Tract 0： Cultural Experimentation is the Key to Saving Our Species
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
176.79716
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my wife and co-founder of the pro-natalist movement, Dr. Rachel Ward, to talk about the creation of the "tracks" series, why we're doing it, and why we think it's a good idea.
Transcript
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That is it. That's the piece. It was a foundation to this. And it's sort of the foundation to
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the question of why, why are we doing all this? And I guess the TLDR is we want to create an
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intergenerationally durable culture that is also capable of very significant technological
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advancement to the extent that we would want to see this group of people get off earth and go
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beyond. A lot of people are like, well, I disagree with what you say in the tracks. And we're like,
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that's fine. Like we, we are totally open to that. We are one belief system among many. And then
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some people are like, well, these tracks contrast with traditional systems. And it's like, yes,
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if they didn't, then they wouldn't be a new system. We are trying something new because other people
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are trying the older things, but we have no animosity. Like you aren't not part of the
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pro natalist movement, just because you differ from us theologically. We believe that theological
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differences are a thing of existential value in terms of cultural solutions.
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Yeah. I mean, I guess a lot of it depends on how robust we're going to be able to make this.
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And I mean, I think the final question I have for you is you, you sort of got all this sprung on you.
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You know, I've seen like the girl defined videos recently. One of their husbands came out as an
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atheist. No, wait, what, what? Oh my God. I've been doing way too much work and not enough fun.
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But when you married me, I mean, you married a staunch atheist.
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I cannot tell you how much I enjoy these conversations.
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It's going to be very different from the others. It's a tracked zero, which means that it's not
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actually officially one of the tracks, but it's the thing that inspired the tracks,
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which is to say that Aporia magazine, I was actually talking to one of our fans recently,
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and they hadn't been to Aporia magazine. And so I was like, oh, you should really check it out.
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It's a, it's a great, like, if you like our channel, you're probably going to like what
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they're doing. And then I go to Aporia's website and I shared this with you and our daughter was on
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the front page. Well, she's so cute. So did you see this? It's so, so here's an example of like
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a random first page. Elites are genetically different. How do different groups form?
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How to solve demographic collapse? Six ideas to arrest fertility decline, human biodiversity,
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a guide, and then embryo selection towards a healthier society. And that's the one that has
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our daughter on the cover. And I was just like, every one of those topics is something that one of
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our fans would love. So I can see how we have a big overlap, but anyways, so the guy who runs it
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reached out to me and he asked me about doing a, like commissioning a piece for me on sort of our
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religious ideas and stuff like that. Cause we had talked about it a little bit on the show,
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but not really gone deep into it. And I go, yeah, sure. Like why not? Like, let's, let's,
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let's do this. And I ended up getting way too into it and writing something way too long. So I broke
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it into like 10 different pieces and that became the tracks. It's like the story of every book you
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write. Right. I think I'm going to go into something small and then it ends up getting
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way too long. But yeah. So the, the first of the tracks, the, the not track one, but like the one
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that was actually the commission, which was like the justification for writing all the others
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became published in their magazine. And that's what I'm going to read as sort of track zero.
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And it is a summary, a lot of, a lot of our other ideas that people might be familiar with
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or something like that. So it's not going to have a ton of new stuff in it, but it is a very good
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summary of ideas that we cover all the time, but in a lot more detail and was a lot more data.
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And it's a piece that I've referenced in several episodes. So obviously I see it as sort of like a
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foundational, like, if you want to see why we're doing X, or you want to see what we,
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why we think, why check this out. And with the tracks more broadly, what I'm really doing is
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just reading things I've taken the time to write, which means that I've put a lot more thought into
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them than what normally goes on in a podcast. You know, if you're reading one of our books,
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this is something that we have read over, you know, at least like 20 times and same with every
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one of the tracks and same was, was this sort of stuff. So, so very different in terms of quality
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of what you're getting anywhere else. So the piece is called reversing the fertility collapse.
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You can't buy fertility and imposing values through government fiat doesn't work.
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New and fortified religions are the only realistic solution.
