:40.780 technocrat institution where, you know, you become a specialist in this your entire life.

00:27:46.920 And that was an institution that I think worked really well and was sort of needed when

00:27:53.360 basically no one was educated, like the medieval period. I mean, what other choice did they have?

00:27:59.200 you know are they gonna allow local leaders to be like elected or something like that oh or you

00:28:04.040 could have them be appointed but then you're just gonna get tons of corruption right actually one

00:28:08.200 of the interesting questions is why don't you get more blatant corruption in the mormon church

00:28:12.020 that is a really good question i mean even the most critical people that we we watch talk about

00:28:18.000 it they're not really they're obviously like well the mormon church is raising a ton of money and

00:28:22.420 it may be in a way that they insinuate is exploitative toward members of the lds church

00:28:26.780 that is insufficiently transparent but they do not imply at any point that they believe there's

00:28:32.060 corruption that is quite interesting yeah even even the head guy in the mormon church who's like

00:28:39.560 basically their prophet like more than because he can update the religion president yeah he's not

00:28:44.700 like the pope where like he needs to be aware of what previous popes have said and what the bible

00:28:48.640 says in mormonism you could just like be like yeah i know that's written there but like we got

00:28:54.040 got new rules but he makes from what i've heard 150 000 a year

00:28:59.320 like literally the voice like it's basically you you don't make money from serving in the church

00:29:08.040 yeah and the big scandals that i've heard about is like the church investing in like a mall right

00:29:14.460 and i'm like i mean that's what they should be doing right like they're supposed to be what did

00:29:18.700 you think they were going to do give away all the money like no they should be investing it

00:29:22.980 and building financial security in case things change you know they could have huge declining

00:29:28.060 membership in the future and then need to to work like they're acting responsibly why are you mad at

00:29:32.680 them and so but you know progressives be progressive being right oh how dare they have

00:29:37.780 money but why why isn't it had any corruption issues i actually i you know i've heard of sex

00:29:45.500 scandals in the catholic church but i've never heard of corruption issues you know what i'm

00:29:49.060 actually going to ask ai do either of them have major monetary corruption scandals yeah good

00:29:55.180 question because there's a lot of money sloshing around it could have to do with the transparency

00:30:03.460 required of tax filings of of non-profits including religions in the united states

00:30:09.660 like perhaps based on the tax filing structure it's just it would be harder but i don't know

00:30:16.740 you know like harder to hide i but i i that can't be it no i say this because i know normally

00:30:23.120 very common in evangelical churches oh yeah yeah well the whole prosperity doctrine thing and like

00:30:30.760 you know that the is it people on youtube or instagram who like tell you the price of one

00:30:35.960 preacher's shoes whenever he comes out wearing insanely expensive sneakers yeah yeah well i mean

00:30:42.080 some of it is just so blatant as for why that happens it's actually a trope now is yeah like

00:30:47.360 the evangelical christian preacher who exploits members typically white protestant culture leads

00:30:55.340 to that more even though you have less corruption overall as i've pointed out in protestant societies

00:30:59.800 and this is just like a factual thing you can just look at a map and do correlations

00:31:03.960 is because protestantism is entirely decentralized you have a thing where if somebody can grift then

00:31:10.660 there's nothing really no central organization that can come down and say hey stop grifting

00:31:14.560 so if you're particularly good at grifting you're just going to grift okay so let's go through this

00:31:19.680 catholic church versus mormonism so it says the gap is large catholic incidents number in the

00:31:26.320 dozens historically with several high profile ones in 2024 to 2026 alone well in the lds church

00:31:32.140 there is essentially zero personal grift that has been proven by leaders wow i want to know why

00:31:38.620 why yeah that's so interesting because there's plenty of money good for them i mean honest i

00:31:47.200 mean i think a lot of people's reaction might just be like well yeah we just haven't found it you

00:31:52.260 know no one got caught but i i think it's perfectly reasonable to expect that that that just it

00:31:57.880 hasn't happened mormons this this it says the main reason is the mormon church okay i i'm gonna have

00:32:06.460 two two answers to this one actually one i think many people in the catholic church rise but do not

00:32:16.680 really care about catholicism it's just like you're born in a catholic country joining the

00:32:22.440 priesthood can be a pretty good deal for a lot of people or joining a nunnery i mean this even

00:32:26.460 historically was was a cool profession if you're like nerdy about stuff and then you you get

00:32:33.540 invested in the bureaucracy of it and you attempt to climb the bureaucracy of it right so but within

00:32:39.440 mormonism because the even on the ground like individual rewards for joining uh the priesthood

00:32:45.980 like you can't even get like an income from joining the priesthood they they expect you for most mormon

00:32:50.780 things to do the work for free so you can't even enter a position oh no no no you pay to go on your

00:32:56.880 mission oh yeah i'm sorry they they have you pay to do stuff for them yeah use me even enter a

00:33:04.360 position where grift is possible on your part until you have already demonstrated that you're

00:33:10.600 pretty invested in actually what's in the church's best interest whereas in catholicism it's very

00:33:17.400 easy to get to high level positions without that proof and i pointed out this is why catholicism

00:33:23.200 never adopted allowing priests to have kids because then they just have even a higher reason

00:33:27.160 the second reason is likely cultural differences if you look at mormonism historically i mean it's

00:33:33.540 the one instance in the united states where something close to communism has ever worked

00:33:38.240 right for people who aren't aware of like the way the original mormon colonies were set up 0.91

00:33:43.340 you would one you'd have to think that it was a good idea to move to a place like that so you

00:33:47.840 already have a strong genetic selection filter and they'd be like, okay, here's where you're

00:33:52.860 living. Here's what your job is. Here's who you're going to be married to. Like they basically set up

00:33:57.740 your entire life for you when you showed up. It actually sounds pretty cool. You know, I think

00:34:02.900 for a lot of people, that's a decent way to live life. Right. And, and they, they did this to also

00:34:08.360 acquire minis genetically better people. The way that they did that is they went to guys around

00:34:14.840 to europe and were basically like hey if you're rich and come to our settlement you know we'll

00:34:19.960 set you up and so they got it we're like we'll get you like three four wives how does that sound

00:34:23.920 right you don't even need to believe it four wives how does that sound gonna live in the american

00:34:27.640 frontier live a hard honest life and so they had a culture that needed a lot more trust historically

00:34:35.980 to survive and that was like really eugenically selective like mormons also would kick out the

00:34:42.660 guys because they had multiple wives who didn't look good enough this is where you have the lost 0.92

00:34:46.880 boy problem was good enough yeah yeah huge problem even today within the polygamous mormon

00:34:53.000 sex is you know obviously the birth ratio of males to females is 50 50 but not all of the guys

00:35:00.840 can have four wives so that means one guy marries for every four guys born into the community and 0.87

00:35:08.740 the three guys that were not successful enough or not good enough or not faithful enough get kicked

00:35:14.100 out which creates a really strong eugenic pressure whereas catholicism basically grew up in the

00:35:22.180 rotting bureaucratic corpse of the roman empire i mean it it did that he's just always hating on

00:35:30.320 the catholics come on even catholics would say this that's where the church came from it it grew

00:35:37.800 out of a roman empire in decline i mean yeah it had a few bumps like with constantine and stuff

00:35:44.560 like that who was really cool but the majority of the period where the catholic church was basically

00:35:49.900 running the empire the empire was falling apart and that means that there was institutionally

00:35:57.020 uh like even trying to fight grift in those sorts of environments would have been incredibly

00:36:02.920 difficult also i think even the idea that the church wouldn't have grift is almost a modern

00:36:09.620 idea if you look if you read about the catholic church historically grift almost seems like the

00:36:16.200 point if you get what i mean like no i don't okay so if you read about any point of pope in history

00:36:28.380 you know you would have like a pope making his son who he had outside of wedlock because popes

00:36:34.880 around all the time that period right yeah he'd make him like the the duke of venice or something

00:36:40.820 right and no the popes were always doing corrupt yeah i know they were like and it wasn't even

00:36:48.200 seen as like a weird thing for pope to do it's just like i mean obviously he's the pope he's

00:36:52.480 gonna corrupt right and and then you had this going down all the all the cardinals were corrupt

00:36:57.560 or the vast majority of them were. 0.64

00:36:59.300 I mean, that's why they elected the corrupt popes

00:37:01.620 because then the popes would give them handbacks.

00:37:03.760 And you have this going down to the local levels.

00:37:06.480 I mean, if you went to like a cardinal from this period,

00:37:10.120 the cliche was they lived in a giant mansion

00:37:13.860 and had lots of mistresses and were incredibly wealthy.

00:37:18.040 How did a cardinal afford a giant mansion, right?

00:37:21.140 Like today, I think if a cardinal afforded a giant mansion,

00:37:25.180 you'd be like, the castle church would be like,

00:37:27.560 You're not supposed to like have any other jobs, right? Like, how do you have a giant mansion,

00:37:32.580 Mr. Cardinal? This seems like a problem. So I think part of the problem that the Catholic

00:37:37.540 Church is dealing with is even an expectation towards a lack of corruption is a new idea

00:37:43.200 within the Catholic Church. The Mormons, interesting, the Mormons had corruption in

00:37:47.240 the early church, but then they just theologically defined it as okay, right? Like, what I'll mean 0.92

00:37:53.000 by this is in the catholic church you know you take five mistresses and people would be like well

00:37:59.040 you're not supposed to do that but you know whatever in the mormon church oh they're like

00:38:03.220 he's like and god told me to and then the next leader does something that gets the rules and

00:38:09.320 he's like ah but god told me to so it's the new rule but they never seem to be particularly

00:38:14.240 avarice for money um potentially because they already had such high status or their community

00:38:20.100 i don't know yeah i don't know i don't know well it's important to study this it's important to

00:38:24.820 ask this question yeah how else did the mormon church historically have much corruption at the

00:38:29.180 tough levels i think there's there's the issue for me is my understanding is there's not much

00:38:35.580 transparency as to how the wealth of the lds church is spent but it's clearly not spent on

00:38:41.400 salaries or on directly benefiting anyone so i just you know we we think some is spent on ads

00:38:51.420 it was kind of weird that they they tried to influence legislation like gay marriage bills 0.85

00:38:58.460 in california that just was odd it doesn't one i i don't think a religion should try to influence

00:39:04.560 legislation that actually does seem odd well like why would mormons care about that yeah like look

00:39:10.700 if other people are debauched and lost i mean the people are to invest money and try to win them

00:39:15.900 over yeah like tend to your own flock that's my big thing just your people handle your people

00:39:23.700 okay if you don't want them to get married to same-sex people then convince them that there's

00:39:32.400 a better way i don't know but don't force non-mormons to do the mormon thing don't force

00:39:38.200 non-catholics do the catholic thing don't force non-muslims to live by or non-non-islamic

00:39:43.980 adherents to yeah okay so this basically explains how the mormons ended up building their culture

00:39:48.780 of no corruption so what happened was joseph smith was famously very corrupt and brigham young

00:39:54.980 who then i consider to be the real founder of modern mormon tradition he he basically put

00:40:00.700 everything he was the ray crock of the lds church yeah he bought mcdonald's from its founder just

00:40:07.080 in case you not yeah yeah so anyway but brigham young he apparently because remember how i said

00:40:13.300 how he operated in almost like a communist society like you go work here you do this you do this

00:40:18.260 that put him into a position even without having to do self-dealing or grift to become the wealthiest

00:40:23.440 person in the settlement by by far sure and because he was already in a position to effortlessly be

00:40:29.500 the wealthiest person he had no reason for corruption and was able to put systems in place

00:40:35.760 it prevented corruption from ever happening. Okay. I suppose I could see that.

