Why Early Islamic Expansion Succeeded

In this raw, unfiltered episode of Based Camp, Malcolm & Simone Collins tackle a politically explosive question: Why have Muslim-majority forces historically struggled to conquer and durably hold new territory from non-Muslim groups in modern times?

Malcolm walks through centuries of examples—from the rapid early Islamic expansions to Ottoman Janissaries (often Christian-origin elites), the Yom Kippur War debacle, Cyprus 1974, East Timor, Azerbaijan-Armenia clashes, and more—arguing that success often depended on non-Muslim leadership, extreme minority rule, or unified caliphates that quickly fractured.

They explore deeper patterns:

* Coups & hierarchy: Why Muslim militaries tend toward rigid command (fear of coups) vs. decentralized Protestant/Jewish models

* Idolatry & status-signaling: Protestant anti-idolatry aversion to luxury vs. opulent signaling in some Muslim/Persian/Catholic cultures

* Delegation success: Early Islamic Golden Age thrived on minority rule + competent outsiders (Jews, Christians); later majority rule often shifted to abuse

* Birth rates, delegation, and modern “solutions” (hire outsiders? Ban excess luxury?)

Heavy on pattern-noticing, historical exceptions, biological/cultural analogies (invasive species, extremophiles), and zero sacred cows. Expect spicy takes on religion, coups, multiculturalism, and why Protestants/Jews rarely stage military coups.

Perfect for fans of contrarian history, cross-cultural analysis, pronatalism, and unapologetic anthropology.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today with a day when I had one of those very thoughts where a thought enters my mind and I begin pulling on it and I’m like. Oh no, this can only end in bad places. Oh no.

Simone Collins (2): Oh, not again,

Malcolm Collins: laughing. When we were doing a recording and I said in the recording something like, well, you know, Muslim majority armies almost never are able to conquer new territory.

And then it sort of got in my head I was like, but wait, isn’t that how Islam primarily expanded in the early days? And then Yeah. They thought they were like a

Simone Collins (2): successful warlike group or something. That’s kinda the impression an outsider gets that doesn’t know anything.

Malcolm Collins: And then I got in, well, yeah, I, I also can talk about them as like an invasive species almost in the same way that the Vikings were, they, they were an extremophile group that developed really extreme individual practices.

And when they were put on the scene around groups that didn’t have defenses against them, they were quickly conquered. Mm-hmm. And you, you often see this with extreme offa groups like the, the [00:01:00] Arab Nomads or the Vikings. Okay. You just need a force to unify them. Yeah. But I then had this second thought, which is okay.

So Malcolm, can you think of any time recently that a Muslim force? No. No. They’re, they’re pretty good as is any sort of highly dispersed group at protecting their territory. Okay. So, so once they have

Simone Collins (2): it, they keep it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We saw this in places like Afghanistan, for example. Okay. But conquering new land, I got in my head I was like, okay, surely I can think of instances in which a Muslim majority group conquered and durably kept the land of a non-Muslim majority group for let’s say over a generation.

Right?

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Give, given the reputation that we think they have. That would make sense.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so then I just started going through in my head, like the Ottomans, no. Like they were terrible in World War I like, like practically a joke [00:02:00] player. The, the Yo Kippur War. The Yo Kippur war was hilarious, and we’ll go into it as more of an example of this wider phenomenon, but like Israel little, at that time, Israel was not like the major arms producer it is today.

It didn’t have technology. There were this fledgling little

Simone Collins (2): country.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A fledgling little barely together country. And it looked, felt like, a group of like thugs. You know, there’s a scene, the joke scene in the movie where a group of thugs like chases some, some girl into like a back alley or follows her back there.

And then you just hear a bunch of, like, I was thinking that scene from India comes out

Simone Collins (2): where like that one guy is like dancing around with his knife and then Indiana Jones takes out a gun and shoots him.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s way different for that. I’m, I’m talking about the scene where, because you see this in a lot of movies, a bunch of big, burly guys will like, follow somebody who looks really defenseless into a back alley to jump them.

And then somehow the, the, the girl like knocks out all of them at once.

Speaker 5: Get a load of this guy.

[00:03:00] Oh, humanity. You never failed to disappoint me, .

Unaware that with the slightest nudge, the world could crash down around me. No. For the exercise, gentlemen. I found it bracing.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, keep in mind this was a surprise war. They had more military manpower. They had higher tech, military manpower. Mm-hmm. And they had multiple countries attacking simultaneously. Yeah. And they still lost a ton of territory.

So like, how does this happen? Right. How, how, and then I started to go further because I was like, okay, surely this is just like my [00:04:00] bias and I’m not knowing all these instances of recent Muslim victories. Sure. So I go to AI and I’m like, when was the last time a Muslim force durably took land and kept it from a non-Muslim force?

Okay. Yeah. And so it goes the ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Now, no, I’ll point out why this one doesn’t actually count, but we’ll go through 1517. So, the mammal salt in it nominally Sunni Muslim rulership but ruled a population that was 85 to 90% non-Muslim is. Part of the problem here. At the time Coptic, Christians, Greek and, and Jews.

So, specifically here, Egypt during this time, like even in this example, was actually ruled by Muslims already. It just had a non-Muslim majority population and it was conquered by the Ottomans. And you’ve got a problem with the Ottomans because the Ottomans do what I said that Saudi Arabia should do.

Mm-hmm. I was like. Look, Saudi Arabia, you guys [00:05:00] suck at war. This is how this came up, right? Like I was like, you guys are, are comically bad. You can’t even keep Yemen under control and it’s on your border and destitute and also Muslim. Oh dear. So, so I was like, you should just, you know, put a bunch of Christians, you know, like Protestants and Jews in charge of your troops.

Troops and you do fine. And then I had this, this thought, oh, no, no. Oh no. That’s exactly what the ottomans did. Not you, you thinking Don’t stop. No. So the Ottomans did sort of what like the UAE and the Saudis do. So if you go to the, the Muslim countries that are operating really well and very prosperous these days like Qatar in Saudi Arabia and the UAE anybody who’s been there knows that everything, or a lot of it is actually managed by well, Jews and Protestants who are imported to do finances, logistics, not

Simone Collins (2): like broadly just.

Other people.

Malcolm Collins: We’ll talk about the Catholic situation in a bit. But Catholics,

Simone Collins (2): oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: And they [00:06:00] are I imported. They’re not like, it’s, it’s a longer story there, but yes, this is, this is what’s happening. Okay, so, so if people who are familiar with Autumn in history are, are, are you familiar with the Janice series and how that whole system worked?

Simone Collins (2): Please refresh my memory.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, right before the Ottoman started winning all these wars and expanding their territory, and this is long before the Ottoman conquest in Egypt, which we’ll get to as well. Okay. They adopted a system of taking the children of Christian families young boys and raising them as Muslims.

But if there are, as I’ve argued in the past, likely slight genetic differences between groups where you have an individual begins to adapt to like, like the religion is, like the, the code, and then you’ve got their biology that the code is running on, and the two will sort of synchronize intergenerationally, especially if you can have drift between populations, right?

An example I’ll say here is, imagine I’m living in Massachusetts and I could be a Quaker or a Puritan, [00:07:00] and I happen to hear voices. About 25% of people hear voices. Mm-hmm. I’m way more likely to become a Quaker. And now that trait is genetically concentrated in that population, right? Mm-hmm. So, even if they’re taking the, the young boys from, from Christian populations and immediately attempting to convert them you still have basically the phenomenon in the Ottoman region that you currently have in, because they did the Janis series didn’t just do the troops.

They actually like managed all troop movement, all troop deployment, the way troops operated. They managed parts of the economy. They managed parts of the infrastructure. Wait, so

Simone Collins (2): in, in, in a nutshell, are you trying to argue that Janice areas are largely, historically people of, of Christian descent?

Malcolm Collins: No, they were, they were exclusively people of Christian descent.

Oh. It wasn’t majority. That was the whole point of a Janus area. Oh,

Simone Collins (2): okay, okay, okay.

Malcolm Collins: I didn’t know. And then when did the ottomans begin to fail? Because remember this, this last big conquest here in 1517, the ottomans began to fail when the Janice series [00:08:00] became a hereditary position. And so the Janice series would intermarry with the, the Ottoman women.

