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

Our podcast, Based Camp, focuses on the topics of sex, politics, genetics, and religion. The first three are understandable obsessions for leaders of the pronatalist movement but the last often perplexes newcomers. Religion? This confusion is amplified when they ask why we haven’t written a book on pronatalism and realistic solutions to falling fertility rates and we point out that we have and it's titled The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. 

The great thing about being an American and exploring the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are, which allows us to see what has and hasn’t worked. 

The “obvious” solutions to falling fertility rates simply don’t work. You can’t buy fertility: Hungary spent 5% of its GDP attempting to do this one year and only rose fertility rates by 1.6%, a laughable figure in a world where rates are falling annually by double digit percentages in dozens of countries. What’s more, if you line up all the studies looking at whether financial incentives boost fertility rates, you see a clear association between the proposed effect size and the margin of error. 

Is there some amount we could pay people to get them to have kids? Of course. Is there an amount a government would be able to pay (i.e., something that would pass in Congress) that would make a significant difference? The answer is no. Anyone telling you otherwise is either not familiar with the data or is lying to you in an effort to promote some other agenda.

Shifting the culture is the obvious way to save our species from the self-induced extinguishing of our most productive members. Yet actually doing so is not entirely straightforward. One’s first intuition when observing that conservative religious populations have more children within countries is to assume that imposing their beliefs on the population level is the solution. But then one sees that the more conservative a country’s average citizen, the lower its fertility rate, as Aria Babu has shown. Imposing conservative values through governments fiat does not appear to work and may even be counter-productive. 

The failure of universal conservative values to sustainably raise birth rates is likely driven by the same process that leads to native ethnic groups having higher fertility rates in ethnically and culturally diverse countries than in ethno-states or mono-cultures (when controlling for prosperity). That's right: an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction. The reason for this, I suspect, is that high fertility requires not just a strong, religiously infused culture but one whose members feels like a threatened minority that is starkly different from its neighbours. This would explain the perplexingly high Jewish Israeli fertility rates.

I suspect there are two major forces at play. The first is just common sense. If you have daily reminders that people who look, act, and think like you might be “replaced”, that is a strong motivation to have kids. In a country like South Korea (where I used to live) almost everyone you see and interact with shares your culture and ethnicity, so there is no daily feeling of existential threat. Think of it like a fertility-cultural version of the bystander effect.

The second force at play is more subtle. When a government imposes a culture’s value system, the forces of intergenerational cultural evolution that made the culture strong in the first place begin to atrophy. If a person lived their life in a mech suit which moved their body for them, all their muscles would eventually atrophy.

Cultures that maintained prohibitions on porn had more intramarital sex and thus more children. Yet they also taught self-control, which strengthens the inhibitory pathways in the prefrontal cortex. So when a country does something like ban porn outright (as South Korea has done) then consuming porn is no longer a personal choice where one affirms one’s cultural traditions; it is simply the law of the land. To see this effect in action just look at the correlation within the EU between how much a country restricts access to abortion to its fertility rate. Abortion restrictions are a good proxy for how much the government is enforcing value systems/perspectives that religions should be enforcing on their own. Removing the responsibility from a religion to motivate individuals to exercise self-control will destroy that religion over time.

If religion is the answer, why not just go back to one of the old ones? While religious communities have shown more resistance to fertility collapse than their secular counterparts, they too are dying. For example, Catholic majority countries in Europe have an average fertility rate of only 1.3—a rate that will see them almost halving in population every generation! Things are not much better in Catholic majority Latin America:

As recently as 2019, a benchmark study by the United Nations Population Division for 2020 to 2100 forecast that fertility in Latin American and Caribbean countries would stabilize at an average of around 1.75 children per woman in the latter half of this century. Stunningly, except for Mexico, all the countries listed in this graph have already dropped below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have total fertility rates of around 1.3 children per woman—the so-called “ultra-low fertility” threshold that has only been seen in a handful of European and East Asian countries.

Catholics are not the only religious group in which fertility rates are plummeting. One can observe the same delayed fertility crash across almost all religious groups. Even historically high-fertility groups like Mormons fell below the replacement rate and will eventually disappear without a change.“ The Mormon fertility rate is harder to calculate than other populations’ fertility rates, but there is evidence of a substantial decline. Even Muslims are not immune to this trend, with their fertility rates sometimes falling below other groups’ when they are in monocultural communities. (Iran’s fertility crisis is an obvious example.)”

One might point out that there are often high-fertility sub-populations within religious communities. The problem is that they tend to be less economically and intellectually productive. These low-productivity, high-fertility groups are much more damaging to religious communities than they are to secular society, as there is much more interbreeding between their members and those of the low-fertility, high-productivity groups. (There is one study arguing that this is not the case in some Mormon communities, but the correlation shown is very weak.) 

With all this being the case, sending our kids into an extant religious community seems like tossing them into a genetic death spiral. It would be unwise in the extreme if I want my genetic line to be among those humans who colonize the stars.

It should come as no surprise that throwing out all one's ancestral traditions—traditions with which one’s ancestors evolved—will have voluminous deleterious effects on the individual. It should also come as no surprise that clinging dogmatically to cultural traditions that evolved within and were optimized for not just a pre-internet world but a pre-industrial world will have disastrous consequences for the group. The only way to ensure ancestral traditions work as intended without updating them for the age of technology is to include within them a mandate for a pre-industrial lifestyle. 

This is why the only groups that seem to show durable resistance to fertility collapse are those that either ban their members from engaging with technology or have social practices that lower the economic potential of their adherents. What is concerning about these groups is that they are often wildly xenophobic, believing that eventually everyone on earth must believe what they believe. In fact, not a single religious group in the world within a developed country has been able to stay durably above the replacement rate while being economically productive and engaging with technology (except, arguably, for Israeli Jews).

Some adherents of traditional religions assume that they can use their technophobic members to generate a large population that can subsequently be converted to technophilia. This strategy does not work for two reasons. The first and obvious one is the enormous dysgenic effects it will have on their population (culturally sterilizing the economically productive members of a group is not a winning formula). The second is that sub-groups within these communities that disengage with technology more extremely will outcompete those that do not. This can be seen clearly in Amish populations where the rate of cell phone use correlates with their fertility rate. Through cultural evolution the technophobic factions will eventually dominate the others (except for iterations that totally culturally and genetically isolate themselves).

This is the crux of why we are raising our kids in a new religious system. It is also why we encourage others to attempt to edit their pre-industrial systems with practices that will make them competitive in an age of AI and the internet. All religious traditions evolve—the drastic social and technological changes that pose new threats simply require that such evolution happen faster.

The genetic game we are playing is different from the one our ancestors played. Historically, if a group had cultural practices that lead them to select for higher economic and technological productivity in breeding partners, males from that group would regularly outbreed with females from neighbouring groups. This had the affect of reducing genetic differentiation between geographically adjacent groups. The advent of near universally enforced child support naturally leads to the genetic isolation of high-earning technophilic groups with the capacity for self-control (outbreeding is heavily punished by the state).

As a result of this, any genetic IQ advantage will be amplified much faster than would have historically been the case. This is doubly true for groups that practice polygenic selection and have arranged marriage protocols in place. Oh, that seems harsh, does it? In the words of one of my favourite movies, “You disapprove? Well, too bad. We're in this for the species, boys and girls. It's simple numbers. They have more.” 

The old ways have failed us. Many bemoan the urban monoculture, whose adherents are known for their censorious “woke” behaviour. As threatening as the urban monoculture may be, when it breaks we will be facing an infinitely more threatening flood of xenophobic, technophobic, religious extremists who will drag our species back to the stone age if given the chance. This flood will come from groups as varied Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists – some of whose adherents maintain a high fertility rate by using culturally induced poverty to simulate pre-industrial environments among their members while maintaining cultural isolation through intense cultural xenophobia.

The pronatalist movement is a beacon for those few humans left who are willing to do what makes us human: innovate, improve, and band together so we can mount a real defense. God willing, once the wave passes, this movement will be the seed that grows into a vast interstellar human empire. 

Finally, you may be asking, “but why religion, why not just a few cultural tweaks?” Even if it's entirely secular, a suite of intergenerationally durable cultural perspectives and practices that differ strikingly from those of the society around it will be called a religion by the dominant cultural group. If my descendants think and perceive the world in a manner that differs from thought processes and worldviews of the dominant cultural group, calling them something other than a religious minority is merely a semantic quibble. And our descendants do need to think differently if we want them to survive. 

The religion we have built for my family must be one of many experimental cultures designed to combat fertility collapse. Our unique religion is meant to be one hypothesis among many—because that is all what we are doing: testing a hypothesis. You can riff on ours or riff on the traditions of your ancestors, but raising your children in the urban monoculture with unmodified ancestral traditions is like asking them to charge a gatling gun with spears. Our goal is not to create a new religion but rather a coalition of them that can share cultural resources rendered useless in the wider society (like marriage markets). If you want to join this network, please reach out, (we are building both a school system and will be doing yearly summer camps when our kids are old enough to socialize with likeminded peers).

And if you are interested in the specific religion of our family, we lay it out in a Substack piece titled Tract 1: Building an Abrahamic Faith Optimized for Interstellar Empires. In short, we teach our kids that whatever man becomes in a million or so years will be conceptually closer to what humans today would think of as a God than to a human. This entity is so advanced that it exists outside of time as we understand it and thus, form the perspective of the entity, it is guiding us to reunite with it.

God is the ultimate manifestation of human potentiality, and the good is defined by actions that expand human potentiality. We believe that this is the entity the Abrahamic Traditions1 were revelations of, and that new revelations are given to man when he has the capacity to understand them. Hence we have a religious mandate to expand that capacity (through both genetic and synthetic means). Ours can be thought of as almost an Abrahamic E/Acc religious system.

Malcom Collins is the founder of Pronatalist.org and the Pronalist Foundation. He has written five best selling books with one topping the WSJ Best Seller list. His professional background is in venture capital and private equity. He runs the podcast Based Camp.

1

When we say this is an Abrahamic tradition, we mean that God has always done his best to attempt to convey truth to man but man of the past was not yet sophisticated enough to fully understand that truth. The story of Jesus’s life was sent to teach us that God’s Son, as man, must be martyred to sanctify mankind. Only through generational martyrdom can God’s Son (representing all of us) but also God (because we will eventually become God) remove man-kinds flaws that prevent us from joining with God. Of course, this is a concept that people during the life of Christ would have been incapable of grasping so when explained to them it came out as a convoluted plan for God to turn himself into a man, which man would then need to unjustly kill in order for God to forgive man. God told us that he was not the type of entity to demand a father sacrifice his son to appease Him in the story of Abrahm, but in that story he also told us that we, His followers, would believe he was that kind of entity but follow His word regardless until it could be revealed He was not.

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Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] That is it. That's the piece. It was the foundation to this and it's sort of the foundation to, you know, the question of why, why are we doing all this?

Simone Collins: And I guess the TLDR is we want to create an intergenerationally durable culture that is also capable of very significant technological advancement to the extent that we would want to see this group of people get off earth and go beyond.

Malcolm Collins: A lot of people are like, well, I disagree with what you say in the tracks and we're like, that's fine.

Like we, we are totally open to that. We are one belief system among many. And then some people are like, well, These tracks contrast with traditional systems. And it's like, yes, if they didn't, then they wouldn't be a new system. We are trying something new because other people are trying the older things.

But we have no animosity. Like, you aren't

Not.

Malcolm Collins: part of the pronatalist movement just because you differ from us theologically. We believe [00:01:00] that theological differences are a thing of existential value in terms of cultural solutions.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of it depends on how robust we're going to be able to make this and I

Malcolm Collins: mean, I think the final question I have for you is you, you sort of got all this sprung on you.

You know, I've seen like the girl defined videos recently. One of their husbands came out as an atheist. No, wait, what?

Simone Collins: What? Oh my God. I've been doing way too much work and not enough fun.

Malcolm Collins: But when you married me, I mean, you married a staunch atheist

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: I cannot tell you how much I enjoy these conversations.

Malcolm Collins: This one's going to be very different from the others. It's going to say track to zero which means that it's not actually officially one of the tracks, but it's the thing that inspired the tracks, which is to say that Aporia magazine, I was actually talking to one of our fans recently, and they hadn't been to Aporia magazine, and so I was like, Oh, you should really check it out.

It's a, it's a great, like if you like our channel, you're probably going to like [00:02:00] what they're doing. And then I go to Aporia's website, and I shared this with you, and our daughter was on the front page. Oh,

Simone Collins: she's so cute. So.

Malcolm Collins: Did you see this? It's, it's So, so here's an example of like a random first page.

Elites are genetically different. How do different groups form? How to solve demographic collapse. Six ideas to arrest fertility decline. Human biodiversity, a guide. And then embryo selection towards a healthier society. And that's the one that has our daughter on the cover. And I was just like, every one of those topics is something that one of our fans would love.

So, I can see how we have a big overlap, but anyways, so the guy who runs it reached out to me, and he asked me about doing a like, commissioning a piece for me on sort of our religious ideas and stuff like that, because we had talked about it a little bit on the show, but not really gone deep into it, and I go, yeah, sure, like, why not?

Like, let's, let's, let's do [00:03:00] this. And I ended up getting way too into it and writing something way too long. So I broke it into like 10 different pieces and that became the tracks. It's like the story of

Simone Collins: every book

Malcolm Collins: you write, right? I think I'm going to go into something small and then it ends up getting way too long.

But yeah, so the, the first of the tracks. Not tract one, but like the one that was actually the commission, which was like the justification for writing all the others became published in their magazine. And that's what I'm going to read as sort of tract zero. And it is a summary, a lot of, a lot of our other ideas that people might be familiar with or something like that.

So it's not going to have a ton of new stuff in it, but it is a very good summary of Ideas that we cover all the time, but in a lot more detail and was a lot more data. And it's a piece that I've referenced in several episodes. So obviously I see it as sort of like a foundational, like, if you want to see why we're doing X, or you want to see what we, why we think, why check this out and was the tracks more broadly, what I'm really doing is just reading [00:04:00] things.

I've taken the time to write which means that I've put a lot more thought thought into them than what normally goes on in a podcast. You know, if you're reading one of our books, this is something that we have read over, you know, at least like 20 times. And same with every one of the tracks and same was, was this sort of stuff.

So, so very different in terms of quality of what you're getting anywhere else. So the piece is called reversing the fertility collapse. You can't buy fertility and imposing values through government fiat doesn't work. New and fortified religions are the only realistic solution. Our podcast Basecamp.

focuses on the topics of sex, politics, genetics, and religion. The first three are understandable obsessions for the leaders of the pronatalist movement, but the last often perplexes newcomers. Religion? This confusion is amplified when they ask why we haven't written a book on pronatalism and realistic solutions to falling fertility rates, and we point out that we have, and it's titled The Pragmatist Guide to [00:05:00] Crafting Religion.

The great thing about being an American and experiencing the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are. Which allows us to see what has and hasn't worked. The quote unquote obvious solutions to falling fertility rates simply don't work.

You can't buy fertility. Hungary spent 5 percent of its GDP attempting to do this one year, and only rose fertility rates by 1. 6%. A laughable figure in a world where rates are falling annually by double digit percentages in dozens of countries. What's more, if you line up all the studies looking at whether, for, whether financial incentives boost fertility rates, you see a clear association between the proposed effect size and the margin of error.

Is there some amount we could pay people to get them to have kids? Of course. Is there an amount a government would be able to pay, i. e. something that Congress would pass [00:06:00] that would make a significant difference? The answer is no. Anyone telling you otherwise is either not familiar with the data or is lying to you in an effort to promote some other agenda.

Simone Collins: I mean, we've talked about this extensively. I agree. It is just what apparently the data

Malcolm Collins: shows. It's just one of these things that whenever you look at it, it doesn't work. You cannot buy high fertility rates. And it makes sense when you think about it, right? Suppose somebody was like, I will pay you, like a large amount, like 50, 000 to have kids, right?

But then that amount isn't like that big when you think about the cost that you're undergoing, it's a permanent change in your life. I mean, it's almost as serious a change as like, I'll pay you 50, 000 to get a gender transition. Like, would you do that? Like you, you can't go on trips easily anymore. Sorry, I'm not talking about gender transition.

I'm talking about kids. You can't go on trips easily anymore. You can't, you know, you are committing to something that you can't easily back out of. It makes sense that it's not something that you can just pay people around. [00:07:00] You need to enable lifestyle changes and change the way they, they see kids. So this is all stuff we've talked about before, but it's good to have it all in one place, I think.

Yes.

Shifting the culture is the obvious way to save our species from self induced extinguishing of our most productive members. Yet, actually doing so is not entirely straightforward. One's first intuition when observing conservative religious populations have more children within countries is to assume that imposing their belief on population, on the population level is a solution.

But, then one sees, the more conservative a country's average citizen, the lower its fertility rate, as Aryababu has shown. Imposing conservative values through government fiat does not appear to work, and may even be counterproductive. The failure of universal conservative values to sustainably raise, birth rates is likely driven by the same process that leads to native ethnic groups having higher fertility rates in an ethnically and culturally diverse countries than in ethnostates or monocultures when [00:08:00] controlling for prosperity.

That's right. An ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction. The reason for this, I suspect, is that high fertility requires not just a strong religiously infused culture, but one whose members feel like a threatened minority that is starkly different from its neighbors.

This would explain the perplexingly high Jewish Israeli fertility rates. I suspect there are two major forces at play. The first is just common sense. If you have daily reminders that people who look Act and think like you might be quote unquote replaced, that is a strong motivation to have kids. In a country like South Korea, where I used to live, almost everyone you see and interact with shares your culture and ethnicity, so there is no daily feeling of existential threat.

Think of it like a fertility cultural version of the bystander effect. By the way, Simone, you're familiar with the bystander effect?

Simone Collins: Where people don't take action when they are in a

Malcolm Collins: large group. Yeah. The famous thing [00:09:00] is

Simone Collins: like somebody, someone being murdered in the street and people just kind of sitting around being like, someone ought to do something.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Someone else is probably doing something about this. And some people have said that it's been debunked or not properly replicated. Just where I left off with. That I don't think it has. I mean, it's just intuitive to me if I'm walking down the street in Manhattan versus walking down the street in a small neighborhood and I see somebody who looks like they're injured up against the side of a building.

I'm going to do something in a small neighborhood and not in Manhattan. Like

Simone Collins: actually, yeah, that's true. Because remember when we walked by that wall street bro, who was like facedown on the ground in that park in. Oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah, and we actually were like,

Simone Collins: wow, he looks pretty fucked up and then we just kept walking.

Oh God.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, you were the worst. We didn't want to deal with it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, he just looked very drunk, but

Malcolm Collins: we could have done worse. The second force at play is more subtle. When a government imposes a culture's [00:10:00] value system, the forces of intergenerational cultural evolution that made the culture strong in the first place begin to atrophy.

If a person lived their life in a mech suit which moved their body for them, all their muscles would eventually atrophy. Cultures that maintained prohibitions on porn had more intermarital sex and thus more children. Yet, they also taught self control, which strengthens the inhibitory pathways in the prefrontal cortex.

So, when a country does something like ban porn outright, as South Korea has done, then consuming porn is no longer a personal choice where one affirms one's cultural traditions. It is simply the law of the land. To see this effect in action, just look at the correlation within the EU between how much a country restricts access to abortion and And it's fertility rate abortion restrictions are a good proxy for how much the government is enforcing value systems slash perspectives that religion should be enforcing on their own, removing the responsibility from religion to motivate individuals to exercise self control will [00:11:00] destroy that religion over time.

And this abortion stuff is actually new to this article. So I'll put it on screen here. Cause it's really interesting that it is a very high correlation. You know, and this is something that we, you know, so many people we talked to just immediately assume we're going to be on their side or that pronatalism is the same as the pro life movement.

And we're like, actually in many ways, they're directly antagonistic towards each other. Which, you know, if you want to see our arc or who's killing more kids, Catholics or us, we go into this topic and a lot of question into like the Christian theology around when does life begin? Blah, blah, blah. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on this?

Simone Collins: No, I just, I, yeah, I, I think when I, when I ask, Or here, I'll put it this way. When friends of ours who are pronatalists and in the know say, Oh, I met so and so and they're pronatalist. Now what I ask is like, okay, are they like the default non researched pronatalist? Meaning that they think it's all about cash handouts or it's about [00:12:00] YIMBY or it's about Abortions or birth control.

Like they sort of point to one thing. Or are they like an actual pernatalist who like understands that this is a mixture of cultural factors and schooling and economic norms and social norms, et cetera government regulation and that has to do with standards that parents are held to things of that sort.

And normally there are more pernatalists now than there used to be. I think that the movement is growing, but still most of them fall into that basic category where they don't, They're not actually aware of and fighting for what we would consider to be real solutions.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is something we'll get into more, but it's something I was actually thinking about when we were in talks with somebody recently is the pronatalist movement has been able to successfully integrate a lot of religious extremists or very conservative religious movements.

Like very conservative Jewish groups, very conservative Mormon groups, et cetera. But the one group that we've never really at a large scale integrated is the Catholic [00:13:00] community because of these differences. Like there's a lot of Catholic, like on the ground pronatalists, but I mean, Catholic thought leaders haven't integrated with the movement in the same way thought leaders in other communities have, which is very interesting to me.

Yeah. And it, and it, it, it's interesting that it also aligns with the ultra low Catholic fertility rates. Which really worries us. But again see our Catholic episode for more info on this.

If religion is the answer, why not just go back to one of the old ones? While religious communities have shown more resistance to fertility collapse than their secular counterparts, they too are dying. For example, Catholic majority countries in Europe have an average fertility rate of only 1. 3, a rate that will see them almost halving in population every generation.

Things are not much better in Catholic majority Latin America, and here I'm quoting an article. As recent as 2019, a benchmark study by the United Nations Population Division for 2020 to 2100 forecasts that fertility in Latin America and Caribbean countries would stabilize at an average of around 1.

75 children per woman in the latter half of this century. [00:14:00] Stunningly, except for Mexico, all countries listed in this graph have already dropped below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica. Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have total fertility rates of around 1. 3 children per woman, the so called ultra low fertility threshold that has only been seen in a handful of European and East Asian countries.

Catholics are not the only religious group in which fertility rates are plummeting. One can observe the same delayed fertility crash across almost all religious groups. Even historically high fertility groups like Mormons, fell below replacement rate and will eventually disappear without change. The mormon fertility rate has been harder to calculate than other populations fertility rates, but is, but there is evidence of a substantial decline.

Even Muslims are not immune to this trend with their fertility rates sometimes falling below other groups when they are in monocultural communities. Iran's fertility crisis is an obvious example. When my point that there are. often high fertility subpopulations within religious communities. [00:15:00] The problem is that they tend to be less economically and intellectually productive.

These low productivity, high fertility groups are much more damaging to religious communities than they are to secular society, as there is more interbreeding between their members and those of the low fertility, high productivity groups. There is one study arguing that That this is not the case in some Mormon communities, but the correlation shown is very weak.

With all this being the case, sending our kids into an extant religious community seems like tossing them into a genetic death spiral. It would be unwise to the extreme if I want my genetic line to be among those humans who colonize the stars.

Well, I

Simone Collins: just want to point this out to those who are a little bit critical of the Tracked series, or when we say things in when I say we, I really mean you, Malcolm, because you're the brain leading all of this. I cannot take credit. But when we say things that you may disagree with religiously that are, they're counter to traditional religions that are not part of them.

I [00:16:00] think the important thing to keep in mind is that we are trying to create an iteration of an intergenerational, a durable religion and culture that can take people to the stars. And we. very much respect traditional religions. And I mean, what, how did you describe it? Just their death spiral. We do actually want our kids to have as a backup traditional religion.

If ours doesn't work out, we want our kids to know that that's the next place they turn, not the urban monoculture. However we are not contributing to society. We're not advancing society. If we do. If we turn to a traditional religion, those are handled. People are going to be members of them unless they die out.

There are lots of people who are already pursuing them.

Malcolm Collins: A great way to put it. If the traditional religions work, they're already safe. If they don't work, then they're going to die. Then we need to do something. Advantage to us in moving back to them. But in general, I do feel that many of them are dying.

And it is one of the things I noticed recently that was really [00:17:00] interesting is the fertility rate of a religion is also often inversely correlated was when it was founded or differentiated from its parent religious system. Okay. Walk me through this. So you look at some of the oldest religions in the world right now, like what's the oldest, like probably extent religious in the world you're looking at two religious groups.

You're looking at the Zoroastrians who became the Parsi. They have a desperately low fertility rate. And then you're looking at the Hindi. Who also have a desperately low fertility rate. Then you're looking at other really old religious systems while you're looking at Buddhism, desperately low fertility rate.

Okay. You look at slightly newer systems. You've got systems like early Christian groups, like Catholics and the Orthodox community. But they're much, much lower than other Christian communities. They're the lowest of all Christian conservative communities with Orthodox majority countries having fertility rates of like 1.

2, 1. 3 on average, and Catholics being around 1. 3. Then you look at later breakoff communities like [00:18:00] the, Protestants and the Muslims, and they have much higher fertility rates. The only community that really bucks this is the Jewish community. And that's only if you don't consider modern Orthodox Judaism, a new religion

Simone Collins: which you would argue actually would count as kind of, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I argue that it was really founded. What we call ultra Orthodox Judaism was really founded in the 1800s. And is the newest of all of the major religious communities in the world. Which is one of the things that causes a lot of our friction was Jewish communities.

Is there like, you guys seem to really like Jewish teachings and scripture and we're like, yeah, we do. And then they're like, well, then come join our Hasidic community. And I'm like, I don't really consider Hasidics ancestrally Jewish. I, I like them. Like

Simone Collins: they're great. They're well, not many of them genetically or ancestrally.

Malcolm Collins: Well, they're genetically, which is why they've sort of been able to skirt under the radar was in the Jewish world. By that, what I mean is, is in the traditional ancestral Jewish communities framework, if somebody [00:19:00] is matrilineally Jewish and holds to the Jewish like Sabbath and a few other major traditions.

Then they are Jewish, like you, you cannot impede their Jewishness, which means even if they have adopted like an entirely new set of teachings and an entirely new conception of God they can't be called by members within the Jewish community as distinctly non Jewish. Yet to me,

As somebody who's studying the evolution of religious traditions. , I don't need to look at this through the Jewish lens. And because of that, it is much more useful To consider the Hasidic movement in entirely new and distinct religious movement. if I'm creating a taxonomy of religious traditions and trying to understand religious traditions interact with each other? How religious practices relate to fertility rates. How religious traditions.

Transferred themselves between generations. Or how religious practices and beliefs about God relate to a [00:20:00] religious traditions, industrial and scientific output. In the same way that I would consider something like Mormons. Not meaningfully a Christian group, but an entirely new Abrahamic branch. Even though that concept would be offensive to Mormons. They are different enough from other Christian groups that if you're studying the history of religious traditions, you need to consider them taxonomically separate. To fully appreciate how their differences impact their community.

Malcolm Collins: When I look at the Hasidic community today, they're very similar to, and I might need to look this up if I'm remembering it wrong.

I want to think

Nazarenes.

Malcolm Collins: community which was a group of the followers of Christ who considered themselves fully Jewish not long after Christ died, but they they, they were practicing forms of Judaism that were much more focused on sort of populism and actually have a lot, lot, lot in common with modern day Hasidic movement and people.

In fact, I would argue that the Nazarenes had more in common with the modern [00:21:00] Hasidic movement than the modern Hasidic movement. Does.

To traditional Jewish religious practices. And conceptions of God.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that the only reason that they really died out is because the non Jewish Christian movement got so big. And that if you look at the Jewish community today, if these pop Kabbalah, I'll call it, got really big, which it could, I mean, it is a growing movement right now. This is like non Jewish Kabbalism.

It might get so big that the Hasidic movement will just, in the same way that the

 Nazarene's ​

Malcolm Collins: died out, you know, look very obviously non Jewish to people. But right now, because there isn't a big, large non Jewish contingent.

If people want more of a deep dive on this topic, I could potentially do one, but it's something that I hesitate on is I fear that it could drive. anti-Semitic sentiments. And that's really not my goal in pointing this out. It's more of a, someone who's just a real nerd about religious history and like [00:22:00] getting into the nuances that the very Abrahamic faith traditions. But, but it's something that I think that, you know, intuitively if you're being honest and you're looking at the Hasidic tradition and you're looking at its origin, you would see that, well, it is Jewish by Jewish standards. If an outsider was looking at it, they'd be like, yes, but both of your practices and conceptions of God. Are radically different from Jewish conceptions of God before the Hasidic movement. And therefore it is. In the eyes of like Christianity, for example, a new sect that is. More different than say, Catholics are from Protestants. But Judaism doesn't really allow for sex in the way that Christian groups allow for, for sex differences. Meaning that it is offensive to point out that their conception of God is quite radically different from earlier Jewish conceptions of God. If you go to our earlier tracks, [00:23:00] the Hasidic conception of God. Generally follows much closer to the mystic tradition, conception of God. Whereas the earlier Jewish conception of God. Follows much closer to either the monotheistic or polytheistic interpretation of God. And that a lot of the teachings that they elevate are fairly new teachings, like the Kabbalah, which is, you know, not more than a thousand years old., But that's why we don't go deeper on this topic because I don't really think that anyone benefits from our overly. Nerding out about religious history

in this particular niche. And the, is that a community takes a lot of pride in the antiquity of their religious tradition and pointing out that it doesn't actually have that much antiquity. It's sort of like when you point out to a Chinese person and they're like, our culture is so old, it has so much history. And you're like, well, Not really, you sorta did a cultural reset during the,

The cultural revolution. , and you don't have that many strong connections to your earlier [00:24:00] traditions. And that's considered very offensive to say to a Chinese person, even if it's obviously an objectively true. So there's no point in. Challenging part of a group self narrative that is important to that group in detail.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, this is totally off point. It's just sort of justifying my framework that the younger a religious tradition is, the better it is at fighting fertility collapse.

And then the question can be why. I actually came up with this idea when talking with one of our fans. And he responded, and I think very accurately they're newer updates on the software. Like, of course they have better bug fixes.

Simone Collins: Well, but then the larger point I'm making is we admire that. And the reason why we are bothering to do something different and choosing to try something different is that we are able to contribute some marginal.

Additional role of the dice for civilization that we would not be contributing. Were we to join an extant religion. So that's 1 of the reasons why we're putting these tracks out there. Why we're being so transparent about it and [00:25:00] why we're bothering with this in the 1st place. We wouldn't really. be giving civilization and or religions and or intergenerational and durable cultures another role of the dice if we just joined an existing one and didn't do anything to change it but those who tried to make new religions or to do spin offs of existing religions like what you just described to make them intergenerational and durable are capable of interstellar travel then you are adding a marginal additional chance or role of the dice for that religion and for humanity in general

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and this is something I should also mention.

If you look at the very highest fertility communities, you don't just have the Jews, you also got the Amish. The Amish are actually a fairly young religion as well. Yeah. Which I think a lot of people don't know. There's another really new Christian community that's similar to the Amish. I'll have to find their name in editing, but they're really interesting and they're ultra high fertility.

They're like Amish, they're completely collectivist communities and completely communist in the way they structure their communities. But they are not as. Banning of technology. [00:26:00] So they're much more strict about their internal communism. And I think they're a form of Anabaptist, but they're much less strict in their technology banning.

Yeah. Interesting.

The group I am thinking of is called the Bruderhof and they would not agree with my framing them as communist. But that is the word that best describes their lifestyle to your average individual.

 I showed it to my wife, Roxanne, and she said, yeah, that's a stupid title. So, I changed it. Yeah, I guess, we are Americans, so we don't like being told.

We don't like being told what the remedy is. I took issue with the word communism in the Christian context because I think communism directly implies a political construct, and as Christians, um, how we live out our faith cannot be political at all, because I don't think Jesus's commands were political.

And ultimately, living in community is [00:27:00] not about how it's constructed, it's about Trying to be true to Jesus teachings and commands. So, Rich, that was my initial reaction, was that communism is a word that shouldn't even be used in this book, let alone in the Christian context.

Malcolm Collins: Which is probably you dig into the communities. They actually seem really dope. Like I, I, they, the people in them seem really happy, very full of life. And they get a lot of criticism from outsiders because the men dress like Modern men, but the women dress actually in outfits, not dissimilar from yours.

And a lot of people look at that and they're like, why are women forced to dress this way? And I've seen interviews with women and they're like, well, you know, if you're trying to be as inexpensive as possible and, and you use dirty clothes, this is actually practical, which is funny that we have convergently come to the same answer that I dress like a much more modern man and you dress like a historic woman and a lot of people are surprised by that because a lot of women's fashion is [00:28:00] really.

Non utility based. Yeah. It should come as no surprise that throwing out all one's ancestral traditions, traditions, which, which one's ancestors evolved will have voluminous deleterious effects on the individual. It should also come as no surprise that clinging dogmatically to cultural traditions that evolved was in and were optimized for

not just a pre internet, but a pre industrial world will have disastrous consequences for the group. The only way to ensure ancestral traditions work as intended without updating them for the age of technology, is to include within them a mandate for a pre industrial lifestyle. Sorry, there was a concept here I wanted to go into, but

oh, it was another hypothesis for why the newer religions might be doing better. It might be because religions sort of deteriorate over time. This is the hypothesis we had when we were writing the pragmatist