Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this thought-provoking discussion, we explore different perspectives on what constitutes a life well lived. We discuss flawed metrics like funeral attendance, dying with money, and social status games that don't matter after death.We argue the only real metric is whether your kids carry on and build upon your values and worldview. We see ourselves as intergenerational entities, so extending values systems matters more than contiguous personal experience. We also touch on coming to terms with mortality, the psychology of life extensionists, and modernity's existential dread of death.Overall, an insightful look at how to live in a way that creates meaningful impact beyond one's lifespan. We aim to set up the next generation, not maximize our own transient pleasure.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I think the, the, the core things where people like really f**k up how they're optimizing their lives is they optimize it around competing in a specific social dynamic or a specific social community that is like, you know, it could be that they organize themselves based on how, how alpha they are, for example.And that doesn't really matter when you're dead. Like, that's notSimone Collins: the thing is, I think that like our final. The theme here might be that the bigger issue is that it's not like people are optimizing around dumb reasons for a life to well lived, like we alluded to in the beginning, which we don't agree with, you know, like how many people show up at the funeral pot, but they don't, there's, there is literally nothing, you know, like I'll just spend all my money, I will just like max out everything, nothing matters after I die.No, IMalcolm Collins: don't want to see this. I think that's true, but I think a different way to word that is they're optimizing around norm, like, like, living the cultural ideal set out like the aesthetic cultural ideal set out by a specific community that they identify with. And one of the key problems of this is this [00:01:00] often leads to an obsession.With like, being okay with yourself and being okay with your identity. In a way that can become all consuming because it's so circular. It's only you who judges whether or not you're okay with who you are. And so when you live a life to be okay with who you are, you will never really be okay with who you are.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: So Malcolm, you know how we were told multiple times by someone that like the way, you know, you've lived your life Well is by the number of people at your funeral So if you have a ton of people at your funeral, obviously that means you nailed it, right?Yeah Well, I just like heard of the greatest hack for this someone for their funeral had a raffle for giving away their car. And I'm like, well, this is it. You just like, you make, you, you pre plan it, you pay it. You have a public announcement when you die and you list all the assets you're going to raffle off to anyone who comes.Everyone shows up to your funeral, like done, you know, you hacked it. Now you've apparently lived a good life and all this happens after you die, of course, but apparently a lot of people care about [00:02:00] stuff like that. So for those who do, you're welcome.Malcolm Collins: Well, and there's a lot of cultures similar to that where you can buy grievers.You know, we've talked about this in other episodes, like in Korea, you can buy people to come and grieve at your funeral. If not enough people are going to come. Well,Simone Collins: and I mean, this goes back to ancient Egypt where they were professional mourners, right? Who would, you know, wail and whatnot.Malcolm Collins: Well, and Rome did this as well with the processions after people would die.You know, it's, it's... What is up with people? WhySimone Collins: do they care? Like, what is, what is this, this weird desire for people to be really sad that you died? I mean, I guess it means that, like, you were necessary to them. It implies that you provided a lot of resources, because I think the real reason why people would lose their s**t if you died is they were also losing their house and their food and their job and, like, I think it'sMalcolm Collins: a popularity thing.They see, they see life is about accumulating, I guess I'd call it emotional debt from other people. And they want the maximum number of other people to [00:03:00] feel bad about the fact that they had died.Simone Collins: Like they want to go out like Princess Diana, like she, I feel like in all human history probably had the best, like, everyone mourning for her very dramatically thing, you know, where like it was traumatic for everyone, right?IMalcolm Collins: always remember her as the one with the expensive beanie baby made for the, yeah, youSimone Collins: know, you've made it. When you die and they make a commemorative, trendy, collectible for you, whatever that may be, you know,YEah, stupid reasons. Well, like, stupid measurements for a life well lived. So what a

In this episode, we are joined by author and podcast host Louise Perry to discuss solutions for improving modern dating and relationships. We cover how to better find a spouse through social connections, college years being optimal, and why delaying marriage and having "practice" relationships often backfires.Louise explains why dogs are a poor substitute for children when it comes to satisfying maternal/paternal instincts. We discuss arranged marriages, the risks of teenage relationships, and why conservative women often have an advantage. Louise argues frustrated maternal impulses can motivate young childless women toward "empathetic" political causes.We also touch on policy ideas like giving tuition incentives for having kids in college, supporting multi-generational living, and reforms to enable combining work and motherhood more smoothly. Overall, a fascinating discussion on improving the "dating market" and cultural approaches to marriage and family.Louise Perry: [00:00:00] The other thing that I'd add, this might not apply as much in the workplace, but definitely in terms of politics, I would say that frustrated maternal impulse is a very politically potent and potentially dangerous force. Yeah. And I think that like, say, I dunno, attitudes towards refugees in the UK, this might not be as, as acute in the U S I don't know.But I, I. Or any number of political causes, this is just one example, I, I think that the reason you see disproportionate numbers of young women who don't have children drawn to these kind of high, like, highly charged, empathetic situations where you are like trying to save groups of people, right, who may well be adult men.But I, I honestly think that a big part of that is, it's, it's like, it's like with getting the dogs, you know, it's this, it's this tug towards mothering. Something is really goodMalcolm Collins: heart take.[00:01:00] Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, this is Malcolm Collins here today with, of course, my lovely wife, Simone Collins and Louise Perry, our special guest today. You would may know her from the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast, or you may know her from her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.And if you do not know her we recently did a tour in the UK talking with a lot of rising political, well, conservative political stars, because of course that's who talks to us. And, she was repeatedly named as the number one conservative thought leader in the intellectual side in the UK right now.And so we are thrilled to have her on our podcast. The question I wanted to focus on was in this episode, is how Can we make dating? Because I think if we look at the world today, everyone who is being honest is saying gender dynamics do not seem to be working right now. So what do you advise when you're advising young girls or young boys [00:02:00] about how to go out there?Because let's be honest, they are in a dramatically worse situation than we were. How do you advise them to go out there and find partners and how much you build a new systems that could help them?Simone Collins: It'sLouise Perry: really difficult. And I say this as someone who's, I've been with my husband for 10 years and I, and I have that feeling of being the sort of, um, last chopper out of Saigon, right?Because it was, because it was, because it was pre dating apps that we met and, and we just met through, it's through friends, the sort of good old fashioned, well, not quite good old fashioned, right? Like good old fashioned is actually an arranged marriage. But there was this sort of, like, brief window, right, post sexual revolution, pre dating apps, where, where you generally met people through actual existing social connections.And I would always advise, where possible, to meet people through actual existing social connections, because apart from anything else, it means you have some kind of vetting process available. The problem with a dating app is it's just a stranger from the internet. And they can, and people will admit people who, who [00:03:00] like friends of mine, male and female who've used dating apps will admit that they behave worse with people they've met on dating apps in terms of ghosting or whatever, because they know there are no social consequences because you know that no one is going to then spread a rumor that they're.That they're like a shitty person who ghosts people. This is, you know, particularly if you're in a big city like London, there are just so many millions of people that they disappear into the night. It's like, it almost doesn't feel real, I think, when you're used to dating out. So, yeah, real social connections is better.It is difficult though. I'm sure you've, you've seen these graphs about how people meet over time and you went from being like an enormous number of people met at church for instance and then and then and then you see all of that stuff and or at work and then you see all of that stuff declining and um uh the

In this episode, we speak with Raw Egg Nationalist about the premise of his upcoming book "Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity." He discusses how liberal democracy fails to satisfy men's innate desire for distinction and greatness (megalothymia).Raw Egg argues that liberalism combined with environmental pollution and unhealthy lifestyles has created a "perfect storm" causing plummeting testosterone levels and the decline of traditional masculinity. He explains how chemicals like BPA mimic estrogen and are implicated in testosterone decline.We cover simple steps men and women can take to improve hormonal health, including avoiding plastics, personal care products with chemicals, and adopting diets and lifestyles that mitigate pollution. Raw Egg argues testosterone decline will have biological and social impacts, and that preserving masculinity is about more than just aggression.Overall an urgent wake-up call about the threats modern society poses to masculinity on multiple fronts.Raw Egg Nationalist: [00:00:00] There's a new study that shows that or that suggests that women who take the combined hormonal contraceptive pill, they actually suffer shrinkage in particular regions of their brain. Yeah, it's, it's quite a shocking study that's just come out.Yeah, wow. Question,Simone Collins: of those who had taken, women who had taken hormonal contraceptives and then stopped, did they show signs ofRaw Egg Nationalist: recovery?Yes, they did. So there was no difference in there. So, so it looks like it might be reversible. But then there are other studies. There are other studies. There was a study of hormonal contraceptive use and its relationship to depression recently. And it showed that If you started taking hormonal contraceptive as a teenager, you would, and then went to, and then, and then stopped taking it, you would always have a massively increased risk of depression as a girl.Whereas if you, if you're a, an adult woman and you go on it, and then you come off, your [00:01:00] rate of depression falls back to the norm. So that suggests that there is clearly some developmental function or developmental process that is affected in some way by taking a hormonal contraceptive as a teenager rather than as an adult.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Hi everyone. Welcome back to base camp and a very special episode of it at that because we are joined by raw egg nationalists who I'm so excited to meet.We're meeting him because he's also speaking at the natalism conference that we're going to go to in Austin this December. But we'd been very familiar with his work before. So yay, we haven't used to talk with him. If you don't know rag nationalist he is an anonymous. Twitter user with some really fun content.It's, it's, his Twitter username is actually baby gravy nine, but he goes under raw egg nationalist. You won't miss him. Plus he's written four books. All part of the raw egg nationalist present presents series on Amazon, but the most famous one is probably raw [00:02:00] egg nationalism. In theory and practice.Don't you think so? But theMalcolm Collins: next book is going to be different and that's what we're going to be talking about today. So tell us a little bit about this upcoming book and what it's on.Raw Egg Nationalist: Well, it's a pleasure to be speaking with you both. This is, I've been really been looking forward to this. So, I wrote a book.My last book was called the Eggs Benedict Option, and that was my most detailed work to date about Health and nutrition. I talked about basically about the global plan for a, or the plan for a global plant based diet and, and the health and political ramifications of that. So, I'm kind of, I'm following on from that and I'm, I'm writing in the same vein as, as, as sort of all of the other books that I've written, the, the main things that I focus on.But the, the book is going to be called The Last Men, Liberalism and the Decline of Mas or actually Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, rather. And it's about, well, it's about, it's about a lot of different [00:03:00] topics that are, that are very germane to our, to our interests, our shared interests, to this natalism conference that we're going to, that we're both going to be, or that we're all rather going to be attending.It starts with a, it starts with a, a reinterpretation of Francis Fukuyama and his end of history thesis. And there's... There's something very interesting. I mean, Fukuyama is a, is a thinker who is, he's, he's caricatured, he's straw manned, you know, people see him as the epitome of liberal hubris, and, you know, he's somebody who, who supposedly believed that liberalism was the end stage of history in a very uncomplicated way, and, and, you know, an, an un nuanced way, but actually when you read, when you go back and read The End of History, what you notice first, or what I notice, what I, I, I came to my attention was the fact that actually the book is called The End of Hi

In this video, we analyze the ideology behind the TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) movement. We discuss how TERFs emerged from an earlier generation of feminists who believed that gender differences were entirely socially constructed and conditioned. This "gender critical" ideology views gender as an oppressive social construct that should be abolished.We explain why TERFs see transgender identities as offensive and threatening to their worldview. We also analyze the perspectives of lesbian TERFs. Overall, we argue that while TERFs are logically consistent within their own belief system, their ideology is contrary to scientific evidence on innate gender differences.The TERF movement may represent the last gasp of an earlier form of feminism that did not adapt to new evidence. While influential for now in some circles, their ideology will likely not outlive the generation that spawned it.Simone: [00:00:00] We'll just say curmudgeonly resistance to change.Malcolm: Exactly. And who would be more curmudgeonly and resistant to change than 1970s feminists? These women were not known for their logic, everybody always knew that this early iteration of the feminist movement was like, f*****g bonkers, and completely dislocated from reality..You went out with a white male? I was a freshman. Fresh person. Please. Please. He's coming over here. Sisters, form a wall! No,Malcolm: their entire ideology to begin with was stupid and reactionary. And, and, honestly, I think to a large extent used for them to gain access to sexual partners.You know, they used to do this political lesbian thing to pressure straight women to sleep with them, and now they're getting the, well, not liking girl dick makes you a bigotso let's talk about what political lesbianism is. If you don't believe gender is a thing, then sexual orientation isn't a thing either.And so if men are the problem in society, then you can just choose to be gay. [00:01:00] And this is a very convenient ideology for a lot of women, who want to believe any woman they have a crush on is a valid target for them to try as hard as they want on.Would you like to know more?Simone: all right. So we were in the UK recently, and we were reminded while being there and talking to people about various political movements and conservative movements there, just how big like the turf movement in general is there, which we're not saying it's big, but it is influential, like a very small number of women.Who identify as TERFs have had an outsized level of influence. One could argue.Malcolm: I go further than that. I'd say if you talk among conservative circles in the UK there is a general belief among the political class that the aspect of the conservative movement that is having the most. cultural victory, you know, moving the Overton window the most is the turf portion of the movement in the U.S. I think we think of turfs as being this rare small group that that is just like weirdo extremists in the U. K. They are a core aspect, [00:02:00] if not the current most successful aspect of the conservative political ideology of the country. Yeah. So, this brings us to a question. Who are TERFs? What do we think of TERFs?And yeah, we'll, we'll just go into it because it's something I spend a lot of time on. So people might know this. We have a holiday called Lemon Day in our family where we have to engage with an ideology that offends us. And I spent a lot of time because I've always found TERFism to be fairly offensive and that might surprise people.So I'll explain why really deeply in their communities, which are called gender critical communities from their perspective.One of the core mistakes people make when they think about who the TERFs are, what they are, what they want, is they think that this is predominantly, and I even noticed this was in the UK to an extent, is they didn't seem to understand when they were talking about TERFs, the full ideology, that This was just an anti trans movement, and it is not.It's not a trans skeptical movement, it's not an anti trans movement, it is so much more than that. It is [00:03:00] a complete world perspective on what it is to be human, what humans are, why humans are that way. It is a logically, internally consistent perspective, but it is a perspective that... Is incongruent with measurable evidence is the way I would put it which to me is interesting because it is such a logically internally consistent perspective that is also so insane.So let's talk about it. And why people ended up holding it, because I think this is very interesting as well. First, I'll quickly describe what TERFs and the gender critical movement actually believe. So they believe that there is no difference between men and women. That's what they mean when they say gender critical.They are critical of the very concept of gender. They think that men and women are different because we have been socialized differently. That is the core cause of male and female differ

In this video, we go over some basic financial advice for families including budgeting strategies like envelope budgeting, tips on investing in a balanced portfolio across assets like stocks, real estate, crypto, and more. We discuss insurance, credit cards, buying in bulk, and investing in relationships and opportunities. This is practical financial hygiene advice, not get rich quick schemes.Malcolm: [00:00:00] This is boring, basic. Financial advice. But I feel like everyone out there is some sort of get what you couldn't do orSimone: like we'll look at financial advice. It's people looking at all these like charts and making it really complicated and they're way above my pay grade or like way below my pay grade, but pretending to be above, which is the worst.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: Hello, Simone. It is exciting to be here with youSimone: today. I'm so excited. Yeah. We're going to talk today about the most important investment of all, your health.No, just kidding. We're constantly sick because we have kids in school.Malcolm: So the most important investment of all is money. Yeah. TheSimone: most important investment of all, money.Malcolm: Screw your health. That's a good, that's a good, for yourSimone: health. Burn bright, die young,Malcolm: right? Yeah. So, it is true. The, the, the most important investment is money.After maybe kids, I guess, like, you know, we are pernatalists, so we've got to say that matters as well, but I, you know, I don't know how much actual control you have over the outcome of that. I think that's whyyouSimone: need to have a diversified portfolio. That means a lot of kids. [00:01:00]Malcolm: Yes. So this is actually a follow up episode to an episode that we did on how to get rich.Where we just went over like, you know, the basics of like the actual financial world starting company and stuff like that. And I think we'll do more topics on this cause the video did really, really well and I did not expect it to do well because it's not our normal sort of a topic. But obviously something I know a lot about I should mention, you know, degree, I've got my MBA from Stanford.Simone has her graduate degree from Cambridge. Both of us have worked in venture capital. Both of us have worked in private equity. And when it comes to investments, Simone, you had a really interesting way of framing it that you were going over with me earlier today about sort of.Simone: Yeah. We were talking about the issue of, of many people we know who've made a lot of money through investing doing it essentially by making bets, like all tact, tactically strategically.Statistically weren't very ill [00:02:00] advised but then paid off and then they just assume I'm a great investor. And you actually saw a lot of this happen during the pandemic. The, and I think a lot of, of poker players and coaches who like teach Bayesian thinking now who have. Really summed up this kind of thinking really well.They talk about when they're coaching poker players and they teach them to think in, in sort of a Bayesian way to make very well considered bets which are always calculated bets. And a thing that constantly frustrates them is the people they're coaching, like they'll lose a hand and they'll be like, yeah, well, I made, you know, I made the wrong choice.I messed up cause I lost. And they're like, no, no, no. You didn't make the wrong choice because you lost, you made the right choice, but you still lost because in the end, there's some chance involved in these bets. And the same case happens with investing. You know, sometimes you make all the right choices and you lose money, but also sometimes you make all the wrong choices and you make a ton of money.That doesn't mean you're a good investor. That doesn't mean you, you thought through things well, or [00:03:00] had a very robust strategy. And in the end, over the long run. You're probably going to lose money if you, if you don't think in a more calculated and statistically sound manner, which, you know, is, that was what we seen, right?You were talking about all the people, you know, who used to make tons of money. Like, I mean, they put everything on Bitcoin and now, you know,Malcolm: Yeah, no. And I, I think that for a lot of people, and this is a great, like evoke set, look at your friends who are bragging about what great investors they were during the Bitcoin, the last Bitcoin bull run.And, and we're believers in Bitcoin, but I think that a lot of people over invest in single assets because it's an asset that they have built a portion of their identity around, and this is something we increasingly see in investing, whether it's in the crypto space or whether it's in the you know, like, youSimone: know, it's just a stock, like a stock people really identify with, more like an industry people really identify with.Yeah.Malcolm: And, and this is. It's something that in the short term, when I look at these people who are all bragging about [00:04:00] this i

In this video, we analyze what the future may hold for East Asia as global civilization starts to collapse. We discuss China's precarious economic position and how their social credit system and COVID policies indicate preparation for maintaining control through collapse. We explore scenarios for Japan and Korea being taken over by cults or other authoritarian groups. We look at the importance of semiconductor manufacturing and evaluate the future prospects for Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and more.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So, you might say, well, why am I still kind of bullish on China? One, they can force population which is going to be relevant for whatever comes after they pass through the eye of the needle, the collapse.But also they have set up their entire system. That's what the social credit system is. That's what the constant monitoring is. That's what the money that the government can track is. Why did they do these COVID protocols? If it put them in such a dangerous position, vis a vis their existing economy, because it was all a planSimone Collins: for their They were preparing for collapse.Yes,Malcolm Collins: they were preparing to maintain their existing government systems in a collapse. A total economic collapse. ISimone Collins: mean, like, if that is true, that is pretty baller on their part. Well,Malcolm Collins: what it means is they will have something that a lot of the world doesn't have, which is not a competent government.The Chinese government is not competent. It is anything but competent. It is wildly incompetent. But at least... A government that is capable of becoming competent again, a government that is capable of disseminating some of the hard [00:01:00] policies that can culturally unify a geographic region, increase its fertility, and maintain some level of isolated technophilia.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! We have done two previous episodes on what is going to happen as civilization, as we understand it, begins to collapse. As we have stated in the previous ones, it will collapse for one of two reasons. Either population collapse, as we've said, you know, Historically speaking, the economy has risen around the world for the past 500 years or so, because the number of consumers and the number of producers was growing exponentially.We are about to hit a world in which the number of producers and number of producers, consumers, at least the ones who have high economic productivity, are declining exponentially. And we have leveraged every layer of our economies, which was great in times of growth, but in times of scarcity will lead to economic collapse.Or AI fixes it, but AI also frees the bourgeoisie from the proletariat meaning that the wealthy within our society will, [00:02:00] increasingly become more wealthy and will increasingly become concentratedly wealthy and will use that wealth as systems begin to collapse to protect themselves from the masses.And that means the masses, again, will experience economic, uh, positive or, or, or what's the word I'm looking for here?Simone Collins: Depravity? Disempowerment. Economic disempowerment.Malcolm Collins: Economic disempowerment of which we have almost never seen. And possibly justSimone Collins: economic, also economic isolation. Yeah. AndMalcolm Collins: as we pointed out, in a lot of the world, what this is going to look like is not like moving back to the developing world.It's not like we will live like we're in a developing world. It will be much worse than that. It will be a developed society that is collapsing. Which if you want to look for a good example of that on the global stage, you are looking at what it's like to live in South Africa today. That is what most of the world is going to be like within our children's lifetimes.But this is the western world, and when I say the western world, I'm actually including a lot of the world. Russia, India, places like that. The one place that is really going to [00:03:00] buck this pattern is East Asia. But East Asia is going to buck it for reasons that may be equally dystopian. Yeah. So this is very interesting South Africa may also end up bucking it, but we, you can watch our video on Africa and a pronatalist system in the future.We really don't know what's going to happen to Africa. We have limited experience there, but most of us have lived for extended periods of time in East Asia. So we have a much better understanding of East Asian cultures and how they are reacting to this. Mm hmm. So the country that matters most for where East Asia is going in regards to all this is China.We can already begin to see China's reaction to rapidly falling birth rates, which is a restriction of, so, so first they just tried to force people. They were like, okay, get out there, have kids. We're telling you have kids. And people said, no. And China was like, oh, this hasn't happened before. Okay, well, we will restrict your access [00:04:00] to vasectomie