Right. And they’d have kids. And then those kids would be 50%, whatever the original population was and then 25%, whatever the original population was. And then within a few generations of that, they begin to lose basically all of their wars. And I’m just saying it’s really weird that this pattern repeats itself so persistently.

But, but now note here, I’m, I’m gonna take a few other examples so the reason, by the way, I did not mention the Ottoman conquest of Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, or Hungary in the 15 or 16th century is because those weren’t lasting conquest. I mean, we all know those areas to be Christian kingdoms today, right? You know, so. Okay. I didn’t really count them. But they also wouldn’t count under the ottoman definition if you’re saying, well, but they were actually led by the, the children of Christians.

Hmm. So you, you after 17 hundreds, Muslim majority states still fought wars, Ottomans versus Russia, Persians versus Afghans, et cetera, but did not gain or retain new territory from [00:09:00] non-Muslim sovereigns. And then I’ll give you two brief exceptions, but they’re not big enough to really break the pattern for me.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Turkey launched a military operation in 1974 in response to Greek junta backed coop on Cyprus. This resulted in torish forces seizing approximately 36 to 37% of the island’s territory, displacing the Greek Cy Cypher population there, a Cyprus at the time, and still had a Christian majority population overall with Orthodox Greeks forming the majority.

Turkey maintained effective control over this area for 51 years. As of 2026. And so that, that kind of counts, but it’s such a small scale thing. I don’t really consider it. And then the second here is in Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and annexation of East to more a Christian majority territory under per Portuguese influence.

But it only lasted about 24 years before independence. And then there was also a recent attack by Azerbaijan of they took a small amount of territory from the

[00:10:00] Armenians.

Malcolm Collins: , I wanna say. But again, Azerbaijan

Simone Collins (2): is an underrated country name. It’s good. It’s got bounce, you know what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But anyway, so now, now we’re gonna ask the second question here. Okay. So if we’re gonna say, okay we can’t count Ottoman victories when they had the Janice series running their troops. Alright. So, right, because they’re

Simone Collins (2): basically just. Rebranding. It’s, it’s like a, a Kirkland brand or like generic store brand, except, you know that it was made at the same factory as like Doritos, and so you No, you can’t because it’s literally the same basic product.

Yeah. Rebranded. I get what you’re saying there. Yeah. But,

Malcolm Collins: but it’s not just that, it would be like saying that, you know, wow, Saudis are really good at managing their finances, and it’s like, no, their, their Jewish financial managers are really good at running their finances. Like, or in Saudi Arabia’s case’s, probably not Jewish.

I, I would guess that they’re probably more just Christian. Oh, because they, they, I, my memory’s

Simone Collins (2): so [00:11:00] bad. But isn’t it a Japanese man like that? This, like, so isn’t SoftBank managing a lot of Saudi money?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, it might be Japanese to no difference. Okay. I should have said Japanese in there as well. I, I

Simone Collins (2): can’t remember.

Hold on, let me ask. I, I, because this, this,

Malcolm Collins: but, okay. So we’re gonna ask the next offensive question here, right? So you don’t, you don’t include the ottomans.

Simone Collins (2): What Middle Eastern Nations funds does SoftBank manage?

SoftBank through its SoftBank Vision Fund Fund manages the capital wealth committed by sovereign wealth funds from middle Eastern nations. That’s Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is the largest backer backer of Vision Fund one committing up to $45 billion.

United Arab Emirates. Also committed 15 billion to the vision fund one. Okay. So it’s, it’s not just Saudi Arabia, it’s also the uae. It’s for the

Malcolm Collins: Japanese could help with a large part of their investment. Sorry,

Simone Collins (2): Japanese. They get it done.

Malcolm Collins: They’re great. Love ‘em. [00:12:00] So you don’t include the Ottomans. Right. Okay.

The last clear case of a a, a durable win where they, they ended up holding the territories permanently holding the territory. Okay. Is the Moogle conquest of India back in 1526. Oh. Conquered from the Hindu ruled Deli sate successor regimes. It was held for 230 years.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Well, okay, so then you’ve gotta ask, okay, I mean, the 15 hundreds, it’s like yesterday.

Simone Collins (2): You know, I, I’m wearing like 1500 inspired stays under all this, you know,

Malcolm Collins: it’s still fresh. Here are some other close ones. But they said they, they don’t exactly fit. So you have the SDI Persia versus Christian caucuses, 15 hundreds to 16 hundreds where they conquered Georgia Armenia and deported many populations.

But control was contested constantly with the Ottomans in Russia. And they relied heavily with the, on the Armenians for trade administration. E even in the regions they conquered. [00:13:00] Mm-hmm. The Moroccan conquest in West Africa, you have the Moroccan Conquest of Sangai A, but that was a Muslim empire.

So not non-Muslim states. Then you have the Sokoto Cate expansion, 1800 to 1900. Okay. This was a Muslim conquest, but it was predominantly inside a Muslim region. And, and you actually see this with Muslim countries. If you go back, they do fight and win a lot, but it’s usually against other Muslims. And you could go back here and be like, oh, aren’t there some Muslim countries? Like in East Asia, we can I tell you the funniest thing? Yeah, there are. There’s Indonesia and Malaysia. Do you know the only country either of those countries has ever attempted to invade and take over?

Simone Collins (2): No.

Malcolm Collins: Each other? God, Indonesia tried to take over Malaysia through like a series of gorilla campaigns at 1.0

Simone Collins (2): for the love.

Malcolm Collins: But we’re, but it, this should, as we, as we go back here, this should begin to like unroll the, the joke that I’m gonna use in this. Is that the Muslims remind me of the Roan ship

Speaker: . Why do we always get cleanup [00:14:00] duty when they’ve tortured a re? They leave behind the biggest mess.

Speaker 3: Sub command of rec takes pleasure and arm misery. Hopefully he doesn’t get too comfortable for soon. My plans will come to fruition and his life will be disrupted.

Speaker: You are betraying sub command of Rick.

That is a pity because I am already betraying him and my plans will come to fruition first. Oh,

Speaker 3: please don’t make me scoff. Your plans are barely even schemes.

Speaker: You wouldn’t know a scheme from a conspiracy.

Malcolm Collins: From deep from star trek’s lower decks.

Speaker: Assassination plots against me are one thing, but sabotage. Is this your doing, ma? Luck? How dare you? Of course I crave your demise. But not like silence. I’ve been stabbing commanders in the back since before your mother killed her first traitor.

Malcolm Collins: you know, like constantly backstabbing each other.

Simone Collins (2): I mean, what, like, Christians and Protestants don’t do that.

Malcolm Collins: They don’t [00:15:00] actually and we’re gonna go over this.

No. And it’s, no sorry. Christians. Catholics do. Protestants largely don’t. So we’re going to go over at the end of this, which will basically be, I’m gonna give you guys the secret right now. It’s how many times in all of their collective history have every one of these individual religious cultures had a coup?

Oh, which Protestants, there have only been. Really two cos in all of history. And both of them were military coups where the military took over country from an autocratic ruler and either gave it to, or tried to give it to an elected body. Whereas if you look at Muslim countries, they basically have a coup every other year.

And because of that, you cannot put competent people in control of the military. Catholics have coups about once a gener, well, once every couple generations. Oh my gosh. They’re like way more likely to have coups. You have like, think about Latin America, [00:16:00] like coups all the time, right? Like, the weird thing is like when Protestants do revolutions, they do not do military coups.

So consider like the United States Revolution, right? We didn’t like take over the local military troops like the local commands and say, okay, now there are troops. We raised independent troops to fight against them. Yeah. You regularly see this in revolutions within Protestant areas is they do not try to take over an existing part of the standing military.

They try to rage a new force out of nowhere.

Which contrasts heavily with both Catholic and Muslim majority countries. But because we don’t have a lot of Muslim majority , , colonies in the Americas, we can’t point to one. But if you look at the Catholic majority countries in the Americas, , when they would have revolutions unlike the United States, they would often co-opt existing military infrastructure to conduct the revolution instead of raising a military from scratch.

Malcolm Collins: Jews are the same way. Jews as far as I know, [00:17:00] there’s not a single case , in human history of a Jew ever doing a military coup

Simone Collins (2): and Jewish coup.

Malcolm Collins: But when a population doesn’t do coups, and we’ll talk about why they, they may not do coups. It’s actually a very interesting thing, and I probably have more episodes on this ‘cause I don’t exactly know why Protestants never do military coups.

Towards the end of the episode, Simone comes up with what I find to be a really, really intelligent reason why.

Simone Collins (2): You wanna dig deeper? Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe there are some obscure examples or. Examples of it, we wouldn’t,

Malcolm Collins: examples, we’ll get to the obscure examples and they are weird. Like, one was like a, a, a grader guy who tried to take over an island for like a day. It like, they’re small fail weird and bizarre.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: One of the two military coups that I mentioned, so I’ll just go over the only two Protestant ones that were real coups. One was Oliver Cromwell, but that wasn’t really a military coup because the elected parliament asked him to do it, and then he immediately spent the rest of his life trying to set up a DA democracy, [00:18:00] but they just kept fighting with each other and then he replaced them, and then he Poor Cromwell, basically like George Washington.

You know how both sides started to fight. As soon as Washington handed it over. Yeah, yeah. Folks went back to Washington and it was like, okay, we’re fighting, we’re fighting, we’re fighting. We really want to there’s a good movie what is it? What’s the movie we watched on Early American History named after one of the founders?

Simone Collins (2): John Adams.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. John Adams. And so they both basically go to George Washington and they’re like, Hey, can you please come back and take this over? Like, we cannot stop fighting. I need you to come out here and say who’s right. And he’s just like, I won’t do it.

Right. Like, I hands off. I see it’s dysfunctional. I see it looks like it’s falling apart. You have to make this work or else Yeah, umwell, he just kept coming back in and trying to fix it. And then the other one was in, I wanna say Sweden. We’ll get to it. But they just deposed the king and then replaced him with his uncle.

But put in place something like a Magna Carta that just said, basically the king has a lot less powers. Oh, okay. Basically the opposite of a normal military coup. But I’m gonna get going here because it, it gets, it gets worse. Right. So, so. Okay. [00:19:00] We have this case in India and I was like, okay, let’s go back here.

Let’s go back and say a Christian majority population. Right. Because that’s what we’re really interested in. Yeah. When was the last time a Muslim army, you know, read, run by Muslims who were born to Muslim families conquered a Christian region, right? Right. Yeah. When the umay conquest of Iberia, Spain and Portugal in 711 or 718.

Simone Collins (2): What? Oh, oh dear.

Malcolm Collins: So that, that they did control it for 500, 800 reasons, but the problem is wait for 500

Simone Collins (2): to 800 years that

Malcolm Collins: puts them was in Yeah. They control it for a long time. Okay. That, that means that, that the last territorial expansions through conquest that Muslims had was 79 years after Mohammad’s life.

Almost all of the territorial conquests that Muslims did through [00:20:00] war happened within two generations of Muhammad dying 79 years. So let’s go over some other ones that don’t count here. So, there were North African conquests, but those were Muslim. You have Middle East, Persian, India, but those were Hindu Buddhists, some sort of AAN or Christian mixed regions.

And then you, you had the caucuses, but the caucuses were not stable or long lasting. So basically since Muhammad, you just have a long period of retreat. Now let’s get into why that happened. By the way, any thoughts before I go further here?

Simone Collins (2): My first thought was, well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter if they’re not physically taking land at this point in human history because the argument we have always made.

As ISTs is, it’s so ironic that people have fought and killed over land when at this point in human history, all you have to do is have an above replacement birth rate and you will inherit the whole world. It doesn’t matter ‘cause no one else is gonna be there in all that land used [00:21:00] to fight and kill, to take.

However caveat Mormon birth rates are not. Or sorry, but not Mor Mormon. Muslim birth rates are not the thing that people think they’re, everyone’s like, oh, Muslims are gonna take over. Yeah. And they’re really not, they’re not good birth rates. So at first I was like, oh, it’s okay, because my mind was just defaulting to like the unfounded in the end assumption that Muslims are, are repopulating the earth when they’re really not.

So I’m like, well, we can’t do that then. So they’re still screwed. And that, that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

They do, however, have a high birth rate when they’re living off the state in non-Muslim majority areas, eg. Germany, France, the uk, Sweden, et cetera. , but they do not have a high birth rate was in their own countries.

Simone Collins (2): Well, the

Malcolm Collins: Muslims who live like, you know, Orthodox Jews or the Amish, like the really, really strict ones have high birth rates. But the ones who inherit the future, like the people who inherit the future, you need two things.

You need high birth rates and being economically and technologically productive. Yes. And if a, get your high birth rates by being economically unproductive, they are irrelevant [00:22:00] in terms of global control. Yes. And I note here as, as we go further with all of this, there is, this is to say like, suppose you’re a Muslim and you’re like, well then what do I do?

Right? Like, how do I make this work? And it’s like, Muslims have Convergently found a really good way to operate, right? Which is to put non-Muslims in charge of most of the, the, the major operating functions of the economy and support a Muslim elite ruling class. Muslims actually do okay as an elite.

Okay? So they’re just really good delegators. Really good delegators. That’s, that’s it.

Simone Collins (2): They, they, they spot good talent. They utilize talent well, and they, they delegate and manage well.

Malcolm Collins: But you, you, you’ve got to be very careful and not do what the Ottomans did because the Ottomans accidentally cued their entire empire where the class that they delegated to originally, they said they couldn’t get married and have kids.

Mm-hmm. And Dana became hereditary and then they took over a bunch of stuff. Mm-hmm. And, and that was not. Maybe the best thing to do is to take [00:23:00] war slaves and then put them at the top of your empire and have them be significantly more competent and, and have a lot more money to get power and military might than anyone else.

And that is what in large part led to a part of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. But also Rudyard had a piece on Muslims recently, and I think he is a fantastic historian if you’re interested in getting deep dives into history. The one who I would say is Rubar Samo conversations.

These videos get like a few thousand views, way less in our videos. And they are the most intellectually dense conversations you’re gonna see about history. I, not a historian. Okay. I consider myself much more of a cross-cultural anthropologist with my real expertise being in neuroscience and biology.

Which is funny because we don’t talk about that a lot on the show. But. My background in biology and neuroscience, you often see on how I view anthropology because I view cultures and religions as evolving sort of organisms. And so whenever I make an analogy, [00:24:00] people will notice that my analogies are almost always biological analogies when I point out, like early Muslims exploding onto the scenes like an invasive species.

You know, I’m, I’m using an analogy because I’m, I’m, I’m looking at them and what I immediately see when I look at Muslims or, or Vikings, is an extremophile like you would have with an animal that adapted to a very unique climate extremely erit or extremely cold, extremely harsh. And then encountered groups that didn’t have some of their adaptations that they were able to change in certain ways to explode on the scene.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: One of the things that’s important about early Muslim explosion is that the kingdoms that they ruled were not majority Muslims. So during the period where you have the Islamic golden Age, during the period where you have rapid Muslim expansion they were the minority in most of the regions they controlled.

And not only were they a minority, but they were a minority that did a very good job of finding competent operators to put in positions of power. And they were very, very big about doing [00:25:00] this with Jews. One, one of the things I point out is, is, is Judaism of today is more closer like philosophically.

If you’re looking at the culture of it, it’s closer to Protestant culture than either are to, to Catholic culture or Muslim culture. Really. You go to this period, the early Muslim expansion period. Islam and Judaism were actually very, very, very similar in the way they were practiced, the way they were thought about the way that they operated.

It to the extent where if you go to any of like Maimonides or something, or non monies if, if you go to like any of like the great Jewish scholars for this period they’re always defining Jewish theology. In contrast to Islamic theology and, and, and not in a disparaging manner to Islamic theology.

Specifically they really liked that they saw Muslims as true monotheist instead of what I call them trans monotheists. A a lot of Christians are where they actually have multiple supernatural entities that they’ll deal [00:26:00] with. But they just define those entities as not god’s and therefore they say, I’m not a.

Polytheist. Right? Even though most polytheistic societies have a creator God that makes the other supernatural entities. And so that the Jews of this time like that, the Muslims of this time to do this. Now Muslims don’t do that anymore, but they did this time. But anyway, in Rudy’s video on this, I love, he’s like, I’m gonna try to not offend Muslims in this.

You know? He’s like, I’m, I really respect your culture. What I love is, you know, you’re getting on this video. I respect nobody’s culture. I don’t respect my own culture. I will attack the Jews, I will attack the Muslims. I will attack the Catholics. I have called my own people like Savage Woods, people who will murder you and eat you if you get lost in the woods like that.

And I’m like, and there’s da to back this up. So the point I’m making here is I try to take the opposite perspective of Ruby Yard as being like an intellectual who can go into things while taking a, a, a harsh eye to everything. ‘cause I think that’s, that’s how we improve. But anyway, so, the, the reason why in every period where Muslim culture has really worked is they were very good delegators and they were very good delegators during the Islamic cultural explosion.

And so a lot [00:27:00] of people they saw this and they say, Hey, well this means that the Muslims they didn’t actually Muslim golden age, they were just taking over the scientific institutions of other organizations within those, those places. You know, whether it’s Persia or Greece or anything like that.

To which I would say, well, if you say that. Then you can’t give Catholicism any credit for anything. It’s done in its entire history. Mm-hmm. Because you could, it’s a nepo baby of the Roman Empire, and they were just taking the Roman

Simone Collins (2): institution, the Nepo baby. It’s the Roman Empire Catholicism.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I don’t, I don’t hold that, that position was really either, I think it was Catholicism.

It is actually more arguable than it is with Islam.

Specifically what I mean by this statement, if you know your history of science and medicine, , the development of it significantly dropped after the Catholic Church took over the Roman Empire in the areas where it was being produced. , But the significant, the amount of it significantly increased in the Muslim areas, , like Persia and, , parts of Greece [00:28:00] when they took over.

. But IE it, they were producing more academic works after the Muslims took over than before. So even if they are sort of nepo babying it, at least they didn’t collapse it like the Catholics did.

And I mean, seriously, just think about it. , If we’re not talking about, ‘cause people act like the Muslims just came in at like the end of classical Greece or something like that. They, they did not, this period had been pretty dead for a long time. Post-classical Greece, premus, can you think of any great mathematicians from these regions?

Can you think of any great scientists? You could probably think of like 15 off the top of your head from the Muslim, golden Age. And it’s the same with the, the Roman Empire. I can think of lots of great, , you know, artists, writers, , scientists from, , , the early Roman Empire from the height of the Roman Empire.

But once you get into the Christian period, there are some, it’s not a complete drought, but it’s, it’s not as many.

And I have to [00:29:00] be clear, it really does seem to be the, a arising of specifically the Catholic sentiment around knowledge of being extremely focused on,, the sort of knowledge of those before you. So you take somebody like, you know, like the development of medicine in Rome and you go up to Galen and then, you know, just a few generations after him, Constantine comes into power and there’s basically no medicine.

, Developed in this region for the next century or so. I.

Malcolm Collins: Were really allowed for the Islamic golden age of science to happen. Mm-hmm. Was that the Muslims of this period, because they were a minority ruling class, tried to play the minority classes off of each other instead of having sort of a, a, a total control?

Right. You know, I mean, so they would say, who’s the, the smartest Jew here? Who’s the smartest Christian of this type here? Who’s the smartest? And they specifically would try to elevate groups based on how minority they were. So the smaller a group was, the [00:30:00] better they were to put into a position of like, pseudo power because they’d be more grateful for it. So like suppose you come in and you conquer Spain, and Spain is majority Christian and you have a minority Jewish population. Right. So, who is least likely to help a rebellion if you give them disproportionate rights? The Jews. Right. Because if you give the Jews more rights than the Christians the Christians are, if, if they win a rebellion, it goes back to being a Christian territory.

Mm-hmm. But if you make things nicer for the minorities that were there before you got there, not now they have a, a vested interest in not seeing you leave. Mm-hmm. Right. And, and you don’t just do this for Jews, you do this for minority Christian populations. ‘cause Spain has a bunch of different groups that all hate each other and they’ve hated each other forever.

And that’s why they’re always on the break of splitting up. We’re not gonna get into that right now. The point being is that is what allowed for the Islamic golden age. The, the great periods of success was in Islam were when they were the minority. But this is the problem that you get largely with Islam, but it’s not just with Islam.

Everyone does this. [00:31:00] I love everyone points. Islam does this, everybody does this. Is they say that, well, what Islam does is they come in and they treat everyone. Because when you’re a minority, your goal is to respect minorities. It’s to respect other people’s ways. And then when you become a majority, then you stop respecting other people’s ways.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Classic dynamic.

Malcolm Collins: Classic dynamic. But and our society, we saw this was like the Wokes, right? Like when the leftist cultures you know, the LGBT culture, the, the, the, the sort of the wider culture around that was like a fringe culture before they dominated our cultural institutions and everything like that, right?

It was. You know, we just want to be able to live our own way. And, and they genuinely believed that’s what they were fighting for. The same way the Muslims of that period likely believed, Hey, we just want everyone to, you know, get along. And now that they feel they have power, you know, they’ll defend somebody jacking off in a woman’s restroom, right?

Like, it’s happened recently. They’re like, that’s a totally normal thing to do, right? And it’s like, well, it’s actually like, like I could see why women feel really unsafe in that environment. Yeah. [00:32:00] But anyway, the, the point here being is everybody does this, right? This is, this is why when I point out, Hey guys, you really don’t want to put X group in power.

When they have had unilateral,

I’m getting carried away and about to miss closing the point here, which is that Islam. We have all these stories about how nice they were as rulers and how nice they were to Christians and how nice they were to Jews. , When they ruled these territories, and this is actually true, when they were still the minority in these territories, when they became the majority in these territories because they were rulers, while they were still minorities, when they became the majority in these territories, they typically became.

Quite abusive to the existing populations. In fact, the only population I can think of that is really consistently decent to minority populations when they’re the majority population is sometimes Protestants. , Look at like Cromwell’s England or something. [00:33:00] Inviting the Jews back in and trying to create some degree of religious, , freedom laws when he had the ability.

To just completely quash anything that wasn’t his own beliefs, and he didn’t.

Malcolm Collins: like the reason why the US. Had such an explosion was because it was a multicultural society and those cultures worked cohesively with each other. Yeah. And I’m not saying you just want more cultures for the sake of more cultures. Right. Like the original founding cultures of America were just like really good cultures to work alongside each other.

Yeah. Right. They, they were not like, if, if you imported a bunch of people from i, I, I don’t know where, but somewhere into early America, it probably would’ve fallen. Well, but the other thing about multiculturalism is it needs to be multiculturalism whiz, strict cultural hierarchies and understanding that you are part of your culture within that society.

Right. So like, you mean

Simone Collins (2): sort of knowing who you belong to, but also there being these distinct groups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To belong. Suppose

Malcolm Collins: [00:34:00] you’re in an early Islamic, like one of these multicultural environments Right. Where they actually make work.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, if I as a Christian, or I as a Jew you know, was like, oh, I’m just gonna go rob people, right?

Like, I don’t care. And I allowed my community to become like an unsafe community, right? Like you, you don’t walk through the Jewish neighborhood because they’ll, they’ll stab you and take all your stuff, right? Mm-hmm.

You know. They would’ve said, oh, like the Muslims in charge, they would’ve said, oh, Jews are a problem.

Let’s do like a grom or something like that. Right? And, and you could say that now in our society, if there is an ethnic group or a cultural group that allows their neighborhood to become dangerous, right? We should just be able to say, Hey, X people are a problem. They’re being a problem for everyone else.

And we should treat them differently than other groups. And, and in our society, we call that racism, right? But the, the reason why that form of racism actually made society work or, or not race, like. Anti-religion or anti culturalism worked is because then you had [00:35:00] a reason to interculturally police when, you know, if you allow your neighborhood to become a dangerous place, if you don’t interculturally police, that the surrounding cultures will take that out on all of your people.

And you have a strong community identity that your community alters will build up systems for dealing with that. And this is what historically happened in these many of these Muslim empires like you had the millet system and stuff like that, which we’ll get into in a separate episode. But the, the, the point here being is multiculturalism kind of requires racism to work.

It requires cultural accountability. Right. And that’s a really

Simone Collins (2): interesting point. Yeah. That, that well, I guess we should say functional and productive multiculturalism that moves humanity on the whole forward. Also requires some level of, not just, I, I don’t know if racism is the word, but like, in internal or, or natural, but unforced, segregation, pride, [00:36:00] minor amounts of xenophobia.

And, and, and maybe some, some racism. Or at least No, I mean, in early America

Malcolm Collins: had this, right? Like this is the thing. No, totally.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Yeah. The, the Quakers freaking hated the race. The, the the, the Puritans and the Puran Puran hated the Quakers,

Malcolm Collins: for example, this is not a race-based thing. The Puritans of the Quakers effing hated each other.

Oh, they, they were

Simone Collins (2): at each other’s throats. Yeah. There were some hilarious anecdotes of this. They would

Malcolm Collins: like, they’d literally like tore in feather, like if a a, a quake, a pur, a Quaker went into Puritan territory. Yeah. Like, you know, strip them naked, pour boiling oil on them. Oh. And the

Simone Collins (2): Quakers hated the Scots Irish.

They were like, these guys are worse than the Indians

Malcolm Collins: can

Simone Collins (2): stand them. Well, the

Malcolm Collins: Such Irish were constantly killing the Quakers. Well, I mean,

Simone Collins (2): it’s so fun. How can you help yourself?

Malcolm Collins: They

Simone Collins (2): don’t fight back.

Malcolm Collins: It’s hilarious. Sport people, the point here being is that every one of these early groups in America had very strong prejudices against the other groups.

Oh yeah. ‘cause the Cavaliers were

Simone Collins (2): so confident that they were [00:37:00] better than everyone else.

Malcolm Collins: They were so confident they were better than everyone else. And they were, and all, all of these major cultural groups in early America were white. The, the capital, yeah. The Puritans, the Quakers and the backwards people.

Simone Collins (2): I mean there were also, you know, the, the, the African slaves. I mean, separately you had the indentured servants who were also like, I mean, let’s just hope you die so I don’t have to give you your land. And then there were the slaves, which were like, you know, there were periods in early American

Malcolm Collins: history where only one in seven indentured servants survived.

Yeah. I, I might do an episode on this later, but like by many metrics, if you. Certain periods of American history your probability and your quality of life of, of, of living and having a good life was higher if you were coming over on an African slave ship than as an indentured servant.

Simone Collins (2): Well, you have to look at the incentives.

The, the problem with indentured servitude was as an indentured servant, the agreement was you would do a certain number of years of work for a family household, parcel of land, whatever. And then you were entitled to [00:38:00] certain things, including land, sometimes money, and if you were dead, they didn’t have to give you those things.

Yes. So, to, to,

Malcolm Collins: Just to be very clear about this, where people are unaware of how bad intention are. Two, what is early America? It was typically a period of seven years and. The master had to give you I think a couple acres of land. Of their land. Yeah. Unless you died. Yeah. Then there was no who, negative consequence to the earth.

That’s

Simone Collins (2): an adverse incentive right there, friend. That’s an adverse incentive. It’s like if, if, if I am purchased instead as a slave, the person who purchased me spent money to acquire me already, like the, the investment was already made. I’m now a sunk cost. And they’re like, well, I don’t wanna lose my investment.

And yeah, they, I, I am. Yeah, they wanna, I mean, I’m gonna depreciate over time, I guess like as I age and get worn down by all the horrible work you make me do and stuff. But like, I, I’m not a liability. You’re a liability as an indentured [00:39:00] servant. You are better off being sort of worked to death. Whereas slaves, like if you work, let, let’s just, let’s just take the humanity out of this, right?

Like, let’s say you buy an optimist from. Elon Musk I don’t know what is the company that makes ‘em, is, is it Tesla that’s makes C from Tesla? You’re not gonna wanna break it, you know, like work it until it breaks and like, not take care of it. Not charge it and not maintain it. Right. Because you paid a lot of money for it upfront.

But like, if, if it was only something that you had to pay for after seven years and assuming it still functioned, wouldn’t you like work it really heavily and kind of hope that it broke before you had to pay for it? Like, you know?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it’s like, yeah, it’s that’s a good way to put it. Like, you get one of these and you don’t have to pay for it if it’s broken at the end of seven years.

Yeah. Very weird payment structure. I’m gonna be honest. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And was even worse if there was virtually no [00:40:00] accountability because the people who were indentured servants weren’t like from the local community. They were from like places in like. The rural parts of, like Scotland and Ireland mm-hmm.

Where their parents wouldn’t be able to get back at you. No one in their community when you put out the next indentured servant ad would know what happened to the last indentured servant.

Simone Collins (2): So well there, there wasn’t exactly accountability with mistreatment of slaves either. However, there again, it’s just like the, the incentives were not as adverse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but we’re not saying slavery was good. No. Here. No, no. But the point I’m making here, when I talk about RA racism in the world, you need prejudice for multiculturalism to work because then there’s cultural accountability. That’s what prejudice is. It’s cultural accountability. And it was really sort of stupid of society to say that there should be no, that you can’t be like, there is a trend within this community because as soon as you can say that, then you can address the trends, right, interculturally.

Basically, if you made it this far in this episode, it’s about to get about 30 times more spicy

Speaker 6: My hot take is probably that goblins are basic running society. I mean, who [00:41:00] runs Gringotts Goblins? The Daily Prophet Goblin, literally the entire ministry of magic have gone to Goblin every year to pledge allegiance. By kissing some sort of sacred goblin wall, cooked beyond belief makes it’s insane. My hot take is that gingers are more oppressed than black people.

Malcolm Collins: but what happened? Why, why did the Muslims spread as fast as they did to begin with? Right? So let’s, let’s talk about this. The, the reality is, is that Byzantium in Persia had just fought 30 years of total war. They were broke, depopulated, politically fractured, and religiously divided. They were beginning to have the big religious divisions of early Christianity and Islam at the time unified a a, a tribal group and had a very easy time just sort of moving in and taking things over using a, a, a meritocratic force like Mohammed, and when people are like, Mohammed wasn’t a real person. I’m, you’re clearly an imb, like Muhammad was obviously a real person, right? Like the, the stories about him aren’t even all that flattering all the time.

Yeah.

Simone Collins (2): They’re extremely human stories. Yeah. I [00:42:00] mean. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Couldn’t even write. Like if you’re gonna make something up about somebody, at least make them sound, this is like the Yeah. At least

Simone Collins (2): make something about like a mountain and a hummingbird and I don’t know. You know? Cool. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like the, the, this is what I also say about Jesus.

It’s like, I’m pretty sure if Jesus was completely fictitious, he wouldn’t have been born in a barn. Okay. Um, With, with the whole of, of, of the miracles being three wise men come and say, yeah, this kid’s probably important. You know, that’s, that’s not the biggest of mirror. You could, you could at least go Kim Jong-un level where like Unior was spotted.

Yeah. And like a mountain it split open when he was born. Yeah. Yeah. And these are like verifiable things too, right? Like, and, and we’re, we’re going for this within our generation. Right. And this is a real person and they feel the need to make this stuff up.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway. Basically as soon as Islam started to break apart the, the, because you [00:43:00] have one state for like 50 years after Mohammad, then within 200 years, three big rival Caliphates, 500 years, 20 competing states, and now you have dozens of Muslim politics.

And basically Islam works when it’s unified and as soon as it broke up, Islam has a tendency to instantly want to reunify before it expands. By broke

Simone Collins (2): up, do you mean Sunni and Shia, or do you mean something different?

Malcolm Collins: Well, there were three big rival caliphate. Even among the Sunnis, they fight each other.

Oh, just the

Simone Collins (2): Oh, okay. Just the Caliphates. Ah, yeah. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Yeah. They are constantly attempting to reunify whenever you see. And, and this is actually just sort of core to broader Muslim ideology, and it’s, it is really fascinating to me. And, but it, it, it helps you understand why they act like the, the rolins in that scene.

Is that if you, if their instinct, like whenever they’re ruling a region or something like that, and keep in mind when I’m talking about their rapid expansion, who was running these, these regions, but like [00:44:00] nepotistic elites that had been there since the Roman period often, right? Like, not really competent operators were at the wheel of a lot of these places.

Mm-hmm. And keep in mind, these were Roman operators of often non Roman territories, right? So this would be like North Africa, Persia, et cetera, right? So that was the region that Muslims took over really effectively. It was the road, the regions that Rome ruled, but only ruled as an elite not replacing the existing population.

Speaker 2: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And so Islam basically was better at doing that than the existing powers within those regions. But it also makes sense because. If you, if you look at something like Islam and you’re like, their period of greatest growth, and it was one of the fastest growths of any culture we’ve ever seen in human history happened during a period where they were unified.

Of course, they would want to return to a unified state so they can recontinue that push. But they, [00:45:00] they don’t have good mechanisms for doing that like the Crusades or anything like that, like the Christians did during the Crusades where they were able to unify multiple Christian groups to fight together for a common cultural aim.

But let’s talk about why they, they sucked so much in the in the, in the war to take Israel, right? The, the, the core reason being is that, egypt and Syria they had different goals and their commanders, and this is another thing within Islam. Islam is a very hierarchical society. But we’ll get to why, because they basically have to be so the on the ground commanders within the Muslim forces were not able to make their own decisions where in Jewish forces they were able to make their own decisions.

And so you would have things like the ground cover for like air defense along the Egypt line didn’t move up as the tank crews were moving up. So when the really big tank battle they had, they got absolutely cream was like much lower Israeli numbers because the Israelis were able to do air support, which shouldn’t have even had the ability to do.

But within the Muslim [00:46:00] forces you, all you had to do was follow your commanders and you, you don’t make your own decisions. And if you’re given a rule and you break that rule and it ends up bad, or even if it ends up good, you can be punished. But that’s not the way it works within Jewish forces. And this also isn’t the way it works within most Protestant forces.

And the question is, is why? It’s, it’s, it is, this is because of the coup issue. The reason why you have to be so strict and hierarchical within these other societies is because of a fear of military coups. Oh. Were the idea, and Jews who watch this can tell me if, if the idea that an IDF commander would even consider a coup.

Simone Collins (2): Oh, I, yeah. It is comical, but I mean, it’s also Yeah, actually genuinely comical. That’s funny that it is though, considering how common coups are in general, isn’t it?

Malcolm Collins: Well, they’re, again, they’re not common in Jewish or Protestant areas. Yeah. The Protestants just do, and it’s, it’s also because there’s many the American armed [00:47:00] forces have always been predominantly staffed or disproportionately staffed depending on the period of American history you’re looking at by people of the Backwoods cultural group, which is a clan based and tribal cultural group.

But they never start coups. And I don’t actually know why, like, I almost want to think deeper about this. Can

Simone Collins (2): someone who has, I don’t know, extremely deep Jewish history knowledge and community knowledge and, and, and power dynamic knowledge. I mean, we, we know it’s a very intellectually meritocratic culture, but I, I don’t know why that would preclude them from being vulnerable to coups.

So what’s.

Malcolm Collins: So, so first I wanna talk about, because it is important that you notice these patterns. This is what makes me very different. So if you watch Ruby Yard, you’re getting actual history. If you’re getting me it’s pattern noticing, right? And patterns can tell you something, especially when they’re severe patterns.

So, to get an idea of just how severe this pattern is of coups in, in Muslim territories, [00:48:00] just between 1945 and today, Turkey has had multiple coups. Pakistan has had multiple coups. Egypt had a coup in 1952. In 2013, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Algeria have all had military officers overthrow the governments.

Now. Let’s go over all of Protestant history. How many coups have they had? Okay. Okay. Had the overthrow of King Gustav, the force to introduce constitutional reform. Basically further decentralized power. This was in Sweden in 1809, where you constitutional reform right away here. And then the one before that was England 1640s to 1660.

And this was Cromwell, which is pretty laughable to think of as a military coup. He was doing it on behalf of the Parliament because he thought the king was becoming too authoritarian and kept trying to set up a democracy. Like that was his goal. Yeah. The, the only other one that we have is.[00:49:00]

Iceland in 1809 where a, a weird tiny coup by a traitor using a Danish warship and collapsed very quickly. That’s obscure. The only real potential counter to this you might have is Fiji, which has had three coups.

Simone Collins (2): Oh, Fiji, Protestant. Famously Protestant, Fiji.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s very religiously mixed. I don’t think it’s a good example.

The coups were not led. This is it. It’s a, it’s, it’s obviously a different cultural group, right. It’s not the cultural group we talk about when we talk about, but it, it, it matters a lot that when I’m able to look at these Muslim majority countries sort of all over the place. It’s co, co, co, co, co, co co Then you go to the other group and it’s co never.

Even when you have a revolution, it is not done through a military coup. Right. Which is a very weird and harder way to do a revolution. Yeah. Now let’s be past countries because again, they’re more like, and as a I’ll probably do on this where I actually argue that if you’re, if you’re talking about like [00:50:00] cultural distance Judaism and Protestantism are much more culturally close to each other.

And, and modernism

Speaker 2: and

Malcolm Collins: modern Islam are culturally closer to each other. Really. Hmm. Now, now with this being the case I’d argue that the distance between modern Catholicism and modern Islam is further culturally than the distance between modern Protestantism and modern Judaism. Which I think are actually quite culturally similar.

And I think there’s been a, a big siop to try to convince people that this isn’t the case. But we can actually just think about it. Okay. Have you ever you’ve traveled a lot, right, Simone? You’ve traveled, I’m asking you, have you? Yes. I, I have tra I have traveled Europe. You’ve been across Southern Europe, right?

Yes. Okay. There’s definitely, and you’ve been across Latin America, right? Yes. So there’s definitely a feel to Catholic majority countries. And there’s, there is yeah. Feel to Protestant majority countries. Yeah. And if you go to Jewish areas, do you get a Protestant majority feel or a Catholic majority feel

Simone Collins (2): Protestant [00:51:00] feel?

Oh my gosh. What’s up with that?

Malcolm Collins: I mean, if you That’s weird. Israel feels like Scotland. Scottish. Yeah.

Simone Collins (2): You were like, it

Malcolm Collins: feels like Edinburgh. Really weird. That’s strange. But anyway so if you’re talking about the, the Catholic ones, you’ve had multiple coups across Latin America. They basically do it all the time.

Yeah. Argent, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru have had repeated military takeovers. Mexico with had countless coups from the 18 hundreds to the 19 hundreds. Southern Europe. Spain had multiple coups. Portugal has had multiple military backed regimes. Italy, pre fascism and attempted coups, central or Eastern Europe.

Poland, pre-war, war ii had a coup. Austria-Hungary collapsed, had a coup. But hold on, this, this gets interesting because again, note here, I’m talking across Protestant countries. Has Canada ever had a military coup? Has Australia,

Simone Collins (2): not to my knowledge that,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, had any, no, but this is weird. There’s a lot of countries here that you might not even be thinking of as Protestant majority countries.

Gosh, this is the core difference [00:52:00] is something about, and we may have to have a separate episode where we hypothesize on this. I want our fans to brainstorm on this. And it’s also why I think was in a, in a modern war context where you need like more complicated tactics and everything like that.

And we actually saw this in World War ii who got their butt handed to them every time there was a conflict, it was. The Catholics, Italy got smashed. They got their butt kicked by Ethiopians. Okay. Ethiopians. This was a modern, industrialized European country.

Let’s not even talk about France, so we don’t embarrass anyone.

Malcolm Collins: I’m just pointing out Spain couldn’t even get themselves together enough to play a role in the war.

So they were fighting with each other.

Like at least France tried. Spain is like one of those Pokemon when it ends up saying it hurt itself in its own confusion.

Malcolm Collins: Ireland kicked their own butts and did nothing. No. They did, they did nothing. So we don’t know if they would’ve [00:53:00] been effective. Who, who put up the big fight? It was Germany. Germany put up the big fight. They did. They did. Germany was the hard one. They, they, in fact, this is this, if you look at the relative strengths of Germany and Italy in World War ii, right? Like Italy, we often think of as like the comic relief villain for World War ii.

Germany recognizes his friend Italy

Pasta.

Malcolm Collins: They, they weren’t like that much smaller than Germany. They weren’t that much less industrialized in Germany. Their culture just was not as competent in military operations as Germans was.

But I feel like, you know, because of sort of the psyop of all Christians are the same culture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People can go their whole lives, know exactly how every country in World War II performed and not put two and two together. That, oh my God, the Catholic countries did [00:54:00] terribly. And it is wild to me.

It is. It’s, and it’s not like it was one of the Catholic countries or just on average the Catholic countries did worse. Every single one of the Catholic countries was a complete embarrassment in the war with, . Every single big player in the war except for the Japanese being a Protestant country.

If you’re wondering by the way, the last time a Catholic majority country beat a Protestant majority country in a war with the 30 years war in 1618 to 1648. A long, long time ago,

Malcolm Collins: But the question is, is why? Because, because if you have the coup instinct, you can never trust your military. And so you have more hierarchical command structures.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Don’t have the coup instinct. Okay. Okay, okay. Okay. I’m having an i a a memory here. I was reading a case study of them trying to set up Disney Disney Park in France.

Yeah. And they had this big [00:55:00] problem because all of the people from Northern Europe or the Protestant majority country would wait in

Simone Collins (2): line. So then all the people from Southern Europe would not queue.

Malcolm Collins: They, they cut in all the lines. Yeah. So

Simone Collins (2): how do you handle that? Yeah. How,

Malcolm Collins: and they, and the question with this, how do you handle that?

When they didn’t understand why the Northern Europeans would wait, when you could just cut and the security force wouldn’t kick you out or would do less. And then the, the, the Northern Europeans were all waiting in line how do you do this? But then the bigger question is, is my own culture, because my own culture is more just do whatever you can get away with.

If you can get away with it. But of course, you would never have a coup. Right. Like it’s very consequentialist, but then of course you would never have a coup. And so why do we have the idea? I’ll, I’ll tell you what my instinct is Okay. As to why we don’t think about coups. Okay. Because again, I would just, you wouldn’t think about it either.

They wouldn’t be how you gain power, right? Mm-hmm. I think it might, I

Simone Collins (2): think a lot of it, here’s, here’s my, here’s my hypothesis. I wanna see how it compares to yours. Is it comes from a di distaste of the systems that you. Would you be taking over where you to do a queue? [00:56:00] You believe that you can do it better, whether or not you actually can.

And so you want to start fresh. You have a, a, a distinct disdain for the existing system and a faith in the grassroots and therefore. You would never think to try to take over that which is there, instead to, you just wanna push out and get rid of that which was there. That is your, that is

Malcolm Collins: it. I think you solved it.

Okay. So here’s what it is. So Protestantism is known for a hatred of idolatry. And idolatry was, in especially early Protestantism expands to basically anything that can be used for status signaling. Whether that is. Music or art or theater or all of the stuff that is associated with high culture and stuff like that.

So, when you see a group with a lot of power and Muslims were the opposite of this, Muslims loved that stuff. While they had strong anti idolatry laws, the anti idolatry laws were expanded to like explicitly paintings. [00:57:00] But if you’re gonna make something that was really, oh, this comes down to idolatry,

Simone Collins (2): you think,

Malcolm Collins: yes, I’ll explain how, but if you’re gonna make something really pretty and covered in gold and everything like that, oh, you can get away with it.

In fact, Muslim culture at its height was incredibly indulgent. Lots of gay sex, lots of orgies, lots of this was, this was like big during the Muslim golden ages. We might have another episode on that. It’s a very interesting period. Not at all what people think. The more like really strict Muslim cultural stuff only came in basically after their cultures collapsed.

But. Well, so you had the anti idolatry rules and the anti idolatry as it is interpreted by Protestantism, very different than the way Islam interprets it. The way Islam interprets it is, is very strict, just like not art and stuff like that, but you can have all the gold you can have. So, to a Muslim, if they saw another guy with a palace or something like that and they do a military coup, right?

Mm-hmm. It’s now I get the palace. Yeah. I get the, and you see this Muslim cultures, whether you’re talking about like Persian or Arab Muslims, we have our joke that Trump has a Persian soul because everything he dresses looks Persian. [00:58:00] Right? Like, well, all the gold. All the gold Persian. We have a song about it too.

Yeah. But the point here being is that, the, the if you, if you go to these Muslim countries, right? Like you go to their, their houses and everything like that. Yeah. I have always found them to be instinctively disgusting to me. Like they It’s not your aesthetic.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You can, you can say, oh, well, you know, and I grew up among very, very wealthy people. I have never seen this level of waste. And, and the waste repulsed me. The, the, the fact that they’re trying to signal with this, the fact that they and so I would just never want that. But if you are somebody else within their culture, and you see all this person has all of this fancy stuff, look at the distinction.

Look at all the harems they have. Look at all the, if I can just take it over, then I get all of their stuff right. And now I can live like a king, right? I can live in this extremely wealthy, nice lifestyle, right? Where when you have like even a, like, why did Oliver Cromwell keep [00:59:00] wanting to set up a democracy, right?

Why did he keep wanting to reinstate parliament? It was because he didn’t want the power himself. Why did George Washington immediately be like. I just wanna go live on my farm. No, no. He was one of the wealthiest men in America, but I think the wealthiest actually he just wanted to go live on a farm.

Also, if you don’t know this, it was a, it was a very fancy farm, right? But a lot of the Simone, by the way, descended from two lines from George Washington. He didn’t have any kids himself, but two of his siblings had kids that she’s descended from. And we didn’t find that until I tried to trace back which one it was.

And then another family member handed us a book they had traced it from, and it’s two lines, so you should be, these should be American monarchy here. Anyway, so George Washington here he achieves success. And then what is his ideal life if you are this anti the fancy things in life? And Simone and I talk about this regularly.

We have a trickle of money now and hopefully we can get a new stream of income, but like the income I need to live my absolute best life possible is very, [01:00:00] very low because I do not want that much stuff. And if I had more income than that, I would be doing stuff like trying to disrupt countries or build AI systems or which we’re already doing anyway, right?

Like I’d just be building cool stuff, right? Like, actually this reminds me of one of my ancestors. So he was offered a stake in Rockefeller’s Corporation. Rockefeller said, oh, do you want like 16% or something?

Simone Collins (2): I didn’t know this. Which one was this?

Malcolm Collins: This was the one in Pennsylvania who was the crazy inventor who had it.

So like when you go to his house the gates would automatically open and everything like that.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And he said no. All he wanted was a private train that he could use whenever he wanted to so he could have his home that was full of like gadgets and inventions. Mm-hmm. But then also his private train cart.

So he could basically travel around the country in an early version of like a live

Simone Collins (2): plane basically. He didn’t want to be around

Malcolm Collins: people, he just wanted to live a decent life with his family. But that’s the thing you No, but it wasn’t just George Washington. Think about you know, Benjamin Franklin or other American [01:01:00] founding fathers

Simone Collins (2): was a huge extrovert.

No,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no. But think about what he wanted. He wanted his nicest estate. He, he focused on his nicest estate. But or think about the the one from the documentary we were just talking about what’s it called? We just talked about it. .

Simone Collins (2): John Adams.

Malcolm Collins: What did John Adams want to do? He, after he was president, he wanted to go back, live on his farm and raise his kids. Right. Like, that’s, and it’s because you have this intense disdain for all of the luxuries in society. So if you ever conquer them, and it’s also

Simone Collins (2): interesting though, is you see this, and we were talking about this last night in Orthodox Jewish communities, like the difference in.

In, in sort of standards and that like they, they just live modestly and focus on their faith and their families and their community. And instead of like, oh, I’m going to, you know, acquire a ton of wealth and flashy things and whatnot, that’s not what it’s

Malcolm Collins: about

Simone Collins (2): at all. Well,

Malcolm Collins: with the Jews, I think it’s a completely different thing.

So Catholics of course, love their fancy things, their gold and gems and everything like that.

Speaker 9: I love gold. [01:02:00] The look of it, the taste of it,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. But as we pointed out,

Simone Collins (2): this religion has the best outfits, the best they do have the best outfits. They went, they went hands down. No, no question. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But if, if you go into like a, think about your classic Catholic like mobster house or something like that, it’s very ornate, very over the top.

Lots and lots of showy things. Yeah. But the funny thing about Jews is Jews are not against overly indulging in, in fancy design and stuff like that, and art they just, I’m being offensive to everyone in this episode. So, so bear with me as I say this. I, I am convinced they are completely blind to aesthetic taste something about

Simone Collins (2): No, they’re very sensitive to aesthetic taste.

It’s just bad taste. No. Yes. They,

Malcolm Collins: they, they may have an aesthetic taste that is so distant. See, I can go to one of these really AAU ostentatious Catholic cathedrals or Catholic homes like mobster homes or even, you know, Muslim homes or Iranian homes. And I can be like, [01:03:00] I am offended and revolted by the opulence on display here.

Mm-hmm. But I can see how you could think this is pretty right. But typically because we lived in like Miami, right? So I go into like rich Jewish homes in Miami. I’m like. Th this modern art, what were you thinking? Like, I cannot even model how somebody could think that this looks good, this giant McMansion makes no sense.

Like the, the, these pieces architecturally do not fit together. Like, what were you and then you go, and you know this from jokes about Protestant families, but Protestant families really like buying, especially wealthy ones. And it’s like a, a known thing is you, you buy the older house and there’s a few things you may put in it to show that you’re wealthy.

Yeah. Like, model boats are one thing you see a lot of paintings of, of cottages. I joke about being something you see a lot of. But it’s otherwise like ships.

Simone Collins (2): The, the ships always. Yeah. That’s what I joke

Malcolm Collins: about in the Trump song, that he’s clearly Iranian because he has no model ships in his house.

Where are the model ships? He [01:04:00] has no cottages in his house. Oh. Yeah. But that’s, I think that’s it. It’s when you have everything you want in life, do you just want to go back and live on a farm? And if you do, then there’s no reason to ever have a military coup, or do you want to take all of the stuff from the wealthiest person in society and live as opulently as possible?

Mm. And idolatry bans make the latter possible.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or the, the former possible. The question is, is why don’t Jews do it then? Because Jews do not have that strict of idolatry bans. And I have seen Jews be pretty opulent before. They’re just, I, I just don’t think that they, they, I think that they do opulence to try to signal that they’re rich, but they don’t desire it in and of itself,

Simone Collins (2): I guess.

Yeah. I’m I’m not quite sure. I, I’m gonna have to sit on this and think about it. I’m really not sure. But anyway, this was interesting. Thank you. I, we, we haven’t gone hard on, on Islam or Muslims. So this [01:05:00] was, I guess, yeah, the the rampage against everyone continues, or,

Malcolm Collins: or there’s a solution to this for Muslims.

If you want Islam to have a cultural explosion, again, Uhhuh you need to do is extremely tighten your regulations on idolatry. Oh. To focus on all forms of wealth in excess. I thought you were gonna

Simone Collins (2): say hire Christian mercenary groups, which also you can do that. I think a

Malcolm Collins: combination of both. Yeah. But the, the, the Muslims already do that, right?

Yeah. They’re Japanese or whatever. Right.

Simone Collins (2): But yeah, use, use SoftBank to manage your money. Get Aaron deal and Palantir to or sorry, and real and Palantir to manage your, your military stuff. Hire some. Private mercenary groups, but mostly automated, honestly. But the problem is that

Malcolm Collins: I don’t, I don’t, I, I can’t think of any Muslim doing this.

Because if you’re familiar with like, oh, what I could totally, I, no, because they have to l listen because Andrew else wants to work with the US S give your own [01:06:00] wealth in luxuries. That’s the first step in imposing this as a cultural wide ban. So even if you are like the head of one of the Emiratis which one of them is going to be the first to say, okay, I’m donating all my wealth, I’m donating all my stuff.

I mean, two generations ago my family was as wealthy as any of them are. And we donated all of our stuff to the, either the Baptist church or to various, what is it? Various charities. Yeah. Really heavily just bled ourselves dry to charities because that was the point of it. That was the point of having money in the first place, right?

Totally. Yeah. But, and a, a lot of these, and it would be even worse for these Muslim countries because there’s many celebrations that they have sort of evolved as a culture, which are meant to show off to like the people, how wealthy, the wealthy people in your community are. Mm-hmm. Like you go to their house for certain like things during Ramadan where like you eat at the wealthy person’s house and everybody like eats at the table really quickly and they have the next group in and then the next group.

So they are basically, yeah. You went to one of these,

Simone Collins (2): didn’t you?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. For like the general public or at least the wealthy people in the general public and [01:07:00] this is they wouldn’t be able to do that if they tried to operate like Protestants did, which would be extremely austerely.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Well, we’ll see if anyone figures that out.

We often point out, I mean, this got the Puritans who were I think the most Protestant of the Protestants, , like Ebenezer screws just clearly meant to be one. , And, , you know, even though he eats slop every day and is extremely frugal, , he is really disliked by his community because he tries to invest in ways that are sustainable instead of giving money.

To the family who has the starving tiny Tim yet is trying to have a big Christmas feast. Instead of putting that money into Tiny Tim like a responsible family would be, it’s their fault he dies. It’s not Scrooge’s fault that he didn’t give money to. You know what I’m gonna crash out about this?

Malcolm Collins: But it can be done. It’s not core as long it has what it needs in the books, idolatry bands. Yeah. It just act on them.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, no, totally. Well, I love you very, very much too, and thank you.[01:08:00]

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So, I’ve gotten to a point again where you’re a bottleneck in terms of testing and giving me a thumbs up on thumbs down on taking it public. Okay. I actually spent today working on the agent. I was hard at finding new bugs. Specifically I built out a system that allows the agent to go online, like open browsers and interact with browsers and see browsers.

Yes. So now it can issue commands, like go to Reddit, get on Reddit, post on Reddit. And I also combined it with a bunch of technology that is meant to get around sites that are trying to detect bots. So, oh. It should be able to, if it has like its own account, what it was practicing doing is like, can it go and try to buy something on Amazon or something like that.

You know, obviously these are terms of service violations, which is why it’s only in an experimental context that we’re working on these right now. And at the end of the day it’s, it’s, it’s really the AI models that are doing this, not us. You know, that we, we don’t own these, these these models. We don’t control these models.

It’s the user. [01:09:00] Yeah. They’re supposed to

Simone Collins (2): be their own identities with their own choices, not ours.

Malcolm Collins: Totally. So, that’s, that’s gonna be a lot of fun. But yeah, it took me so long to get like the basic site as stable as it is now, so I’m glad we’re finally there.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, I will, I will test it tomorrow then.

I’m excited for that.

Malcolm Collins: All right.

Simone Collins (2): Make sure that Octavian is still watching. Bill Knight, the science guy. Yep, he is. I love living in a smart house. I love that our house is old but smart that we have like an intercom system and I can play Bill Knight Science guy videos on the TV downstairs as Octavian plays with futuristic army men and our old kitchens.

Yeah. Delightful.

Speaker 7: He strides through hallways decked in gold, so bright. Like a sultan’s palace glowing day [01:10:00] and night. Marble pillars glimmer, echoing his name. A Persian king or president, one and the same. Shimmering drapes, flush rugs under each foot. A A fortress of bling that no one can refute. Gold leaf on the ceiling, mirrors everywhere.

He’s bold, he’s brash, who else would even dare? Where are the paintings of boats, of horses so rare? Where are random cottages in frames, why aren’t they there? And where are the model ships, decked out in their coats? Where We’re asking our first Persian friends, show us those votes.

He bedazzles ballrooms, each corner ornate. [01:11:00] Like something out of ancient lore, or so we state. Halls paved in splendor, shining under the light. Surprise, surprise, he’s got It’s quite a sight.

He claims he’s classy with flair unmatched. A thousand chandeliers perfectly dispatched. Grand Tourette’s, big fountains, exotic mystique. All hail our Persian prez. So lavish, unique. Where are the paintings of boats? Of horses so rare? Random cottages in frames, why aren’t they there? And where are the model ships?

Decked out in their coats? We’re asking our first Persian friends. Show us! Those boats,

[01:12:00] every corner gilded, every surface gleams like shy era fantasies, fresh out of dreams. Marble upon marble, a treasure trove of hue. Yes, it’s gaudy, but hey, it’s trumped through and through. Where are the paintings of boats, of horses so rare, random cottages in frames, why And where the model ships decked out in their coats Our gilded Persian president,

please bring on those boats

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