Based Camp - Tract 0： Cultural Experimentation is the Key to Saving Our Species

00:00:00.000 That is it. That's the piece. It was a foundation to this. And it's sort of the foundation to

00:00:05.080 the question of why, why are we doing all this? And I guess the TLDR is we want to create an

00:00:11.780 intergenerationally durable culture that is also capable of very significant technological

00:00:17.720 advancement to the extent that we would want to see this group of people get off earth and go

00:00:24.120 beyond. A lot of people are like, well, I disagree with what you say in the tracks. And we're like,

00:00:29.300 that's fine. Like we, we are totally open to that. We are one belief system among many. And then

00:00:37.160 some people are like, well, these tracks contrast with traditional systems. And it's like, yes,

00:00:42.000 if they didn't, then they wouldn't be a new system. We are trying something new because other people

00:00:47.620 are trying the older things, but we have no animosity. Like you aren't not part of the

00:00:53.700 pro natalist movement, just because you differ from us theologically. We believe that theological

00:01:00.680 differences are a thing of existential value in terms of cultural solutions.

00:01:05.960 Yeah. I mean, I guess a lot of it depends on how robust we're going to be able to make this.

00:01:12.900 And I mean, I think the final question I have for you is you, you sort of got all this sprung on you.

00:01:16.960 You know, I've seen like the girl defined videos recently. One of their husbands came out as an 0.91

00:01:21.400 atheist. No, wait, what, what? Oh my God. I've been doing way too much work and not enough fun.

00:01:28.120 But when you married me, I mean, you married a staunch atheist.

00:01:31.680 Would you like to know more?

00:01:33.020 I cannot tell you how much I enjoy these conversations.

00:01:37.300 It's going to be very different from the others. It's a tracked zero, which means that it's not

00:01:43.300 actually officially one of the tracks, but it's the thing that inspired the tracks,

00:01:47.940 which is to say that Aporia magazine, I was actually talking to one of our fans recently,

00:01:52.100 and they hadn't been to Aporia magazine. And so I was like, oh, you should really check it out.

00:01:55.560 It's a, it's a great, like, if you like our channel, you're probably going to like what

00:02:00.000 they're doing. And then I go to Aporia's website and I shared this with you and our daughter was on

00:02:06.860 the front page. Well, she's so cute. So did you see this? It's so, so here's an example of like

00:02:13.940 a random first page. Elites are genetically different. How do different groups form?

00:02:19.500 How to solve demographic collapse? Six ideas to arrest fertility decline, human biodiversity,

00:02:26.180 a guide, and then embryo selection towards a healthier society. And that's the one that has

00:02:31.660 our daughter on the cover. And I was just like, every one of those topics is something that one of

00:02:36.000 our fans would love. So I can see how we have a big overlap, but anyways, so the guy who runs it

00:02:41.640 reached out to me and he asked me about doing a, like commissioning a piece for me on sort of our

00:02:48.980 religious ideas and stuff like that. Cause we had talked about it a little bit on the show,

00:02:52.580 but not really gone deep into it. And I go, yeah, sure. Like why not? Like, let's, let's,

00:02:59.320 let's do this. And I ended up getting way too into it and writing something way too long. So I broke

00:03:04.360 it into like 10 different pieces and that became the tracks. It's like the story of every book you

00:03:08.640 write. Right. I think I'm going to go into something small and then it ends up getting

00:03:12.700 way too long. But yeah. So the, the first of the tracks, the, the not track one, but like the one

00:03:19.640 that was actually the commission, which was like the justification for writing all the others

00:03:23.420 became published in their magazine. And that's what I'm going to read as sort of track zero.

00:03:28.760 And it is a summary, a lot of, a lot of our other ideas that people might be familiar with

00:03:35.140 or something like that. So it's not going to have a ton of new stuff in it, but it is a very good

00:03:40.880 summary of ideas that we cover all the time, but in a lot more detail and was a lot more data.

00:03:47.300 And it's a piece that I've referenced in several episodes. So obviously I see it as sort of like a

00:03:51.800 foundational, like, if you want to see why we're doing X, or you want to see what we,

00:03:55.340 why we think, why check this out. And with the tracks more broadly, what I'm really doing is

00:03:59.280 just reading things I've taken the time to write, which means that I've put a lot more thought into

00:04:04.000 them than what normally goes on in a podcast. You know, if you're reading one of our books,

00:04:07.720 this is something that we have read over, you know, at least like 20 times and same with every

00:04:13.100 one of the tracks and same was, was this sort of stuff. So, so very different in terms of quality

00:04:17.460 of what you're getting anywhere else. So the piece is called reversing the fertility collapse.

00:04:23.020 You can't buy fertility and imposing values through government fiat doesn't work.

00:04:28.520 New and fortified religions are the only realistic solution. 1.00

00:04:33.260 Our podcast, Basecamp, focuses on the topics of sex, politics, genetics, and religion. The first

00:04:40.660 three are understandable obsessions for the leaders of the pronatalist movement, but the last often

00:04:45.780 perplexes newcomers. Religion? This confusion is amplified when they ask why we haven't written a

00:04:52.420 book on pronatalism and realistic solutions to falling fertility rates. And we point out that

00:04:57.340 we have, and it's titled The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion. The great thing about being an

00:05:02.380 American and experiencing the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed

00:05:07.720 world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are, which allows us to see what

00:05:13.080 has and hasn't worked. The quote unquote obvious solutions to falling fertility rates simply don't

00:05:18.660 work. You can't buy fertility. Hungry spent 5% of its GDP attempting to do this one year and only rose

00:05:26.120 fertility rates by 1.6%, a laughable figure in a world where rates are falling annually by double

00:05:32.460 digit percentages in dozens of countries. What's more, if you line up all the studies looking at

00:05:37.800 whether financial incentives boost fertility rates, you see a clear association between the proposed effect

00:05:43.580 size and the margin of error. Is there some amount we could pay people to get them to have kids? Of

00:05:51.580 course. Is there an amount a government would be able to pay, i.e. something that Congress would pass

00:05:58.160 that would make a significant difference? The answer is no. Anyone telling you otherwise is either not

00:06:04.600 familiar with the data or is lying to you in an effort to promote some other agenda.

00:06:09.460 I mean, we've talked about this extensively. I agree. It is just what apparently the data shows.

00:06:15.020 It's just one of the things that whenever you look at it, it doesn't work. You cannot buy high fertility

00:06:18.920 rates. And it makes sense when you think about it, right? Suppose somebody was like, I will pay you

00:06:24.100 like a large amount, like $50,000 to have kids, right? But then that amount isn't like that big when you

00:06:32.020 think about the cost that you're undergoing. It's a permanent change in your life. I mean, it's almost as

00:06:38.500 serious a change as like, I'll pay you $50,000 to get a gender transition. Like, would you do that? Like, 0.79

00:06:43.620 you can't go on trips easily anymore. Sorry, I'm not talking about gender transition. I'm talking about 0.94

00:06:47.060 kids. You can't go on trips easily anymore. You can't, you know, you are committing to something that you

00:06:52.780 can't easily back out of. It makes sense that it's not something that you can just pay people around. You

00:06:58.940 need to enable lifestyle changes and change the way they see kids. So this is all stuff we've talked about

00:07:04.380 before, but it's good to have it all in one place, I think. Yes. Shifting the culture is the obvious

00:07:09.520 way to save our species from self-induced extinguishing of our most productive members.

00:07:14.840 Yet, actually doing so is not entirely straightforward. One's first intuition when

00:07:19.920 observing conservative religious populations have more children within countries is to assume that

00:07:24.880 imposing their belief on population, on the population level is a solution. But then one sees the

00:07:31.380 more conservative a country's average citizen, the lower its fertility rate, as Arya Babu has shown.