In this video, we discuss the two enemies of the pronatalist movement - the urban monoculture and the xenophobic, technophobic religious extremists. We talk about how the urban monoculture acts as an "easy mode" villain, uniting high fertility groups, while the real threat is the aggressive, ultra-religious groups who want to eliminate all other cultures. We explore which groups may act as allies in creating pluralistic, technophilic haven states in the future.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] One increases fertility on its own, like xenophobia increases fertility on its own, but in addition to that, it also lowers the economic potential of a group, further increasing its fertility in that direction, which means you're getting this cluster of strategies,, low economic output, high xenophobia.High technophobia, which cluster together into like one branch of winning cultural strategies, which by far today is the cultural strategy, which is outcompeting all others in terms of fertility, a lot of them believe that at the end of the day there's just going to be one religion, one culture in the world. That's it. There can only be one as we say, they are highlandering it. And so, essentially, the true enemy of the pronatalist cause, not the immediate enemy, the urban monoculture, which is serving as a very simplistic villain for us right now, a villain on easy mode that is meant to prepare us for the true danger, which comes [00:01:00] after us, which it is to a large extent protecting us from, which is a world full of. technophobic, aggressive, ultra religious extremists that want everyone who's not them dead.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! Hi, gorgeous.Simone Collins: Too much energy?Malcolm Collins: Never. So this episode is going to be a bit of a follow up from the last episode, but it's also going to be a standalone. So you can watch these likely in either order. And they're going to touch related to, but divergent concepts.Simone Collins: And you'll include a link to the first one in case people want in theMalcolm Collins: description.Yeah, I could actually do the thing in YouTube where I like tag the first one. Do that, youSimone Collins: young technophilic person. There'sMalcolm Collins: a little button here right here. This is where it appears and you push the button and it will like open a thing where you can then click and like open it in a different tab to watch after you're done with this one.[00:02:00] Okay, great. So, with this episode, what we are going to discuss is the two enemies of pronatalism. And so let's talk about sort of what pronatalism is more broadly. It is a movement dedicated to ensuring the preservation of a pluralistic and diverse human species. And people would be like, well, why that?Why not? Just like increasing birth rates? Because if we do nothing, what's going to happen is we're going to have a crash in human fertility rates. We're going to have a crash in the world economy. Both of which are things that are still going to happen if we do something, but to me, A few groups will come to power and basically erase everyone else.That's what it looks like is the path that we're going on. We're going on sort of a monoculture of a species where like one or two or maybe three, if we're lucky, if our group That's just completely fails cultural and ethnic groups will be the only things [00:03:00] left of our species and they will wipe out the rest.And that is absolutely terrifying to us. Because I think that 1 of our greatest strengths is our diversity. And I also think that in this unengaged world. The groups that end up wiping out most of the other groups are going to be quite technophobic, i. e. we are moving back to a dark ages of extremist religious tribalism.Yep. And that is not great. Not, not, not great at all. And so what we are trying to do is build an alliance of the individuals that are high fertility and do want to exist in the future, and the cultural groups that are high fertility and do want to exist in the future. And this alliance means something.If you are a culture that is high fertility, Sort of axiomatically, you differentiate significantly from the dominant culture in our society right now. It is a very low fertility cultural group. This is what we call the cult, or the urban monoculture, or the [00:04:00] virus, whatever you want to call it. It is this large culture that exists in pretty much every major city in the world today.And when we say that, what I mean is, is if I look at the culture in, You know, London versus you know, London versus New York versus Boston, you know, they're all going to be much more similar to each other or Paris more similar to each other than they are to just like, I go a few hours to like, the Amish or like the Hasidic population or something like that.These high fertility populations, uh, almost definitionally need to differentiate in our culture, the culture, our family practice, it differentiates a lot from

We discuss how widespread economic collapse could lead to a "techno-feudal" future, with fortified city-states and regions controlled by technological elites. However, networks of these havens may help rebuild civilization. We compare to South Africa's current situation and emphasize why islands and unstable regions are poor choices. This builds on the concept of sovereign network states.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what makes it a network empire instead of a network state. And I think the core, the, the core thing that Balaji when he came up with this concept and missed is the insecurity of a future world when we're dealing with wide scale economic collapse.That is the world that we are heading into where it is cheaper. For the wealthy class in our society to isolate themselves from everyone else than it is for them to ensure widespread prosperity.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: I am so glad to be recording these again. Our audience doesn't know, but it's actually been like a week and a half since we did our last recording because we were at this ARC conference in the UK, which is supposed to be, I don't know, like this new alternative to Davos sort of a thing, but I think it's just really conservative British Davos.But one of the people who we met while we were there and we had a long conversation with was Curtis Yarvin. And in that conversation, I really helped me clarify some [00:01:00] things that I think about what's going to happen in the future of our species. And we may release that conversation because it was recorded at some time, but it was recorded in, like, a busiest restaurant with a Greek reporter interviewing us both together.So I can't believe that some random Greek newspaper, a monarchist newspaper, by the way, is getting the piece where it's me and you and Curtis Jarvin talking for, like, 2 hours. But, we constantly get accused of being techno feudalists in the media. And, this to me feels not just like an unfair accusation, but almost an insane accusation.It's a bit like... If you know, I have some friends who their family were, you know, left Germany early, and they tried really hard to convince everyone the Holocaust was coming. And they were just basically told they were crazy, and so, this family is actually descended from a guy who broke into his girlfriend's house at night, took the girl he was dating, and ran away.Now, they made the horrible mistake of running east [00:02:00] to Russia, instead of west and so then they... For like a 10 year period, just constantly had to flee new places. But anyway, it would be like calling him a, a Holocaustian. And people would be like, well, yeah, but even if he saw it coming, you know, they could have said, well, let's try to prevent it.Right. And it's like, no, there was a certain point where he was like, look at. Hitler, this guy who was elected to power. Look at what he's writing. Read his book. Okay. He published this like it's not vague what his plans are. And you know, I feel a bit like that when I talk about techno feudalism, where I'm saying it is.Almost inevitable at this point that something like a techno feudalistic state is going to happen. And we need to, those of us who do not want to be churned up by the system, need to prepare for how the world is going to change. Both in terms of our culture and our families and economically because it's [00:03:00] going to be absolutely catastrophic and very, very significant.Now, 1st, I would say, when we talk about techno feudalism, we do not mean. So there's this, like, Greek economist guy who keeps he wrote, like, a book on quote, unquote, techno feudalism and the way that he defines the term is vague and pointless, basically what we already know, which is that we live in a world in which large tech companies control a lot of the economic system.And it's like, yes, we know that. That's not what we talk about. When we talk about techno feudalism, we are talking about something that is much closer to literal feudalistic states. But before we go further, we need to talk a bit about. Where we think the overall economy is going before we can talk about the technophilic states, which are going to be major players within this future economy.So this actually was a point that Curtis made in the conversation. And after hearing it, it really clarified a lot of how I think about things, [00:04:00] but it was in line with what I thought already.It just gave me more. Picture as to what the future is going to look like. And he said,didn't catch the future of the future of the Western world at least.And the, the, the future, the future of the eastern world is also going to be bleak, but the way it will collapse is going to look very different. And we can get to that in different videos. But. The future of the Western world is going to look very similar to the current situation in South Africa.aNd this has nothing to do with, with race or even the politics of the country. Right. What specific

We discuss strategies for starting your own company, from high-risk VC-backed startups to acquiring existing small businesses. We cover different funding options like venture capital, SBA loans, and getting investments from people who believe in you. Advice is tailored based on intelligence level. We also warn about the risks of demanding a higher salary without increasing your value to the company.[00:00:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I'm thinking more about like, you know, bridge loans or whatever, like loans for growth once you do acquire. I don'tMalcolm Collins: have access to that. Yeah. I get that. Advice to normal people.Simone Collins: Okay. Anyway. Yes. As being loans are, are great and they do provide a lot of opportunity.Malcolm Collins: However. Let's. Let's go into what I would suggest is the number one way that, that I would look at creating a company.If I was an average milling to above middling intelligence person living in the U SWould you like to know more?Simone Collins: So Malcolm, there's a person in our family who would really, really love, loves money. And definitely encourages us to make money. And whenever she's been unhappy with how much money we're making, her advice is always just tell them to pay you more.Malcolm Collins: Which is my mom who's not with us anymore, but she would always do this.Just be like, I'd be like, Oh, I'm making this much. And she goes, that's not enough for you. You just need to tell them to pay you more. And I was like, I'll get fired if I do that. You [00:01:00] know that, right? Yeah. She goes, you just need to be firm. And I think so many older generations are this way. This isn't like, just go and, and bang on doors at offices until you get hired. But one of the things, you know, if you look at online influencers and stuff like that, sort of the place they always end up, whether you're talking about girl defined or Andrew Tate or even Trump is trying to teach people how to make money. And they'll create these little universities for me because it's true.You know, if you're building your own little community, you know, one of the things that's easiest to promise them is financial independence and wealth. So you promise them that you get them to waste money on that. And, and it ends up, you know, some, I think some of it is pretty good. So you look at like hustle university and stuff like that, like what Andrew Tate is doing and some of the other ones it's reasonable.He has to figure out how to tell idiots how, like, because, and I'm not saying that he disproportionately attracts idiots. I'm saying if your reach is wide enough, no matter who you are, a huge [00:02:00] chunk of that is going, the majority of that is going to be idiots. It has the same, because you know how dumb the average person is?Well, half of them are dumber than that. Exactly. You've got to be selling them all sorts of stuff like... Dropshipping and stuff like that. Like ideas that anyone can focus on. But theSimone Collins: great thing about what he's doing that I really respect is most people who I see online who are selling these kinds of programs, they're like sort of pyramid schemes and they're based around coaching.Like I'm a coach, you be a coach, you make money like me, blah, blah, blah.Malcolm Collins: And it doesn't really work.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, she's one of like a million. What I like about what Andrew Tate is doing is he's giving people very concrete, very practical, often like very unromantic, you know, they're, they're not sexy.They're not about becoming a famous, beautiful coach that everyone wants to follow. You know, it's, it's about copywriting. It's about dropshipping. Like you said, it's about opening an online shop. It's about very like straightforward stuff that most people could do. And for which. With the exception of copywriting there is demand and, you know, I don't think AI was ballooning when he first [00:03:00] started this copywriting course.So I do admire. what Andrew Tate is doing with that. But you're absolutely right. That, that is what you typically see when some influencer tries to start teaching their audience to make money.Malcolm Collins: I mean, I want to start by being clear that I actually think that he is probably the most honest in terms of what he's promising people of all of the people I have seen do this.Yeah. So good on him. But we're going to do something a little different because you know, I have my MBA from Stanford, right? Like I am in terms of making money probably one of the most educated types of people there, there are, you know, Simone got her degree from Cambridge and technology policy and we have done something that gave us a huge insight that normal people don't have, which is called a search fund.So not only did we learn how to raise money from investors, like we've done venture capital, both of us have worked in venture capital, so we know that whole industry but we went out there and we had to find a company to

We discuss the potential extinction of ethnic groups, human speciation through space colonization, future gender differences, genetic caste systems, and using selection technology to create gifted children. Razib shares his vision for the long-term genetic future of our species.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] It's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I spent the first, like, all my childhood. Assuming, that everyone was just going to sort of become the same like golden ish color as everyone just interbred with everyone else.And, and what I'm seeing instead is like everyone moving in the direction of glomming off in these more isolated communities becoming more different from each other instead of all kind of the same. It's just so weird. And then of course, speciation is going to happen whenMalcolm Collins: people get off. We ran a big study on this.And one of the things that's most correlated with fertility rate, at least in the U S is xenophobia. Which means that we actually will likely preserve independentSimone Collins: ethnic groups. It's just the opposite of what I expected, like, for the majority of my life. It's so weird.Razib Khan: Yeah, I mean, the issue here is, like, also if you look at a country like Brazil or Cape Verde what happens is actually, like, even in, like, a genetically homogenous admixed population, there's still variation, and so people still look different, and so, if they're sorting based on physical type, There will be like, kind of like, [00:01:00] precipitation back out, if that makes sense.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Hello. We have a very special guest on Basecamp, Razeeb Khan. He is the CSO of Generate, which is a really, really cool startup, basically enabling people to use a lot of genetic technology and information that they haven't been able to use yet.Plus he is the proprietor of unsupervised learning, which you can check out on Substack. Talk about deep dives on really cool genetic histories and all sorts of stuff. You had really better check it out. If you don't know about it yet, you're in for a treat. You can also just check out a lot of things that he's working on at razeemkhan.Malcolm Collins: com. And he's probably one of the most famous in the world communicators on human genetic stuff when it comes, especially on the spicy side.Razib Khan: Whenever people say that, I'm just like, why aren't there more communicators? I mean, it's like,Malcolm Collins: Well, I'll tell you why there are more communicators. I'd say there are a number of other communicators, but I think a lot of the other communicators in this space go a little too hard on the race stuff.Like they seem to have a [00:02:00] vested horse in the game, which pollutes their ability to Give the message. Whereas you come at it much more neutrally. Which I think is why you're such an effective communicator. And to that end, one thing I wanted to ask is where do you think the future of humanity is going genetically speaking?Like, are we going to see a die off of ethnic groups? Are we going to see new ethnic groups? Are we going to see You know, who does well in this coming world? What's going on?Razib Khan: Yeah, it's complicated because you know, these sorts of linear projections, not necessarily linear, but just like, I mean, obviously they're exponential too, but you know, like in 1900, if you had asked me this you know, the, the theory was like all the colored races were going to disappear because the fertility of.of white Europeans was so high and they were conquering all the continents and settling everything. Obviously that's not what ended up happening. So it just goes to show you that these like very, very long term projections. So for example, like people like, oh, there's going to be like 5 billion people in Africa in 2100.I mean, that's, [00:03:00] I'm exaggerating. I think it's close to like 3 billion or 4 billion. Okay. I just don't think that there will be I think that those are overestimates. Probably and you know, the transition will be faster you know, since like about the 1980s, the UN has actually consistently over predicted population growth because as you guys know, a demographic transition has been happening everywhere and fertility is crashing everywhere.And so it just depends on where so in any case I think like Peter Zahon says, Oh, the Chinese people are going to disappear. I'm like, look. They got a low fertility, but like there's 1. 4 billion of them. I mean, you know, they're not going to like, they're not going to disappear. Okay. There's like 20 million Jews.And like, we're not like, Oh, the Jews are going to disappear. You know, the reason the Jews are not going to disappear is ultra Orthodox Jews have high fertility. Right. So, they're still going to be around. If you read Frank Herbert's Dune, they're still around, you know? So you just need some of them that really want to reproduce.And wait, who areMalcolm Collins: the Jews in Frank Herbert'sRazib Khan

A deep dive into the cult-like structure that has spread through academia, media, and other institutions in society. We examine how it separates people from their families, controls narratives, punishes dissent, and aims to erase cultural differences. The cult exploits minority groups as a shield while actually worsening inequality. It is a descendant of European imperialism and is highly effective at inducing trauma and unhappiness in its members.Malcolm Collins: ​[00:00:00] negative utilitarianism, is the core moral philosophy of the cult. i. e. we will remove pain from people, and that ultimately leads to the logical conclusion , that , we need to not just kill all humans, but prevent any sentient life from ever evolving again.Like, the cult is, I think, much more extreme than people think and, people can be like, no, he doesn't think that, you're being extreme. Go to a party with your progressive friends. Mention fertility rates are falling. Mention humanity may go extinct. I guarantee you, someone in that room is going to say is it really that bad if humanity goes extinct?And then a number of them are going to be like, yeah, that's a good point. Is it really that bad if humanity goes extinct? If you don't realize that you are in an insane and dangerous cult, When that is a normalized idea, a normalized thought, I don't know what to say like that's like, wake up you're in the [00:01:00] people who want to end all human life.You are a supporter of theirs. The people who take your children and put them into a lifetime of debt. You are standing this organization. They are evil. The cult is a descendant of the imperialist European cultivars. It is not a native cultural group.This is just the newest iteration of European colonialism and genocide.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: We do sort of live in a world today that is controlled by a cult. And it's something that we've talked about in other videos, but we've never really gone that deep on the subject because we talk about it so much that we're like, Oh, there's no use in like a single video on this, but it would make sense to go deeper in on a video.If you. Look at the way that different cultural traditions and different religions relate to things like truth. You can begin to contextualize the urban monoculture, or the cult as we call it in [00:02:00] the terms of these religious traditions, and what you see is it behaves in a way that is very similar to some of the more either inefficient or abusive traditions but also That it is just a religion,Simone Collins: but what's interesting about it and why this is important to talk about is never before in human history, to our knowledge, at least has a cult like structure, like crystalline structure been spreading rapidly.through like the heart of the most powerful elements of society. I guess you could argue that Catholicism kind of did this with the Roman Empire, but I don't even think the impact is nearly as profound.Malcolm Collins: No, not as much. And it does something very weird that no religion in history has ever done, which is it doesn't require that individuals who are supplicants to it state that they are in this cultural tradition.So historically cultural traditions were usually mutually exclusive, or at least things that you had to [00:03:00] identify with. You had to say, if you became Jewish. Jewish now or Christian. I'm Christian now or Muslim. I'm Muslim now. The cult doesn't require this. You can be a member of the cult and call yourself whatever you want.Identify however you want. In fact, that's one of the core things that promises that no matter how you identify yourself, that will be validated by the cult. But it. It changes all of your perspectives and the way that you have to relate to society in a way that is very consistent with a unified cultural practice.So let me give an example here. So when I'm contrasting and comparing cultures, there's typically multiple ways a culture can relate to truth. So you can look at the Catholic way of relating to truth, which is truce should best be determined by individuals who have spent their lives studying a thing and then have been certified by a central bureaucracy.Credentials. Yeah. Well, no, like a cast, like a priest cast that [00:04:00] says this is what's true and this is what isn't true. And they've been certified by central bureaucracy and then you have the Protestant, you know, perception of truce, which is to say, well, that cast could become corrupted.There could be misincentives and therefore truth should always be determined by the individual. Both of these have negative externalities to these ways of seeing truth that are just not relevant to this conversation. If you look at the cult that controls our society right now, it has far moved in the Catholic direction.Which is to say truth should be determined by individuals who have spent their life studying things and have been certified by a central bureaucracy. The cent

An in-depth look at how the Fermi Paradox and the Grabby Alien Hypothesis provide evidence that an AI apocalypse is unlikely. We examine filters to advanced life, terminal utility convergence, and why we may not have encountered aliens yet.Malcolm: [00:00:00] So basically, no matter which one of these Fermi paradox is true, either it's irrelevant That we are about to invent a paperclip maximizing AI, because we're about to be destroyed by something else, or in a simulation, or... We're definitely not about to invent a paperclip maximizing AI, either because we're really far away from the technology or because almost nobody does that.That's just not the way AI works, I am so convinced by this argument that it is actually, I used to believe it was like a 20 percent chance we all died because of an AI or maybe even as high as a 50 percent chance, but it was a variable risk as I've explained in other videos.I now think there's almost a 0 percent chance. I a, a 0 percent chance, assuming we are not about to be killed by a grabby AI somebody else invented Now it does bring up something interesting. If the reason we're not running into aliens is because infinite power and material generation is just incredibly easy, and there's a terminal utility convergence function, then what are the aliens doing in the universe?Would you like to know more?Simone: Hi, Malcolm. How are you doing, my [00:01:00] friend?Malcolm: So today we are going to do an episode, a bit of a preamble for an already filmed interview. So we did two interviews with Robin Hanson, and in one of them we discuss this.theory. However, I didn't want to off rail the interview too much going into this theory, but I really wanted to nerd out on it with him because he is the person who invented the grabby aliens hypothesis solution to the Fermi paradox. So I hadn't heardSimone: about grabby aliens before, so I'm glad we're doing this.This is great.Malcolm: Yes, so we will use this episode to talk about the Fermi Paradox, the Grabby Alien Hypothesis, and how the Grabby Alien Hypothesis can be used. Through controlling one of the variables, i. e. the assumption that we are about to invent a paperclip maximizer AI that ends up fooming and, killing us all because that would be a grabby alien definitionally.If you collapse that variable within the equation to [00:02:00] today. Then you can back calculate the probability of creating a paperclip maximizing AI. And, spoiler alert, the probability is almost zero. It basically means it is almost statistically impossible that we are about to create a paperclip maximizing AI.Unless, with the two big caveats here, something in the universe that would make it irrelevant whether or not we created a paperclip maximizing AI. Is hiding other aliens from us or we are in a simulation, which also would make it irrelevant that we're about to make, create a paperclip maximizing AI, or there is some filter to advanced life developing on a planet that we have already passed through that we don't realize that we have passed through.So those are the only ways that this isn't the case. But let's go into it because it is, it is really easy.I just realize that some definitions may help here. We'll get into the gravity alien hypothesis in a second, but the [00:03:00] concept of the paperclip maximizing AI. Is the concept of an AI that is just trying to maximize some simplistic function. So in the concept as it's laid out as a paperclip maximizer, , it would be just make maximum number of paperclips and then it just keeps making paper clips and it starts turning the earth into paper clips and it starts turning people into paper clips.Now, realistically, if we were to have a paperclip maximizing AI, It would probably look something more like, you know, somebody says.Process this image, and it just keeps processing the image to like an insane degree, because it was never told when to stop processing the image. And it just turns all the world into energy to process an image. Or something else silly like that. This concept is important to address because there are many. people who at least pass themselves off as intelligent, who believe that we are about to create a paperclip maximizing AI. , that AI is about to, as they call foom, which I mentioned earlier here, which just means rise in intelligence astronomically quickly. Like double his intelligence every [00:04:00] 15 minutes or something. And then wipe out our species.And after that begin to consume all matter in theuniverseMalcolm: So the Fermi paradox is basically the question of why haven't we seen extraterrestrial life yet? You know, Like, we kind of should have seen it already it's, it's, it's kind of really shocking that we haven't, and I would say that anyone's metaphysical understanding of reality that doesn't take the Fermi Paradox into account is deeply flawed, because based on our understanding Of physics today, our understanding of what our own species intends to do in the nex

Malcolm and Simone have an insightful discussion about how men perceive women's sexual histories and body counts. They talk openly and honestly about the biological and instinctual factors that make many heterosexual men care about a potential partner's number of past partners. Malcolm explains how different types of sexual encounters impact body count perceptions differently, like long-term relationships vs one-night stands. He also discusses how things like OnlyFans, being successful vs unsuccessful, and specific sex acts do or don't count in terms of market value and body count from his perspective. Overall they aim to help women understand these factors that men consider so they can make informed decisions.Malcolm: [00:00:00] when women are like, yeah, I slept with him, but I didn't have an emotional connection with him. And it's that is a thousand timesSimone: worse. That's, yeah, that almost means you're more likely as, as the male partner to be raising a child that is not yours because apparently they just do not care.Which is not. Yes.Malcolm: The, I didn't have an emotion. If, if somebody cheated on me, I would a thousand times prefer they're like, well, I cheated on you because I had a strong emotional connection with him.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, Malcolm. Hello,Malcolm: Simone! It is wonderful to be chatting with you today!Simone: Yeah, so you know, obviously one of my favorite people in the entire world is Ayla. And she does, when she does events, these live Twitter polls. Where she'll like, have people line up based on all sorts of things. You know, how recently did you poop?Or to our subject today, what is your body count? And I lo that's one of my favorite One's that she, she lines people up about because you really see a very interesting logarithmic scale [00:01:00] when people line up. So it's like zero, like a couple of ones, and then it's two to five, like vast majority of people.And then it's like 50, 112, 250, 300. Like it's crazy. It just gets like crazyMalcolm: high. And I'm always at one end of these, obviously the really high end of the scale, but you're always at the really low end of the scale because we're exact opposites in that, you know, you being a virgin when we first met and me being just ridiculously high body count.I remember recently I learned something new at these events because it wasn't something I had thought about before. I was at one end and usually at the really high end, it's, it's almost all male guys. Yeah. And one of the guys was like, wait, because previously they hadn't done the previous one.They had one on how heterosexual are you? And I was like, it went the extreme end of heterosexual. No, ISimone: think it hurts was, was how many different dicks have you had in your mouth? Oh, best ofMalcolm: what? So something likeSimone: that. Yeah.Malcolm: How few menSimone: had never had a dick in their mouth? It was like, what on earth? Very rare.Malcolm: Yeah. So, so one of the [00:02:00] guys turns to me and he goes, wait. It's all heterosexual. And, and then all the other guys who are like at the extreme end of the scale were like, wow, impressive.Simone: Yeah. So yeah, you also didn't realize is that high body count is often man to man. Yeah.Malcolm: Yes. And I hadn't considered that.So, so yeah, I was even probably more extreme than I had considered was in these contexts, but yeah. This is really interesting, because for me, when I met you I, I think it would be really disingenuous for me to pretend that you having a, an incredibly low body count wasn't a huge bonus to me.And when I went out and would sleep with people, I specialize both in people with low body counts, virgins mostly, because that was just the pathway and the tactics that I was using in the sexuality video that we're not able to post here. But also because I personally found it really gross when I learned that a woman had a high body count.And I think one of the big problems in our [00:03:00] society, when people talk about do body counts actually matter, It, it breaks down on a few fronts. So conservatives often will use arguments like a key that opens any lock, you know, or a lock that can be opened by any key, you know, and or you wouldn't want to use a shoe that a bunch of other people had used.Oh yeah. And I thinkSimone: Mormons use a chewed gum analogy. Yeah.Malcolm: And all of these analogies. I don't really think sell the message like I was a young girl and somebody told me one of these analogies You know what? I would think is well times have changed and you're just an old person and you don't know how it is for My generation or that's you know an older mindset or That's not convincing.To me, if I was a woman and somebody was like, well, you wouldn't want a shoe that a bunch of people had worn. Part of it would beSimone: like, screw you, I buy like all of my shoes on Poshmark and I rent half of my shoes on Rent the Runway. So goMalcolm: ahead. And I'd also be like, bu

A thoughtful discussion about relationships in today's world. We consider how expectations around romance and marriage have changed over time, and the importance of shared purpose within a partnership.Malcolm: [00:00:00] pretty much like all the reviews were like, Oh, the grovel on this is really good. Yeah. It's great. Grovel. It was just like him groveling at her feet to try to get her to come back. Oh God. This is like a fantasy that women have.Yeah. Apparently no.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: We were having a conversation this morning in the car and Simone has telling me, she's like, Oh, well there, there's this amazing thing where it turns out I can get these popular romance books for free. And so I listened to them to go to bed every night.Nothing puts you to sleep like a romance novel. But you have to stop listening to them all after a certain point. Go into this because I found this fascinating and telling about modern society. Yeah. So not all romance novels end with like the will they part, you know, where like the couple finally forms and comes together.And like, sometimes there, there are periods at which couples do like start becoming couple ish way earlier in the [00:01:00] novel. And the problem that I have when this happens is that I can't know the books after that. Like in the beginning, it's fun because you're like, well, what's going to happen? I mean, you know what's going to happen, but what's going to happen?How is it going to happen? Oh, these people are driving each other crazy. The tension is so fun. But once it does happen, it becomes intolerable and I think the reason why is suddenly it's basically all about toxic relationships. It's all about drama. It's about one person you know, lying to the other.It's about tension. It's about breaking up after that point or someone's not being faithful. More than that, I think when you were describing it to me this morning. You were like, it keeps focusing on the interdynamics of their relationship. Yeah, like even when it's pleasant, yeah. Instead of immediately switching, they get in a relationship and then they say, Oh, now you're a couple.Now what are you going to achieve together? Which should [00:02:00] be, yeah. And it's interesting that you have this different framing of, okay, well, once you've sorted out the partner thing, Then you focus on what you're going to do with that person, right? Like that should be the point. And I think what this says about larger society is that people have a totally messed up perception of what relationships are all about, as is indicated by romance novels, which is to say that relationships are all about how you feel and how your partner feels.And. you know, after you get in a relationship, it's either about how, how in love you are and how you do all these things for each other and how, Oh my gosh, how romantic it is. And you're all, it's all pleasure all the time and amazing. Or it's about, Oh, he's not listening to me enough. You know, Oh, this tension, or I have to lie to him about this, or he's lying to me about something.So it's all about feelings, feelings, feelings, all feelings, feelings, feelings. And it's not at all about. Yeah. I mean, the whole point of becoming a couple is you, you, you then as a unit can achieve more than you would ever achieve by yourself. And also your [00:03:00] partner can help you become a better person.Now, sometimes that transformation takes place during the courting process. And these books were like, you know, the, the, the protagonists will change and become better people over time, or they'll help one person become a better person. But like once they become together, yeah, it just like everything falls apart.And I don't know why a woman would want to get in a relationship like or get married in the first place if she assumed that that was what was on the other end, just like, you know, making each other feel good, which I actually see a lot of relationships like this. And I think a lot of relationship breakdown is the misunderstanding.And I think it comes from women more than men, potentially due to engaging in these sort of books and stuff. Yeah, the societal norms that these books are establishing. That once you're married, you're a single unit. You are basically a single person from that point on. You know, one of the things that you sometimes do when you like to piss off regressives, is you call yourself...Mrs. Malcolm James Collins. Yeah, because that's the traditional way of doing it. [00:04:00] And the reason for that is because when people got married, they became a single unit, a single entity. They're, they're no longer with the question about how do we get along with each other? It became, okay, what are we going to do?Like, how are we going to change the world? What do we need to do for our family? And that many hard cultures are more traditional cultures still understand this. Of course, all of them have been eaten around at the edges, like

A discussion about how certain worldviews and ideologies can spread rapidly in today's interconnected world, and how this can lead to polarization when opposing viewpoints clash. We reflect on the importance of building connections and understanding across divides.Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] the virus is a predominantly white thing. It descends from European cultural groups. It is a form, a new form, you could call it Neo European imperialism.It's goal is to... Target and erase the cultures of not just because it's gotten bad at erasing the cultural background of the people who live near it, you know, they've begun to develop immunity. So now because as soon as somebody is infected with it, it tells them, Oh we want you to be as happy as possible all the time.Like, do not challenge yourself. Just do whatever that you want to do in the moment, and that will make you happier in the long term, right? And don't allow anyone else to challenge you for doing those things. , but in doing that, it makes people not have kids. And it causes bigger problems when they say, okay, well now we need to get immigrants into the country because they don't have a resistance to us and we'll just take their children . And well, then these immigrant groups, they begin to get wise to this as well. And they're like, Hey.[00:01:00]I don't want you to take our kids. And then, people like us, traditional conservatives, we go to the immigrant groups and we're like, Oh, we have a lot in common with you. You don't want our children. We don't want your children. We are both terrified of the same thing. Let us work together. And I think that This is the, the real turning that we are having as a society now.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Record. I hit record. Oh, great. Perfect. Good. You're not going to forget this time.Simone Collins: So you're so pretty and smart. Oh, my pretty.Malcolm Collins: I know you're also smart. No, mySimone Collins: brain can't handle things because it's so, so female. I don't know how to dealMalcolm Collins: with that. So one of the things that we often get is people are like, why don't you do More like explicitly pronatalist stuff or explicitly stuff about the virus or explicitly stuff about stuff that are like main talking [00:02:00] points for us when we're on other podcasts.And the core reason is, is we've actually tried to, like, we've recorded a number of episodes on the topic of the virus and how it works, but they end up like. You know, like a cart following a path that's been read, ridden through a bunch of times and grooves get dug into the path and then the cart just slips into those grooves and it ends up going the same route.It's gone every time. And that leads to a very boring conversation. Cause it's the exact same talking points I go through whenever I'm on somebody else's show. And I know that you guys have heard all of them before, and so I don't want to bore you with them. And so in talking about the virus this time, we're going to give it another shot.We're going to do something different. We are going to explore it through the lens of a specific organization to understand how the virus spreads and how to potentially fight the virus, how to recognize the virus and how it works. So when I talk about the virus, I'm talking about the colt, whatever you want to call it, this thing [00:03:00] that is Becoming an increasing and increasing influence in our society.People want to call it wokeness, but calling it wokeness is wrong. Extends so far beyond just the wokes. It'sSimone Collins: also specifically not actually. In advocacy or in favor of what you would consider to be woke advocacy or social justice. Like it doesn't serve actual social justice outcomes. Anyone who actually cares about these causes is going to find over time that this is doing more harm than good.So also it is unfair to call it woke because it is inherently not woke. It is inherently hurting the woke platform. And so you actually had a great way of putting this in, in context with like the current conflict in Gaza. Do you want to, I didn't remember. Oh, yeah. So you were saying that like, you know, in the same way that Hamas will set up its headquarters in hospitals to defend itself and like, you know, be in the most defensible positionMalcolm Collins: when it knows that to attack it, you have to attack a [00:04:00] vulnerable group.Exactly. So it specifically puts itself where, you know, if it gets bombed or something, then they can go, Oh look, they're bombing you in the hospital.Simone Collins: You clearly hate children and sick people. Yeah. So the,Malcolm Collins: the, the, this sort of local virus sets itself up within the most vulnerable communities and it uses the agents within those communities.To perform the most insane and unspeakable of its injustices so that the other side ends up targeting and bombing those communities, basically, and then it can go, Oh, look, gay people, LGBT community. They hate yo

We discuss the surprising history behind Jewish gun ownership rates, including how repeated pogroms selected for urban Jews who fled rather than fought back. We explain why an urban, intellectual tradition doesn't encourage individual gun ownership, and how Israel is exerting new evolutionary pressures.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] So... Jews and guns.Malcolm Collins: Yes. So if our book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Religion, used one of those cheeky titles where somebody, you know, like, why don't zebras get cancer or something like that? You know, where it's like one interesting thing that the book like goes too deeply into it would be, why don't Jews own guns?And, and the, this is a uniquely like, like vexing question. So I'm not going to go into the stats. If you want to go into all the stats and the citation. You can go look at the book, but if I was to expect that, like, like if you look at Jewish history, there are two things that I would expect of every Jew, never live in a city, always have a gun.Simone Collins: Everyone has a gun.Malcolm Collins: And this is very interesting to me because if you look at our cultural. Background like our cult of art. You want to call it that it tells us to do both of those things. It tells us, you know, do arms training when you were a young kid, always have, you have a gun behind you. We have a gun in almost every room of our house.I [00:01:00] decided to add a little screenshot here. Of Simone standing desk where she works or within arm's reach is an AR 15 and right behind her in that shot is a Remington.And right where I'm laying down to record this right now, where I edit the videos next to my bed is a Walter CCP pestle. there's almost nowhere in our house where we spend a significant amount of time where there is not a firearm was in arms reach.Malcolm Collins: You know, and if you look at modern times, this is a uniquely interesting question, like even in Israel gun ownership rates are Thank you. Very low, weirdly, weirdly low. I mean, like people inSimone Collins: the army, they're trained in, in gun use, you know? Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like they should be one of the most gun literate and, and, and thus gun having people, I would suspect that in any population, if you look in Israel and we keep, you know, I read these horrifying stories of what happened when Hamas first attacked, and I keep wondering.Why didn't this old lady have an AR 15 on her wall? Like what was, why wouldn't she have that? She lived right next to [00:02:00] Gaza. That it's not like they didn't know that this attack may happen. Well, and whenSimone Collins: you think about this attack, if, if these, if people in all of these areas and I don't know what the concealed carry laws are in Israel, you know, like, but for example, if the, if the people of this festival.If, you know, 25 percent of them had concealed carry, this would have played out very different if, you know, everyone had weapons in their house, if they lived in a kibbutz, especially if it was a kibbutz close to the border, like, this would have played out very differently, you know, the story, these terrifying stories of, you know, two kids alone at home, you know, their mom in another place on the phone with them as their home is being, I mean, if they had guns, again, this, this could have playedMalcolm Collins: out super differently.And I'm saying here, you know, there are like progressive jews, they look at what happened. And they're like, Oh my God, I, I, I, I never expected the, the, the people of Gaza to do this. And everyone else is like, what are you talking about? They're like, Muslims going around and beheading people? That's so out of character.What? And then, and then of course everyone else is like. What are [00:03:00] you, what are you talking about? Everybody knew this could happen. Everybody, and they're like, no, no, no. It must have been something we did. I, I can't see any other reason this could have happened. And, and worse, and I mean, we're talking about this and we're not going to do a full episode on, on this particular topic, but I have just been so ashamed even with how little I think of progressives in the U.S., how they have treated these horrifying massacres. I saw a top. post on Reddit arguing that the, the, the massacre of the babies was their heads being cut off was a fake stunt perpetrated. This is on front page of Reddit, or at least my front page perpetrated by the Israeli government.Simone Collins: God, I wish that were true.I like, I genuinely wish that wereMalcolm Collins: true.It gets worse, Lloyd. My parakeet, Petey. Huh? He's dead.Oh. Oh, man. I'm sorry, Harry. [00:04:00] What happened? His head fell off. His head fell off?Yeah, he was pretty old.Malcolm Collins: I saw. You know, classes in Harvard right now, you know, we've heard about them being from from our contacts who are at school. They're right now being canceled. So all of the students, these are grad students, by the way, can go

Malcolm and Simone discuss the concept of "pragmaxing" - dedicating your life to maximizing a purpose bigger than yourself. They talk about why trying to improve the world, even if you won't experience the results, is worthwhile. They cover martyrdom mindsets, generational progress as a relay race, and leaving the campsite better than you found it. Malcolm argues this drive is innate to humans and that competent people uniting can create positive change. He emphasizes realizing you are flawed but still striving for a future "radiant beings" deserve.Malcolm: [00:00:00] one person in a comment, he goes, why are you trying to make the future a better place if you won't experience that future? And it's bro, you are so missing the plot. So what Simone said, we have a different iteration of how we see ourselves. And that's cute. If I lived for, let's say, a hundred thousand years, right? I would be such a radically different person at the end of that period, that there is no way I would have any meaningful connection to who I am today.Yeah, it'sSimone: pointless. It's pointless. The person you're going to be in even ten years is not going to be you. So why are you trying to preserveMalcolm: it? Yeah, and if I did try to preserve it, if I did successfully preserve it, if in a hundred thousand years I was meaningfully the same person I am today, well then I didn't improve.I didn't better myself, and I shouldn't still be around. I am a pointless, wretched thing if I improved so little over a hundred thousand years that I am still recognizable as a Malcolm. That is sad and sickening. And so why do I care that I can't see the better world that I'm trying to create?It is a world not meant for me. It [00:01:00] is a world that I would sully with my very presence. Moses on the mountain, you are not meant to live in the promised land. Because you are wretched, you are trying to lead the way for the people who will get to experience the Promised Land because they deserve it in a way that not a single person alive today does.Would you like to know more?Simone: Welcome to Base Camp where one person has a conversation with themselves two times over. One says themselves and one's in drag. I'm Malcolm Collins dressed as a woman. And this with me here today isMalcolm: also Malcolm Collins, but this time dressed as a man. I would love it if we pretended that's what our show was.Like we convince people that it really is just one person with a synthesizer talking to themselves. Yeah. So we wanted to talk about Maxis. Because this has really become a thing recently, you know, whether it's looks maxing or trans maxing or we see it across society and when I want to talk about [00:02:00] the allure of it, and if we could create an iteration of it, that is healthy because a lot of it is just almost intrinsically unhealthy whenever you are, so I understand why it's emotionally appealing.Right? This idea of, I'm just going to go 100 percent whole hog into whatever thing it is I'm doing. I'm just going to say, okay, at every level, how do I optimize the outcome, right? That I'm trying to achieve. And that can create this sort of Zen state. Yeah. It's a sort of forced hedonistic stoicism where it's hedonistic in that you're maxing a thing, but it's stoic in that you are As intelligently as possible trying to think through how do I actually maximize this thing?And as disinterestedly and soberly as possible, and that [00:03:00] can create you to view things in a very different way. And it's much easier to apply that to a specific modality than it is to say, well, what if I took this maxing mindset and applied it to my entire life? So that's one thing that we wanted to talk about with this, but then we wanted to say.All of this within the context of if we're creating healthy maxing, well then we need to think about maxing as a cultural group, like how do you max our cultural group and this comes to defining our cultural outside of just our religion or whatever, right? I mean, like the wider group, the type of people who watch our videos, the type of people who are part of this sort of new conservative movement in America.And I think a really good acronym for engaging with this group is not one that applies to it, but one that applies to another group, which is Tessacralism. Have you heard ofSimone: this? What? No. I'm picturing weird hats. Is this okay?Malcolm: , it's used to explain like the [00:04:00] cluster of things that EAs are into.. Transhumanism, Singulitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Affective Altruism, and Long Termism. I mean, you definitely see some of these. Transhumanism, Singulitarianism, Rationalism, Affective Altruism, and Long Termism definitely like cluster together within this community.And one of the things that I've noted is that within... Our community, you get a separate area of clustered interests which are education reform or working on alternate education systems space travel, like interested in making us an inter

Malcolm and Simone discuss the downfall of the Girl Defined sisters, who preached conservative Christian values but ended up disillusioned and unhappy. They argue this shows the risks of "pop religion" - churches promising secular pleasures rather than meaning. They say this led the sisters to see their unmet expectations as a betrayal. Simone and Malcolm advise religious communities to explain the emptiness of secular values rather than try to "out-compete" progressive culture. They believe this outrage marketing approach backfires by making congregants obsessed with what they're denying themselves.[00:00:00]Malcolm: When they're protecting their kids, you're not just protecting your kids from you know, if you're in a conservative religious family, you're not just protecting your kids from these, these secular influences. Right. You also need to watch out for pop Christianity.The people who come in, it was their live, laugh, love signs. And Well, you know what I'm talking about, right? They, they are just, and they can be just as negatively seductive of your kid's expectations as any other group, which then leads them to turn against the family.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: Hell, hello, Simone. So I walked in on my wife, Steve, when she's working, she likes to listen to stuff in the background. And one of the things that she loves to listen to is drama. She loves to listen to progressive like far progressive YouTubers comment. On conservative YouTubers or conservative personalities in [00:01:00] negative ways because she, I guess, fantasizes about one day they pick up us and the partSimone: of me, I want to preemptively understand how people will critically view our.Lifestyle and choices and stances. I think it's helpful toMalcolm: understand that. And I saw one that really interested me because it was on people who even I used to be aware of. As girl defined. Yeah, I was like, oh, I remember these guys. These were the hot young people who were all about, you know, chastity and waiting till marriage for a guy and everything like that.And and, and, you know, the sexualization of young women and how to fight against that. And. A lot of those are messages that, you know, actually resonated with me a lot. Yeah. I mean, they were, they were Fundy Christians and, and I identify with Fundy Christianness, you know, fighting back against the man in society today because they're definitely not the group in power right now.But you know, when I was younger, as a lot, I was consuming their, their video as well from like early secular atheist YouTube, because that was like the big thing on YouTube, the atheist[00:02:00] whatever debate, and they were always ragging on Girl Defined, so I also got their perspective from that end back then, and people didn't really seem to have anything on them, not, not that, that I thought was super bad.BackSimone: in the day, you mean. Yeah. Back in the day, back in the day. It was just, how very dare they. Yeah. HowMalcolm: very dare you say women should live by conservative values. So anyway this documentary we'll, we'll post it here cause they go into like enormous depths. Their lives got sad, like really sad when I, when I follow, when you follow what happened to them afterwards and they got sad in a way that I wouldn't have.predicted, but in hindsight makes perfect sense. And it really highlights a problem. You know, a lot of people, when they look at what we're doing and they're like, well, you can just go back to the old ways of doing things, right. And that will protect you because that used to work. But unfortunately we are dealing with memetic viruses that are even specialized at spreading within churches now.And the [00:03:00] secular world can twist norms that you don't realize in a, in a way where you don't realize your norms have been twisted. And so you think you're following a traditional conservative way of doing things, but really. Your view of the world and what you should be aiming for has become so twisted that when you apply this old way to this new world, everything begins to fall apart.And this is what we saw happen with them, and it was Desperately sad to watch.We could have the crumbs, just the bare crumbs of, of love and intimacy Um, for both of us and then just be like pretending like that that, that that's That's great.Malcolm: So the first thing I would say is, is the one who's still really on, on media and stuff like that. Her marriage just seems to be bothSimone: terrible. See, let's, let's be clear. So the girl to find started out is basically two sisters who then subsequently got married and then [00:04:00] subsequently adopted slash had kids.The, the, the sister that he is referring to is Bethany Thiel.Malcolm: Well, and so they in one scene they were talking about With her husband. They were joking that they get in five fights a day, but like they don't fight that much, you know.We only have, like, a couple fights a day, right? Right.Malcolm: T

Economist Robin Hanson returns to discuss his proposal for increasing fertility rates through financial incentives for parents. He explains how governments could pay parents for having children by issuing shares of the future tax revenue those kids will generate. Robin argues this would provide better motivation for good parenting. The hosts consider potential impacts on social classes, racism, sexism, cultural objections, arbitrage opportunities, and more.[00:00:00]Simone Collins: Hello, everyone. We are so excited today. A little bit, a little bit fanboying and girling out because we are joined by the fantastic, brilliant, and super fun Robin Hanson. He, in addition to being a professor of economics at George Mason University, has written some of my favorite books, including The Elephant in the Brain, which is just mind blowing, and The Age of M.He, he talks about prediction markets, grabby aliens,Malcolm Collins: signaling. Well Simone didn't know that he had invented the term grabby aliens. And I didn't know he had invented the term great filter. This is in regards to the Fermi paradox. So genuinely like a huge figure in terms of and, and, and being at the we, we go to these events where it's all like young, like up and coming, like supposed to be all the smartest hip young people.And he's always at these events. Because he is considered like the one person not in our generation who is Seminal to these communities. He's so with it. He's so withSimone Collins: it.Malcolm Collins: So what we're going to talk about on this one is we were giving a lecture at one of these that have been called manifest [00:01:00] about pronatalism.And then he just drops this idea about how it could be solved. That we had never heard before and was really interesting and we want to go into it.Would you like to know more?Robin Hanson: All right. So let's first acknowledge that any solution requires some policy people to do some things. And if they don't do certain things, it doesn't happen.And I'm honestly not that optimistic. The right people would do the right thing here. And we should, we could talk a bit about that. So the fundamental problem is a lot of things in our culture. Are oriented toward low fertility and a lot of people really like those things that is they're really deeply attached to intensive parenting, long years of schooling, delayed mating, gender equality, and there's a whole bunch more and any solution that induces high fertility.Is going to cut into some of those things. And so even if we could get people to adopt the solution, which I'm about to tell you, and they [00:02:00] try it for awhile, there's a risk that they'll see that. In fact, it cuts into those things. They'll go, Oh no, Oh no, we can't have that. And then they would turn it off because they'd rather have declining population and low fertility than to have some of those things that, that I think is a fundamental risk that is just a fundamental cultural conflict.And a lot of. Maybe even the majority of elites really prefer the package that leads to declining population, even when they understand that they could do otherwise. But doing otherwise will change some of these key parts of their culture that they're really attached to. So that's my fundamental warning.But given that, if you're willing to prioritize fertility high enough, i. e. doing what it takes to raise fertility I think there is in fact a simple solution. So, first of all, there's a lot of studies on how incentives to increase fertility and their effects. And so there are definitely a lot of studies that show small incentives have pretty small effects.[00:03:00]And then there's some studies that show modest incentives have modest effects. And as an economist, I feel really confident. Huge. Big effects. No question, right? If you gave people a million dollars per baby, a lot of babies, okay, that's just going to happen. Right.Malcolm Collins: Businesses would be started around that, you know, exactly.Robin Hanson: Right. Now, if I say that, then people will say, who, how can we possibly afford that? Cause now you're imagining we're going to have to tax everybody else to pay for this. And that's going to be a huge tax and we're not going to like it. So the key observation is that we don't have to pay for it. We can make investors pay for it.So here's the trick. So at the moment, in say the U. S. We have roughly a hundred trillion dollars in debt. That's not just the explicit bonds we've sold, but also the promises we made, like Medicare and Social Security, that we haven't set up a way [00:04:00] to pay for. Which is yeah, we owe it. Okay. And if you divide that by 300 million people, that's 300, 000 a person.And there are some other estimates of unfunded promises that are even higher, say 700, 000 a person. Oh, boy. Even the literal debt per person. In terms of bonds is a hundred thousand dollars a person. So we're talking somewhere between a hundred thousand, seven hundred thou

Malcolm and Simone do an in-depth analysis and critique of Nassim Taleb's controversial article "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle". They break down his motivations, concessions, rhetorical tactics, and arguments against IQ testing. They explain why his solutions are impractical and highlight where he contradicts himself. Malcolm outlines a framework for reading critiques like this - looking for motivation, proposed alternatives, concessions, repeated bad arguments, and more. They agree IQ isn't everything but make the case it still matters, especially if IQ is declining.Malcolm: [00:00:00] when you look at our prison system, the vast majority of people in it are at Very low accused. And when you deny that they had a systemic disadvantage when compared to you, when you tell people to throw that out, what?You are taking the most vulnerable people in our society who are in a situation to do something they had no control over. And completely acting like they had the same advantage as you did in life. It is sick. It is sick. It is not moral. And you need to get your f*****g s**t together and actually look at the data instead of trying to blow smoke in people's faces so you can play your little virtue game.Okay? Because people are suffering for your b******t. And so you can feel like a hero without having to challenge actual real world problems and fix them and take responsibility for the advantages that you were born with, which other people weren't. he ends up making an argument. That needs to say that he has achieved everything that he has achieved in life without systemic advantages at [00:01:00] all.He has just willed himself to this. Place that he isSimone: simultaneously while flaunting that systemic advantage, right? In every sense like to a fault, like to a point of illegibility.Would you like to know more?Simone: So Malcolm, what if I told you that obviously a wealth doesn't predict success because there are tons of millionaires and billionaires who just do nothing with their lives and piss away all their money. And obviously being like super, super poor, like under the poverty line is a problem, but like above a certain level, it really doesn't matter about how much money you have.Oh, I think thatMalcolm: would make a lot of sense. I think that's exactly the type of thing a wealthy person would argue. Right. So I got to talk about how we got on this topic. We had a fan of the show stay over at our house because they happened to be passing through the area. And one of the things that they mentioned, because they were like, well, this is an area where I question something that you guys talk about a lot.Specifically, he believed that [00:02:00] IQ didn't matter at all. And the reason he believes this is because another smart person who he looked up to had argued this very passionately. Specifically, Nassim Taleb. and he wrote this medium post about thiscalled IQ is largely a pseudo-scientific swindle. And I read this medium post and I saw it as a really interesting opportunity because self-contained within the me the post its itself was the proof that he was manipulating data and essentially lying to the reader. But what we want to try to do on this episode is to not just show that yes, IQ likely does matter, but give you the tools necessary to, even if you don't understand the scientific language was which a person is arguing, i.e. in this case, like advanced statistics. Even if you don't [00:03:00] understand that. Understand the telltale signs that a person is lying to you and be able to tell that they are lying to you even if you don't understand what they are saying and better than all of that, get to deeper truth than you even could from reading an article from the perspective of somebody who is Agreed with what is true or what you already believe.And by that what I mean is if somebody who really believes in career is invested in IQ mattering, writes an article that IQ matters. Well, they can't really trust it either because they might be lying with statistics as well. Right. There's somebody who deeply believes IQ doesn't matter, or at least.tries to argue that has sprinkled throughout his article, little admissions to where IQ does matter. You can know that at least in those areas, it definitely matters because he has everything at stake in showing that it doesn't. So that's why learning to read articles in this way is really important.Now, before we go further with [00:04:00] this, I want to elaborate on the analogy that Simone started the show is because I think this is where we're going as a society. And a lot of these people today who, We're born with advantages over people, born with usually really high IQs, and then they pretend like they've achieved everything that they've achieved on their own.It is not the look that they think it is. It's very much the new, I don't see race. Pretending you don't see a systemic advantage that you have had over other people your entire life, and tak

Malcolm and Simone have a fun, meandering discussion about how science fiction narratives can reveal deeper truths about the future when they engage seriously with topics like demographics and AI. They analyze the problematic ways overpopulation and AI are portrayed in much sci-fi. The hosts share imaginative fictional world concepts they've conceived, including a mythology based on online entities, a post-Yellowstone America, and more.Malcolm: [00:00:00] this reminds us of a so there was a book that we were thinking of writing. We never got around to writing it, but we can talk about it here. Because I, I thought it was very interesting. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to write a modern version of mythology.Would you like to know more?Simone: So Malcolm, when the Cyberpunk game came out, you were super excited. Like you had a blast with it. And then we watched the anime at the same time. Great anime,Malcolm: by the way, really good. Love Rebecca. Great character.Simone: Yeah. I mean, well, Rebecca is the only one who like thrives in the world. She's the only one who's really likable.But she's the only one who gets it. Everyone else is so whiny. It'sMalcolm: horrible. But something was really clear in this and it made me reflect on a lot of other sci fi, which it shows that when people are writing sci fi from a mainstream perspective, particularly a progressive one, and I think cyberpunk as a genre is inherently progressive, which is to say that It assumes that like corporations are going to become like these big evil things that ruin everyone's life and that capitalism goes wrong [00:01:00] and makes everything worse for everyone and dehumanizes the individual and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.But that they show that these individuals have... so blinded themselves to fertility rates that they do not consider them in how their worlds are structured or how humanity changes, which I think goes to, in a way, discredit their worldviews. But. Through discrediting their worldviews, it can help us better predict what the future will actually be like.So, let's describe what I mean by this. So if you look at the show Cyberpunk or the game Cyberpunk, one really interesting thing is who's having kids in this world. You know, it starts with a kid who's a single kid of a mom, right? Okay, so I'm thinking of the anime here. But in this world, it seems almost impossible for there to be motivations for many people to have more than two kids.And yet, you know, as I always say, if you have a population where a third of the [00:02:00] population, which is like, obviously true in the cyberpunk world is having no kids. I actually think the cyberpunk world is probably half the people are having no kids. If you look at the motivations in this world, if it was certain people are having no kids.Another third of people are having two kids, if you assume that which, again, I see very few people motivated to do that in the cyberpunk world. Well, then the final third of people have to be having over four kids for the population to stay stable. Yeah. No one in the cyberpunk world is having over four kids.I mean,Simone: maybe Yeah, unless there's just some, like, off camera colony of, like, you know, traditional Amish people producingMalcolm: all the humans. Well, yeah, so you could argue that they're all coming from, like, these like Human farms. Nomadic. Well, so there's two potentialities in this world. It could be that the nomadic sort of car people of the wasteland just have tons and tons and tons of kids.I mean, you don't see this in the show or the game, but it could be that they're just like Amish and like their settlements are just kids running everywhere. Or it could be, like you said. The kids are actually created by the state or by corporations in bats. Now that [00:03:00] would work for the world, yet it's clearly not something that's shown in the world.AndSimone: it would be if the, of course, the, the authors had thought of it, because that's interesting and weird.Malcolm: And it makes corporations look worse, so it works for a cyberpunk y world. Right. But you actually see this across sci fi, is so many sci fis are written with the assumption that humans exist in inexhaustible supply and always replicate, that they build things into the world that are just discordant with actual things.Potential future realities. So a great example of this comes from Starship Troopers, where a person remarks Starship Troopers, the line that the first. Would you like to know more from these episodes? Comes from so in Starship Troopers, there's a line that, well, of course you need to become a citizen, like join the military to get this special status in society if you want to get a license to have kids.So this is a world where to solve [00:04:00] overpopulation, which everyone used to thought was going to be an issue. The way that you did that was licensing people to have kids. Which, you know, would be a great thing if you have a lot of

Description: Economist Bryan Caplan joins Simone to discuss fascinating dynamics within left-wing culture. They analyze how progressive groups enforce rigid conformity, leading to constant internal conflict as people fear being "cancelled." Other topics include fertility rates across ideologies, Bryan's controversial open borders stance, and why some childless people react so angrily to his pronatalism.Bryan Caplan: [00:00:00] I've done some fun Twitter polls of you know, are you left? Are you right? Do you worry about the left getting mad at you? Do you worry about the right getting mad at you? And one of the biggest groups that lives in fear is the left of the left,Simone: right? Yeah. Yeah.Bryan Caplan: Left. It's not quite like the ready body or like the Amish, but it is a weird dysfunctional subculture of people who feel like they've got to be looking over the shoulderswould you like to know more?Simone: we are really excited today because we have a very special guest joining us, Brian Kaplan. He is, in addition to being a professor of economics at George Mason University, and a New York Times bestselling author, he's an author of not just a ton of books, including obviously some favorites of ours, like Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, like two huge obsession areas for us, but also in collaboration with the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, an awesome webcomic a book called Open Borders, the Science of Ethics in Immigration, which is [00:01:00] illustrated and there just needs to be more books out there as avid readers of comics and manga, like throughout our, like youth.Simone: We are huge fans of this format. So like super stoked, especially when it's something about policy. Well, it'sMalcolm: wild. We actually have a Saturday morning breakfast cartoon in one of our books as well. We asked for permission. So that's but other things he's written on is the case to get don't grow up to be a feminist.Malcolm: It's one of the books. And one of the most recent ones is on how democracies are non functional or becoming less, less optimized for good economic outcomes. So ladies and gentlemen,Simone: if you need some good reading, basically just search Brian Kaplan'sMalcolm: name. So, the priming that I wanted to go into this interview with, because I find this very interesting, and I haven't seen your pontification on this particular angle yet.Malcolm: When I look at all of the things that you're seeing as problems, they both seem to align with many of the things that we think about the world, and I think most people have really thought about things. So they're very sane and based takes, right? Fertility population's going to begin to decline in the developed world, which is going to have [00:02:00] major economic effects.Malcolm: The academic system is working less and less well. There's sort of social contagions like feminism, which are causing many downstream societal effects. My question to you is realistically, where does the world go 50, 100 years from now? Do we see a beginning of a collapse of the developed world?Malcolm: Do we see small social groups begin to gain more power? What's going on?Bryan Caplan: My honest answer is, I always say, we'll muddle through, there's no collapse, there's no disaster. Even the idea that things will get overall worse is, I think, highly unlikely. Mostly, I think, in terms of missed opportunities, things could have been so much more than they were.Bryan Caplan: If we get to immortality in a thousand years, what we could have done in a hundred years, well, what a horrible tragedy for nine hundred years worth of people. It's not the same thing as... The Planet of the Apes or something like that, or just a complete takeover. It's [00:03:00] just that we could have done so much better and we didn't.Bryan Caplan: How sad.Malcolm: So then economically, how do you think demographic collapse plays out? Do you think that it won't have that big of an effect? Do you think it will have a big... Like, how can countries adaptBryan Caplan: to it? It will have a huge effect relative to what could have been. That doesn't mean that we will see that living standards actually go down in absolute terms.Bryan Caplan: I'm not going to rule that out for the most egregious cases. I do think that despite the great dysfunctionality of politics over the world, including democracies, that when things get really bad, to the level of things are actually going to get noticeably worse before your eyes, then I think normally countries get more flexible.Bryan Caplan: It's like, all right, well, we can't have them, they actually get worse. What politics is really bad at is realizing incredible missed opportunities that people just have not gotten used to yet. For example, so if South Korea, if it really looks like they're going to be unable to [00:04:00] staff their old folks homes, they'll let in the immigrants at that point.Bryan Caplan: It has to get bad,

Malcolm and Simone have an in-depth discussion analyzing the rapid rise in transgender individuals. They review and debate various theories like endocrine disruptors, social contagion, female puberty discomfort, autogynephilia fetishism, and more. The hosts discuss why certain explanations are seen as offensive, while concluding that personal transitions should be respected. They also posit their own idea that it serves as an identity "reset" that improves mental health.Simone: [00:00:00]Malcolm, hello.Malcolm: Hello. So, Today, we well, we're going to talk about what like, just sort of a discussion between us, because this is a topic we've been diving into more recently due to our engagement with the trans vexing community and other trans communities online, is what is really causing transness. And the reason we titled this study trans people are magical is there is an approved answer to this question.It is that they were born with the wrong soul. And that they were actually born with the soul of someone of a different gender. The problem is we don't really believe in souls. And even if I did, I'd be almost certain that gender just isn't that important to like our core identity, like our soul.And I, And this is why we went with the title, Trans People Are Magical, because any sort of scientific explanation you try to give, or any evidence based explanation you try to give for what is going on socially for recent trends within the trans [00:01:00] community and people who identify as trans, is considered transphobic.In part, I don't know, because you're quantifying it. We can talk about why all the explanations are considered offensive. Individually, they have reasons they're considered offensive, but collectively, it's almost like a topic we're not allowed to talk about or investigate, when it seems to me Like, it should be really important that the number of trans people has increased something like 400 percent in the last decade, but the that the trends in who is transitioning has changed really dramatically, where it used to be predominantly male to female, and now it's predominantly female to male of this young age range.And these, I think, could point to something.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: So first, before we get any further in this, Our larger stake on gender transition is that there are likely people transitioning for every one of the reasons we're going to mention. The question is what is causing these statistical trends?Are some of these reasons more important than other [00:02:00] reasons? Are they all just contributory reasons? Is there like one core reason? That's a really interesting question to me. We could say we just don't have the data to know right now because people are afraid to collect the data because you have your, Oh,Simone: people collect data, but only for a very specific set of answers.It's alreadyMalcolm: pre approved. And the thing that really upsets me about the trans data when I go over it is you can see by the date of publication, it will begin to trend towards showing the pre approved answer.So a great example of this would be brain structures. If you look at the earlier studies on trans people that were using like fMRI data and stuff like that they would usually say or the ones that I'm familiar with would say, The trans people's brains actually are more similar to the gender they were assigned at birth than the gender they were identifying with, whereas in later studies, the opposite is being said, like studies that were done more recently.And [00:03:00] unfortunately, knowing the pressures that happened within academia, that makes me now doubt both of those studies. I'm like, Oh, I just wish I could know what the real answer is.It looks like I misspoke here going through the recent research, even on Wikipedia, which is where there's a studies came from, that I had put on the screen. , even the more recent research shows that, trans individuals brains are more similar to the gender, they were assigned at birth to the gender. They identify ways. And this makes perfect sense. If you think about it. You don't when you're walking around, see people, randomly at least at the rates that we see trans people in the population. Get organs of a different gender. You know, you don't see men walking around with the skin of a woman , or, or the arms of a woman. In fact, the only place where I'm really familiar with this happening is either in intersex individuals or in individuals. , Women specifically who were born with male facial hair. And this happens at much [00:04:00] lower rates than transness happens within the population, but could explain a proportion of individuals who are born trans So if 5% of us young adults are identifying as trans and about 1.5% of the population is born intersex. That means that this wrong brain hypothesis would only explain about 30% of the community. Assuming that this phenomenon appears at about the same rate that genitals get switched u

Malcolm and Simone have a thought-provoking discussion analyzing some of the most common anime tropes and what they reveal about Japanese culture and desires. They explore the prevalence of high school settings, "isekai" fantasy worlds, unusual relationships, slice of life, and more. The hosts share their own theories on how these tropes represent escapism, surrogate parenting instincts, and a cultural lack of meaning in adulthood. They also recommend their favorite anime series and studios.Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.Malcolm: I know, same time. Well, hello, Simone. So we were talking about something and you spontaneously had this idea. Which just enchanted me because I think you might be right. And sometimes when we're looking at the world, there's these little nagging questions which persist beyond reality.Where it's like, what on earth is going on here? You know? You're talking about a big one with sexuality. I'd say is, why is it that... Gay males and straight males are more likely to find the opposite gender repellent than gay versus straight females.That's where we can say something is going on here and we can use these sorts of persistent differences or unusual patterns to suss out deeper things that are going on within a population.Now [00:01:00] in anime, there are actually many of. And in Japan, there are many of these, so our audience may not know this, but my wife was born in Japan, and she spent a lot of her childhood going to Japan to trips and stuff like that, you know, for her, it was sort of like her home away from home, and her middle name is actually Haruko so even has a Japanese middle name and, bye. One, so we're going to go over a few different questions that we've seen sort of persistently in anime, and I'll go over the three that I know we're going to cover, and then we might come up with some others. The first one is, why are, hmm, what's the way to say this that won't get the video? Why do females who phenotypically present as youth appear in specific situations within anime where if they were [00:02:00] presenting that way in live action within most Western countries? Everyone would literally immediately be arrested. Yeah, it would be super illegal. Why is this such a normalized thing within anime?Would you like to know more?Malcolm: That is question number one. And I would point out thatAs time has gone on I have seen this more and more within high production anime.To the point now where it's just almost totally normalized. Mainstream. Where it would be almost a little weird if it didn't appear even once in an anime. It, it would be like an anime without a, an episode where they go to the, Beach or onsen. The onsen, or the hot springs, or the, a beach episode, you know?It's just a thing, right? If I, if I saw a harem comedy and one of the characters wasn't, Ooh, you know, I'd be like, okay, what's going on here? Oh, note here. A harem comedy is anime where a number of [00:03:00] women are all interested in one man. It does not surprise me why anyone would find that interesting, but that's, that's nothing.anime?take place in high schools? This is a very interesting question because you do not see any other art form across any other culture I'm aware of. Almost all of it only takes place during one stage of an individual's life. Right. Yeah. And, and especially none where it's their high school age. And then the final question is What is going on?This actually came from an a comment. I, I personally wouldn't find this to be that interesting a question, but it may have interesting answers. What is going on with all the Eizoukei anime? That's anime where people are transported to another world. Why is this a popular genre right now? Alright, so let's go to the first question.You had an idea that sprung to you one day, and I think it may be accurate.Simone: Yeah so we were watching an anime in which there's a dynamic like this basically where like a, [00:04:00] a salaryman wakes up in... Fantasy video game world and then, you know, ends up in one of these relationships and it, you know, you, you expect these relationships to be, can I, is it okay if I say Lolita?No,Malcolm: youSimone: cannot say that. Okay. So, you, I think most people make the least charitable interpretation of these types of relationships and why people are interested in them. So, last, last night we were watching this anime called My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even At Level 1, where this salaryman basically wakes up in a video game world and starts befriending people, and his Before we goMalcolm: further with the anime explanation, I want to explain what makes it such a unique anime, from a, from a watching it perspective.Yeah. And it is so clearly a just a desperate fantasy of what if life wasn't terrible? Yes. In every single angle of the anime, that it breaks down many [00:05:00] ideas to much more simplistic tropes than they would normally be broken down into. It's not a particularly good anime or anything

Malcolm and Simone have an in-depth discussion about the controversial internet personality Andrew Tate. They analyze his worldview, intelligence, backstory, masculinity, cultural influences, differences from their own perspectives, and more. The hosts find Tate to be smart and logically consistent overall, while disagreeing on certain issues like treatment of women. They explore how he appeals to young men lacking direction, the roots of his philosophies, and debate toxicity vs pragmatism. Ultimately they conclude that different cultural groups can productively co-exist while optimizing differently.Simone: [00:00:00] I think he doesn't maintain frame. He is the frame and I do feel like he is a method actor who's had a psychotic break and is now. In the fantasy.He is. And like, you can see it. You can see it when he talks. He is 100 percent genuine and I think he wakes up in the morning and he growls to himselfWould you like to know more?Simone: IMalcolm: want to start this episode. So Andrew Tate did a thing on how all of the world problems could be solved if every man had a sword in his house. And so he has this Honestly, it's a smaller sword than mine that he keeps in his house for one of the examples is if if your woman goes out and she learns about something from the news, like, some disease is supposed to be killing people and she's all panicked.You just point your sword at her and say, don't be scared woman, and then we won't have problems anymore. And so we're beginning our Andrew Tate episode by showing this sword that's been in the, the back. Oh, I got to swing it around like an ultra nerd. Yeah. [00:01:00] Sorry. I can'tSimone: actually. You're going to, you're going to damage some seriousMalcolm: lights.Inside and I am a dad. Which means that I may have swords in my house, but I'm a nerd because I do it. I'm not mad. In fact, I would argue every man who has swords in their house is just a nerd. Like I don't, I don't know how he thinks that makes him look tough. I, I think it The last question I got on this, somebody saw it and they go, Oh, you must be really into D& D.And I'm like, well, you know. Ha ha ha ha ha. But I don't think that's my takeaway from him.I guarantee you don't walk around your house with a sword because you're not a commander. I'm a commander. You know, like when you command the troops into battle.I guarantee you. I do. Sorry. I looked up the video. The sword video and i found this and i just love he's like you don't walk around your house with a sword. i'm like yeah yeah, yeah. actually i do but um i don't i don't go around doing it feeling like i'm a commander i understand that walking around your house with a sword [00:02:00] and as a grown man is a sign of being a nerd and i accept that about myselfMalcolm: Which actually brings me to a point. Which is interesting and important. That's why we need people like Andrew Tate. So I often go through the comments when I do guest appearances on other podcasts and stuff like that.And there is one type of comment that we just get, like, really, really regularly in these videos. Especially me when I appear, which is, look, I love the stuff he's saying, but he just looks like such a poindexter, you know, or I can't stand his voice, like he sounds too nerdy, or you know, like, I, I, like, I like it.Like he's, he's saying important facts that we need to know, but he is like in some way repellent because of how nerdy I appear. And this is actually really interesting because the two places where I've gotten these comments the most, one was when I did an appearance on the Jolly Heretic where, [00:03:00] and then the other was when I did an appearance with Ruby.He's the guy who does What If Alt Hiss, but he has a separate podcast. Great podcast. And, you know, we should have them on sometime. But both of these guys are like objectively significantly nerdier looking than I am. And yes,Simone: but you look young and Unabashedly enthusiastic, which is to say, like, you gesticulate, you bring a lot of, like, character and, like, goofiness into your, into yourMalcolm: mannerisms.I, I think another thing it could be is I am nerdy, but I am also hot. Like, I, I know I'm hot. And it could be that I represent a nerd who is sexually threatening.Simone: Well, but here's the other thing. I mean. Who is the other, so most people who are hot and funny and passionate and like physically like they gesticulate a lot and make a lot of like Uh, funny facial expressions.It's, it's the gays. The [00:04:00] gays. So that's also why I think you get a lot of accusations for being gay. Is because you're like, you're attractive. But also you're flamboyant. And like, like expressive. And humorous. AndMalcolm: goofy. And that is not an accusation that I get as to why they can't listen to me. And this is really interesting.Yeah, it's the nerd thing.Simone: It's the nerd thing.Malcolm: of men who genuinely have trouble consuming information from men that they don't see