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Our podcast, Basecamp, focuses on the topics of sex, politics, genetics, and religion. The first
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three are understandable obsessions for the leaders of the pronatalist movement, but the last often
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perplexes newcomers. Religion? This confusion is amplified when they ask why we haven't written a
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book on pronatalism and realistic solutions to falling fertility rates. And we point out that
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we have, and it's titled The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion. The great thing about being an
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American and experiencing the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed
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world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are, which allows us to see what
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has and hasn't worked. The quote unquote obvious solutions to falling fertility rates simply don't
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work. You can't buy fertility. Hungry spent 5% of its GDP attempting to do this one year and only rose
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fertility rates by 1.6%, a laughable figure in a world where rates are falling annually by double
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digit percentages in dozens of countries. What's more, if you line up all the studies looking at
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whether financial incentives boost fertility rates, you see a clear association between the proposed effect
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size and the margin of error. Is there some amount we could pay people to get them to have kids? Of
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course. Is there an amount a government would be able to pay, i.e. something that Congress would pass
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that would make a significant difference? The answer is no. Anyone telling you otherwise is either not
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familiar with the data or is lying to you in an effort to promote some other agenda.
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I mean, we've talked about this extensively. I agree. It is just what apparently the data shows.
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It's just one of the things that whenever you look at it, it doesn't work. You cannot buy high fertility
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rates. And it makes sense when you think about it, right? Suppose somebody was like, I will pay you
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like a large amount, like $50,000 to have kids, right? But then that amount isn't like that big when you
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think about the cost that you're undergoing. It's a permanent change in your life. I mean, it's almost as
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serious a change as like, I'll pay you $50,000 to get a gender transition. Like, would you do that? Like,
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you can't go on trips easily anymore. Sorry, I'm not talking about gender transition. I'm talking about
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kids. You can't go on trips easily anymore. You can't, you know, you are committing to something that you
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can't easily back out of. It makes sense that it's not something that you can just pay people around. You
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need to enable lifestyle changes and change the way they see kids. So this is all stuff we've talked about
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before, but it's good to have it all in one place, I think. Yes. Shifting the culture is the obvious
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way to save our species from self-induced extinguishing of our most productive members.
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Yet, actually doing so is not entirely straightforward. One's first intuition when
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observing conservative religious populations have more children within countries is to assume that
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imposing their belief on population, on the population level is a solution. But then one sees the
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more conservative a country's average citizen, the lower its fertility rate, as Arya Babu has shown.
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Imposing conservative values through government fiat does not appear to work and may even be
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counterproductive. The failure of universal conservative values to sustainably raise birth rates
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is likely driven by the same process that leads to native ethnic groups having higher fertility rates in
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ethnically and culturally diverse countries than in ethno states or monocultures when controlling for
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prosperity. That's right. An ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting
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immigration is actually speeding up its extinction. The reason for this, I suspect, is that high
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fertility requires not just a strong religiously infused culture, but one whose members feel like
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a threatened minority that is starkly different from its neighbors. This would explain the perplexingly
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high Jewish-Israeli fertility rates. I suspect there are two major forces at play. The first is just
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common sense. If you have daily reminders that people who look, act, and think like you might
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be quote-unquote replaced, that is a strong motivation to have kids. In a country like South Korea, where I
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used to live, almost everyone you see and interact with shares your culture and ethnicity. So there is
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no daily feeling of existential threat. Think of it like a fertility cultural version of the bystander
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effect. By the way, Simone, you're familiar with the bystander effect?
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Where people don't take action when they are in a large group.
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Yeah, the famous thing is like somebody- Someone being murdered in the street and people just kind
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of sitting around being like, someone ought to do something.
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Yeah, someone else is probably doing something about this. And some people have said that it's
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I don't think it has. I mean, it's just intuitive to me. If I'm walking down a street in Manhattan versus
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walking down a street in a small neighborhood and I see somebody who looks like they're injured up against
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the site of a building, I'm going to do something in a small neighborhood in non-Manhattan.
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Actually, yeah, that's true. Because remember when we walked by that
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Wall Street bro who was like face down on the ground in that park in-
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We were like, wow, he looks pretty fucked up. And then we just kept walking.
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When a government imposes a culture's value system, the forces of intergenerational cultural
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evolution that made the culture strong in the first place begin to atrophy.
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If a person lived their life in a mech suit which moved their body for them, all their muscles
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would eventually atrophy. Cultures that maintained prohibitions on porn had more intermarital
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sex and thus more children. Yet, they also taught self-control, which strengthens the
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inhibitory pathways in the prefrontal cortex. So when a country does something like ban
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porn outright, as South Korea has done, then consuming porn is no longer a personal choice
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where one affirms one's cultural traditions. It is simply the law of the land. To see this
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effect in action, just look at the correlation was in the EU between how much a country restricts
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access to abortion and its fertility rate. Abortion restrictions are a good proxy for how much the
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government is enforcing value systems slash perspectives that religion should be enforcing
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on their own. Removing the responsibility from religion to motivate individuals to exercise
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self-control will destroy that religion over time.
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And this abortion stuff is actually new to this article, so I'll put it on screen here because
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it's really interesting that it is a very high correlation. And this is something that so many
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people we talk to just immediately assume we're going to be on their side or that pronatalism is
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the same as the pro-life movement. And we're like, actually, in many ways, they're directly
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antagonistic towards each other. Which, if you want to see who's killing more kids, Catholics or us,
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we go into this topic and a lot of question into like the Christian theology around when does life
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begin, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on this?
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No, I just, yeah, I think when I ask, or here, I'll put it this way. When friends of ours who are
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pronatalists and in the know say, oh, I met so-and-so and they're pronatalist. Now what I ask is like,
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okay, are they like the default non-researched pronatalist? Meaning that they think it's all about
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cash handouts, or it's about YIMBY, or it's about abortions or birth control. Like they sort of
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point to one thing. Or are they like an actual pronatalist who like understands that this is a
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mixture of cultural factors and schooling and economic norms and social norms, et cetera,
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government regulation, and that has to do with standards that parents are held to, things of that
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sort. And normally, they're more pronatalist now than there used to be. I think that the movement is
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growing, but still most of them fall into that basic category where they don't, they're not
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actually aware of and fighting for what we would consider to be real solutions.
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Yeah. And this is something I'll get into more, but it's something I was actually thinking about
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when we were in talks with somebody recently is the pronatalist movement has been able to
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successfully integrate a lot of religious extremists or very conservative religious movements,
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like very conservative Jewish groups, very conservative Mormon groups, et cetera. But
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the one group that we've never really at a large scale integrated is the Catholic community because
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of these differences. Like there's a lot of Catholic, like on the ground pronatalists, but I mean,
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Catholic thought leaders haven't integrated with the movement in the same way thought leaders in
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other communities have, which is very interesting to me.
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And it's interesting that it also aligns with the ultra low Catholic fertility rates, which really
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worries us. But again, see our Catholic episode for more info on this. If religion is the answer,
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why not just go back to one of the old ones? While religious communities have shown more
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resistance to fertility collapse than their secular counterparts, they too are dying. For example,
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Catholic majority countries in Europe have an average fertility rate of only 1.3, a rate that will
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see them almost halving in population every generation. Things are not much better in Catholic
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majority Latin America. And here I'm quoting an article. As recent as 2019, a benchmark study by
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the United Nations Population Division for 2020 to 2100 forecasts that fertility in Latin America and
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Caribbean countries would stabilize at an average of around 1.75 children per woman in the latter half
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of this century. Stunningly, except for Mexico, all countries listed in this graph have already dropped
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below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have total fertility rates of around
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1.3 children per woman, the so-called ultra-low fertility threshold that has only been seen in
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a handful of European and East Asian countries. Catholics are not the only religious group in
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which fertility rates are plummeting. One can observe the same delayed fertility crash across
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almost all religious groups. Even historically high fertility groups like Mormons fell below replacement
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rate and will eventually disappear without change. The Mormon fertility rate has been harder to
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calculate than other populations' fertility rates, but there is evidence of a substantial decline.
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Even Muslims are not immune to this trend, with their fertility rates sometimes falling below other
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groups when they are in monocultural communities. Iran's fertility crisis is an obvious example.
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One might point that there are often high-fertility subpopulations within religious communities.
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The problem is that they tend to be less economically and intellectually productive.
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These low-productivity, high-fertility groups are much more damaging to religious communities than
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they are to secular society, as there is more interbreeding between their members and those of
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the low-fertility, high-productivity groups. There is one study arguing that this is not the case in
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some Mormon communities, but the correlation shown is very weak. With all this being the case,
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sending our kids into an extant religious community seems like tossing them into a genetic death spiral.
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It would be unwise to the extreme if I want my genetic line to be among those humans who colonize the
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Well, I just want to point this out to those who are a little bit
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critical of the Tract series, or when we say things in... When I say we, I really mean you,
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Malcolm, because you're the brain leading all of this. I cannot take credit. But when we say things
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that you may disagree with religiously, that are counter to traditional religions that are not part of
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them, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that we are trying to create an iteration of an
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intergenerational and durable religion and culture that can take people to the stars. And we very much
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respect traditional religions. And I mean, how did you describe it? Just their death spiral? We do
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actually want our kids to have as a backup traditional religion. If ours doesn't work out, we want our kids
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to know that that's the next place they turn, not the urban monoculture. However, we are not
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contributing to society. We're not advancing society. If we turn to a traditional religion,
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those are handled. People are going to be members of them unless they die out. There are lots of people
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A great way to put it. If the traditional religions work, they're already safe. If they don't work,
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Advantage to us in moving back to them. But in general, I do feel that many of them are dying.
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And it is one of the things I noticed recently that was really interesting is the fertility rate
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of a religion is also often inversely correlated with when it was founded or differentiated from
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So you look at some of the oldest religions in the world right now. Like what's the oldest,
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like probably extant religious in the world. You're looking at two religious groups. You're looking at
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the Zoroastrians who became the Parsi. They have a desperately low fertility rate. But then you're
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looking at the Hindi who also have a desperately low fertility rate. Then you're looking at other
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really old religious systems. Well, you're looking at Buddhism, desperately low fertility rate.
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Okay. You look at slightly newer systems. You've got systems like early Christian groups,
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like Catholics and the Orthodox community, but they're much, much lower than other Christian
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communities. They're the lowest of all Christian conservative communities.
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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
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the Muslims, and they have much higher fertility rates. The only community that really bucks this is
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the Jewish community. And that's only if you don't consider modern Orthodox Judaism a new religion.
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Which you would argue actually would count as kind of...
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Yeah, I argue that it was really founded, what we call ultra-Orthodox Judaism was really founded in
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the 1800s and is the newest of all of the major religious communities in the world, which is one of
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the things that causes a lot of our friction with Jewish communities is they're like, you guys seem to
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really like Jewish teachings and scripture. And we're like, yeah, we do. And then they're like,
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well, then come join our Hasidic community. And I'm like, I don't really consider Hasidics
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ancestrally Jewish. I like them. Like, they're great.
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Well, not many of them genetically are ancestrally.
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Well, they're genetically, which is why they've sort of been able to skirt under the radar within
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the Jewish world. By that, what I mean is in the traditional ancestral Jewish communities framework,
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if somebody is matrilineally Jewish and holds to the Jewish like Sabbath and a few other major
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traditions, then they are Jewish. Like you cannot impede their Jewishness, which means even if they
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have adopted like an entirely new set of teachings and an entirely new conception of God, they can't be
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called by members within the Jewish community as distinctly non-Jewish. Yet to me...
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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
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movement an entirely new and distinct religious movement. If I'm creating a taxonomy of religious
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traditions and trying to understand how religious traditions interact with each other, how religious
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practices relate to fertility rates, how religious traditions transfer themselves between generations,
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or how religious practices and beliefs about God relate to a religious tradition's industrial and
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scientific output. In the same way that I would consider something like Mormons, not meaningfully a
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
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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
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
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community, which was a group of the followers of Christ who considered themselves fully Jewish not long
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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.
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In fact, I would argue that the Nazarenes had more in common with the modern Hasidic movement than the
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modern Hasidic movement does to traditional Jewish religious practices and conceptions of God.
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And I think that the only reason that they really died out is because the non-Jewish Christian
00:21:09.640
movement got so big. And that if you look at the Jewish community today, if these pop Kabbalah,
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
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the Nazarenes died out, you know, look very obviously non-Jewish to people. But right now, because there isn't a
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big, large non-Jewish contingent. If people want more of a deep dive on this topic, I could
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potentially do one. But it's something that I hesitate on, as I fear that it could drive
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anti-Semitic sentiments. And that's really not my goal in pointing this out. It's more of a
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someone who's just a real nerd about religious history and likes getting into the nuances of the
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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,
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they'd be like, yes, but both your practices and conceptions of God are radically different from
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Jewish conceptions of God before the Hasidic movement. And therefore, it is in the eyes of, like,
00:22:28.140
Christianity, for example, a new sect that is more different than, say, Catholics are from
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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,
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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
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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
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nerding out about religious history in this particular niche. And the Hasidic community takes
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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,
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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
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
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.
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
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.
00:27:18.220
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
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.
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.
00:29:55.960
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
00:41:23.460
your time is better spent trying to future-proof that religion because you have the clout and the
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
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,
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.
00:42:04.340
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
01:00:49.740
And I'm certainly not doing this for sex, which a lot of cult leaders are doing.
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
01:01:07.260
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.
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
01:02:06.600
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.