00:07:37.300 Imposing conservative values through government fiat does not appear to work and may even be

00:07:42.740 counterproductive. The failure of universal conservative values to sustainably raise birth rates

00:07:48.700 is likely driven by the same process that leads to native ethnic groups having higher fertility rates in 0.88

00:07:53.660 ethnically and culturally diverse countries than in ethno states or monocultures when controlling for

00:07:58.940 prosperity. That's right. An ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting 1.00

00:08:03.980 immigration is actually speeding up its extinction. The reason for this, I suspect, is that high 1.00

00:08:09.560 fertility requires not just a strong religiously infused culture, but one whose members feel like 1.00

00:08:15.220 a threatened minority that is starkly different from its neighbors. This would explain the perplexingly 0.50

00:08:21.260 high Jewish-Israeli fertility rates. I suspect there are two major forces at play. The first is just 1.00

00:08:27.060 common sense. If you have daily reminders that people who look, act, and think like you might

00:08:32.020 be quote-unquote replaced, that is a strong motivation to have kids. In a country like South Korea, where I

00:08:37.700 used to live, almost everyone you see and interact with shares your culture and ethnicity. So there is

00:08:42.360 no daily feeling of existential threat. Think of it like a fertility cultural version of the bystander 0.57

00:08:48.760 effect. By the way, Simone, you're familiar with the bystander effect?

00:08:52.100 Where people don't take action when they are in a large group.

00:08:57.660 Yeah, the famous thing is like somebody- Someone being murdered in the street and people just kind

00:09:01.260 of sitting around being like, someone ought to do something.

00:09:03.940 Yeah, someone else is probably doing something about this. And some people have said that it's

00:09:07.380 been debunked or not properly replicated.

00:09:09.240 Yeah, that's where I'd left off with that.

00:09:11.540 I don't think it has. I mean, it's just intuitive to me. If I'm walking down a street in Manhattan versus

00:09:16.200 walking down a street in a small neighborhood and I see somebody who looks like they're injured up against

00:09:19.680 the site of a building, I'm going to do something in a small neighborhood in non-Manhattan.

00:09:23.940 Actually, yeah, that's true. Because remember when we walked by that

00:09:26.480 Wall Street bro who was like face down on the ground in that park in-

00:09:31.040 Oh, yeah.

00:09:32.200 The financial district.

00:09:33.340 We actually- 0.99

00:09:34.680 We were like, wow, he looks pretty fucked up. And then we just kept walking. 0.99

00:09:39.220 Oh, God.

00:09:40.520 Anyway, Simone, you were the worst.

00:09:43.380 Me too.

00:09:43.940 You didn't want to deal with it.

00:09:45.120 We're both the worst.

00:09:46.160 Yeah. No, he just looked very drunk.

00:09:51.120 The second force at play is more subtle.

00:09:56.420 When a government imposes a culture's value system, the forces of intergenerational cultural

00:10:01.600 evolution that made the culture strong in the first place begin to atrophy.

00:10:05.380 If a person lived their life in a mech suit which moved their body for them, all their muscles

00:10:09.540 would eventually atrophy. Cultures that maintained prohibitions on porn had more intermarital

00:10:14.720 sex and thus more children. Yet, they also taught self-control, which strengthens the

00:10:20.320 inhibitory pathways in the prefrontal cortex. So when a country does something like ban

00:10:24.240 porn outright, as South Korea has done, then consuming porn is no longer a personal choice

00:10:29.600 where one affirms one's cultural traditions. It is simply the law of the land. To see this

00:10:34.280 effect in action, just look at the correlation was in the EU between how much a country restricts

00:10:40.680 access to abortion and its fertility rate. Abortion restrictions are a good proxy for how much the

00:10:46.740 government is enforcing value systems slash perspectives that religion should be enforcing 0.98

00:10:52.320 on their own. Removing the responsibility from religion to motivate individuals to exercise

00:10:57.280 self-control will destroy that religion over time.

00:11:00.020 And this abortion stuff is actually new to this article, so I'll put it on screen here because

00:11:04.360 it's really interesting that it is a very high correlation. And this is something that so many

00:11:10.860 people we talk to just immediately assume we're going to be on their side or that pronatalism is

00:11:15.260 the same as the pro-life movement. And we're like, actually, in many ways, they're directly

00:11:20.360 antagonistic towards each other. Which, if you want to see who's killing more kids, Catholics or us,

00:11:26.460 we go into this topic and a lot of question into like the Christian theology around when does life

00:11:32.280 begin, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on this?

00:11:36.460 No, I just, yeah, I think when I ask, or here, I'll put it this way. When friends of ours who are

00:11:44.060 pronatalists and in the know say, oh, I met so-and-so and they're pronatalist. Now what I ask is like,

00:11:50.680 okay, are they like the default non-researched pronatalist? Meaning that they think it's all about

00:11:55.820 cash handouts, or it's about YIMBY, or it's about abortions or birth control. Like they sort of

00:12:02.200 point to one thing. Or are they like an actual pronatalist who like understands that this is a

00:12:06.760 mixture of cultural factors and schooling and economic norms and social norms, et cetera,

00:12:13.080 government regulation, and that has to do with standards that parents are held to, things of that

00:12:18.120 sort. And normally, they're more pronatalist now than there used to be. I think that the movement is

00:12:24.160 growing, but still most of them fall into that basic category where they don't, they're not

00:12:28.960 actually aware of and fighting for what we would consider to be real solutions.

00:12:34.620 Yeah. And this is something I'll get into more, but it's something I was actually thinking about

00:12:37.960 when we were in talks with somebody recently is the pronatalist movement has been able to

00:12:42.140 successfully integrate a lot of religious extremists or very conservative religious movements,

00:12:47.340 like very conservative Jewish groups, very conservative Mormon groups, et cetera. But

00:12:52.900 the one group that we've never really at a large scale integrated is the Catholic community because

00:12:59.140 of these differences. Like there's a lot of Catholic, like on the ground pronatalists, but I mean,

00:13:04.200 Catholic thought leaders haven't integrated with the movement in the same way thought leaders in

00:13:08.520 other communities have, which is very interesting to me.

00:13:10.880 Yeah.

00:13:11.140 And it's interesting that it also aligns with the ultra low Catholic fertility rates, which really

00:13:16.220 worries us. But again, see our Catholic episode for more info on this. If religion is the answer, 1.00

00:13:22.060 why not just go back to one of the old ones? While religious communities have shown more 1.00

00:13:26.040 resistance to fertility collapse than their secular counterparts, they too are dying. For example,

00:13:30.980 Catholic majority countries in Europe have an average fertility rate of only 1.3, a rate that will 1.00

00:13:35.980 see them almost halving in population every generation. Things are not much better in Catholic 1.00

00:13:40.580 majority Latin America. And here I'm quoting an article. As recent as 2019, a benchmark study by

00:13:46.420 the United Nations Population Division for 2020 to 2100 forecasts that fertility in Latin America and

00:13:53.040 Caribbean countries would stabilize at an average of around 1.75 children per woman in the latter half

00:13:57.940 of this century. Stunningly, except for Mexico, all countries listed in this graph have already dropped

00:14:02.540 below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have total fertility rates of around

00:14:09.440 1.3 children per woman, the so-called ultra-low fertility threshold that has only been seen in

00:14:14.780 a handful of European and East Asian countries. Catholics are not the only religious group in

00:14:19.100 which fertility rates are plummeting. One can observe the same delayed fertility crash across

00:14:24.500 almost all religious groups. Even historically high fertility groups like Mormons fell below replacement 1.00

00:14:30.560 rate and will eventually disappear without change. The Mormon fertility rate has been harder to

00:14:35.400 calculate than other populations' fertility rates, but there is evidence of a substantial decline.

00:14:41.740 Even Muslims are not immune to this trend, with their fertility rates sometimes falling below other

00:14:47.080 groups when they are in monocultural communities. Iran's fertility crisis is an obvious example.