00:40:44.900 Now, one of the questions that I have for you is sort of a closing out question

00:40:47.740 is the way that techno-puritanism is structured, would it have eugenic fertility practices or would

00:40:55.580 it have anti-eugenic fertility practices? Because interestingly, it doesn't have as many protections

00:41:02.420 that some of the other religion systems do you know it's like find out how to have kids find

00:41:07.120 out how to improve those kids i think the mere mandate of genetic selection along with genetic

00:41:12.260 augmentation when the technology is available means that it would be like the most eugenic of

00:41:18.020 the religious groupings because even people i think it also is important that there's a rule

00:41:22.320 that you you can't make your income from being a religious leader that never got baked in i

00:41:29.360 actually never read that tract you didn't that's kind of important it's one of the tracks we have

00:41:36.320 never read so there's like five tracks that i've or maybe more maybe like 10 i've never read

00:41:41.560 so we got to get back to doing tracks if i'm going to be honest i mean piss off part of our

00:41:47.240 audience but we pissed off so much of them recently by being like you keep going for

00:41:51.540 their sacred cows carl young tucker carlson apparently people care about these things

00:41:57.060 why but go on young one i do not know why anyone was surprised that carl young is like

00:42:03.580 the heart and soul of the urban monoculture and i it's it is weird to me it's like

00:42:09.960 woo psychiatry like feel good positive psychiatry and a lot of people you know jordan peterson

00:42:15.080 really promoted a lot of his ideas and he was the internet's daddy for a long time so yeah

00:42:20.700 and well this caused people to make a big mistake they they have this perception of like

00:42:25.100 these ideas helped me at this point in my life. And I'm like, I'm not arguing that it didn't

00:42:31.100 help you that you might not have been at like a lower optimum. The problem is that the ideas of

00:42:35.580 Carl Jung are not a global optimum. They are a local optimum. So they may be able to get you

00:42:41.260 out of, if you don't know the difference between a global and a local optimum,

00:42:44.280 it's like standing on a hill and looking at a mountain. You have to first go down before you

00:42:48.660 can get to a higher place. And if we're speaking of mental health, yes, there are ways of seeing

00:42:54.200 the world and problems that you can't have that would make your life worse than adopting the ideas

00:42:59.640 of Carl Jung and attempting to work on yourself from his perspective. Unfortunately, to get to a

00:43:05.680 global optimum, you have to give up many of the ideas that you accepted while you were the student

00:43:14.940 of Carl Jung. So an example of what one of these would be is something like believing that you have

00:43:21.860 like a bunch of unconscious trauma from your childhood or something like that being able to

00:43:26.900 frame and mentalize stuff like that may have helped you deal with a life view where you were

00:43:32.940 because carl young is saying you have trauma and that trauma can be dealt with and this collection

00:43:41.140 of toolkits he gave you for dealing with the trauma could get you to a higher place but then

00:43:46.900 we come along and say actually the science says trauma is mostly a fictional concept it doesn't

00:43:53.580 exist and you would be better off you would lose the trauma that you have if you simply didn't

00:43:58.440 believe in it but unfortunately now that's harder for you because you both adopted the belief in

00:44:03.800 trauma and the belief of the fix in trauma so you need to dig out both of those now before you can

00:44:10.240 get to the globally optimum place of i am responsible for my own mental state in any

00:44:17.320 given moment and i actually largely have control over it and i have control over the way i

00:44:22.220 contextualize anything that's happened to me throughout my entire life yeah and of course

00:44:26.180 that's gonna you know freak some people out who have ideas and that's you know shame

00:44:31.620 because yeah yeah a lot of people in the conservative movement they were genuinely