In this introspective discussion, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into what it means to find success, meaning, and responsibility as an individual in the context of society. They touch on the dangers of hedonism, the importance of "delusions of grandeur," why suffering is essential, why we're not all equal, playing your role, taking on the burden of humanity, developing real confidence, having initiative, and more. The hosts share personal stories and perspectives on how to be happy with yourself, live up to your potential, and positively contribute even if you're not destined for traditional status and recognition.Malcolm: We are told that life is a race, but life isn't a race. It's an action RPG, and you have spec'd your character wrong. A lot of guys today, and I think this is one of the biggest problems, is they are specking characters that are designed to win in the sexual marketplace, and then it ends up f*****g up the rest of their life because a male who wins in the easy sex marketplace is...It's a very poorly specced character for the job market. It's a very poorly specced character for the marriage market. It's a very poorly specced character for the dadSimone: market. Yeah, even for like long term happiness like for more than just a 10 year period even, just terrible.Malcolm: Some people are born to be kings and some people are born to be knights. Yeah. And that we have taught the knights of our society to be systemically unhappy with who they are, because they are followers and not leaders.They are part of a system and that through acting as a part of that system, they can [00:01:00] Individually achieve the highest greatness that any human can achieve, which is maximizing your own potential in the world we are glorified for the crucible that life builds for us. It is through our suffering that we achieve things of meaning and we build an identity of meaning in one that we can be proud of. And that there is nothing to be proud of if you have no challenges.Would you like to know more?Simone: Malcolm, the other day, someone and they were like, let's be honest, Simone, you wouldn't have looked at Malcolm twice if he wasn't like super, you know, I can't remember what it was like super smart or successful or something. And I was like, 100 percent no. Like the reason why I was driven crazy by you, the moment I met you was.Frankly, your delusions of grandeur that you sat across the table, you laid your cards down and you were like, you know, first, you know, I'm not looking to get married, I'm looking to find a wife, like, totally honest about your intentions, but [00:02:00] also like, and here's my vision for the universe, this is why I think humans are here, I'm going to get our planet, like, our species off planet, I'm going to do this, I'm going to protect sentience, I was like, You dream big andMalcolm: even, even the way I come off publicly was something that I worked really hard on the video on how to get people to have sex with you is one that we can't publish because Claude said it was too naughty.But one of the things I did over and over again when I was little is I would go to little, I don't know the word young, like high school, right? I would go to malls and I would practice walking up and talking to random people. And I would just do this over and over and over again, like reps. It was the goal being getting somebody's, you know, phone number and then, you know, doing some sort of post talk follow up or something like that.Just over and over and over and over again both so that I learned to not feel pain at, , social rejection, because this is a really ingrained thing that's really hard to get over. But also so that I learned how to do that, [00:03:00] like, as a skill, how to maintain that positive energy when going up to someone, it's positive, non threatening energy is something that really.It's not necessarily you're born with it, but you can learn to master it through repetition.Simone: But for you, it was more than that. It was the passion. It was the dreaming big. Women find that super hot. Well, men find that hot too. Although men, I think love admiration, like genuine admiration for them from a woman more than like her confidence necessarily.Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm: Absolutely. I think that this is something that really cannot be stressed enough in this modern, like mannose sphere environment, which is when you are out there and you were looking for a wife. The best way to attract a woman is with your passion. And this is something that women, the type of women who make for great wives. Are very attracted to and are looking for. They are looking for someone in this world who they are inspired to follow. I was watching this great [00:04:00] clip of Steve Erwin today. Uh, talking passionately about what he wanted to do. And I suggest you guys check out the clip, but I'll try to include the last little bit of it here, but it doesn't get as copyright struck where you can just see in his wif

Michael Gibson shares insights on identifying extraordinary talent in young people from investing in them early via his VC fund 1517.He explains how classic predictors like test scores fail to capture entrepreneurial gifts like courage, initiative, and "insider-outsider" status. Homeschoolers often excel as they're self-driven. Malcolm notes EA types who use funds practically tend to thrive.They discuss why cities lack on-ramps for talent, risks of attaching to "smart" identity, and how youth's fluid intelligence enables conceptual leaps elders miss. Overall Michael concludes talent ID is tough, but development is key - we must cultivate qualities like grit young.Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Michael Gibson. He is the co founder of the VC fund, the 1517 fund, which invest in young people typically before they've gone to college,Malcolm Collins: how do you judge the competence of somebody who's young,Michael Gibson: yeah, we learned a lot. Well, when we started the fellowship, we had an application a lot like colleges. We asked for test scores, GPA, what school you went to. And that was good at, certainly signaling cognitive ability, but we quickly learned it was not a strong predictor of success out in the wild. And so we had to start looking for other things . There were even negative correlations that were surprising.Would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Hello. Today we are joined by Michael Gibson. He is the co founder of the VC fund, the 1517 fund, which is game changer in terms of venture capital investment, because they invest in young people typically before they've gone to college, sometimes during but he also wrote a book that I've enjoyed very much called paper belt on fire, which I really encourage you to.Simone Collins: Yeah. Check out, but we're not going to be [00:01:00] talking so much about the book today. We really want to get into Michael's work with the 1517 fund with how he spots young talent with things he's learned from his investments and the people he's worked with and the people he's found through this fund, because I mean, Oh my gosh, the talent you're meeting, it's, it's insane.Simone Collins: So we're really excited to dive into this and thank you so much for joiningMichael Gibson: us. Yeah. Thanks for having me.Simone Collins: So the biggest thing that I'm really curious about, cause it's been a while now, you know, you're like, you've been, you've been doing this for years at this point. And you've done a lot of hustling.Simone Collins: I mean, like sleeping on couches, staying up all night, going to these crazy young person parties. I couldn't do this, you know, like young people stay up late and I'm like, my bedtime's at eight 30. you're doing these. IMalcolm Collins: went, I, sorry, I got to take a little detour here. So I went on this trip to, I don't know, somewhere in Central America.Malcolm Collins: With a bunch of Peter Thiel fellowship kids and they like they went out like I, I hadn't gone to a party, like a club in years, but I was like, maybe it's gotten better. Maybe it's not as bad as I remember. And I get there and I'm [00:02:00] stuck there until 1 30 in the morning and it's loud and it's sweaty and it's gross.Malcolm Collins: And it was just as pointless as it always was. And you have to deal with this stuff. I think professionally. It's all about how you. Get these young geniuses interested in working with what you guys are doing. How do you sell yourself to them?Michael Gibson: Man, well, that is certainly part of it. Yeah, it's funny is it's such a slippery, tough craft that we're constantly reexamining the foundations of what we do.Michael Gibson: And, and one of the I guess, two different problems that we constantly wrestle with, or, or, you know, we, I guess we're trying to figure out which problem we're, we're. Operating in one is if you are a fisherman, is it better to be in a well stocked river? Our pond. So it's you're one of those bears just grabbing salmon cause they're flying in your face where in this case, the fish are, you know, talented people building startups or is it better to focus on the craft [00:03:00] of fishing, like being the best, you know, it's like you could identify the one fish that's in the stagnant pond and find it and fish it out.Michael Gibson: You know, that's, so this is like the two problems we struggle with. We're like, okay, which one is it better to be? Is it better to find the location where just talented people are and then figure out what they're working on? Or is it better to, you know, hone your skill pattern matching skill at okay, does this person have the right stuff and just, you know, go out there, you know, looking for that.Michael Gibson: And so, so, so that is a trade off. Or, you know, I can't, I guess I'm saying it's two problems. It's just one problem. It's which one are we in? So to that end is yeah, I've been in hacker houses. I've lived in ecosystems and, you know, tried to go native to the extent t

We are joined by author Richard Hanania to discuss his controversial new book "The Origins of Woke." Richard argues that modern woke ideology stems directly from changes to civil rights law in the 60s and 70s, not broader cultural shifts. He traces how pursuing equality of outcomes rather than opportunity put quotas and disparate impact front and center, leading to impacts on testing, HR, and more. We debate whether wokeness may also have religious origins. Richard details the role of government in racial classification, Title IX, and mandating practices at universities. We discuss potential government action to combat wokeness, and whether running for office with an unorthodox approach could drive change.Simone Collins: [00:00:00]Hi, today we are joined by a very special guest, the author on Substack and Twitter, Richard Hanania. Really awesome work. We love following him and we love talking with him even more.So we're so excited he's coming on the podcast .Malcolm Collins: Well, so an interesting thing is, is. with our audience, you're hitting an audience. It's going to be great for your book. The origins of woke. But it great in an interesting way because we are so interested in the same type of stuff.We actually are going to have persistent disagreements about the types of questions that normal people have literally no vested interest in. Exactly. I am so interested. And I know our audience are interested. Here your theory on the origins of woke presented in like the short version that will get them excited for the book.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Richard Hanania: So the, the basic argument, if you're going to send up, you know, you're going to sum it up in a sentence is that wokeness is caused by government policy through via [00:01:00] civil rights law. And it's a strong claim and it's not, you know, it's a very, it's a claim that can you know, it could be misinterpreted and of course it doesn't explain literally every single thing that ever happened.Like, it doesn't explain like Z's or pronouns or, or whatever, but the basic outline of like, all policy is racist. If it has like a disparate impact, how we classify race in this country. You know, the fact that our institutions have HR departments that and DEI offices that are obsessed with race. It's like, That is ultimately traceable to law.There's a fascinating history there and it can potentially be undone by law too.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, so I mean, you've gotten fairly in the weeds in your book into like how this first was introduced into law and why it wasn't stopped as it was happening. Can you talk a little to that?Richard Hanania: Yeah, so this is a history book.I mean, I want to say origins of woke. I mean, my background is in political science. I'm trying to like, meet the standards of like, a good social science argument of like, how we got here. And so that requires a lot of history. And yeah, I mean, the civil rights movement. I [00:02:00] mean, that's the basically every school children know about it.It's, you know, the idea that, you know, there was there was a sort of this moral sort of wave in reaction to Jim Crow laws in America in the 1960s that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And what happened after that is that the people, you know, who were involved in that movement didn't just pack up and go home and embrace that she wasn't solved overnight.There was, you know, pretty much immediately within, you know, within You know, within literally years there was a move towards equality of outcome rather than equality of results. And what happened, what happened from there was you had to start pushing, you know, quotas or quasi quotas onto private institutions.You had to start going after standardized tests. And later the same civil rights act and other, you know, associated laws, smaller less important laws were used to go after free speech through hostile work environment and, and harassment and all these things really led to the rise of HR really led to like a institutional homogenization.And so it's sort of the genesis of how we got here. SoMalcolm Collins: can you talk about [00:03:00] when really the moment happened when it moved from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, like in the legal system? I mean, thereRichard Hanania: are, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, steps on the way, but I think the Greggs decision in 1971 was, you know, pretty much the ratification of it by the Supreme Court.The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thought it would lose that case. It actually sort of encouraged that. plaintiffs not to appeal because they thought the legislative history was so clear that you could use tests and you couldn't just say they were racist on the grounds that whites do better on them than blacks.They said, clearly that's not what the law meant. That's not what the law says. They thought they would lose. It goes to the Supreme cour

Malcolm and Simone have an insightful debate about why some celebrities seem to genuinely enjoy interacting with fans, while others recoil. Malcolm argues niche internet stars are more likely to be themselves publicly, feeling kinship with fans who understand their odd ideas. But Simone counters that reaching mainstream fame requires compromising your true self. They discuss how public personalities reacting negatively to fans likely feel cognitive dissonance about the persona being liked. They theorize on specific celebrities, concluding Bill Murray, Donald Trump and Andrew Tate are fully themselves, while progressive influencers often put on a facade. The lesson - pay attention to how famouses engage with fans for clues to their authenticity.Malcolm: [00:00:00] he was like, Oh, I have a parasocial relationship with you guys. You've never met me, but I watch all your episodes and I feel like. I sort of know you through that. And it was very interesting the way I felt about that in the moment because I was like, yeah, well, I mean, you're our friend, right?Like, I immediately felt like it was much more of a two way relationship than historically I have seen. People talk about parasocial. Well,Simone: more than you would expect. Right?Malcolm: And so then I begin to reflect on the people I know when they talk about their fans, do they have. A relationship where, , they genuinely feel an emotional connection to them, even when they haven't personally talked to somebody, they just meet someone, and this one's like, oh, I'm a big fan of your work, and they're immediately like, oh, yeah, we're going to get along, or do they sort of recoil at that? So then what is your thesis on what was causing this divide?Would you like to know more?Simone: So Malcolm, I am so afraid right now. For what reason? The, [00:01:00] imagine there's like a monster or like a murderer outside, outside your room, just outside and that feeling, that feeling, or like, like your worst enemy or like your boss or something is like right outside your, your door just waiting for you.Malcolm: So this is because there is a mess outside her door.Simone: There's a mess. I can, I canMalcolm: hear it. We got all of this stuff from my mom after she died and we've been putting it away. And Simone just always reacts this way to messes. Where is this existential sort of constant hatred and dread? By the way, Simone, speaking of messes and I get added the longer we're in a relationship, I get new little tasks I have to do.So I took a shower before this podcast and now I have to squeegee the walls of the shower after I do it. Oh, heart stains don't. I don't know if this is a task that anyone else has to do for their wife. I have not heard [00:02:00] of this as a part of regular life maintenance.Simone: If you have hard water, it is hard water.Malcolm: We have a whole system to help with the hardSimone: water and it's not enough. It's not enough. It gets the glass all smudgy and gross and cloudy. And I don't want that. But yeah, anyway, we're not going toMalcolm: talk about shower count. What, what, what inspired this podcast with a particular. So we're going to be at this Natalist conference.We're, we're not the ones running it. A lot of people think we're, we're the ones running it. No, another group is running it. Actually they've got some, some canceled people among them. So it will be spicier, I think, than a lot of things that we might put together ourselves. And we were talking as one of the people who was running it, but who we hadn't met yet.And he was like, Oh, I feel like, I already know, like, like I have a parasocial relationship with you guys. You've never met me, but I watch all your episodes and I feel like. I sort of know you through that. And it was very interesting the way I felt about that in the moment because I was like, yeah, well, I mean, you're our friend, right?Like, I [00:03:00] immediately felt like it was much more of a two way relationship than historically I have seen. People talk about parasocial. Well,Simone: more than you would expect. Right? Like when, yeah, when someone says, like, we feel like we have a parasocial relationship with you, we're like, oh, so, like, 1, you don't hate us for our views to, like, we're on the same page with some weird ideas.Like, we've, we've, yeah,Malcolm: but I want to get into here. Simone. Why? Because then I started thinking about, you know, Simone and I, I guess with guests we've had on and stuff like that, people can tell that we hang out at circles with lots of really high profile online celebrities in, and also IRL celebrities.And so then I begin to reflect on the people I know when they talk about their fans, do they have. A relationship where, like, they really like the relationship they have with their, their, their fans, like, they, they genuinely feel an emotional connection to them, even when they haven't personally talked to somebody, they just [00:04:00] meet someone, and this

In this insightful episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss new research showing childhood trauma is caused more by one's perception of events than the events themselves. People with verified abuse who don't see their childhood as bad show minimal ill effects, while those with no abuse who believe they were mistreated exhibit high rates of mental issues. Malcolm reflects on his own unusual upbringing, arguing he avoided PTSD by seeing challenges as adventures. They explore why women tend to recall more childhood adversity. Malcolm contends trauma comes from random negative events, not predictable ones. Ultimately, it's community narratives that frame events as traumatic or not. Avoiding "trauma creation" will be key for their parenting.Malcolmm: [00:00:00] all these people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never allowed to feel bad.And I was never allowed to confide in people and they're like, and that was all bad. That was all bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes your life better. When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame your life, In the moment, it doesn't feel awesome.In the moment, when you want to be vulnerable, it doesn't feel awesome. But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically better. And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points.Would you like to know more?Malcolmm: Its so great to be here with you today. You had just sent me this study where you're like, this is so fascinating. Mm-hmm. , and better than that, [00:01:00] it confirms our preexisting beliefs. And isn't that just the, the best kind of studies, right? Yes.Simone: That's, that's what, that's why people read studies to, well, for confirmation bias of, so this study, is by Andrea Denny's and Kathy Spatz Widom.Gonna get their names wrong, of course. It's called Objective and Subjective Experiences of Child Maltreatment and Their Relationships with Psychopathology, published in Nature Human Behavior, which is a very respectable journal. And basically they found... I'm just going to quote them. We found that even for severe cases of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports.In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked to subject report, subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports were consistent with objective measures. So, so dumbed down some more words.Malcolmm: In simpler language. Basically [00:02:00] what it means is that if you had a really traumatic, in the way that modern society would frame trauma, childhood, like you were systemically abused in ways that were verified by the court system, but you don't believe that you had a difficult childhood, you will not have any negative effects from your childhood.However, if you had a perfect childhood, but you believe you had a terrible childhood, you will have all of the effects that we associate with childhood trauma. Now, this is something that confirms with other studies that we've talked about on this show. You know, we've talked about the study of sleepers that showed that People who believed that they had had bad sleep, but hadn't actually had bad sleep, had all the effects that we as a society associate with bad sleep.People who verifiably had bad sleep they didn't have any of those effects. Yeah, it's how [00:03:00] youSimone: see it. If you think that you slept poorly... You're going to show signs of fatigue that day, you're going to struggle, and even if you slept like s**t, but you believe you slept really well, you're going to be like, oh, I'm perky, I feel good, on average.Malcolmm: This is so critical within our, because what this actually means, you know, you can, you can say, oh, this is like interesting or quirky or whatever. It actually means that as a society, when we say something like, childhood trauma causes adult issues. That is just verifiably untrue. It's the belief that you were traumatized in childhood that causes adult issues.Yet, often these two things are pretty correlated, right? Often somebody who is traumatized in childhood will have the belief that they were traumatized in childhood. But what's critical to remember is when the left, Yeah, it's usually the left who does this, invents new types of [00:04:00] traumas that somebody can go through, or they frame something as particularly traumatic that previously people wouldn't have thought of as traumatic.They create the symptoms of trauma in that individual. Where that individual previously wouldn't have had those symptoms. And this is, you know, we have seen this have such negative effects on individuals lives. Recently we were interacting with someone and they were just absolutely riddled with likeSimone: all sorts ofMalcolmm: diseases, you know, neurological issues, pain, all these sorts of

Malcolm argues racism applies group differences to individuals, while true evil legally encodes it. This prevents inter-generational competition essential for progress. He explains racism’s similarity to communism in suppressing the “grand game” advancing society. Racists grasp external excuses for failure rather than learning from successful groups.Affirmative action is the worst modern racism as it systemically handicaps minorities. Historic racism still disadvantaged some groups, but evenness doesn’t mean fairness. A level playing field enables eventual parity. They discuss respectful cultural pride versus outgroup hatred. Overall the left’s racism destroys potential while right bigots chiefly hurt themselves.Malcolm: [00:00:00] ethnic socialism is what it really is.Malcolm: Racism is ethnic socialism. They apply. Unfair barriers to people of different racial and ethnic groups based on preconceptions about those groups that prevent those groups from competing against them in a fair and open ecosystem. And doing that. They hobble those groups, but they also hobble their own group.Malcolm: What the great thing is about actual racism is groups that don't punish it, don't compete as well.Malcolm: And they end up falling apart. If you look at America and you look at the white populations, the white populations that were less racist economically have outperformed the white populations that were more racist. Hmm.Simone: Yeah.Malcolm: You look at multicultural groups and this is something you see. Racism is a self extinguishing phenomenon when it is not entrenched in government law.Malcolm: That's why I see the groups that are just like [00:01:00] generically racist as less evil than the groups that enshrine racism in law with things like affirmative action because. Those groups are hurting themselves often more than they hurt the groups around them. And so it's like, ha ha ha, look at the idiot.Would you like to know more?Simone: Malcolm, you really piqued my curiosity the other day when you said racism was a lot like communism. What's going on there?Malcolm: Now, this is a fun topic and it was inspired by a comment by Simone by the way, love you excited to be talking to you again where some people were like, why isMalcolm: racism ethically wrong? You know, so first we need to define what we mean by racism. And what we consider racism. So some people consider racism as believing different ethnic groups are different. That is stupid. And diversity has no value if we're not actually different.Malcolm: In a [00:02:00] world in which everyone is secretly the same, there is no point in diversity, culturally, ethnically, anything like that. It's an aesthetic difference. And that it's not, there's no superiority to a painting with more colors in it than a painting withSimone: less color. And furthermore, in such a world, which is optimal, it would also be ridiculous to pretend that there aren't differences, right?Malcolm: And it's you know, I think, here's where it gets bad, okay, and this is where I define racism.Malcolm: It's when you use Intergroup differences to make decisions about individuals when you find out they're part of one group or another group, or to make decisions about how you interact with groups as a whole. This is very important to me. Like I bet that you never. allow knowledge of like, well, people like this, they're like, they're like, Catholics are like, this Jews are like this.Malcolm: It's just like groups like this. Like, obviously there are going to be [00:03:00] statistical norms that are culturally, even if, even if just cultural differences, because different ethnic groups clustered within different cultural groups and culture can influence life outcomes. Of course, you're going to have different averages that differ between groups.Malcolm: And these averages can allow you. to create prejudices, which allow you to more quickly make decisions about those groups. Often this is what I am against, and this is what I consider to be a racist. But then there's the higher form of racism, which is the ultimate form of racism. And I think where you get into sort of pure evil, which is when you encode group differences into legal systems.Malcolm: Or social systems in terms of how you deal with cultural outsiders. Ah, okay. So let's talk about why this is very similar to communism and why it is evil from our cultural perspective. Okay. So there are many things that our culture values. But [00:04:00] one of the highest value systems within our culture is intergenerational improvement.Malcolm: The core goal of every human being... is to make kids that are better than them. It is. a game in which you are always playing against your ancestors and yourself. It is a game in which you are consistently striving to not stagnate, where stagnation is the highest form of failure. A stagnant species, our pattern from our worldview, Is completely pointless.Malcolm: It is, it may as well not exist. If you think of

We interview Patrick Friedman, a leading thinker on competitive governance, about his vision for decentralized societies. He explains the charter city model as a way to "upgrade" existing nations by allowing innovation in legal systems. These startup societies enable jurisdictional experimentation absent in most countries today.Patrick argues exit rights are paramount so groups can self-determine governance. He envisions charter cities as platforms where many opt-in communities with niche values/cultures can emerge. We discuss economics, recruiting celebrity founders, penal colonies, and more unorthodox concepts. Overall Patrick sees charter cities as unlocking competition to find better forms of social organization.[00:00:00] Hello. We said, we're going to get a very special episode today, which can almost be thought of as a lost interview, because it was one of the early interviews we did. Uh, but it was in a very different format than our other episodes. And so we didn't want to release it until we had a bit more of a following. It was, was Patrick Friedman who runs Pronos capital, the first venture capital fund that focuses on charter cities and network states. So when people are trying to start new countries, uh, this is the main funder of that. And Patrick Friedman, who we've known for a very long time since Silicon valley. Is the guy who would have been at the center of the seasteading movement when that was really growing. He coded at Google for 10 years, rent a small angel fund since 2, 7, 11 has degrees in CS and business and has been a leader in the competitive governance scene for over 20 years. Yeah. Leaders understatement there.He was basically he's the, what was the early charter city guy, when [00:01:00] most of the charter city movement with seasteading, which was this idea that people would go live on. Uh, sort of floating boats that would be made up of, uh, autonomous components that could like break apart and recombine. So like even your house, you could easily leave one government system and go to another government system very easily. So, uh, Some other stuff here I have 2001 began thinking about a new approach to upgrading governments. The side hustle 2008, started the sea setting Institute with funding for Peter teal, 2009. Co-created a famous phrase, a self-organizing festival on water, still running annual annually. So for if ever raises another thing, cause this is actually a really important event within. Silicon valley culture, which was seen as sort of like the rationalist slash less wrong version of burning man. Um, but it was done on boats, which honestly seems much more appealing to me. Uh, 2011 co-founded future cities development, which have had the first M. Oh you for a modern charter city in 2012 in to southern 18 started promos capital patrick [00:02:00] has board memberships and advisory positions across this charter city network state space He does talks interviews and events regularly around the world Very excited to, to bring this loss a bit of context for you and we have a few other interviews we might be able to put out this way Um so very excited about that.Simone: Hello Simone.Malcolm: It's wonderful to be here with you today. And Patrick Friedman. Patrick Friedman, he is and has been for a long time, known as one of the most preeminent thinkers of what. Future cities may look like what future society may look like. And given that we've been talking so much about the future of the world economy and the future of what human civilization may look like in ways that are very orthogonal to the way people think about civilization today, we are so excited to have him on.Malcolm: I would love you to give a bit more of your background if you think as any is necessary. And the first question I will prompt you is, is has [00:03:00] any of your thinking around what future human cities may look like? Changed with the rapid development of AI and the movement of AI into the public sphere? Or had you, were you such a forward thinking, you alreadyPatri: accounted for all of this?Patri: Well, nobody can know the timing of something like ai, but I think of it as being like somewhat orthogonal. Like, I have serious concerns about AI risk, but like, that's not my path, right? I have my part of the world order that I try to make better. And yeah, I think it's like really hard to predict what AI will do, but definitely now is the time when it's starting to do something.Patri: So we'll find out. Okay. So when you thinkMalcolm: about how cities are gonna change, what is your sort of go-to talking points right now?Patri: Well, so I'm, I'm interested in New city states it's kind of my life's mission to make it so that we can start new countries, like we start companies today. And at this kind of halfway point, after 20 some years of working on [00:04:00] it what it looks like is what are called charter cities.Patri: Charter cities have regulatory authority over some parts of the law while

Malcolm and Simone discuss how political polarization makes it impossible to take a neutral stance today. Malcolm argues progressives force moderates into extremism by demanding endless concessions. He cites education reformers branded far right for helping disadvantaged kids.Simone notes many organizations now prioritize self-preservation over their mission, leading to tribal dynamics. Malcolm adds conservative spaces permit diverse views while progressives enforce narrow dogma, even lying about opponents. He believes their incompetence and false attacks will galvanize the public against them.Overall they conclude you must pick a side as the left doesn't allow middle ground. But the right welcomed them despite differing views, valuing truth-seeking over signaling status. They encourage watching for the progressive coalition's coming collapse.Malcolm: [00:00:00] Scott Alexander, right?Malcolm: Who writes Slate Star Codex. And him just talking like as truly neutral as possible. It's important to understand that in a society where the academic system and most media centers are controlled by one faction, if you talk neutrally, you are a threat to them because you weigh things. Towards the, the faction that's not in power, which is the conservative faction.Malcolm: And so he very famously just really tries to give the truth in like the most non extremist, non hyperbolic way possible.Malcolm: So, you know, he got outed by the New York Times and they did this really mean piece on him andMalcolm: to me that even somebody as honestly, I think pretty progressive in terms of his sensibilities as him is now pretty solidly grouped with conservatives in terms of the online intellectual movement..Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, you beautiful human being.Malcolm: Simone, you are the most beautiful human being who's ever [00:01:00] lived, and I love you to death. Now, today we are going to talk about political polarization, because this is an issue that has bedeviled us where we keep having people come to us and they're like, I'm going to start a nonpartisan version of your foundation, like the Prenatalist Foundation, because we Pretty openly aligned conservative.Malcolm: And we're like, that's not going to go well for you or they'll even try to start a, a full on progressive one. And I'm like, that might go better than an unaligned one. But the question is, is why? So one, I mean, I think the easy answer for a lot of people is truth has become a team sport in our society.Malcolm: Where people care less, you know, when they hear a piece of like, they can hear a piece of like research data, right? Which is just like. Furthering their understanding of reality, and they might become upset because it makes their side less likely to win.Simone: Yeah, I'm fuzzy on this, but I think even some psychology studies have demonstrated that people, when presented with evidence that runs against their [00:02:00] political beliefs and their political party's belief will become even more trenched in their belief.Simone: They won't be convinced or change their mind by that. So it, it does imply that truth is indeed a teamMalcolm: sport. And this is really damaging implications on reality. I mean, like, for example Germany, because of the environmentalists, shut down all its nuclear power plants? Not good. What were you thinking?Malcolm: Like... This is a, you know, when we complain about like aesthetic conservatism versus real conservatism, this is the perfect example of aesthetic environmentalism versus real environmentalism, nuclear power, bad, dirty, big nuclear silos and deformed people living near them. You know, it's like, okay, that's like a weird, like aesthetic of environmentalism from the 1980s, but like, we should know better now.Malcolm: Especially if you don't have any other way than to generate that power than Russian oil, which it turned out you didn't have any backup plan for, it was [00:03:00] profoundly stupid. And so I should say, we don't just have this problem on the right of like this, like, I'm going to be, you know, aesthetically and I'm, I'm, I'll link the video here or you can check it out, like aesthetic conservative versus real conservative, because we do have this problem on the right, but the left has it as well.Malcolm: Where they just stop caring about reality, and it's just about whether or not their team is winning. So I'd say that there's sort of a few reasons why this doesn't work. But I think one of the most important was when Simone went over with me, and I want to have early in our video here, you know, because I watched some watch time on these, and I'm like, well, let's at least get the good ideas to people faster, right?Malcolm: Which was, do you want to go into it, Simone?Simone: I don't remember it. What, what, can you remind me and I'llMalcolm: explain it? Okay, your idea was that if you try to hold the middle ground, the progressives will just keep pushing you further and further and

Malcolm and Simone debate how to define "woman" after he's asked in a trans community. Simone says it's whoever you perceive as female. Malcolm argues it's a social construct dependent on culture. He explains how polygamous and monogamous societies define it differently based on evolutionarily adaptive strategies.Ultimately Malcolm concludes there's no universal truth, only answers contingent on the utility you're optimizing for. A culture seeking fertility may define womanhood differently than one focused on happiness. He cautions against governments enforcing subjective cultural norms on others, as with criminalizing misgendering. Overall they agree relativism is the only intellectually honest perspective.Malcolm: [00:00:00] but what do I think is the true answer?Malcolm: Because I think that there's no true answer can mean many differentSimone: things. There's your answer, the cultural relativistic one. Now you're saying there's a true answer.Malcolm: Yeah. Okay. There's many different ways. So all the ways you could determine if someone was a woman, right? You could say, well, XX chromosome, XY chromosome, oh, they pass, oh, they self identify as a woman.Malcolm: Oh, a woman is whatever would make them happiest if they were called the woman. Yeah. That's what they want to be called. Yeah. Yeah. A woman is whether they can have kids. There's many, many, many, many different ways. ASimone: woman is a state of mind.Malcolm: That you can determine this, right? And in different cultures.Malcolm: Elevate different interpretations of gender above other interpretations of gender. So what's the right answer? Okay. Now, the true answer, the actual true answer, like if you're just stripping all of the tradition away.Simone: Glad you're solving this problem all in one podcast.Would you like to know more?[00:01:00]Simone: Hey, hey Malcolm what, what is a woman?Malcolm: So yeah, this is a spicy question, Simone. Yeah. I was in this Transmaxxing, I was, I was talking in the Transmaxxing discord with the, the Transmaxxing community for people who, aren't familiar with the trans vexing community they are individuals who transition.Malcolm: Not because or at least they don't think that transitioning needs to be tied to gender dysphoria, but they think that it makes sense for some men to transition for social advantage. Yeah, soSimone: basically transition for gain or gender euphoria, not just gender dysphoria.Malcolm: Yeah, and I, I like it because I what I like about the community is they're expanding the concept, and they're passing off traditional trans communities.Malcolm: Those are the two things I like. I don't, I don't know, am I terrible for, for having so much fun when like extremist progressive communities get pissed off at somebody just for asking questions they're not allowed to ask? Like, hey, I'm a guy and I feel pretty oppressed in society today. Am I allowed to transition?Malcolm: No! Yes! The most transphobic question anyone can ask! [00:02:00] How dare you think about doing that? You're so privileged! So I, I do love that they're breaking down this, these, these things and they asked at the end of this, this thing, what is a woman? Cause you know, there's this video, what is a woman, which good video.Malcolm: This has been recommended to us by smart people. And I think it shows real toxic parts of the trans movement, which let's be honest, has some real. Ooh, toxic parts. But I had never actually considered the question myself until it was proposed to me in the context of this group meeting. And so I had to come up with an answer on the spot and I was really satisfied with my answer, but it's not one that I had come up with before.Malcolm: Oh, really? So Simone, first I want to hear if you, what your answer is unbiased by me to this question.Simone: Right. So, to me. I mean, obviously, there's not a good answer for this, but for me, a woman is someone that I see on the street and I'm like, oh, look at that woman. So if you pass, whether it's intentional or [00:03:00] not, you're a woman or a man.Simone: And there are manyMalcolm: men who just look extra girly. You just like extra girly are not trying to look extra girly.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Like there, there can be a, a natal man who just looks extremely femme, not intentionally. And I'm like, Oh, what a pretty girl. But same, same with, you know, natal women who just happened to look really boyish.Simone: Like you, you are, you are what people interpret you to be.Malcolm: Yes. So you judge womanhood as an eye of you as the perceiver, because your brain is categorizing everyone you see into either male or female and the way it handles that categorization. You say, because everyone's brain does this. I should be clear.Malcolm: Even people who are like, I am the most gender understanding person in the world, they definitely have an assumption when they first see somebody of what gender that person identified. They'd be like, okay, I'm not sure. But what yo

Hello friends! In this fun video, Malcolm and Simone go through their personal tier list for how plausible they find various cryptids and paranormal phenomena. They logically break down why they find things like Bigfoot somewhat plausible but ghosts less likely. Malcolm explains at length why he thinks UFOs could actually be time travelers from the future based on his unique metaphysical framework. The two recount spooky stories from staying in haunted houses, and debate whether emotional imprints can linger. Simone wants to hear your real-life cryptid encounters in the comments. Overall a thought-provoking look at evaluating extraordinary claims and events with nuance and evidence. Let us know which cryptid explanations you find compelling!Malcolm: [00:00:00] The tier list goes flathead monster, moss man, almost certainly not real.Malcolm: Loch Ness monster, almost certainly not real. Bigfoot. \ Plausible, but probably not real. UFOs, probably real, but not actually aliens. And crop circles, probably real, but maybe alien.Simone: And girths, I don't know, but probably carbon monoxide and or weird gold. Oh, girths, yes. Yeah.Simone: Girths.Malcolm: Girths. Spooky. But now you'll get to see why we think all of this.Would you like to know more?Simone: Okay. Okay. Before we get into the main topic, this is sort of related. I was walking around our backyard this morning. Malcolm. And I heard the weirdest noise and I was so confused. And I was by the chicken coop and I hear what sounds like a goose. It was like, like that basically. [00:01:00] And I was like, is there a goose?Simone: Like, you know, but the previous people who own this house used to have geese in the chicken coop. So I thought like, I mean, I don't like, has a goose broken in to the chicken coop? Has it like assimilated with our flop? But no, turns out. That when, when roosters, we have one male chicken, when they're going through their little puberty and they start to try to like, like, they, they like do it very awkwardly.Simone: And it was just him completely failing to like,Malcolm: he's trying to be tough and he's always trying to be tough to the other. Yeah, he's always like, He goes around and bosses them about and like, Yeah. And sometimes, cause we have big chickens, we put them in the big chicken coop to try to get him to handle the big hens cause they're kinda dumb and, and annoying.Malcolm: And they'll end up just bullying him and So this is him trying to be cool. Like he's, he's like this teenage, but yeah, it's like his voice crack is about like trying to be [00:02:00] masculine and cool and just utterly failing.Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Bullying everyone's smaller. And then as soon as he gets put with the bigger chickens, he freaksMalcolm: out.Malcolm: He's trying to get back to his coop. So we put him back in the, one of the birds.Simone: Yeah. We don't want to hurt his feelings or anything, but also like you've startedMalcolm: giving him chicken trauma. Yeah.Simone: I, you know, I'm so sorry,Malcolm: afraid of giant women now, but,Simone: You know, this is not, you know, there, there are many people who experience extraordinary transporting things like this, like mysterious homes.Malcolm: So, I, some of our listeners, by the way, hello, Simone, it is wonderful to be here with you today. Hello husband. So one of our listeners was like, yeah, you've mentioned in other videos that you're like. Really into cryptid YouTube and like aliens YouTube. And not just that I've actually spoken on it on other podcasts.Malcolm: So there's another podcast that like goes into this stuff. I don't remember the name of it, but it's by like a professor at, I want to say MIT or Yale. So like a educated [00:03:00] professor type guy, and like the way that he is being secretly under, under the system is he believes in aliens visiting us and was, was talking to me about that.Malcolm: The question here is, as somebody who consumes a ton of content on ghosts and aliens and cryptids and all of that, do I believe any of it's real? If so, which of it do I think is most likely to be real? So I'd say the first and like the most interesting thing about asking me this question is I actually sort of don't like, I don't really think that any of the stories that I have heard have a high likelihood.Malcolm: And yet I keep consuming them like I find them just so interesting to investigate. You can't get enough ofSimone: it and it's enough and I will have to say to the public that you will watch a [00:04:00] lot of them to the point where you will also leave your closet doors wide open at night.Malcolm: Yeah, well, that's because of Mr.Malcolm: Bolin and all the murderers who hide in closets and kill people. So I also really like true crime. So it might be sort of the same category. It might be two different categories, but I don't think it's impossible. So I think something that's really important, and I think a lot of people have had their eyes open to this a lot, sort of

Malcolm recounts a heated debate with AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI safety. He explains his belief that subsystems in an advanced AI would converge on the same utility function, while Yudkowsky insists no AI would subdivide that way. Simone notes Yudkowsky's surprising lack of knowledge in physics and neuroscience given his confidence. They express concern his ideas ruin youth's outlooks and discuss hypothetical clapbacks. Overall they conclude that while well-intended, Yudkowsky's certainty without humility on AI risks is dangerous.Simone: [00:00:00] What'sMalcolm: really interesting is that he actually conceded that if this was the way that an AI structured itself, that yes, you would have terminal convergence, but that AIs above a certain level of intelligence would never structure themselves this way.Malcolm: So this was very interesting to me because it wasn't the argument I thought he would take. And that would be true. I, I will agree that if the AI maintained itself as a single hierarchy, it would be much less likely for its utility function to change. But the problem is... Is essentially no government structure ever created and has functioned that way.Malcolm: Essentially no program ever created by humans has run that way. Nothing ever encoded by evolution has run that way. i. e. the human brain, any brain, any neural structure we know of. There are none that are coded that way.Malcolm: So it is very surprising. So I said, okay, gauntlet thrown. Are you willing to be disproven?Malcolm: , because we will get some more understanding into AI interpretability, into how AIs. Think in the near future. If it turns out [00:01:00] that the AI's that exist right now are actually structuring themselves that way, will you concede that you are wrong about the way that you tackle AI apocalypticism?Malcolm: And then he said, and this is really interesting to me. He's like, no, I won'tMalcolm: I was also like, yeah, also, we could run experiments where we do a bunch of basically unbounded A. I. S. and see if they start to show terminal convergence.Malcolm: Do they start to converge on similar utility functions? You know what they're trying to optimize for again? He was like, well, even if we saw that, that wouldn't change my views on anything, right? Like his views are religious in nature, which was very disappointing to me. Like, I thought that maybe he had more of like a logical or rational perspective on things.Malcolm: That. And it was, it was really sad.Malcolm: You know, we don't talk negatively about people on this channel very frequently, but I do think that he destroys a lot of people's lives. And I do think that he makes the risk of AI killing all humans dramatically higher than it would be in a world where he didn't exist.Would you like to know more?[00:02:00]Simone: Hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello. So we just got back from this wonderful conference thing we were at called Manifest. So we had gone out to SF to host a few pronatalist focused dinner parties and randomly we got looped in to something called Manifest, which was a conference for people who are interested in prediction markets.Malcolm: But interestingly, we ended up meeting a bunch of people who we had known through like online stuff. Some were absolutely fantastic, like, Scott Alexander, absolutely. I never met him before in person. We'd communicated on a few issues, really cool guy. Would you say so Simone?Simone: Yeah. Like super awesome.Malcolm: Richard Hedania, a really nice guy as well. Robin Hanson, who we, we, we'd actually met him before. But. And of course Ayla, we, we, we're old friends, you know, she's been on this channel before but we did get in a fight with someone there and I am very excited to tell you guys this [00:03:00] tale, because it was Eliezer Ukoski, but before we go further on that, I want to talk about a secret that we, we had a mystery.Malcolm: The PronatalistSimone: Foundation had a mystery. Oh, I can tell this story. Yeah. So for the past few months, maybe closer to a year, we've received the odd random donation from someone. And it was the same person in the same amount each time, but it was very random timing. I could never predict when these would come in.Simone: And it's very unusual for someone to donate. Multiple times like frequently like that. So we were always like very flattered and pleased. We didn't know this person We didn't recognize their name, but we're like, this is amazing. Like, thank you so much It means a lot to us and it really does and then we actually Met that person recently and RandomlyMalcolm: at the conference, you were talking to her and she mentioned she was the AndSimone: she mentioned that, yeah, that, that she was the mystery donor and that the reason why she donates turns out to be the coolest reason for [00:04:00] donating that I've ever heard before.Simone: And I think it's the only way we should ever receive donations in the future. So she has a group of friends who she l

Michael Gibson joins to discuss his book Paper Belt on Fire, which chronicles his work with Peter Thiel's fellowship program investing in young talent.He explains how old institutions like academia are declining yet retain lingering prestige, and the development of new ecosystems and hierarchies based on competence. Michael argues creativity comes from outside stale hierarchies, citing the conflict between legitimate prestige and disruptive greatness.They debate how far we are from the decentralized network state, and if COVID accelerated institutional failure. Malcolm notes elite alternative communities forming, while Simone asks if the paper belt’s dysfunction will deter its acolytes. Overall Michael concludes we need more inspirational stories of success outside institutions.Simone Collins: . [00:00:00] I'm super excited for this. Hello and welcome to another episode of Basecamp where today we have a very special guest and someone who's writing I really enjoy but also whose work I probably enjoy even more, Michael Gibson.Simone Collins: You probably, if you've heard of Michael, I've heard of him because of his book, Paper Belt on Fire. However, he's in other circles, much more well known for being the co founder of 1517, a very unique type of venture capital fund that doesn't just focus on sort of already proven older entrepreneurs, but rather really young people.Simone Collins: They are investing in, in people like pre college. It's amazing. We're going to talk about all these things. But in this conversation, we are really hoping to dive into his book, which I read as soon as an audio book was available paper belt on fire which really aligns with a lot of the stuff that we're saying.Simone Collins: is much more eloquently written than the way we would write it. It's, it's sort of a mixture of philosophy prognostication, but also like personal history and history of the 1517 fund, which is absolutely fascinating. So we're [00:01:00] really excited to talk with you about it.Would you like to know more?Michael Gibson: Okay. Yeah. Thanks for having me on.Michael Gibson: And You know, thanks for the kind words as well, both about, you know, whatever, my writing style, but also about what we're doing. Yeah, the book I, I maybe How would I boil it down? I said something like because why would I have memoir? In philosophy and then, you know, behind the scenes account, venture capital and backing young people, I think, I think it comes down to strange people do strange things and when the times get tough, the weird GoPro and I wanted to take people behind the scenes and add some color and story to, you know, some of these characters I've worked with over the years.Michael Gibson: One, the one thing I guess part of my bio okay, why tell this story is the, we have Danielle Strachman, my co founder of 1517, we helped Peter Thiel start his fellowship program in 2010, and that was a program where [00:02:00] 100, 000 was given to 20 individuals a year. The two conditions were one, you had to be 19 and under to apply.Michael Gibson: And two, you couldn't be enrolled in university. So you had to drop out or take time off or maybe you never went. And across five years of co running that program, we saw incredible things come out of it. We, you know, most notable examples are helping Vitalik Buterin launch Ethereum Dylan Fields created a company called Figma that was acquired by Adobe for 20 billion last year.Michael Gibson: Austin Russell. Founded a company called Luminor Technologies. They make a LIDAR system for cars. They went public in 2020. So the, the Teal Fellowship had a lot of great successes and there's a independent, this guy is probably the best venture capital analyst in terms of being an outsider at CB Insights.Michael Gibson: And he put up a tweet in fact, last week, where he did a deep dive on the success of the Teal Fellowship. And he, he. [00:03:00] Posted the hit rate, like how many of these people, if there's 20 people in every class, you know, what's the rate at which people create, you know, unicorn billion dollar businesses. And, and, you know, his conclusions were like, wow, this hit rate is something like 7%, which in the world of venture capital is, is quite astonishing.Michael Gibson: So, you know, there's this program out there that, that the world hasn't really heard about mainly because Peter Thiel is, is persona non grata. The media hates him, the publishing world hates him, and so no one wanted to hear this story. And since I was there and part of it, I, that was the story I wanted to tell.Michael Gibson: So there'sMalcolm Collins: two things I wanted to discuss really quickly tied to what you just said. The second one we'll talk about next, which is, is how the media like tried to keep your book from being promoted. I think as much as it otherwise would have been given. You know how big the things you guys are doing actually are.Malcolm Collins: But the first thing I wanted to talk about

Malcolm and Simone have an insightful discussion about why fashion has changed so little since the 1990s, unlike the dramatic shifts seen in previous decades.Simone argues this stagnation stems from supply chain optimization and globalization, which have homogenized clothing production and limited variation. She cites how historical fashion shifts correlated with advances in materials and manufacturing capabilities. Now we've reached an equilibrium where most clothing uses the same global supply chains.They extend this idea to ponder other areas where change may have slowed, like scientific advances, celebrity culture, and content creation. Malcolm suggests fewer new stars emerge because media consolidation limits breakout opportunities.Overall they conclude that despite feeling accelerated, technological progress has also locked society into certain optimized systems that resist innovation. However, they see potential for fashion to evolve again through augmented realities, prosthetics, and body modification.Simone: [00:00:00] It was something that you would actually change fashion. And most people would have switched around several times. It was unusual to have not changed your gender in this... In this like post singularity culture, which is, I don't know. I mean, I, Ian Banks is a very prescient author, soMalcolm: you never know.Malcolm: I think types of flightiness will be among the populations that are bred out of our species.Simone: I don't know, man, because in this world, men could turn into women and have babies. So, their fertility rate might be pretty goodWould you like to know more?Simone: Hello, Malcolm. Hello,Malcolm: Simone. I was on Facebook this morning and she always needs me to find something to mentally challenge her every day or engage her. And so this is my task today. As I said before, my life is the framing device of Arabian Nights. If I don't find something interesting to talk to her about every day, I'm so, [00:01:00] today it was this meme that's been going around.Malcolm: That if you look at how much fashions, cars, build, like architecture changed from like the 50s to the 60s. The 60s to the 70s, the 70s to the 80s, the 80s to the 90s. It was really dramatic. Like you look at an 80s outfit versus the 90s and these were common, you know, like common outfits.Malcolm: If you in the nineties dressed in an outfit that was common in the eighties, people would think you. We're like in a Halloween costume. However, if you look at the, the entire period of the 2000s and to some extent, the later 90s, so 1995 till today, almost nothing has changed. If you looked at footage of a street, like a random corner in New York, other than all the s**t there now, because cities are beginning to fall apart you would, Not see that much, like you wouldn't be able to tell when it took place outside of like the size of people's phones and this is really [00:02:00] fascinating and so the question was, why is it that I can wear an outfit from like 2002 and I can go to a party in it today and everyone would be like, yeah, that's like just a totally normal outfit.Malcolm: Why did things stop changing? And the default answer, and this was the answer that I came to originally, because I saw the video, I might have been primed in it, but it's also what I was thinking, is it was the rise of the internet. The rise of the internet just made communication so ubiquitous. There was no reason for things to change anymore, and it became harder for things to change, because it was easier to access sort of any content from that moment till the beginning of the internet.Malcolm: And Simone goes, no, the answer is obvious to me. And I actually think you might be right. So do you want to go into it?Simone: Yeah, I'm almost certain that the lack of meaningful change in fashion is a change in basically globalization, manufacturing and global supply chains, which [00:03:00] has sort of led to an optimization of clothing creation.Simone: That has led to this sort of convergence in fashions where things aren't meaningfully changing. In other words, the primary driver of distinct fashions in the past wasn't fashion itself. It wasn't like, you know, trends or stuff that people thought was pretty. It was more like the way that clothing was manufactured.Simone: Now, of course there were like weird sumptuary laws in the past that would sort of dictate who was allowed to know what. Describe a sumptuary law. A sumptuary law is basically a law saying if you're not rich. You're not allowed to do, or wear, or own this thing. So this one would be the color purple, for example.Simone: The color purple really long shoes had sumptuary laws associated with it. I think there were some foods that had sumptuary laws. Ermine the, the fabric that you typically associate with lining a royal person's cloak things like that. So that might dictate fashion a little bit. But,Malcolm: I pushed back on her when you said this first.Malcolm: And I said, no

Malcolm and Simone have a thoughtful discussion about the meaning of utopia, examining why abundance, luxury, and leisure often fail to bring lasting happiness. They reflect on wealthy people they know who seem unhappy despite having everything, and posit that utopia may actually lie in having the opportunity to meaningfully impact the future and matter.Malcolm suggests that living during a pivotal point in history provides that chance to matter. Simone notes people likely imagine utopia as simply spending time with loved ones, but Malcolm argues experiencing abundance reveals its emptiness. They discuss the ennui displayed in The Great Gatsby, and debate how to convey this truth to their kids.Ultimately they conclude utopia isn't defined by material comforts, but by the chance to pursue intrinsic values and make a difference. Even those with privilege can achieve this if they use their position wisely.Malcolm: [00:00:00] But here's really when people go into fantasy worlds. Right. This, this, I find really interesting. The most persistent fantasy world concept, you know, like in D or D or something like that is you was a group of people who are diverse, meaningfully diverse, often actually different.Malcolm: And who do you actually get along with are working to change something that ends up impacting the future of that entire universe, that that fantasy that you get was in the most commonly created fantasy world actually falls into this model that we have of what true happiness comesSimone: from. But most people would never intentionally sign up for that, like not for the world because it's a lot of work and it's scary and they might have to.Simone: Sleep outside, a fox might chew on their head.Would you like to know more?Simone: Malcolm Collins. Hello.Malcolm: Hello, Simone [00:01:00] Collins. I love you to death. And today we are going to talk about what I think is an interesting topic that I was musing on. So I was , watching one of these shows, right? Where they have the You know, the island made of gold or the city of gold, right? And it really got me thinking about okay, so you go to an island where there's a city of gold or gems or something like that, you know, the classic trope is you get to this place and obviously the signs that we now associate with status and luxury don't actually bring you any happiness.Malcolm: They're not actually of utility was in this island because they are. So abundant. And then it got me thinking about utopias throughout history and what would a utopia be within our modern context. So historically one of the most common types of utopia. And I think that this is the one that's really talked about in the Bible is a land where whenever you plant crops, They always grow like this is the Garden of Eden, right?Malcolm: So it's, it's a land where you can always have food, like food isn't scarce. But you still have to [00:02:00] put in some level of work for that food. You know, they had the, the, at least as much foresight to understand a land where just food appears as soon as you want it. That would be a, a, a nightmare, even, even to these, these early people.Malcolm: They were quickly able to to understand that concept, but today, if you just had a land that produce food, whenever you put stuff in it, or food, you could work for, I guess, on a treadmill and then food exists I think most people would find that to be a dreadfully boring and uninteresting and disengaging place.Malcolm: So then this started to frame for me, okay, what is a utopia these days? What does a utopia look like these days? So I want to hear your thoughts first.Simone: First, I think utopias are more defined by an absence of things that people don't want. I think about the song Big Rock Candy Mountain, which a lot of people were introduced to by Oh Brother Where Art Thou?Simone: And like the lyricsMalcolm: No, no, no. [00:03:00] Way more people were introduced to it bySimone: Flapjack. I don't know what Flapjack is. What isMalcolm: Flapjack? Flapjack is a cartoon. . So the team that worked on Flapjack then went on to create like tons of shows that we now know.Malcolm: It's, hold on, ISimone: am actually freaking out about that. It's fine, Malcolm. It's fine. I don't get out much or even go online much. Okay. Okay. TheMalcolm: regular show adventure time at gravity falls, bravest warriors, Steven universe, Craig's Creek. Okay.Malcolm: KO summer camp Island Hilda amphibia owl house.Simone: Okay, I haven't heard about most of these, so I'm not feeling bad anymore. It was a very important show in the history of television. I'm not a child, I don't watchMalcolm: cartoons. I do, because they're great.Simone: Yes, they are, and I love that you watch cartoons, and our children love you for that too.Simone: Anyway, this is originally a folk song. That was more about the life of someone who rides the rails, like a bum, essentially a vagabond. So it's, it's like all the, the, the [00:04:00] things that are in th

In this thought-provoking discussion, Spencer Greenberg shares his predictions for how AI could transform society in the next 10 years. He envisions prolific AI spam, propaganda bots, highly addictive personalized content streams, and hacked emotions. But AI also holds promise for revolutionary advances in healthcare and entertainment. Overall, Spencer emphasizes AI's vast potential for both tremendous benefit and harm to humanity.Spencer: [00:00:00] systems like tick tock, imagine a world where it's generating billions of new pieces of content every day with, with generative AI, or even going a step further, generating custom AI content for your mind.Spencer: And then it sees how much you like it and then generate it and it tweaks its generation process. So we could imagine a world in 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, where you're actually seeing AI generated content personalized to you that you just kind of. Receive in a stream and become just insanely addicted to.Would you like to know more?Malcolm: Hello. We are so excited to be here today with Spencer Greenberg of the clearer thinking podcast, and also famously like the clearer thinking organization.Malcolm: We the, the guy who is running this project, which is now fact checking trying to review psychological research to see if it's replicable as it's being published, which is just so cool. We've known him for years, almost as long as we've known each other, and he is... One [00:01:00] of the sort of social leaders of the EA rationalist diaspora in the New York area.Malcolm: And just an incredibly respected gentlemen scientists in our opinion. And by gentlemen scientists, we mean one of those people who is out there. outside of mainstream academia conducting really greatSpencer: research.Simone: And you can tell he's one of the leaders because he vehemently denies it. And yet he like builds all the stuff that everyone uses.Simone: So.Spencer: Well,Malcolm: I so I mean, he's definitely a thought leader in the Gentleman's Science Network because he's created the software that everyone's using to do it right now. Like I would say. 80% of the independent research is probably done on his software right now. But where we wanted to go with this one is we wanted to talk about where humanity is going into the future.Malcolm: So let's start with the question of where do you think we're going to be in 10 years?Spencer: So I should start by saying, this is wild speculation, predicting the future is incredibly hard. So take everything I say with a massive grain of salt. A lot of that's going to be wrong, [00:02:00] but with that caveat behind me, I will speculate.Spencer: I think that AI is going to have an absolutely massive effect on society. I think it's. It's hard to really fathom right now all the different ways, but, but I think we're going to see it coming. I think a few areas we'll see it coming. One is in spam and manipulation. There are already a bunch of countries that have warehouses of people that are essentially putting propaganda onto Twitter and social media.Spencer: This is well known, but I think that that is going to be nothing compared to. A million bots that are powered by AI, right? It's one thing to have, 300 people in a warehouse. It's another thing to have a million AI bots, right? It's also these AI bots are now at the point where they could all have different personalities.Spencer: They could all say unique things in line with those personalities. They could have a lot, they can be sleeper agents where mostly they just tweet or post totally normal stuff 99% of the time, but then go into full gear. to promote propaganda. So that's just one little facet. Let's start there.Malcolm: I was going to [00:03:00] ask.Malcolm: So Elon is right when he's saying you need to limit access to these platforms now and any platform that doesn't is just going to become swarmed with bots.Spencer: I think it's complicated. I mean, I do think, I do think this is going to be a massive problem. Whether the current approaches Twitter wants to use will work.Spencer: I don't know. I mean, almost nobody's on Twitter blue relative to the whole Twitter population. So I'm not sure how they're going to do that. Maybe what they'll do is make it harder and harder. To do anything as a non Twitter blue user, but I don't know that that solution will actually work. I think it's going to be an arms race and the very difficult one.Spencer: The closer and I guess to be able to do what a human can do. The harder it is to actually detect that it's an AI, right?Malcolm: Actually that brings me to something that's been happening recently on Reddit, and I don't know if you've seen this phenomenon, but, reddit's in this big fight right now with like the mod teams, and it appears that Reddit Corporate is using lots of AIs.Malcolm: Actually, they recently had to block out like the programming [00:04:00] subreddit or something like that, because they figured out that the Reddit Corporate

Malcolm and Simone contrast their parenting approach with Jordan Peterson's authoritarian tactics. They believe kids should develop internal morals, not obey external authority.Simone: what you do now with our children is show when their will has crossed a line with your will, whereas Jordan Peterson's strategy is, I am going to let my will rule this household, and you have to bend to my will. Mm, .Malcolm: Yeah, no, no, no. It makes perfect sense.Malcolm: And I understand, like, I, I really, I get it like, and I, and again, I'm saying, I actually don't think it's wrong for the type of, of, of families that really crave structure. I think it's incredibly effective.Malcolm: I want to raise kids where the punishment for unjust action is. is how it makes them feel about themselves, not an external authority applying that punishment because then you enter the real world and you see external authorities not applying punishment for bad action.Malcolm: You see the zeitgeist in society says, this is what's good, right? Because look at our society right [00:01:00] now, the things that rewards the things that cancels, right? These are all the little kids that were taught to obey authority, you know, and they. They go out into society and they're looking for what's right and what's wrong.Malcolm: And so they look at what is the authority punishing? What is the authority not punishing? The things the authority doesn't punish, well, those must be the right things. And the thing the authority does punish, those must be the wrong things. Instead of trying to determine those things for themselves and take their own mental weight for that.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hi Malcolm. HelloMalcolm: Simone. So you read this Jordan Peterson book and we've been talking more about various things that we either agree with or don't agree with in it. And one of the areas I really want to focus on is parenting strategy. We touched on it a bit with the eight passengers situation video.Malcolm: But I, I IMalcolm: don't have a prescription where I'm not like, this is the right way to do it. I actually think for different. [00:02:00] genetic sociological clusters, which likely are inherited through a family. There are different strategies. So contrast two broad strategies, the Jordan Peterson strategy, right? Which is and we'll go into it, but essentially it's a very controlling strategy that is focused on the adult breaking the child's will.Malcolm: It'sSimone: about discipline and structure.Malcolm: Yes. And then the other strategy, which is much closer to the strategy that our family employs and was employed with both of us when we were growing up, I'd called the Rodney Atkins strategy which comes from the, the he's mine song, great country song if you haven't heard it.Malcolm: But the thesis of what happens in the song is a guy catches a group of teenagers out smoking in a field and is, is, is taking them to his dad, to, to what he thinks is their dad's house, right? One of their dad's house. Cause he saw where they were running. And he's, he's complaining that these kids won't speak when spoken to, and they were getting up to mischief.[00:03:00]Malcolm: And the dad's like, you know, he's mine. He's really proud of his son for doing all that in a way. And he's like, if you knew me back then it'd be no surprise to you what he's done. And then, you know, other things like the kids that have football game and somebody takes a cheap shot at their little kicker and he.Malcolm: Punches the kid and he ends up getting removed from the game. And, you know, he's obviously being punished and he's like, talking about how he jumps up in the stadium and shouts, he's mine. And he's all proud of his son for doing this. But it reminds me a lot of parenting strategies that my parents utilized for me to the extent where I really realized, and I think also part of the, he's mine song, it keeps going back to, if you understood what I was like when I was a kid.Malcolm: You would understand, one, that the same traits that I am nurturing when I'm a kid are what eventually led me to become successful, and what will allow them to become successful, one[00:04:00] but two, that any other reaction to this, you know, again, it is showing that it is potentially an intergenerational genetic thing would obviously be a, a deleterious reaction, and I know this from when I was a kid.Malcolm: So, Let's go into the, well, okay. So here's an example from my own childhood before we go into the, what Jordan Peterson recommends is I remember I got in trouble once at school with, with one of my teachers I, I don't remember the specifics of it, but it felt very unjust to me at the time.Malcolm: And so I went to my mom afterwards and I was like, Oh, the teacher said this about what I had done. And she goes, Oh, you don't need to listen to them. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And she goes, well, I mean, she's an elementary school teacher. She's not exactly in adult s

We explore overlooked aspects of Africa's future, including its cultural/genetic diversity, selective pressures, and mindsets. We discuss resilience to woke ideology, potential for conflict, impacts of globalism's decline, and groups embracing technology. Though many regions face collapse, Africa's sheer variety may allow winning cultures to emerge.Malcolm: [00:00:00] in Africa those conflicts are going to get worse in the short term, but I, where it all hashes out.Malcolm: A lot of the world's winners, I'd say probably half of the world's winning cultural groups are probably going to come out of Africa. Just due to the sheer diversity of the continent. In literally every context, a thing can be diverse.Simone: Yeah, I'm excited. Especially because the more people in different cultures.Simone: In and from Africa we've encountered the more it's oh my gosh, this is this is gonna these are cultures that over time and with more and more technology are going to react in really interesting waysWould you like to know more?Simone: Hello.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. Today is going to be a fascinating topic. It actually came up because yeah, I was, I had a a friend interviewing me and we were talking about what the future of Africa is going to be and in a pronatalist world, but What's the end goal with Africa?Malcolm: What ends up happening with Africa? And it also reminded me of a conversation we'd had [00:01:00] with Edward Dutton when he was over at our house. He was asking why is it that so many people in the pro natalist movement are black and specifically African? The two groups that are most disproportionately represented in the pronatalist movement are people from Jewish backgrounds, sometimes now they're secular and people from African backgrounds. And so the question was why?Malcolm: And I actually I don't feel like I had a really good question for it when he was asking me when he was filming for this documentary thing, but I've been thinking a lot more about it and I think I have a better reason now. So at the time, my intuition was, is it was for the same reason as Jewish people disproportionately, IMalcolm: think. That's still true. I was just pulling at the wrong threads. So specifically what I had thought that it was intergroup identity, like the idea of being like, I like my people. I have no shame in my people. I want my people to exist in the future. And [00:02:00] that was a big part of it.Malcolm: However, I actually think now what it is familiarity was a mental framework. Of intergenerational tribalistic thinking where people, where you recognize that different groups are different from you, but you plan to work alongside them. Intergenerationally. , in a non dominant way.Malcolm: Like it, not in a way where you plan to eventually convert them. And that is a type of thinking that sort of, I guess you could say our entire movement is really heavily based around. And it's something that when you talk with Jewish people, they're immediately familiar with it. Oh yes. I understand the concept of working alongside people who are different from me without eventually trying to convert them and living in a multicultural, environments.Malcolm: And when you talk to people from Africa, because many of them have really strong tribal identities. They really understand this as well. Oh, yes, of course. I understand the idea of, [00:03:00] my, my people might be different from this group's people, but we would still be able to work together long into the future, but here's where it gets interesting.Malcolm: What actually ends up happening with Africa as wokeism continues to spread because right now, as wokeism has spread around the world this sort of. We call it the mind virus, right? The super virus. It is a sterilizing a medic set, which is eventually going to destabilize many of these regions, but it requires regions often to have a sufficient amount of wealth to easily spread among them and sufficient amount of like social technology.Malcolm: And I think to an extent China has been resistant and India has been resistant, like South and East Asia have been resistant to it. But the cultures that they had alternative to it seem to just do very poorly against technology and lead to some of the lowest birth rates in the world.Malcolm: Even lower than woke populations. Middle East, I think this is something that [00:04:00] people might be surprised about, but it's been uniquely susceptible to wokeism, or not uniquely, but surprisingly susceptible to wokeism. And the reason it's been surprisingly susceptible to wokeism is not because wokeism penetrates the entire depth of the society, but because the society is very hierarchical, and the people at the top of that society, Try to ingratiate themselves or like socially get along with to some extent Western friend groups that are of similar socioeconomic levels and as such begin to adopt some woke ideas that then per permeate down throughout society.Malcolm: So, a great ex

Malcolm details the aggressive dating tactics he used to find a wife, treating it like a sales and marketing funnel. He optimized for volume and pre-vetted candidates.Simone: [00:00:00] Yeah. And I'd also love to talk, I think like tactically, I think people would find it interesting, the things you did to make your high throughput screening scaleMalcolm: So really important thing to remember is every interaction with an individual you might marry can be thought of as a roll of the dice, which has a probability that they are going to be interested in you and interested in choosing you as a product on the market. Right. And. That probability can be influenced by two things.Malcolm: Either by increasing the probability that every individual partner you interact with would be interested in marrying you. Or increase the number of people you're interacting with. Both of those would end in the same percentage probability that you find a wife.Malcolm: So one of the biggest things is just really, really high throughput. But now we're going to talk about finding a wife as a sales strategy. Because I think this is the core way to conceptualize it.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. So [00:01:00] we recorded a secret video because when I put it into Claude, it was like, oh, no, no, no, you, I cannot even talk about this video. I cannot share this video. It was on how to get people to sleep with you. But the, the, the key. You know, set up for intro for this video is the way that you perfect getting people to sleep with you, specifically women.Malcolm: So we're going to talk about this from the context of men it will develop one strategy in the same way that. And that strategy will not be the ideal strategy for finding the type of person that you're going to marry. And yet it is the mechanism that many men use to attempt to find that person.Malcolm: This is the same way that many women get confused. They go out on dating markets and they think that their value on the sex market is their value on the marriage market, and it is not. In other words,Simone: they think that like, if an eight will sleep with them, then they should be able to marry an eight when really a lazy eight just wanted to sleep with them a three or four because they didn't [00:02:00] want to bother trying to get someoneMalcolm: harder to get.Malcolm: But the point here being is that these two markets are different. They're not just different for girls. They're also different for guys and the strategies that they get women to sleep with you. They can still get women to marry you, but the type of women you want to sleep with. Well, let's put it this way.Malcolm: They're typically the type of woman who's going to be more promiscuous. They're typically the type of woman that you can, like, pick up at a bar. They are not the type of woman that you want to raise your kids. That you want to, and this is a, you know, a post that I saw recently. This one I could not agree with you.Malcolm: You look at parenting books, . And they go, look, if these books were honest, what they would actually be is books targeted at single guys. And if they were a 10 chapter book, Nine of the chapters would be focused on how to get a good wife, because who you matter both genetically and parenting style and the general environment and vibe of the house that the kids grow up in matter so much more than any parenting strategy you could conceive.Malcolm: Simply implement who you marry is [00:03:00] everything. If you, you know, make a point and you're like, okay, I am going to make a sacrifice on her being a little narcissistic. Well, now your kids are going to be a little narcissistic and they're going to grow up in an environment ruled by a narcissist, which will make their lives.Malcolm: It's harder, right? And so when you are out there and you have developed a strategy, a strategy that gets women who you didn't know before that night to sleep with you is going to intrinsically target thoughts, you know, T H O T's right? Like individuals who will sleep with a guy because they believe that guy is just so arousing in the moment that they're just going to go out and sleep with them.Malcolm: And yet the type of woman who you, I think most of our viewers would want to marry, right? Would never sleep with a guy in a scenario like that. So of course, if you implement these strategies, you're going to get these horrible, untrustworthy vipers of women that the MGTOW community has a waltz. Right.Malcolm: It's not a waltz. It's like a guy's out fishing. Right. Then you say, he's like, this pond only has [00:04:00] catfish in it. And it's like, well, you're using a catfish lure. Like, of course you're only catching catfish. So anyway, let's go into how to actually secure a high quality wife and one day we might be able to, maybe we'll do it on the subreddit or something like that, release the, the evil video that Claude thought was too effective at get

Malcolm and Simone discuss the unsustainable lifestyle promoted by "trad wives" on social media. They argue these women are actually trophy wives dependent on hidden male labor.Simone: [00:00:00] they show all this video or photos of them making pies at home and living in a very cottage core way and like doing, hanging up laundry to air dry. And picking mushrooms and they're these women for the most part, like I get this, like. Really visceral reaction to these because the lives that these women are living our lives of complete leisure and luxury.Simone: Like they think that what they're doing is becoming a trad wife when really what they're doing is becoming a trophy wife. And what they don't realize is that the men that they're marrying. Can't afford that a man who has a trophy wife really basically should be independently wealthyMalcolm: every time you see one of these women who is indulging in this quote unquote trad lifestyle, also see a man. Who's off camera, who's secretly working to afford all of this and is sacrificing to afford all of this. And yet the woman is acting as if she is the one making the sacrifice, living in abundant leisure.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. [00:01:00] This is one where I had sort of a concept for a video and she didn't want to talk too much about it beforehand because she's like, Oh, I want to be surprised.Simone: Yeah, I'll ask dumb questions and see what you say. Well,Malcolm: we were talking, you know, in reference to the Barbie movie that it's very clear that the women are not happy in the world that they have created.Malcolm: In the world that feminism created for women, it appears that this new model doesn't work and women are living really systemically unhappy lives.Malcolm: Based on how, how feminized they've made the world there's some great statistics on this as well that I might be able to put on state screen showing that generally the more a woman buys into feminism or the more that she lives in a feminist environment, the less happy she will be.Malcolm: And they, over time, women's happiness has been going down as the number of well, as, as feminism has won more and more victories in our societySimone: happiness, or maybe it's just mental health problems.Simone: I think it's just rates of mental health problems, which of course is like primarily depression.Simone: Like, but it's not just happiness. It's [00:02:00] like all sorts of bad things. So I think it's, it diminishes the problem. Oh yeah, no, it'sMalcolm: women's happiness. It's declining over time.Simone: Yeah. But I think if you also look at rates of, of women's mental health that mental health liberals and conservatives, especially amongMalcolm: women. Yes, it is. It's really terrible. This world is uniquely bad for women more worse than it was when women had less rights. When I say less rights, I don't mean like 1950s. I'm talking like 1980s, right? And that is fascinating.Simone: I don't, I don't, first off, I want to push back a little bit and say, I don't think this is about rights.Simone: I think this is about, Like cultural expectations and quotas and things like that. Like, I think that it's very important that men and women are treated equally under the wall, but I'm sorry, under the law. But actually right now, of course, men are not treated equally under the law. Men are much more at risk, for example, in divorces with child custody, et cetera.Simone: So I don't even think that it's, it's like equality. That's the problem isMalcolm: rights are responsibilities. We have [00:03:00] pointed out multiple times on the show that when people. Experience a post scarcity environment that we assume they would indulge in hedonism, but instead the most frequent thing is they indulge in self victimization because that removes responsibility from them.Malcolm: And the thing that people hate most is responsibility and as rights changed, as it became possible for women to work and compete with men in the workplace, then became the expectation of that lifestyle. for every woman that she does in addition to other things that she wants to do with her life. And, and biologically women are just going to be more driven to do things like want to have kids and stuff like that and feel it harder when they don't do those things.Malcolm: So. In ignoring the biology, yet giving equal expectations. Now, here's where we come in and we have a very different take than I think traditional conservatives. I think a lot of people, they want to go back to maybe the way things were before women's rights, before all this. And yet, I do not think that world was either efficacious Or an [00:04:00] ideal world for women.Malcolm: I think that it was worse than, than less ideal. I just think it was a pretty shitty world for women. If you go back 1920s, you know, 1850s, a terrible place. I would not want that for my daughters. But then the question becomes, what does a stable vision for fe

Malcolm and Simone have an in-depth discussion about the underlying messaging in the new Barbie movie. They analyze how the movie portrays feminism, gender dynamics, and societal roles.Malcolm: [00:00:00] obviously big spoilers in this, in this talk through I think structurally every part of the movie was literally as based as could be first part of the movie women, they do not treat men with any respect. This is seen as a world created from the aspirations of women in our society. Second part of the world, they go to the real world. It turns out the patriarchy doesn't exist, except in high school bookstores. Keep in mind, they could have gone to any bookstore. Could have been a public library.Malcolm: It could have been a college. It's a high school bookstore. Then They come back to this world, Ken convinces everyone voluntarily to join this new realityMalcolm: when they run into people who have beliefs that are different from them, or a way of structuring their lives that is different from them, they immediately say, these people must have been brainwashed.Malcolm: She goes over, she brainwashes them all by making them sad because they were happy in [00:01:00] patriarchy land.Malcolm: They are now sad outside of patriarchy land, right? Like, that's the process of the brainwashing. And then they take power again by taking advantage of men's good nature and genuine care for them while they have genuinely no care for men. Then... It ends with them taking complete control again, making all the men homeless again, , the man decides, MGTOW, very clearly said, MGTOW is the only real pathway for men.Malcolm: Then the main character gets this whole, what was I made for song? And it's having kids, playing with kids, being a part of kid's life. I couldn't see anything more men's rights than this movie, scene per scene. It'sSimone: pretty weird. But then why is it then that progressive audiences apparently think that it's a very feminist film?Would you like to know more?Simone: . So Malcolm, what the hell was going on with the Barbie [00:02:00] movie? Like,Malcolm: yes, we just watched it yesterday. And unironically, it may be one of the most based movies I've ever seen. But from a very weird perspective, like, I think, I actually question this. I... I know from interviews that the person who wrote it did not intend for it to be, have an incredibly anti feminist message.Simone: Yeah, I don't think it's intentionally anti feminist, forMalcolm: sure. My read is that either somebody in the editing process or somebody that had... Ability to influence the scenes that were shown and like dialogue lines occasionally.Simone: This is my take and I think I have the correct take which is that feminism as it is today is so inherently anti feminist that any true depiction of feminist stances and views and world views is going to show how toxic it is.Simone: I think that's what itMalcolm: is. Well, we can talk through the movie and obviously big [00:03:00] spoilers in this, in this talk through and, and the audience can decide and add in the comments. Whether they think there was any, like, saboteur on the team trying to make the movie have, andSimone: I think Feminism is its own saboteur, Malcolm.Simone: No, no. SoMalcolm: what's really interesting about it, it had a really cohesive anti feminist message. It wasn't like bits and pieces. It was like really sort of clever in the way it was done. So first we'll start with, so we'll just go through the various stages of the movie with everyone sort of telling its own anti feminist message.Malcolm: Hmm. Okay. So it starts in Barbie world, right? And it's sort of made clear throughout the movie that this original iteration of Barbie world is the female utopia that both women dream of the women who live in our world dream of. And that the you know, woke corporations are fighting to create.Simone: Yeah, like, Every [00:04:00] Night's Girls Night. And it's Barbie's Dream House, not Ken's Dream House.Malcolm: Well, so, there was a few things. So, one, Every Night's Girls Night was funny because it's, it's true. Like, you hear it and you're like, Yeah, but there's many bars where every night is actually girls night and there's never, almost never guys nights at any of these places.Malcolm: Like it just sort ofSimone: subtly shows, I don't know, isn't every night guys night at a gay bar?Malcolm: No, no, no. So girls nights, a specific thing where girls drink free at a bar. You've never been to a bar, so you don't know what I'm talking about. You've literally never been to a bar, so you literally have no idea what the humor in that joke is in Barbie world.Malcolm: They say that as if it's some like. Comical great thing for women yet. It's reflected in the real world where every night is also girls night. And by realSimone: world, we mean real world. And like, actually not in the movie. Cause there'sMalcolm: actually in our world and what it shows is our world is already so [00:05:00] comicall

Description: Brian Chau joins Simone and Malcolm to discuss the latest data on Gen Z sexuality and relationships. They analyze declining physicality, porn addiction, anime girl attraction, generalized neuroticism, and more "cursed" stats from Brian's interviews with young alt-righters.Brian Chau: [00:00:00] this episode specifically, was in part a, an excuse for me to interrogate the love lives of my Zoomer friends. I am on the older side of Zoomer of the Zoomers.Brian Chau: And yeah, I basically asked, I asked around. I asked all three of the alt right catboys that I know in real life. Yeah, and basically tried to get a kind of gestalt, like we were talking about, a kind of summary of their love lives. People were very happy to offer, you know, these kind of predilections, being into especially certain type of anime girls.Brian Chau: I feel like there is if you talk about a real life person who you're attracted to, I think there's this soft idea of, civil rights law coming, coming after you, if, or people, you know, who feel, who are, like, similar in appearance, feeling uncomfortable with that. And that's something that Zoomers have.[00:01:00]Brian Chau: Want to avoid, but that's the same is not true for, for anime girls. So, so it's almost considered this is like, this is like this kind of like weird post sexuality thingWould you like to know more?Simone: Well, hello, we are super excited to have a VIP guest with us today, Brian Chow, he is first and foremost in our minds, of course, and from for the past quite a while of the host of the amazing podcast from the new world, really good long listen, if you are looking for something good to listen to to learn from amazing interviews.Simone: But more recently, Brian has become a senior machine learning policy fellow. Brian at the Alliance for the Future, something that we shall talk about in another episode with him. But today, I think we're going to get into something really interesting. Brian, do you want to kick us offBrian Chau: here? Right. So I was I was listening to another great podcast Basecamp with Simone Collins and Malcolm, Simone and Malcolm Collins.Brian Chau: Yeah. So, so, so I listened to an episode that you guys done. You guys [00:02:00] did on your own about it was one of the ones about Zoomer sexuality and I thought I have so many takes on this and I'm not populating my sub stack with my Zoomer sexuality takes maybe, maybe like the paid feed, but you know, there's so many other things that I'm working on.Brian Chau: Right now that I just want to be more, I just want the Substack to be more laser focused on, the podcast to be more laser focused on. Yeah, you're high culture, we're low culture. Okay, yeah yeah, we will be talking about that eventually. And yeah, I thought this was a great venue to talk about it. I think that we have, you know, some similarities, some disagreements probably.Brian Chau: But I do think that there's just not enough, there's just not enough like... Horizontal exploration of this idea, right? This idea of kind of changing, changing the axis, changing how people interpret sexuality, the kind of like default narrative. This is the theme of my podcast often, is this kind of default narrative.Brian Chau: And this is like orthogonal [00:03:00] to like the actual thing that's happening. I think, I think the episode of course that really, really struck through to me was the one about I think like submissive and dominance. But also, you know, also this wasn't this was actually after this was released after I reached out to you guys.Brian Chau: But also, the one on alt right catgirls, that is very, very important topic of our generation. No, it's such a thingMalcolm: is that the the concept of the alt right catgirl I keep seeing and The, as the right has, because it used to be like the left was sex positive and the right was sex negative to some extent, and now the, the left has totally ceded any, any manifestation that is sex, sex positive for men, you know, if I'm, I want my overwatch to have, you know, sexy tracer, but that is a right wing idea.Malcolm: Which is really interesting.Brian Chau: Right, it's the Barstool [00:04:00] Conservatives, right? Yeah. Yeah, the party of, the party of horny men and also the people who hate horny men the most. Yeah, I think that's a good description of the Republican Party. Although, you know, although some of the, some of the the, the right, the right wing elite, you know, are coming around to it.Brian Chau: Have you guys talked about Bronze Age Pervert on the show? No. It's a good character to mention. We'd love for you to go deeper. Yeah. Okay, okay. So, yeah. So, Bronj's age pervert is this very hard to describe in one sentence. His, his philosophy is Nietzsche and bodybuilding.Brian Chau: Done. Easy. Yeah.Malcolm: Yeah. You describe him as like a, a poet he's much more interested in conveying poetry and an aesthetic than specific ideas in a way that is... It's really interesting

I recently discovered that the Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou? was actually based on a true story involving my family! In this video, I share the fascinating tale of how my great-grandfather tapped a popular 1930s musical group to help a politician he supported win a Texas governor's race against a candidate with ties to the KKK. I talk about the real-life people and events that inspired the movie's characters and plot, and reveal details that weren't included in the film. From the crazy water crystals business to Papio Daniel's flower company, learn the true history behind one of the Coen Brothers' most beloved movies!Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. And today is a very interesting episode for me because something very weird happened to me last week. There is a movie that I have liked, , since I was a kid. Cause it came out when I was in middle school. I want to say, Oh brother, where art thou? And when I first saw it, I was like, it is very weird how many similarities it has to stories my family told me about my great grandfather.Malcolm: But, I discounted these similarities for three reasons. One, it was very clearly based on the Odyssey. Two, it was very clearly based on the Bible and themes of biblical redemption. So I was like, okay, there's already so much content in this. It couldn't possibly also be based on a true story. And three, the whole thing takes place in Mississippi and all the stories I were told about took place in Texas.[00:01:00]Malcolm: So I ignored it. Well, a few days ago, I was Googling some of the characters from it. And they're like, oh yeah, Papio Daniel was based on a real Texas politician and I was like, like a huge wave hitting me. I was like, oh shi all of it was true? All of it was based on my great granddad? That is insane! And, and, and what's insane is I actually looked to see if there were YouTube videos covering this and there weren't.Malcolm: And I assume that part of it is due to how nuanced and niche this history is. It's all about it. Texas gubernatorial election in the in the the 1930s, I think but it is it is also like surprisingly accurate to the plot of the movie. So I am going to combine both what I was able to find in terms of historical evidence of what went down, as well as evidence from family oral tradition into essentially what happened here [00:02:00] and what is the true iteration of the story in oh brother where art thou if you were to to take it outWould you like to know more?Malcolm: so the first thing to note is is just so you know that like i'm not Making up that this is actually based on this Papio Daniel was a real Texas politician.Malcolm: He was a, a Texas governor and in the movie, he is the politician that attempts to use the popularity of this musical group to win office. In real life. What happened was, is, is my great grandfather, who was a radio station owner and a business magnate at the time, tapped Papio Daniel, who was the star of a musical group, to try to defeat a candidate who was supporting the Klan's interest in a Texas election.Malcolm: So the fact that this was a Klan group versus [00:03:00] an anti Klan group is accurate. What is mixed up in the storytelling is the who the different characters are. Papio Daniel, while the, the politician is named Papio Daniel, he would probably better be named. Carr P Collins, who is my ancestor, and he was somebody who wanted to have a political fight with a specific other somebody, and he tapped a musician to win that political fight.Malcolm: So, now we're gonna go back. First of all, you gotta understand the origins of this political fight. Why was he so, so, so angry? at this other candidate. Why did he need this other candidate to lose? And why was he looking for somebody to run against him? So we're going to go back three generations for this.Malcolm: But first, Simone, you saw the movie recently. What'd you think? You hadn't seen it in a long time. It's,Simone: it's a great movie. It's holds up incredibly well. And it's one of those movies that's stylized, but not in a way that makes it stuck in time or dated, [00:04:00] which I quite like.Malcolm: Yeah. Well, and you also didn't think our fans would care about this episode at all.Malcolm: ISimone: really, yeah, I, I, I failed to understand why this is interesting or why this matters.Malcolm: I think it's good evergreen content. If you have a family history that tells a part of history that other people haven't heard. It's interesting toSimone: you and nobody else cares. Everyone,Malcolm: nobody else cares. Apparently it was interesting enough to other people that they made a movie about it.Simone: I don't know. There's so many interesting, historically accurate elements of the movie, I think things that they throw in that they make important that they. It's a very nerdy, it's a surprisingly nerdy movie where people, the people who created it from clothing to products, to cars, to what people were.

We explore the phenomenon of cultural speciation - when cultures fragment into distinct new cultures. We discuss why groups feel most hostility towards similar groups, the role of cultural isolation, threats to young movements, Catholic orders as cultural "stem cells", and more.Malcolm: [00:00:00] Are you sayingSimone: that you're saying that Catholicism is a nepo baby?Malcolm: Catholicism is a nepo baby.Malcolm: It's a nepo baby of the Roman empire.Simone: I mean,Malcolm: we. So, I mean, there's many reasons why Constantine may have chosen. I mean, obviously, there's a reason he gave, but a lot of historians think that what was actually going on there is he really liked the Catholic Church as an alternate administrative unit that already had centers set up throughout the Roman Empire, which allowed him to To implement many reforms.Malcolm: AdministrationSimone: in aMalcolm: box. Yeah, it was like an administration in a box that allowed him to compete with the deep stateWould you like to know more?Malcolm: Hello, Simone. How's itSimone: going? Very good, Malcolm. I thought today we might talk a little bit about your theories on cultural speciation. In other words, how cultures split off into new entirely separate cultures.Malcolm: Yeah, so this is really important for us to talk about because we talk about the evolution of cultures a lot on this channel. [00:01:00] Yeah. The idea that cultures can be thought of as an evolving software sitting on top of our genetically prescribed sociological predilections, which is our hardware.Malcolm: And so, So what's really cool about cultural speciation events is one. We can see them in real time all around us. And two, by studying them and by looking at them, we can get a better understanding of why people, one, do something that appears very weird in the moment, and, and two, the long term consequences of this action and why it's important to like the development of human societies and why we might even be genetically coded and why we To do this action that can seem really weird because it leads to faster cultural evolution, right?Malcolm: Right. So this is, we're going to talk about what we call the Judean people's front problem. And this is from the Monty Python movie, the life of Brian, because it's a great example of this. There's this [00:02:00] little group of four people who are the Judean people's front. And this was about like the anti Roman.Malcolm: Jewish groups that were really common in Rome around the time of Jesus because this was just a thing in Rome. You want, actually, if you want to see more about this, you can watch this show, Rome. That's what it's called, right? The, the serial. Yeah. That was an APL. Oh, it's so good. It's so good.Simone: So,Malcolm: So I'll just do the skit because I'd like to put it here or I'll, you know, we'll have a link to it, but we'll get copyright strike if we do it.Malcolm: But essentially there's, there's like a small group of people in the, in the Coliseum. Another guy comes up to them. He's trying to join their group. He's Oh, I'd really to join the Judean people's front. And they're like, are you sure you want to join? And they, they're like, you got to really hate the Romans to join us.Malcolm: And he's Oh yeah, I really hate the Romans. And then they're like, the only thing we hate more than the. Romans is the people's front of Judea and then the guy goes, I thought we were the people's front of Judea.Malcolm: And they go, no, we're the Judean people's front and he goes, oh yeah, I hate the people's front of Judea. Oh. And of course the popular [00:03:00] front of Judea and he's who's the popular for that guy over there? And it's one guy sitting alone. And what you see there is what we call a cultural speciation event and the key aspect of a cultural speciation event.Malcolm: It's typically you see this one more with younger dynamic cultures, but you see it across all cultures where the highest amount of animosity and the highest amount of thinking about how you are different from people is about the groups that you are most similar to, not the groups you are most different from.Malcolm: So. A great place that you can see this if you're familiar with the effective altruists or the rationalists or the less wrong communities is between those communities, you know, the effective altruists and then you've got teapot Twitter and then you've got you know, the post rats, the post rationalists and broadly, these people have a lot of the same views on the world, but they are really obsessed with how, oh, well, I'm not exactly a rationalist.Malcolm: I'm part of this group. Like they're much more interested in these. Yeah. Subdivisions of the groups. [00:04:00] And these are all the things that I think the rational against wrong, the rationalistic is wrong. And that's why I really hate them. Or these are all the things I think effective altruistic gets wrong. In fact, I'd say it's almost like a, being a hipster.Malcolm: Th

Malcolm and Simone have a thought-provoking discussion contrasting toxic masculinity and toxic femininity. Malcolm argues that toxic femininity is actually more dangerous, as feminine mindsets optimize for safety over truth. He explains how female dominance in bureaucracies and power structures leads to collectivist thinking that coerces adherence to cultural norms over facts. They also touch on the pros and cons of masculine vs feminine psychologies, gender differences in locus of control, and whether empowering women or stagnant institutions drive the feminization of society.Malcolm: [00:00:00] Women, historically speaking and, and weak men, they were rewarded for relating to truth. Where the things that are true are the things that are least likely to get me killed for believing. Mm-hmm. , the things that I believe are true are the most normative things within our culture and the things that will upset the minimum number of other people.Malcolm: This is because women are physically much weaker than men and, and there is a, a set of men who just adopt a mindset like this as well, and that segment is growing due to exogenous chemicals likeMalcolm: such as endocrine disruptors which are making many males think more like females.Simone: I mean, it could be argued that the feminization of society is a product of female empowerment.Simone: Do you think it's that, or do you think it's that the organizations are the pathwaysMalcolm: to power now? If we didn't have the women's rights movement, society would become more feminine as it developed these large [00:01:00] bureaucracies.Would you like to know more?Simone: Hello, Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello, Simone. My beautiful wife.Simone: So today let's talk about toxic masculinity and femininity because it is something that comes up, especially I hear people talk more about toxic masculinity than femininity, but I think we should talk about both.Simone: What is your understanding? Of toxic masculinity, what does it mean to you? Cause what it means to me is, is like when people talk about toxic masculinity, it's really more that they're just shitting on masculinity. Like they're notMalcolm: You're right. I think culturally, when people talk about toxic masculinity today, they're just like, Oh, this is a masculine thing.Malcolm: I don't like it.Simone: Yeah or it's, it's, it's terrible that like men don't cry enough, that they don't feel safe crying and that's toxic. MenMalcolm: shouldn't feel safe crying. They're not being a safe provider to most of the parents. They're not giving them most of what they, they promised to give them,Simone: yeah. So I think that's, that's one picture of it. Well, what else is [00:02:00] toxic masculinity that men need to be dominant, that men are, that men should be allowed to be aggressive. And I think that what's really interesting is I, I see personally toxic masculinity the same way that I see mental health problems or like a mental health disorder which is a perspective actually that you gave me when you were writing one of.Simone: One of the books that, that we've collectively wrote really that you wrote, that I edited. But you, you explained to me and our readers that really the DSM, which is the primary body establishing what is a mental disorder is more a reflection of societal norms. Then a reflection of what is actually healthy or unhealthy.Simone: ThisMalcolm: is really important to know. So if you look at the DSM, which is a standard diagnostic manual, if you were to look at it in the seventies being gay would be considered a psychological illness, right? And if you look at it today, one of the debates they're having is. It's actually removing, sadism as a psychological illness because they're like, Oh, this is like a BDSM thing, [00:03:00] right?Simone: But in the past, wasn't being gay on the DSM?Malcolm: Yeah, it was.Malcolm: As I said, in the 70s, it was on the DSM. It was considered a psychological illness. So, as things get normalized in the society, we change them. And a lot of when we're talking about mental health, there is... I think an average male psychology and there is an average female psychology and there is gender dimorphism there and society adapts to that.Malcolm: However, not all males fall perfectly into the average male social set. And I think that Or the ever female. So I think what's toxic is when you create an environment in which status is based on one's normative behavior patterns tied to their gender of birth, so that they achieve status within a community by masturbating a.Malcolm: specific set of practices that they associate with being masculine or feminine. However, just acting on your own behavior, I don't think it's toxic in either context, although it's more toxic on the feminine side and it's more [00:04:00] toxic on the feminine side because a group that is all acting according to feminine biology, but it's also intelligent can move much more towards internal locus of control in a way that th

We discuss the aspects of Jordan Peterson's thinking that resonate with us and where we differ. We cover his reliance on archetypes and narratives, his traditional views on gender, and his appeal to personal responsibility and paternalism. Though we disagree on some areas, we find value in engaging with his perspectives.Simone: [00:00:00] I think that's kind of what it is with Jordan Peterson that okay, the tendency isn't exactly to be like this paternalistic disciplined ideal, this ordered ideal. But I think many readers would love a vision in which masculine equals order in which masculine is this like calm paternalistic ordered force that makes everything okay.Simone: I mean, again, it like brings me back to the daddy. MasculinityMalcolm: create a, a, almost a feminine lens through which masculinity canSimone: be translated. I wouldn't say, no, I wouldn't say it's feminine. And I wouldn't, and he would find this. An affront because he really hates Infantilism, but I think it's an infantalized version of masculinity.Would you like to know more?Simone: So Malcolm, you gave me a little bit of a homework assignment this week, didn't you?Malcolm: Well, so we were going to do a video on some of Jordan Peterson's ideas. And, and sort of where our ideas contrast with his and where our ideas align with his. And Simone was like, no, no, no, we have to, I have to at least read one of his books before we do that.Malcolm: Cause that's the [00:01:00] way we read books. Simone reads them. She writes like a book report. She sends it to me and then I review it. And, and that's how we think on knowledge. And then we'll have a conversation every day about it. And recently she started reading her or our first Jordan Peterson book to actually, you know, go through cover to cover and what's it, what's it called?Simone: Maps of meaning. No, just kidding. That's like a deep cut. 12 rules for life. His, his big, his first big for public consumption book. And so you're about a chapter into it or? I'm probably on chapter four or so.Malcolm: You're on chapter four. Okay. So what we're going to talk about is your first Thoughts on reading it what, what, what resonates with you, what you think he's actually communicating.Malcolm: Yeah. OrSimone: really what seems to differentiate, what more specifically, what seems to differentiate us from Jordan Peterson in his philosophy, because there's a lot that I think we hold in common. And then there's a lot that we really don't and it's really interesting to me. Like I, I read a lot of what he says and I'm [00:02:00] like, yeah, no, absolutely.Simone: And then he'll say something else and I'll be like, Oh my gosh, and nails on a chalkboard. What are you doing? And it's, it's unusual, I think, to come across an author, especially someone discussing psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, et cetera. Self help broadly that we sometimes really agree with and sometimes don't.Simone: Usually it's we're 100% on board. We're like, yeah, you're one of us or. We, we, this is I can't even listen to this without having an aneurysm. Even though we willMalcolm: listen anyway. So let's talk about, I mean, so the first thing that I think really when you were talking to me. You're like this because this is another area that we've been digging into recently.Malcolm: It seems really influenced by Jungian psychologySimone: Yeah, yeah I think really what he's done is he's he's dressed up Jungian psychology to make it much more palatable to a modern broadly millennial a little bit Gen Z audience by adding a ton of [00:03:00] evolutionary biology and neuroscience and like discussion of social science studies and things like that to this.Simone: So he'll mention, for example, go ahead,Malcolm: Malcolm. I was going to say, you were saying yesterday when you told me about this, but not to the core of his points. The core of his point is typically Jungian psychology, and then he'll add a bunch of anecdotes that might not be directly connected to it that are like about evolutionary psychology or something.Simone: Not necessarily. I mean, I think it's, it's hard, it's hard for me to articulate really well, but my understanding of. a big thesis that Jordan Peterson holds is, and this is so close to what we, you specifically, have argued in the pragmatist guide to religion, but differently. So in the pragmatist guide to religion, you point out that humans have evolved in concert with culture and religion, that we, our biology.Simone: is designed to work with culture and religion. And when you strip that away, things fall apart. But then you proceed in, in all of our books to make [00:04:00] very logical arguments and appeals to people about relationships, about sexuality, about life philosophy, about all sorts of things, right? Like it is all, and you know, the people who, who like our books also.Simone: Like that we are robotic and sociopathic and like very autistic. And then the criticismsMalcolm: that we get, t