00:14:53.000 One might point that there are often high-fertility subpopulations within religious communities.

00:14:58.560 The problem is that they tend to be less economically and intellectually productive.

00:15:02.600 These low-productivity, high-fertility groups are much more damaging to religious communities than 1.00

00:15:08.760 they are to secular society, as there is more interbreeding between their members and those of

00:15:14.320 the low-fertility, high-productivity groups. There is one study arguing that this is not the case in

00:15:20.640 some Mormon communities, but the correlation shown is very weak. With all this being the case,

00:15:25.660 sending our kids into an extant religious community seems like tossing them into a genetic death spiral. 1.00

00:15:30.860 It would be unwise to the extreme if I want my genetic line to be among those humans who colonize the 0.99

00:15:36.220 stars.

00:15:37.720 Well, I just want to point this out to those who are a little bit 0.99

00:15:40.100 critical of the Tract series, or when we say things in... When I say we, I really mean you,

00:15:46.800 Malcolm, because you're the brain leading all of this. I cannot take credit. But when we say things

00:15:51.520 that you may disagree with religiously, that are counter to traditional religions that are not part of

00:15:57.720 them, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that we are trying to create an iteration of an

00:16:04.380 intergenerational and durable religion and culture that can take people to the stars. And we very much

00:16:11.600 respect traditional religions. And I mean, how did you describe it? Just their death spiral? We do 1.00

00:16:18.800 actually want our kids to have as a backup traditional religion. If ours doesn't work out, we want our kids

00:16:24.400 to know that that's the next place they turn, not the urban monoculture. However, we are not

00:16:29.860 contributing to society. We're not advancing society. If we turn to a traditional religion, 0.93

00:16:36.340 those are handled. People are going to be members of them unless they die out. There are lots of people

00:16:40.780 who are already pursuing them.

00:16:42.460 A great way to put it. If the traditional religions work, they're already safe. If they don't work, 0.99

00:16:47.400 then they're going to die.

00:16:48.540 Then we need to do something. 0.63

00:16:49.600 Advantage to us in moving back to them. But in general, I do feel that many of them are dying.

00:16:55.120 And it is one of the things I noticed recently that was really interesting is the fertility rate

00:17:00.620 of a religion is also often inversely correlated with when it was founded or differentiated from

00:17:06.920 its parent religious system.

00:17:08.580 Okay. Walk me through this.

00:17:10.300 So you look at some of the oldest religions in the world right now. Like what's the oldest,

00:17:14.140 like probably extant religious in the world. You're looking at two religious groups. You're looking at

00:17:19.220 the Zoroastrians who became the Parsi. They have a desperately low fertility rate. But then you're 0.99

00:17:25.560 looking at the Hindi who also have a desperately low fertility rate. Then you're looking at other 1.00

00:17:29.720 really old religious systems. Well, you're looking at Buddhism, desperately low fertility rate. 0.99

00:17:34.380 Okay. You look at slightly newer systems. You've got systems like early Christian groups,

00:17:39.180 like Catholics and the Orthodox community, but they're much, much lower than other Christian 1.00

00:17:44.400 communities. They're the lowest of all Christian conservative communities.

00:17:47.860 With Orthodox majority countries having fertility rates of like 1.2, 1.3 on average and Catholics

00:17:53.720 being around 1.3. Then you look at later break-off communities like the Protestants and 0.95

00:18:00.320 the Muslims, and they have much higher fertility rates. The only community that really bucks this is 1.00

00:18:06.280 the Jewish community. And that's only if you don't consider modern Orthodox Judaism a new religion.

00:18:11.420 Which you would argue actually would count as kind of...

00:18:13.860 Yeah, I argue that it was really founded, what we call ultra-Orthodox Judaism was really founded in

00:18:19.280 the 1800s and is the newest of all of the major religious communities in the world, which is one of

00:18:24.920 the things that causes a lot of our friction with Jewish communities is they're like, you guys seem to 1.00

00:18:28.980 really like Jewish teachings and scripture. And we're like, yeah, we do. And then they're like,

00:18:33.820 well, then come join our Hasidic community. And I'm like, I don't really consider Hasidics 0.91

00:18:39.580 ancestrally Jewish. I like them. Like, they're great.

00:18:43.660 Well, not many of them genetically are ancestrally.

00:18:46.060 Well, they're genetically, which is why they've sort of been able to skirt under the radar within

00:18:50.820 the Jewish world. By that, what I mean is in the traditional ancestral Jewish communities framework,

00:18:56.960 if somebody is matrilineally Jewish and holds to the Jewish like Sabbath and a few other major

00:19:04.700 traditions, then they are Jewish. Like you cannot impede their Jewishness, which means even if they

00:19:10.880 have adopted like an entirely new set of teachings and an entirely new conception of God, they can't be

00:19:19.160 called by members within the Jewish community as distinctly non-Jewish. Yet to me...

00:19:24.960 As somebody who's studying the evolution of religious traditions, I don't need to look at

00:19:30.540 this through the Jewish lens. And because of that, it is much more useful to consider the Hasidic

00:19:37.040 movement an entirely new and distinct religious movement. If I'm creating a taxonomy of religious

00:19:42.720 traditions and trying to understand how religious traditions interact with each other, how religious

00:19:47.620 practices relate to fertility rates, how religious traditions transfer themselves between generations,

00:19:53.580 or how religious practices and beliefs about God relate to a religious tradition's industrial and

00:20:00.660 scientific output. In the same way that I would consider something like Mormons, not meaningfully a 0.99

00:20:07.240 Christian group, but an entirely new Abrahamic branch, even though that concept would be offensive to

00:20:12.820 Mormons, they are different enough from other Christian groups that if you're studying the history of 0.99

00:20:18.420 religious traditions, you need to consider them taxonomically separate to fully appreciate how

00:20:26.060 their differences impact their community. When I look at the Hasidic community today, they're very 1.00

00:20:31.620 similar to, and I might need to look this up if I'm remembering it wrong, I want to say Nazarene's

00:20:36.580 community, which was a group of the followers of Christ who considered themselves fully Jewish not long

00:20:41.580 after Christ died. But they were practicing forms of Judaism that were much more focused on sort of

00:20:48.180 populism, and actually have a lot, lot, lot in common with modern day Hasidic movement and people.

00:20:54.340 In fact, I would argue that the Nazarenes had more in common with the modern Hasidic movement than the

00:20:59.380 modern Hasidic movement does to traditional Jewish religious practices and conceptions of God.

00:21:05.300 And I think that the only reason that they really died out is because the non-Jewish Christian 1.00

00:21:09.640 movement got so big. And that if you look at the Jewish community today, if these pop Kabbalah, 0.96

00:21:16.460 I'll call it, got really big, which it could, I mean, it is a growing movement right now. This is

00:21:22.720 like non-Jewish Kabbalism. It might get so big that the Hasidic movement will just, in the same way that 0.96

00:21:29.440 the Nazarenes died out, you know, look very obviously non-Jewish to people. But right now, because there isn't a

00:21:35.460 big, large non-Jewish contingent. If people want more of a deep dive on this topic, I could

00:21:41.540 potentially do one. But it's something that I hesitate on, as I fear that it could drive

00:21:48.160 anti-Semitic sentiments. And that's really not my goal in pointing this out. It's more of a

00:21:54.760 someone who's just a real nerd about religious history and likes getting into the nuances of the

00:22:00.600 very Abrahamic faith traditions. But it's something that I think that, you know, intuitively, if you're

00:22:06.140 being honest and you're looking at the Hasidic tradition and you're looking at its origin, you

00:22:10.700 would see that while it is Jewish by Jewish standards, if an outsider was looking at it,

00:22:15.740 they'd be like, yes, but both your practices and conceptions of God are radically different from

00:22:22.060 Jewish conceptions of God before the Hasidic movement. And therefore, it is in the eyes of, like, 0.90

00:22:28.140 Christianity, for example, a new sect that is more different than, say, Catholics are from

00:22:36.920 Protestants. But Judaism doesn't really allow for sects in the way that Christian groups allow for

00:22:44.700 sect differences, meaning that it is offensive to point out that their conception of God is quite

00:22:52.420 radically different from earlier Jewish conceptions of God. If you go to our earlier tracks,

00:22:58.140 the Hasidic conception of God generally follows much closer to the mystic tradition conception of

00:23:06.400 God, whereas the earlier Jewish conception of God follows much closer to either the monotheistic or

00:23:12.960 polytheistic interpretation of God. And that a lot of the teachings that they elevate are fairly new

00:23:18.820 teachings, like the Kabbalah, which is, you know, not more than a thousand years old. But that's why we

00:23:23.580 don't go deeper on this topic, because I don't really think that anyone benefits from our overly

00:23:28.320 nerding out about religious history in this particular niche. And the Hasidic community takes 1.00

00:23:36.640 a lot of pride in the antiquity of their religious tradition, and pointing out that it doesn't actually

00:23:41.660 have that much antiquity is sort of like when you point out to a Chinese person, and they're like,

00:23:46.200 our culture is so old, it has so much history, and you're like, well, not really, you sort of did a

00:23:51.380 cultural reset during the the Cultural Revolution, and you don't have that many strong connections to

00:23:57.720 your earlier traditions. And that's considered very offensive to say to a Chinese person, even if it's

00:24:03.480 obviously and objectively true. So there's no point in challenging part of a group self narrative that is

00:24:10.060 important to that group in detail. But anyway, this is totally off point. It's just sort of justifying my

00:24:15.820 framework that the younger religious tradition is, the better it is at fighting fertility collapse.

00:24:20.520 And then the question can be why I actually came up with this idea when talking with one of our fans,

00:24:25.320 and he responded, and I think very accurately, their newer updates on the software, like, of course,

00:24:30.980 they have better bug fixes. Well, but then the larger point I'm making is we admire that. And the

00:24:36.920 reason why we are bothering to do something different and choosing to try something different,

00:24:42.340 is that we are able to contribute some marginal additional role of the dice for civilization,

00:24:48.580 that we would not be contributing were we to join an extant religion. So that's one of the reasons why

00:24:55.240 we're putting these tracks out there, why we're being so transparent about it, and why we're bothering

00:24:59.260 with this in the first place, we wouldn't really be giving civilization and or religions and or

00:25:04.600 intergenerational and durable cultures another role of the dice if we just joined an existing one and

00:25:09.260 didn't do anything to change it. But those who tried to make new religions or to do spinoffs of

00:25:14.800 existing religions, like what you just described, to make them intergenerational and durable or

00:25:19.260 capable of interstellar travel, then you are adding a marginal additional chance or roll of the dice

00:25:25.440 for that religion and for humanity in general. Oh, and this is something I should also mention.

00:25:31.460 If you look at the very highest fertility communities, you don't just have the Jews, you also got the Amish.

00:25:34.880 The Amish are actually a fairly young religion as well. Yeah. Which I think a lot of people don't

00:25:39.560 know. There's another really new Christian community that's similar to the Amish. I'll have

00:25:43.720 to find their name in editing, but they're really interesting. And they're ultra high fertility.

00:25:48.820 They're like Amish, they're completely collectivist communities and completely communist in the way 1.00

00:25:53.680 they structure their communities. But they are not as banning of technology. So they're much more strict

00:25:59.840 about their internal communism. And I think they're a form of Anabaptist, but they're much 0.87

00:26:04.780 less strict in their technology banning. Oh, interesting.

00:26:08.780 The group I am thinking of is called the Bruderhof, and they would not agree with my framing them

00:26:14.780 as communist. But that is the word that best describes their lifestyle to your average individual.

00:26:20.960 I showed it to my wife, Roxanne, and she said, yeah, that's a stupid title. So I changed it. 0.98

00:26:25.840 Yeah, I guess we are Americans, so we don't like being told. We don't like being told what

00:26:31.620 the remedy is. I took issue with the word communism in the Christian context because I think communism 0.97

00:26:39.360 directly implies a political construct. And as Christians, how we live out our faith cannot

00:26:49.500 be political at all, because I don't think Jesus' commands were political. And ultimately,

00:26:57.220 living in community is not about how it's constructed. It's about trying to be true to

00:27:03.260 Jesus' teachings and commands. So, Rich, that was my initial reaction, was that communism is a word

00:27:10.500 that shouldn't even be used in this book, let alone in the Christian context.

00:27:17.340 Which is probably...

00:27:18.220 You dig into the communities, they actually seem really dope. Like, the people in them seem really

00:27:24.100 happy, very full of life. And they get a lot of criticism from outsiders because the men dress

00:27:29.220 like modern men, but the women dress actually in outfits not dissimilar from yours. And a lot of people

00:27:34.920 look at that and they're like, why are women forced to dress this way? And I've seen interviews with

00:27:39.180 women and they're like, well, if you're trying to be as inexpensive as possible and you use dirty 1.00

00:27:44.900 clothes, this is actually practical. Which is funny that we have convergently come to the same answer

00:27:49.540 that I dress like a much more modern man and you dress like a historic woman. And a lot of people

00:27:54.980 are surprised by that. But it's because a lot of women's fashion is really non-utility based. 1.00

00:28:01.360 Yeah.

00:28:02.960 It should come as no surprise that throwing out all one's ancestral traditions, traditions which one's

00:28:09.060 ancestors evolved, will have voluminous, deleterious effects on the individual. It should also come

00:28:14.380 as no surprise that clinging dosmatically to cultural traditions that evolved within and were

00:28:19.740 optimized for, not just a pre-internet, but a pre-industrial world, will have disastrous consequences

00:28:25.760 for the group. The only way to ensure ancestral traditions work as intended without updating them

00:28:31.440 for the age of technology is to include within them a mandate for a pre-industrial lifestyle.

00:28:38.360 Sorry, there was a concept here I wanted to go into.

00:28:40.620 Oh, it was another hypothesis for why the newer religions might be doing better.

00:28:46.380 It might be because religions sort of deteriorate over time. This is the hypothesis we had when we

00:28:51.240 were writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, is that religions start in an ultra-hard state

00:28:56.380 and they deteriorate as they get older because of social forces around them chipping away at them

00:29:03.020 and trying to do things easier and easier and easier.

00:29:05.560 Mm-hmm. And he argued that there were some interesting evolved innovations, like the Catholic

00:29:11.760 Church having essentially spin-off factions that got really extreme and then slowly reintegrated,

00:29:18.020 thereby keeping the church more hard than it otherwise would be.

00:29:21.940 Like they basically spun off little departments, which is what the orders were. And then the

00:29:27.420 orders would reintegrate into the central bureaucracy. And if you study the history of Catholic orders,

00:29:31.940 you know, they'd often start like as sort of like radical religious extremists with new ideas that

00:29:36.740 lived like ultra-austerely. And then they become wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and end up

00:29:40.800 becoming like indolent and falling apart as being the cool place that the hardcore people want to go.

00:29:45.380 Yeah. But it may have benefited the church overall, thereby countering this dynamic that you described.

00:29:53.980 So I thought that was interesting.

00:29:55.960 This is why the only groups that seem to show durable resistance to fertility collapse are those

00:30:02.820 that either ban their members from engaging with technology or have social practices that lower the

00:30:08.100 economic potential of their adherents. What is concerning about these groups is that they are often wildly

00:30:13.200 xenophobic, believing that eventually everyone on earth must believe what they believe. In fact,

00:30:18.960 not a single religious group in the world within a developed country has yet been able to stay 1.00

00:30:23.600 durably above the replacement rate while being economically productive and engaging with technology,

00:30:29.040 except arguably the Israeli Jews. Some adherents of traditional religions assume that they can use

00:30:34.780 their technophobic members to generate a large population that can subsequently be converted to

00:30:41.400 tectophilia. So this is what we often get was like, you know, ultra Haredi populations and stuff like 1.00

00:30:46.880 that. They're like, okay, yes, there's a portion of the community that like doesn't work and, but

00:30:51.800 they're, but they're super high fertility and that these people can then be converted by mainstream Jewish

00:30:57.280 society. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like I've looked at the stats and this just doesn't seem to be

00:31:02.000 happening. The productive, like the ultra productive Jewish society, which ends up sometimes funding the 0.99

00:31:08.600 Haredi movements are the descendants of people who didn't join those movements. They're not spinoffs

00:31:13.740 of those movements. And it should make obvious sense as to why this is the case and what I'll get

00:31:18.300 into here. This strategy doesn't work for two reasons. The first and obvious one is the enormous

00:31:24.100 dysgenic effects it will have on their population. Culturally sterilizing the economically productive

00:31:29.800 members of a group is not a winning formula. The second is that subgroups who's in these communities

00:31:35.320 that disengage with technology more extremely will outcompete those that do not. This can be seen

00:31:42.040 clearly in Amish populations where the rate of cell phone use correlates with their fertility rates.

00:31:47.640 And this is actually a link to study here through cultural evolution and the technophobic factions

00:31:52.180 will eventually dominate the others, except for iterations that totally culturally and genetically

00:31:57.880 isolate themselves. Now this point is actually sometimes missed by people or they don't fully

00:32:04.600 understand like how severe a problem it is. So if it turns out that you can use technophobia to

00:32:14.580 increase your fertility rates, that is fine. If what that caused was like a, you know, you go through

00:32:21.260 for some level of technophobia and then you get a big jump in fertility rates. Right. Right.

00:32:25.320 Right. But that's not that. It's not that. It's not like if you reduce hours of, of screen time,

00:32:32.040 like by 20%, then you get a certain percentage increase. No, no, no. It is like that. You do get

00:32:37.540 a certain percentage increase. No, I thought it was basically access at all. That's when it starts

00:32:41.540 to fall apart. If there's any access whatsoever. No, no. So you get the most extreme responses at the

00:32:47.340 extreme levels, but it is a linear increase. That's the problem. It's not a tiered increase.

00:32:56.480 So if it was a tiered increase, there were optimums you could choose to strive for.

00:33:02.460 So think of something like screen time, right? If it turned out that screen time had both a linear and

00:33:08.620 somewhat logarithmic or exponential effect on something like IQ, then you would, well, the cultural

00:33:15.740 groups that always had zero screen time, this is a bad example. Okay. Screen time doesn't really

00:33:20.180 work for this. I have to do just technological access. So technological access, if it had a tiered

00:33:27.980 impact, there would be optimums you could strive for. By that, what I mean is you could say, well,

00:33:34.540 we'll engage with some level of technology. Like we'll still have cell phones. We'll still have

00:33:38.560 computers, but we'll limit access to them or something like that. Right. Like what the Mennonite groups do 1.00

00:33:44.160 and some Amish populations do. The problem is, is this doesn't work. If you have some access to

00:33:51.060 this technology and you limit access to it in some portions of your group, just completely ban access,

00:33:57.840 they're going to outbreed the portions that just limit access at like a factor of three. It's not

00:34:03.900 like a small factor. It's an exponential effect within these communities. And you can clearly see

00:34:08.140 this from the statistics. Well, this creates a big problem. If what you're expecting is that you're

00:34:13.440 going to get spinoff from the extreme technophobic groups, you know, you're like, okay, well then

00:34:19.760 some of the technophobic groups, kids will be of this like moderately technologically engaged

00:34:25.580 community. So consider something like Amish, right. Or the Mennonite community. Right. So you'll have

00:34:30.040 some people who are born into these ultra Amish families, but who then grow up, but then use cell

00:34:36.780 phones, but still consider themselves Anabaptists. Right. And they're more economically productive than the 0.98

00:34:41.380 individuals who don't, right. And economically and technologically productive. When I say

00:34:44.440 economically productive, I mean, they contribute more to the global economy. Like they're able to

00:34:47.720 engage in industrialized farming, for example, and stuff like that. Right. Well, the problem is,

00:34:54.280 is that if it turns out that always these groups that are more technologically engaged have

00:35:00.140 dramatically lower fertility rates than the individuals who don't within these communities,

00:35:03.840 then you're getting a genetic selection effect, which means intergenerationally,

00:35:08.580 these groups are going to spit out fewer and fewer and fewer of these economically engaged

00:35:14.860 individuals. And so genetically, these groups are going to go into a death spiral pretty much

00:35:21.700 immediately. And this is a problem with not a death spiral in terms of like, they're not going to go

00:35:27.120 extinct. Right. That that's, that's not what's going to happen to them, but they're certainly not going

00:35:31.700 to become members of the space faring group of humanity. You know, they're not going to join those

00:35:37.800 populations that end up taking us to the stars and make up the vast majority of future humans.

00:35:43.260 Well, they're very unlikely to have any sort of impact on society. They're very unlikely to run

00:35:47.940 the government or administer services or really do anything aside from, at best, be some kind of

00:35:55.380 contractor of larger, more technophilic forces that builds roads or does, you know, executes on very,

00:36:01.800 very small things, not under their own direction, though.

00:36:04.140 Yeah, well, actually, I'd push back. They do often end up running governments when they get

00:36:08.920 to high enough population levels. And I think that if I'm going to get a little spicy here,

00:36:12.840 this is one of the problems that Israel ran into is that they started electing individuals from these

00:36:18.200 communities that, you know, have like extremely high unemployment and stuff like that when they

00:36:22.440 were electing their ultra Orthodox members to Parliament. And that led to a collapse of their

00:36:28.220 intelligence apparatuses. And not just like, like their intelligence was still partially working,

00:36:32.940 but the government was too incompetent to listen to it. And that's what allowed these attacks to

00:36:38.040 happen in Israel. This is like the mainstream interpretation. If you don't assume that the

00:36:43.040 attacks were because it's insane that they could have missed these attacks coming, you know, there was

00:36:47.560 large scale movement in the country beforehand. You could say that maybe they intentionally let them

00:36:52.740 happen because they wanted to go ahead with this. But but Occam's razor, like if I look at all the data,

00:36:57.960 it appears that there was just a level of incompetence induced by members of these communities

00:37:02.920 taking, you know, too much control within the government and not focus on competence and industry

00:37:10.080 and competence and industry doesn't mean like just productivity. It means like a base level of

00:37:15.020 competent operation. And that's not what these groups had any selective pressures around.

00:37:19.620 Hmm. Yeah, at least not in the realms that we that realms relevant to government, surveillance,

00:37:28.440 etc. Yeah, high levels of competence in their own.

00:37:33.600 That's going to happen in the United States. That's going to happen in other countries as well.

00:37:37.440 Now, just in case anyone's going to say, oh, you can't say that that's anti Jewish or something.

00:37:42.780 It's not. This is the mainstream position right now of people who are experts on these types of topics

00:37:47.780 and who are willing to speak out against dominant narratives. If you would like to hear somebody

00:37:53.420 else's take on this, here is Peter Zaihans, probably the most famous strategist in the world

00:37:58.480 right now. How do the Israelis not know? Israel supposedly is the gold standard for intelligence. 0.67

00:38:04.820 And there aren't a lot of things in the area that honestly, they need to worry about all that much.

00:38:09.560 This is the one, the one, the one thing that the Israelis have always been obsessed about.

00:38:15.240 That's where all of their microphones are pointed. And so the fact that they missed this is just

00:38:19.040 mind boggling because there were hundreds of fighters involved, dozens of vehicles using six

00:38:24.340 different transport options, and the Israelis missed it all. Part of its demographic, the Israelis have 1.00

00:38:31.460 some laws that protect basically people who commit themselves to Judaism. So if you're studying to

00:38:36.960 become a religious scholar and all you do is study the Torah, you don't have to pay taxes and you don't

00:38:42.480 have to serve in the military. And that means that you can have lots of kids and don't have to pay for

00:38:47.740 them, which, you know, encourages people to have a lot of kids. And that means somewhere between 10

00:38:52.880 and 30 percent of the population, based on where you draw the line, of the population basically doesn't

00:38:57.040 work, but can still vote. And think of that relative you have who's on disability insurance and doesn't

00:39:07.300 work and just sits in his lazy boy all day and bitches about how people are screwing up the world. 0.96

00:39:12.300 That's them. 0.97

00:39:13.100 And they are a rising demographic because of population growth. I mean, they're demographic.

00:39:19.960 And that means that they have been the kingmaker in any number of governments in recent decades.

00:39:25.460 And they are a strong, strong minority within the Israeli system. And there's no way to get rid of 0.95

00:39:31.120 that. If you're going to have a political system like this, you want to have a lore so that the real

00:39:36.320 whack jobs don't get into government. In Israel, there really isn't one functionally because they don't

00:39:41.700 want to silence anyone's voices. So you have this whole rainbow of whack job right wing parties.

00:39:47.600 Right wing is probably not the right term. Let's just call them religious fundamentalist parties 0.98

00:39:50.240 who are supporting the current government. And they're not very good at what they do because

00:39:56.480 they're coming from a stock of people that doesn't value secular education at all. People who are

00:40:00.400 absolutely mind numbingly incompetent, but have very firm ideas on how the world should work.

00:40:06.440 And they're the ones who are now having to explain how they have presided over the greatest

00:40:13.000 intelligence debacle in the world in the last 50 years.

00:40:16.640 I mean, keep in mind, this is not just a problem within Israel. It's just that Israel is the first 1.00

00:40:22.880 country to see the consequences of this because they, like Judaism more broadly, as we talk about,

00:40:29.180 is one of the most advanced religions from a pronatalist sophistication standpoint.

00:40:33.900 It's better at resisting the virus and it's better at spitting off these high fertility 1.00

00:40:39.040 communities. So it's, it makes sense that they sort of went through this or are going through

00:40:43.620 this transition before other countries. But it is also the reason why as much as we respect Judaism,

00:40:49.680 we have some trepidation about, like we use it as a backup religion for our kids, as we mentioned,

00:40:55.160 like, like don't go to the urban monoculture if you don't believe what we believe, go to Judaism 0.65

00:40:58.800 at least. But, you know, we're not choosing it as the first choice because there's definitely

00:41:04.800 challenges that the Jewish community needs to overcome that I don't see a clear path for them 1.00

00:41:10.640 to overcome right now.

00:41:11.900 Well, and that our kids wouldn't be well positioned to help with.

00:41:15.900 So yeah, because they'd be sort of newcomers in the community.

00:41:18.560 Yeah. Like if, if we had, you know, if you are in one of these religions and you are on the inside, 0.98

00:41:23.460 your time is better spent trying to future-proof that religion because you have the clout and the

00:41:29.580 cred to be able to do so.

00:41:31.820 Yeah. But as a convert, it makes no sense. Yeah.

00:41:35.380 When it's the same with something like Catholics, like Catholics are like, oh, you have a lot of 1.00

00:41:38.260 problems with the things we do. And I'm like, yeah, but I love Catholicism. It's cool. Like,

00:41:41.980 look at all the, don't, don't, you know, I'm not out. I'm, I wouldn't have my kids join the faith, 0.95

00:41:47.580 but I really respect the faith as a cultural system. And if you were born into it and if you

00:41:54.720 associate with it, then work on improving it and building sons who can be, you know, great preachers.

00:42:02.620 Yeah, exactly.

00:42:04.340 People often ask, why are you guys so obsessed with Israel in South Korea? And as, as sort of people

00:42:12.760 who are running the prenatalist community, and the answer as to why we're so critically focused on

00:42:17.780 these two communities is they showcase two different futures for human civilization. And

00:42:23.700 they give us a hint of what works, what doesn't work in what we need to prep for. In the case of

00:42:29.600 South Korea, what we're looking at is what happens to the groups in the populations that just do 0.88

00:42:35.220 nothing significant or that works to fight population collapse, i.e. they end up focusing all of their

00:42:42.620 efforts on population collapse around things like government handouts and government financial

00:42:48.020 incentives, which Korea has spent something like $280 billion in just the last 16 years, which as we

00:42:55.500 constantly scream from the rooftops does not work. This has been well studied. The other, Israel, they have 0.50

00:43:04.280 largely, you could almost say, adopted the strategy that we plan to adopt ourselves, which is a fairly new

00:43:12.060 religious movement that is highly resistant to fertility collapse, and that otherwise works well alongside

00:43:19.700 technologically productive population groups, and is otherwise inclusive of those groups, and, and in that

00:43:26.860 sense pluralistic, yet they are still having massive, massive problems. And they are the same problems that if we do

00:43:37.180 everything right, and the countries and populations that do almost everything right are going to eventually

00:43:43.260 be facing themselves. For us to steer around these problems, we need to study and understand the

00:43:51.900 difficulties that Israel is having right now and the Jewish people are having right now to avoid those

00:43:58.780 difficulties ourselves. They are not having these problems because they are incompetent or because they

00:44:04.860 made some sort of a wrong move, the problems that they are facing are the problems that anyone runs into

00:44:11.180 when they play almost all of their cards exactly right. And that's why they're so critical, even more

00:44:17.500 critical to understand than Korea, because they're what happens if we do it right. And the key thing that we 0.91

00:44:26.140 sort of take away from it is you have to have very, very, very strict guards against mystical world pools,

00:44:36.140 which is one of the things we talk about in track three, and it's one of the reasons why we are so,

00:44:40.860 so, so, so, so anti-mystic. And you need to have really strict guards against anyone who achieves a high

00:44:51.740 level of religious influence, but is otherwise non-industrially productive, which is why, and I

00:45:01.580 don't know if we've gone over this in any of the tracks yet, but we have strict prohibitions on preachers

00:45:08.140 that use preaching as their primary source of income. You need to show that you can be industrially

00:45:14.620 and scientifically efficacious before you can rise as a preacher. Otherwise, individuals who are

00:45:22.780 able to spend all their time preaching are always going to out-compete within a religious hierarchy,

00:45:28.220 individuals who have to split their time, and it leads to this, these sort of incompetence spirals,

00:45:34.860 which can cause huge, huge, huge problems. And I should point out, when I say incompetence spirals,

00:45:41.100 I don't mean incompetence spirals from the perspective of, like, these people who reach

00:45:46.380 these really high levels of status within a variety of communities. They are not stupid people. They 0.99

00:45:52.780 are people who have focused their entire competence on sophistry their entire lives because that was

00:45:59.900 what was rewarded. It was in their communities, and that is what allowed them to achieve these positions

00:46:05.260 of high status. But an extreme level of sophistication was in Sophoc arguments, but no

00:46:12.140 industrial specialization, no scientific specialization. This leads to very bad decisions

00:46:18.700 being made at the societal level and bureaucratic level, which can lead to catastrophic failures like

00:46:26.620 the intelligence failure that led up to the Gaza attacks. This is the crux of why we are raising

00:46:31.820 our kids in a new religious system. It is also why we encourage others to attempt to edit their

00:46:36.460 pre-industrial systems with practices that will make them competitive in an age of AI and the internet.

00:46:42.220 All religious traditions evolve. The drastic social and technological changes that pose new threats

00:46:48.300 simply require that such evolution happens faster, which is actually what I was just saying.

00:46:53.500 The genetic game we are playing is different from the one our ancestors played. Historically,

00:46:58.620 if a group had cultural practices that led them to select for higher economic and technological

00:47:03.420 productivity in breeding partners, males from that group would regularly outbreed with females from

00:47:08.060 neighboring groups. This had the effect of reducing genetic differentiation between geographically

00:47:14.060 adjacent groups. The advent of our near universally enforced child support system naturally leads to the 0.90

00:47:23.180 genetic isolation of high-earning technophilic groups with the capacity for self-control.

00:47:29.260 Outbreeding is heavily punished by the state. This is something we've talked about in other videos,

00:47:33.340 but it's worth understanding. Historically, if the wealthy elite in your society had some sort of

00:47:39.980 eugenic effect, and by that what I mean they were selecting for IQ or productivity,

00:47:46.140 males from that community were able to breed with many of the surrounding females who were unfaithful to 0.62

00:47:51.900 their husbands, which was actually quite common in a historic context. However, child support makes

00:47:56.940 this incredibly unlikely to happen within our society at any sort of large level, because if

00:48:02.140 you are wealthy or economically productive in any sense, you are sort of a target for individuals,

00:48:07.100 and so it doesn't make sense to breed with anyone outside of your ultra-wealthy community,

00:48:13.260 which leads to more genetic isolation of different groups in our society.

00:48:16.780 As a result of this, any genetic IQ advantage will be amplified much faster than would have

00:48:23.340 historically been the case. This is definitely true for groups that practice polygenic selection

00:48:28.060 and have arranged marriage protocols in place. Oh, that seems harsh, does it? In the words of one of my

00:48:34.060 favorite movies. You don't approve. Well, too bad. We're in this for the species, boys and girls. It's

00:48:40.540 simple numbers. They have more. And this is true when we're talking about these technophobic, xenophobic

00:48:46.700 populations. They will outnumber us 100,000 to one in any realistic future that we're looking at.

00:48:55.900 The question is, can AI give us the edge if they decide to kill us? And I suspect so.

00:49:00.860 AI and genetics, at least. The old ways have failed us. Many bemoan the urban monoculture,

00:49:07.100 whose adherents are known for their sensuous, quote-unquote, woke behavior. As threatening

00:49:12.380 as the urban monoculture may be, when it breaks, we will be facing an infinitely more threatening

00:49:17.660 flood of xenophobic, technophobic, and religious extremists who will drag our species back to the

00:49:23.100 Stone Age if given a chance. This flood will come from groups as varied as Christians, Jews, Muslims, 0.95

00:49:28.940 and Buddhists, some of whose adherents maintain a high fertility rate by using culturally induced

00:49:34.700 poverty to simulate pre-industrial environments among their members while maintaining cultural

00:49:40.140 isolation through intense cultural xenophobia. The pronatalist movement is a beacon for those few

00:49:45.900 humans left who are willing to do what makes us human. Innovate, improve, and band together so we can

00:49:51.900 mount a real defense. God willing, once the wave passes, the movement will be the seed that grows

00:49:58.620 into a vast interstellar human empire. Finally, you may be asking, quote, but why religion? Why not just

00:50:05.340 a few cultural tweaks? End quote. Even if it's entirely secular, a suite of intergenerationally durable

00:50:12.700 cultural perspectives and practices that differ strikingly from those of the society around it

00:50:17.660 will be called a religion by the dominant cultural group. If my descendants think and perceive the

00:50:22.940 world in a manner that differs from the thought processes and worldviews of the dominant cultural

00:50:27.260 group, calling them something other than a religious minority is merely a semantic quibble,

00:50:32.060 and our descendants do need to think differently if we want them to survive. Any thoughts?

00:50:37.980 This is our stance. This is why we're doing what we're doing.

00:50:40.540 The religion we have built for my family must be one of many experimental cultures designed to combat 0.80

00:50:47.740 fertility collapse. Our unique religion is meant to be a hypothesis among many because that is all we

00:50:53.580 are doing, testing a hypothesis. You can riff on ours or riff on the traditions of your ancestors,

00:50:59.100 but raising your children in the urban monoculture with unmodified ancestral traditions is like asking them

00:51:05.020 to charge a Gatling gun with spears. Our goal is not to create a new religion, but rather a coalition

00:51:12.220 of them that can share cultural resources rendered useless in wider society, like marriage markets.

00:51:19.020 If you want to join our network, please reach out. We are building both a school system and we'll be

00:51:24.300 doing yearly summer camps when our kids are old enough to socialize with like-minded peers. And this is

00:51:29.580 like a really interesting point here. A lot of people are like, well, I disagree with what you say in the

00:51:34.540 tracks. And we're like, that's fine. Like we, we are totally open to that. We are one belief system

00:51:42.540 among many. And then some people are like, well, these tracks contrast with traditional systems.

00:51:47.420 And it's like, yes, if they didn't, then they wouldn't be a new system. We are trying something

00:51:52.060 new because other people are trying the older things, but we have no animosity. Like you aren't

00:51:58.700 part of the pronatalist movement, just because you differ from us theologically. We believe that

00:52:05.740 theological differences are a thing of existential value in terms of cultural solution. I don't know

00:52:11.260 if you have thoughts, Simone. No, I mean, we're of the same mind on this. And if you are interested

00:52:16.220 in the specific religion of our family, we lay it out in a subset piece titled track one, building in a

00:52:22.380 hero, make face optimized for interstellar empires. In short, we teach our kids that whatever man

00:52:28.380 becomes in a million years or so will conceptually be closer to what humans today would think of as a

00:52:33.740 god than a human. This entity is so advanced that it exists outside of time as we understand it. And

00:52:39.740 thus from the perspective of the entity, it is guiding us to reunite with it. God is the ultimate

00:52:46.540 manifestation of human potentiality. And the good is defined by actions that expand human potentiality.

00:52:52.300 We believe this is the entity, the Abrahamic traditions were revelations of, and new

00:52:58.540 revelations are given to man when he has the capacity to understand them. Hence, we have a

00:53:03.500 religious mandate to expand that capacity through both genetic and synthetic means. Ours can be thought

00:53:10.460 of as almost an Abrahamic EAC religious system. And then there was a footnote in that last paragraph.

00:53:16.140 When we say the Abrahamic tradition, we mean God has always done his best attempt to convey truth

00:53:22.060 truth to man, but man of the past was not yet sophisticated enough to fully understand that

00:53:26.700 truth. The story of Jesus's life was to teach us that God's son as a man must be martyred to

00:53:33.260 sanctify mankind. Only through generational martyrdom can God's son, representing all of us,

00:53:39.900 but also God, because he will eventually become God, remove mankind's flaws that prevent us from

00:53:45.660 joining with God. Of course, this is a concept that people during the life of Christ would have been

00:53:50.300 incapable of grasping, so when explained to them, it came out as a convoluted plan for God to turn

00:53:57.420 himself into man, which man would need to unjustly kill in order for God to forgive man. But God told

00:54:03.660 us that he was not the type of entity to demand a father sacrifice his son to appease him in the

00:54:08.780 story of Abraham. But in the story, he also told us that we, his followers, would believe he was that

00:54:14.780 kind of entity, but follow his word regardless until it could be revealed. He is not. That is it. That's

00:54:21.740 the piece. It was sort of the foundation to this and it's sort of the foundation to, you know, the

00:54:26.700 question of why, why are we doing all this? What's the idea here? Yeah. And I guess the TLDR is

00:54:33.420 we want to create an intergenerationally durable culture that is also capable of very significant

00:54:41.820 technological advancement to the extent that we would want to see this group of people

00:54:48.460 get off earth and go beyond, right? Yeah. That's the idea. And I think it's possible.

00:54:56.380 Totally possible. I think people see what we're doing as a fool's errand and I really don't see it that

00:55:01.660 way. I mean, I think the probability of this working out is a good 18, 23%, which a lot of

00:55:07.820 people are like, that's an insanely low. It's not an insanely low number. That's an insanely high

00:55:12.140 number that is extremely aggressive. So I think, yeah, you know, Godspeed to us, please.

00:55:20.060 Yeah. Well, and, and, and, you know, building a denomination, it's not really a religion because

00:55:25.580 it's more of an Abrahamic denomination because it follows the old Abrahamic traditions that elevates

00:55:31.180 the traditional systems while in the context of a world that now has internet and AI and all sorts

00:55:37.900 of advancements that people historically couldn't even imagine. I suspect it'll be a lot more robust

00:55:43.660 than people imagine. Yeah. I mean, I guess a lot of it depends on how robust we're going to be able

00:55:52.380 to make this. And I mean, I think the final question I have for you is you, you sort of got all this

00:55:56.860 sprung on you. You know, I've seen like the girl defined videos recently. One of their husbands came 0.93

00:56:01.420 out as an atheist. No, wait, what, what? Oh my God. I've been doing way too much work and not enough

00:56:08.220 fun. I cannot believe I missed out on that. Seriously. Which one? I don't remember. The one

00:56:14.540 who does the sex courses, her husband, the one who I think the other one. Oh, he was a little more off

00:56:20.700 camera. So yeah. And they, she got over it very well. I mean, it was very hard because she was

00:56:25.660 like, this is not what I married. Like she doesn't say that. I understand that you thought you were

00:56:31.360 marrying something else. And I had these questions even when we were getting married and I should have

00:56:35.520 been more forthcoming and they're keeping their marriage together. And they, they seem to be very

00:56:39.000 emotionally healthy in the way they're dealing with it. But when you married me, I mean, you married a

00:56:43.560 staunch atheist. And all of these religious. You didn't feel like an atheist because I associated

00:56:49.700 people with more traditional values. That is to say, wants to have a family who radical is being

00:56:56.080 sort of. It's funny you mentioned this because even when we were doing our search fund, people

00:56:59.000 thought we were religious extremists to the extent that they wouldn't sell to us because of that.

00:57:02.860 They're like, I would sell to you guys what you appear to be. They said like the whole Mormon thing

00:57:07.680 is really creepy to me. They thought we were extremist Mormons. Yeah. And I'm like, we are not Mormons.

00:57:13.300 And he was very surprised by that. I forgot about that, but that happened a couple of times.

00:57:18.560 Yeah. Because we were so dedicated to this value system. It might be that we've always

00:57:22.680 like, but I spring these ideas on you and you're always like, yeah, that makes sense.

00:57:27.020 Like I'm springing insane ideas on you. Yeah. But we're very mimetically aligned and it,

00:57:34.520 none of this seems as a surprise to me because remember let's, let's just show how little this

00:57:39.700 is surprising how, how little your faith has changed from the get-go on our first date after

00:57:46.420 saying that you weren't looking to date, you were looking for a wife and you expected to find her

00:57:50.120 at Stanford. You proceeded to lay out your entire world philosophy and your goal for your life and for

00:57:57.640 the human, for humankind. And it was to get humans off planet. It was to make sure that humans were still 0.57

00:58:06.200 capable of innovating and iterating and doing more and overcoming themselves and going beyond the

00:58:13.780 limits of, of our bodies, our minds and the earth. And here you are now trying to create not just

00:58:19.780 technology or systems for that. And, and certainly not just for our own family, but some kind of

00:58:25.100 framework that can enable larger groups of people to do this. I think it's pretty cool.

00:58:29.320 I think this is why we haven't had any conflict in regards to all the theology stuff is because I am

00:58:35.820 optimizing it all around that original goal that you signed off on. And when I come to the theological

00:58:41.620 beliefs, I never come to them without saying, but this is also what's in the best interest of,

00:58:47.120 you know, humanity's flourishing. Yeah. Well, everything we've done has always been like that.

00:58:51.900 Our choice around children, jobs, extracurriculars, everything has been around that. So none of

00:58:59.100 this is inconsistent or surprising. I could see someone's change of religion being inconsistent

00:59:04.060 or surprising to someone when their core values appear to be changing or their core belief

00:59:09.460 structures. So their end goal for humanity or themselves, but nothing has changed for you.

00:59:14.720 You're very consistent. So yeah. And this is like, Oh, I'm afraid that you're going to spend off into

00:59:20.200 crazy town when I watch these. And it's like, at least for me, crazy town. He was always in crazy

00:59:26.860 town. I was always in crazy town. No, but I'm not like, like, I am still very much was in the

00:59:33.680 bowling lane, you know, was kids. They, they put the things in the gutters of the bowling lane. So

00:59:38.340 the ball can't bumpers, you know, not with kids. I suck at bowling. But, uh, there's way bigger bumpers 0.96

00:59:48.440 in the lanes of my consciousness than people think like everything I'm doing is just in, in terms of

00:59:54.580 the best interest of my kids. And that is the guiding force behind all of this for me, at least.

01:00:02.320 But anyway, I mean, I don't know. It's, it's not just your kids. It's your, it's your life

01:00:07.420 philosophy. It's, it's, I mean, your kid and your kids are part of that and you're, you deeply love

01:00:12.920 your kids. It's not like your kids are kind of instrumental projects or anything, but all of this is

01:00:17.840 in an effort to serve a very consistent and quite logical in my view goal for humanity, which includes

01:00:27.600 yourself. Well, I also think, you know, if people are afraid about things going off the rails here,

01:00:33.080 one thing that really prevents that to some extent is even in the very earliest religious videos we've

01:00:37.840 done on our family's religion, it's the idea that it's sinful for anyone to take money for religious

01:00:42.960 teachings. So I can't be doing this for money or I I'd have to take a massively hypocritical position. 0.69

01:00:49.740 And I'm certainly not doing this for sex, which a lot of cult leaders are doing. 0.75

01:00:54.460 You know, do you think they, do you think they're actually doing it for sex or do you think that

01:00:59.300 that's just once they be, they, they obtain power and become kind of corrupted by it, then they just

01:01:05.360 start using it for sex?

01:01:07.260 Yeah. Well, I mean, I suppose they have some sort of an internal drive to want to do something and then

01:01:14.280 they can use their power and the fact that they're seen as some sort of denominational or religious

01:01:19.400 leader to affirm their internal desires, which is really different from what we're doing. It's much more

01:01:27.380 closer to someone like Spinoza using his religious teachings to become like a sex mania. Like it's not

01:01:33.320 going to happen. Like it's comical in a religious, in a historic context or Maimonides or like, you

01:01:39.740 know, or, or John Calvin, you know, being like, it was John Calvin. He's saying some pretty heretical

01:01:45.820 things here. Is he going to end up becoming a sex maniac? It's like, no, no, very clearly not. 1.00

01:01:52.260 Yeah. I think we're okay. I think we're okay.

01:01:54.980 I love you to ask Simone. You are the perfect woman and I am just so lucky to be married to you

01:02:03.460 given how understanding you are of my crazies.

01:02:06.600 I'm the one who is lucky and I love these conversations. I savor them. And I'm really

01:02:13.080 glad that you are going for this because people do think it's weird and you're not getting any,

01:02:19.520 you know, pat on the back for it. And in fact, it's a lot of work as trying to work out holidays for

01:02:24.900 our kids. I was trying to work out how to best communicate things and positions that are

01:02:30.140 sometimes antagonistic with communities that would otherwise accept us. Yeah. Which is,

01:02:35.060 you know, tough because you, you can, okay. We don't really feel a lot of desire to conform,

01:02:40.820 but one can imagine how nice it might be to be accepted and not frozen out by people all the time.

01:02:48.020 So yes. Yes. To just be like, Oh no, just, you know, like was idolatry,

01:02:52.140 just believe the parts of the Bible that you like, you know, ignore everything that conflicts

01:02:56.660 with your traditions. I love you, Simone. I love you too.

Based Camp - March 22, 2024

Tract 0： Cultural Experimentation is the Key to Saving Our Species

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