00:44:36.540 helped by these like sort of proto frameworks when they had nothing else and it's it's damaging

00:44:44.980 to them to point out well the proto frameworks may be better than nothing but i think that you

00:44:49.780 know other other people probably feel that way about our religious beliefs for example they're

00:44:53.800 like well your religious beliefs are better than the urban monoculture but you know they're not

00:44:58.300 the true option right they're not at the end so okay you've got the eugenics question but then

00:45:03.960 also the corruption question the way the index is set up because we actually worked really hard

00:45:09.480 on creating the government system for technical internism if it ever got large yeah and the way

00:45:14.900 that funding is set up was in it and money is managed was in it basically makes corruption

00:45:20.540 organically impossible if you are interested in how we did that you can read i think we talk about

00:45:27.460 it both in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion and the pragmatist guide to governance

00:45:31.540 how we structured the techno puritan framework or the index system to avoid the possibility of

00:45:40.180 corruption because it basically organically downweights the power of any faction that is

00:45:48.380 acting in a corrupt manner immediately and aggressively so that is fun but would it work

00:45:56.760 as well as the Mormon system? Probably not because it does allow living off of the money 1.00

00:46:02.920 as it is structured right now. It does? As it's structured right now. I mean,

00:46:09.900 you would be removed if it appeared that you were living in a way that was irresponsible or you were

00:46:14.640 managing the money in a way that was irresponsible. But the goal of the way the system was set up was

00:46:19.600 maximum flexibility for the person in charge at the moment with also maximum ability to remove

00:46:25.240 them i've always felt that's the optimal government type dictator but very easy to remove is what you

00:46:30.960 want yeah i guess the the votes were structured such that if you made your income or had any

00:46:39.860 benefits from the governing structure be it a government or i don't know like some city state

00:46:45.800 you're a part of then that would like force you to recuse yourself from voting you're not allowed

00:46:52.480 to vote in the system when you're making money off the foundation if you're a government worker

00:46:56.280 and you make a salary from the government you do not get to vote about how the government works

00:47:00.860 yeah and this is something i strongly believe i don't think anyone who's making money off the

00:47:03.660 government i don't think any government worker i don't think any elected official i don't think

00:47:06.620 anyone on welsh fair should be allowed to vote if you are a net drain i mean so a lot of people

00:47:12.520 would argue well i work in the government i know how it works therefore i'm more qualified to make

00:47:17.560 an informed vote but we would still argue that the adverse incentives are such that

00:47:22.560 no you're really just going to vote yourself more money and more more secure yeah and we've seen

00:47:27.720 this with teachers unions have teachers unions made teaching better like no of course not like 0.97

00:47:32.880 giving giving people power over their own employer is always a stupid thing to do yeah they vote

00:47:40.420 themselves better benefits less work more money that's it's yeah i mean they may know how things 0.99

00:47:46.520 work but it doesn't mean they have any incentive to improve them with their votes yeah like you

00:47:52.660 can know how an organization works but the thing that you're going to vote for is how that

00:47:56.460 organization can improve your life as an employee that's unmoored from an organization's core

00:48:01.640 mission which either is you know maximize shareholder value or you know pursue some

00:48:07.260 kind of non-profit mission and it can be either but i've rarely seen employees act in accordance

00:48:13.320 with an organization's true mission

00:48:16.920 or an organization's imperative

00:48:19.680 to drive shareholder value

00:48:22.200 unless literally their compensation

00:48:24.100 is contingent on those things.

00:48:26.380 Like, you know, they make more money

00:48:28.100 when the organization makes more money.

00:48:30.360 So, yeah.

00:48:31.640 Yeah.

00:48:32.580 So very interesting.

00:48:33.980 Very interesting.

00:48:35.020 Obviously, the big question

00:48:36.100 that I think a lot of people have

00:48:37.320 and one of our fans wanted to dive into this

00:48:39.200 and do more research is,

00:48:41.360 is this true across religions?

00:48:43.320 And across religions, do we see any other patterns where high religiosity people might actually see a hit to this pattern?

00:48:50.460 I'd be very, very interested.

00:48:52.080 I'm so curious.

00:48:53.980 But it is very, very interesting.

00:48:57.300 But yeah, well, it means that these groups are going to, in the future, be able to increasingly out-compete the progressive groups.

00:49:04.520 But I think what people miss is what does conservative mean?

00:49:07.420 What does intelligent conservative mean?

00:49:08.780 because like obviously if you were rating us we would come off as extremely religious and

00:49:15.020 extremely conservative in any of these tests and yet i think part of the conservative movement

00:49:19.960 wants to frame us as being non-religious and non-conservative because the way that we are

00:49:26.000 conservative doesn't align with what they historically saw conservatism to mean um

00:49:31.620 which i've always found to be very funny they're they're always like oh you you're nothing like the

00:49:36.140 founding fathers you're some weird form of calvinism that tried to blend religious like

00:49:42.300 christianity was modern science and i'm like i've got bad news for you about the founding fathers

00:49:47.700 buddy but yeah but anyway if you're interested in our thoughts on that stuff look up our track

00:49:51.480 series it's it's crazy we're completely nuts well that's why i think some people they're there that's

00:49:56.560 one of the areas where i think many of our fans just don't they don't fully grok how materialist

00:50:01.620 we are in our understanding of reality but anyway or or how fanatical we are in our religiosity

00:50:10.240 which is something that just grows year over year religiosity with materialism yeah

00:50:16.400 but they're not necessarily incompatible you know as we've shown which is weird yeah 100 percent

00:50:24.920 it's nice it's nice to hear i think a lot of progressives think that religion is dysgenic

00:50:31.440 so i guess i i like this in in that sense because i think a lot of progressives are like oh those 1.00

00:50:35.960 like disgusting stupid people who believe in god having all these children are like you know 1.00

00:50:42.000 uneducated 20 something married couples having children those swine or is it you know that is 1.00

00:50:49.940 that is not true i just want to get into space i'll tell you that like civilization is seems to

00:50:56.400 have a ticker on it these days and it is us in the various religious groups that are obviously

00:51:00.480 going to be taking to the stars so yeah and i'm excited for that it's gonna be great people aren't

00:51:06.880 gonna go to space because they they you know i think there's this really weird trend and that's

00:51:12.520 just because everyone's so anti-capitalist now but there's this this trend it seems in sci-fi

00:51:16.400 movies where if it's not some like space hero going into space it's some beleaguered

00:51:21.920 you know victim of capitalism going into space to you know make their way or whatever or you know

00:51:32.060 just try to like survive and no people aren't going to be going into space because it's like

00:51:38.340 getting a job at mcdonald's they're going to be going into space because they're like the pilgrims

00:51:42.380 who went to the colonies who wanted to build a city yeah they have a vision of a of a nobody's

00:51:47.760 going to want a beleaguered person on a spaceship you only want fanatics on a spaceship everybody

00:51:52.820 on it believes that they're building a utopia um that is going to be hard in the short term and

00:51:58.220 incredibly beneficial in the long term and this is why these beliefs of like oh well elon's just

00:52:02.620 going to take all the power after he gets to mars or something like that and it's like one of my

00:52:06.800 favorite things is like the guy who was like yeah i i was paid consultant money by some billionaires

00:52:12.240 they're like yeah we built these like post you know civilization collapse compounds they have

00:52:17.460 these like giant staffs and how do i keep the staff from like turning on me and killing me

00:52:21.560 and taking over you know after the apocalypse happens and the obvious answer is you should

00:52:27.580 already be acting in their best interest and in the best interest of the shared mission of this

00:52:32.140 post-apocalyptic settlement and you should already have a shared value system so everybody knows what

00:52:37.020 the shared mission is and if you haven't done that then somebody will create one and they will

00:52:42.240 kill you right like nobody's going to live just so that you can continue your playboy lifestyle

00:52:48.040 yeah insofar as you can have one of those in a post-apocalyptic environment i mean i think that 0.98

00:52:54.760 that's something that that even people like elon may may miss like even if like we're pretty

00:53:01.020 fanatical about the idea of like i would love to build a stable colony on mars even if we became

00:53:06.600 like our descendants became some of the first martians and they held to our religious beliefs

00:53:12.220 if he wasn't acting in the best interest of the colony i think he'd be killed pretty quickly

00:53:17.020 by the the colonists because in a colony environment like this everybody's lives

00:53:23.940 are hanging on by a threat in any sort of space colonization environment and you really don't

00:53:30.040 have time for anyone who's self-dealing it is just not worth the risk uh to invest one ounce

00:53:38.840 in a leader's luxuries that's not going to life support and expansion and uh the birthing center

00:53:45.600 and you know whatever is needed yeah yeah well we're in for a really interesting next few

00:53:55.920 centuries so

00:53:57.220 not that we're going to see them

00:53:59.000 I hope that we get off planet 1.00

00:54:01.580 and our descendants can come to form 1.00

00:54:03.740 the clan people

00:54:05.560 out in the distant space

00:54:07.620 and that's pretty much the way that we treat this

00:54:09.680 we know that our vision for the future of humanity

00:54:11.860 is incompatible with many of our allies

00:54:13.800 in the conservative movement

00:54:15.460 and so get off

00:54:17.920 get going

00:54:19.520 and space is big

00:54:20.540 space is big

00:54:21.520 space is big yeah

00:54:22.980 it's okay

00:54:25.360 all right

00:54:25.920 love you simone i love you too malcolm

00:54:32.720 i will start your grilled cheese i'm still excited to record this i'm hitting record just so we know

00:54:38.320 that means a bunch of actions are not going to work and did the front end build work this time

00:54:43.520 it did i just need to wait for it to finish now yay already people who are using the agentic ai

00:54:49.680 for just fun are realizing like oh this could be used in you know some business applications

00:54:57.240 they're not i'm not the only one who's like oh my gosh please let me well i mean that's where

00:55:03.120 i'm trying to get it i'm trying to get it to a point where i can use it for the things i want

00:55:06.100 to use it for um and the thing that i want to use it for most is building video games because i've

00:55:13.820 always wanted to make video games and i would be video coding video games right now if i wasn't

00:55:18.480 building this and so i want to build this to a place where i can build video games because

00:55:23.120 hopefully it's it's better at building large-scale things than what i'm working with right now

00:55:28.300 and there we go it is updating excellent what are we doing for dinner time

00:55:35.360 steak i only just started thawing it out this afternoon so i don't know

00:55:40.960 okay i mean i can i can and leave it on at room temperature girl cheese

00:55:47.720 oh girl cheese okay and then tomorrow i can get rid of the last of my my lunch meat that i'll put

00:55:53.560 on top of it yeah don't don't put the the lunch meat in the girl cheese although no okay so you'll

00:56:00.480 just kind of plop it on top yeah because i think girl cheese doesn't cook as well when you cook it

00:56:07.120 as a melt actually no let's try cooking it as a melt oh i mean i can make do no i mean also you

00:56:15.040 seem like things deconstructed anyway so why would i not just give you grilled cheese and

00:56:19.200 you have some meat on the side that's a good idea okay then favorable

00:56:37.120 What are you whispering about?

00:56:41.120 Nothing. Nothing.

00:56:43.120 Nothing.

00:56:49.120 Was it an attack?

00:56:51.120 Yes.

00:56:53.120 They kicked the camera.

Based Camp - April 23, 2026

New Data： The Genetic Effects of Conservatism & Religion

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript