Dopamine Traps, Midwesterners, and STEM Education

On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with the talented

Tom Swift

, technical lead of the Tortuga Society and one of our most prolific public exponents.

Recently I put him in charge of the Tortuga Technical Institute—a group within Tortuga to collaborate on open source projects and entrepreneurial endeavors, with a particular focus on fighting dopamine traps and building out vectors for a more physical and embodied kind of intellectualism.

Tom also runs his own publication here on Substack where he writes a lot of interesting and novel takes about science, technology, and civilization more broadly.

Recently he’s started a new service for founding subs called the Tom Swift Academy, which aims to provide high quality instruction in math, physics, and engineering to cultivate a cadre of independent inventors. Read more here.

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Topics include:

• Tom’s background and why he doesn’t talk the same way as other Zoomers

• The highly asymmetric nature of Gen Z

• How Walt Right Perspectives helped Tom understand mainstream culture

• Why it’s nearly impossible for kids in the mainstream to not get sucked into smartphones and social media

• Why Tom never personally fell into dopamine traps

• Tom’s conversion to Catholicism

• Is there a difference between cradle Catholics and converts?

• The recent popularity of Calvinism among more intellectual Protestants

• The Great Awakening and American religious pluralism

• Mormonism—is it sustainable? Is it compatible with America?

• Is monogamy viable long term?

• Polygyny as the inevitable outcome of post-scarcity

• Monogamy is especially suited for agriculture and early industry

• Why Midwesterners are the least polygamous Americans

• Bacon’s Rebellion and the widespread replacement of indentured servitude by African slavery over the course of the 1700s

• Tom’s article The Fordlands vs. The Cornlands, which explains why the Rust Belt is more Faustian and open than the agricultural midwest

• Widespread early marriage is potentially quite bad for spergy dudes

• In the Upper Midwest hunting is more popular than sportsball

• The repulsive nature of Black athlete worship

• Tom reveals where in Omaha he grew up and Walt asks him about the neighborhood where he lived in 2018-2019

• The Omaha Zoo is amazing

• Tom reflects on the problem with the Nebraskan Character and how it leaves people there especially susceptible to Wokeism

• Why people are more individualistic west of the hundredth meridian line

• The prominence of Finnish-Americans in the Northern Peninsula

• Did the end of the American riverine economy turn Midwesterners into hobbits?

• Why the insurance industry is so big in the Midwest

• Iowa being the first primary state suppresses right wing intellectualism

• Walt rants about Arizona

• Tom’s piece The Sunburned Exiles, about the exodus of Midwesterners to the SW

• Europeans naturally are lazy / accumulate brown slaves in a tropical clime

• Does the lack of seasons make white people go crazy in Florida?

• Amish and Mennonite industry in the Fordlands

• Why we should move the American capital to Cairo, IL

• The decline of intellectualism in an embodied / physical dimension following the defunding of NASA after the Space Race

• Tom’s plan to launch a series for Founding Subs to teach math and science to independent inventors looking to a build a home laboratory

• Intellectualism is now associated with abstraction / wordcelism because of an educational an economic feedback loop

• As we approach post-scarcity time horizons are going to shorten

• What Tom is doing for Tortuga Tech—he is actively theorycrafting with hardware engineers to fight dopamine traps

• Tom’s plan to create communities where post-2010 dopamine traps don’t exist

• Walt references

  Raven
  ’s article from last year The New Prohibition about hipster cafes in Stockholm banning screens

• Tom projects Catholics will take over architecture, engineering, and construction filling in in the “missing middle” between modernity and traditional societies

• Tom’s article The New Cantons, proposing that cities on the Great Lakes regions should model their society on the Hanseatic League and other Baltic societies

• Tom proposes a system of devolution to the country level functionally similar to

  ringleader
  ’s Backyard Nationalism

• Professor Axelrod
  ’s article A Place to Call Home, about how to build a modern-day Gult’s Gulch in a rural locale where women might actually want to live

• Tom asks Walter if he can write a novel based on his Martian Abduction Scenario in The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict