Nerd Culture, Cringe, and Vitalism

Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Leaflit Mitsuha (slime-girl VTuber, guild receptionist, and master worldbuilder) for a deep dive into her massive collaborative TTRPG universe in the Lyrian Chronicles / Angel’s Sword RPG.

From 10+ years of running campaigns born out of depression, to building a live-service West Marches-style canon campaign with 140+ players, to magic systems, corrupted zones, divine power through belief, player-driven politics, fiend drama, and how AI is supercharging communal storytelling — this is one of the nerdiest, most optimistic conversations we’ve ever had.

We explore how online communities are prototyping the future of entertainment, why “cringe but free” vitalism beats shame culture, the power of shared worlds vs. solo gaming, and why asynchronous friendships and player agency matter more than ever.

If you love worldbuilding, anime-inspired lore, tabletop RPGs, VTubers, AI creativity, or just watching smart people geek out — this one’s for you.

The game can be found at:

https://rpg.angelssword.com/

If you’re interested in joining the Mirane Campaign you can find it on the Patreon for the game (This is how they fund development, since it’s free to play):

https://www.patreon.com/c/angelsswordrpg/home

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Prefer it?

Malcolm Collins: No, actually this is what, so I was just saying that Leaflet is like one of my top three sources of news, and Simone was like, this is the way news should be. And like if you had told me as a young man, well when you grow up, you see it turns out the New York Times, nobody trusted anymore. You know, you, you go to, uh, wall Street Journal, nobody trusted anymore Uhhuh.

But you see there’s like these anime characters online and um, a lot of people really trust them. Not, not only that. And it’s like, oh, what, what’s their credentials? Like, how does everybody know that they, you know, are they like work correspondence or something? And it’s like, no, it’s just like everybody starts lying.

And so like the five people who aren’t like everybody takes super seriously.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Basically. And

Malcolm Collins: they’re just like, that sounds. Insane. And it is like, no, no, no, it’s weirder. You see, it turns out that like the type of music you listen to is going to regularly feature these random anime characters. [00:01:00]

Leaflit: Oh, God.

Oh. Like the whole, like sky, like,

Malcolm Collins: oh, it’s so funny. Leaf flip. We had, uh, one of our kids, uh, who’s watching Sky, because I, I play Sky Browns all the time while I’m working or whatever. I, I like his songs. Yeah, I think they’re pretty good. Mm-hmm. Um, and, uh, you know, and so our daughter likes to identify with every female character she sees.

Yeah. So she goes, oh, that’s me. And usually I’m like, okay, yeah, sure, yeah, that’s you. Um, and this, I was like, oh no, actually, uh, that’s one of my friends and one of our older kids was like, wait, one of your friends that’s like an an, that’s like a, an animated character. She goes, those aren’t real. And I’m like, well, okay.

So this is a, this is gonna take a little bit of time to explain, uh, but sometimes. They’re real. Uh, Simone, what’s his, uh, sign on the screen? Is this something we can get rid of? Uh,

Leaflit: the live,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: live view. Why? Why does it think we’re live?

Leaflit: I don’t know.

Simone Collins: [00:02:00] I don’t know. But we’re not there. It’s gone. I’ve made it disappear.

Everything’s going to be okay now.

Malcolm Collins: I invented a new dish today, which is actually pretty good. Um, oh, what’s that? So mac and cheese is extra pepper, like black pepper,

Leaflit: uhhuh.

Malcolm Collins: It actually works really well.

Simone Collins: I think it’s done a lot at restaurants as it is.

Malcolm Collins: What made me realize this is a lot of like Asian dishes that you’ve been making recently.

Just use obscene amounts of black pepper. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, like pepper chicken and stuff like that. I was like, why, why, why don’t I do this with everything?

Simone Collins: Why not?

Malcolm Collins: It’s

Simone Collins: doable. Okay.

Leaflit: Good flavor when it’s freshly cracked and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: But the reason I’m so excited to talk with Leaflet today, ‘cause the first time we talked with her, apparently it was like your first time talking to somebody else.

Sorry for you. I should, uh, give some context. So Leaflet is, um, quickly growing in influence. I think she’ll soon be, I mean, just based on my viewing it, I think she’ll soon be one of the sort of [00:03:00] dominant right-wing streamers, um, oh geez. In terms of like interesting ideas. Um, and we brought her on ages ago.

Um, and, uh, since then she’s gone on all the channels. She’s always on the, uh, the, the side scrollers.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: side scrollers and stuff like that. Um, and she’s always on ev every Sky Brow video, every one of the Sky Brow videos. It’s like three F-ing leaflet appearances. If I could have as much mental space as somebody’s ring.

Um, and, uh, if you guys were

Leaflit: on too.

Malcolm Collins: He did. He did one with us. One with us, yeah. Um,

Leaflit: was it the Creamy Majaro one?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Creamy Majaro.

Leaflit: That was the best one. That was my favorite one.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. I really like the Amelia one.

Leaflit: I like that one too. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Um, but what I wanted to do is this video, so for all our friends who are coming here to learn something about the world, because I was like, how was it weird that, uh, you’re one of my major sources new?

No, no, no. I don’t wanna do that in this video. I wanna focus on like nerd stuff specifically.

Leaflit: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: So I want to focus on, [00:04:00] because when I first heard that like you had built a world

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I asked you about it last time. I think you were a little, like, you didn’t, you, you probably were like, somebody doesn’t actually want all the lore.

And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Simone Collins: You were still working on it though. I don’t think it had gone live yet.

Leaflit: Yeah. It’s, it’s out now and it’s grown a lot since then. Like we have over like. 140 players now.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Leaflit: But like, that’s not like players who are playing in, you know, with their friends and whatever.

This is like one campaign. You imagine like one tabletop,

Malcolm Collins: one camp. Explain campaign how this works. One, sorry. Okay, so I need to zoom back for the audience here. Okay. So, um, there, it’s like tabletop gaming, um. Mm-hmm. And, uh, tabletop gaming happens in like, d and d is the most famous example. You got pathfinders, all that.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Um, and sometimes people will create their own, uh, lore in worlds. Um, and that is what she has done. But it [00:05:00] appears that somehow you created like an MMO version of tabletop gaming. So explain.

Leaflit: Sure. I can. So it, you know, it started off, uh, I was running this campaign for like, such a long time. Like I, I looked and I was like.

I had like, what, 14,000 hours or something and like, roll 20. Yeah. I, I’m like crazy. So like, no, it’s a good kind of crazy this, I went through some really, really bad times in my life and I was like super depressed. I didn’t like do anything. And all I did was tabletop. I was like, I’m just gonna play tabletop, go sleep, wake up, play, play tabletop.

So all of that stuff, and like translated into the YouTuber stuff and the company and all the stuff that we do is like, based on that. So like, that campaign has been running for that long, like over 10 years. Yeah. It’s so

Simone Collins: cool. I mean, it’s not cool that you were like in a dark place. Oh no, it’s fine. It sounds like, it sounds like a, a show’s plot.

Like, you know, girl gets depressed and then like literally falls into an alternate universe and it’s a little zaki and like that is, and [00:06:00] then like becomes like an internet celebrity and then it’s straight out of like a show plot. And then I didn’t

Leaflit: like expect any of this. Like if, if you told me like.

Years ago that I would be doing this, I’d be like, you’re crazy.

Malcolm Collins: That is. Okay. So I wanna dig into how this came to be this world, but I also wanna get into like, because I watch, so for Boo who don’t know, like the content that I’m familiar with from her is from YouTube and it’s a fan of hers who clips it and she sort of shares it 50 50 with the fan, um, and, uh, puts together her YouTube.

But what that means is I don’t get all of the lore and backstories to your characters mm-hmm. To your world. Like, okay. Brief question just to start.

Leaflit: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: What’s the difference between the Goo Girl character and the character you are Nower and are they actually the same character? Character? Is it sort of like a same Okay, so it’s a slime.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Reincarnated slime is, is one of my favorite is Kai. So, um, oh,

Leaflit: me too. Me too. [00:07:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. Okay. I’m

Leaflit: a slime girl. Right. So like, the, the, the story is that. My character is half slime. So my character’s dad is a slime and my character’s mom is a fay. And there’s like an entire, like this all came up because like years ago when I was running this campaign for so long, right?

Mm-hmm.

One of the players was like, but what if I wanna have a kid in games? Like what happens if like, I’m a cat folk and my wife is a slime. And so like, I was like, damnit. So like now I had to like write all of this lore bin and it ended up being used for this to like make my character. So my character is technically, her race is kymera, which is like magically mutated biological thing.

So like for instance, a cat folk would be a kymera, but they would be of the cat folk, like. Type, like subspecies type, right? And even with them that there’s even two different like phenotypes. There’s like the lyth [00:08:00] and the Zo lith, which is like, so the difference would be like if you had a, a rat girl versus like a caven,

Malcolm Collins: sorry.

First of all, one of my favorite things about this conversation, if there was a huge population on the internet who sees both of us as right-wing extremists, and this is a conversation that to the internet right wing extremists, they having, it’s like, well, you’ve got the chimera of the cat girl. Um, no.

Okay, so, so it, your character came out of an individual play session that you were playing.

Leaflit: She’s an NPC. So, okay, so, so she’s not even my oc That’s a funny thing. What? Yeah, she’s not So this cha So when I was making my V YouTuber character, I was like, well, I don’t really wanna be like the girl. I wanna be like.

Just some random villager office lady. And that’s what Leaflet is, is she’s like the guild receptionist of the Guild. So the player character, I’m DMing the game, the player characters, [00:09:00] they went through this really, really long campaign. They ended defeating the big bad. Mm-hmm. And they’re settling down.

They’re like, let’s make an adventuring guild. Right. So they found the Adventuring Guild and my character is the receptionist of the Guild. So I’m not even like a main character or anything like that.

Malcolm Collins: No. I actually really like this, um, as, as a world that was created by the Adventuring Guild receptionist.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Sounds very fitting for like an anime. Um, yeah. Uh, have you, have you watched the one about the Adventure Guild receptionist?

Leaflit: I have not. Is that the one where she’s really powerful?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah.

Leaflit: Yeah. I haven’t seen it yet. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s actually, it’s decent. It’s decent. Um, okay. So, uh. You when you were playing this particular campaign, was this in your world or was this before your world existed?

Leaflit: All of it is the same world ever since the first one. So there’s been like different timelines, like some take place like thousands of years in the past, but it’s all one continuous world. [00:10:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Leaflit: And go ahead.

Malcolm Collins: No, continue. Um, I wanna keep hearing, well you, you have multiple campaigns that you place in different times.

First I gotta hear about the logistics. How do you do this many people in one campaign?

Leaflit: Oh, you’re talking about that one? So that one is the newest one. So that’s the 10th campaign. I think it’s the 10th one. And so what happened is we, we, we developed this, this RPG, right? The tabletop RPG. And we released, we released it like the system’s out like an alpha, like anyone can play it for free.

It, it’s kind of like imagine Dungeons and Dragons. But the difference is the rules are online, so anybody can play it. There’s no fee. And then. It updates every two weeks, two to three weeks. So we have like patches. So it is, I hate to use the term, but it’s like a live service tabletop, RRP G kind of.

Malcolm Collins: That’s actually really interesting. Okay. So if I understand this correctly, people play individual campaigns with small groups.

Leaflit: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: But what’s politically happening in the world Change, like politically GI don’t know what you call it, but like that’s changing as they’re playing.

Leaflit: Okay. So, so [00:11:00] it goes like this.

So, you know, we have, we have, we have the game, we have the live service thing, right? And what happened was is as we were playing this, we were like, we don’t have enough people testing the game. And mm-hmm. Somebody was like, well, have you heard of West Marshes? You know what West Marches is?

Malcolm Collins: No.

Leaflit: Okay. So like, have you heard of West Marshes?

And what West Marches is, it’s a format of tabletop RPGs where you have all of these individual parties. And, and they can do whatever they want in this world, but then like what they do like actually affects things that other parties see. So like what happened was we were like, what if we do that like a canon campaign where players can feel like they’re actually a part of like the leaflet world and the leaflet lore, and then they can affect the world.

So like, we’re like, okay, so let me sit down and like make a setting for it. And what we invented was a setting separated from the main continents. Like where a leaflet lives right now is like a different, that’s like the main area. Okay. And then we separated off. So there’s this, there’s this concept in the story.

Um, there’s a place called the Astro Line, and it’s basically like. [00:12:00] Imagine like the equator, but it’s just giant, like irradiated zone. It’s like magic is messed up there. Yeah. And it corrupts stuff, right? So these adventures are basically, and normally you have to be a really high level adventure to go there ‘cause they don’t want people going there.

Mm-hmm. But this person set up like this kind of bootleg village where they’re like, okay, anybody that wants to go in, like, you know, you could come here and then like, there’s a way to get in there. Right? So the players are those people, they’re like the, the, we’re not official adventurers, but like, you know, screw it, we’re gonna go in there and uh, we’re gonna look and whatever reason.

So like some players are like,

Malcolm Collins: so what makes

Leaflit: the

Malcolm Collins: line irradiated? Like, what makes it dangerous?

Leaflit: Okay. So it’s a little bit, okay, there was an event that happened in the game in previous things and it caused an event in which this happened. I can’t really say it because it’s like, it’s a spoiler and like everybody’s trying to figure that out right now.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. Oh. All of that’s awesome. Okay. [00:13:00] Okay. Okay. I can tell you later though.

Leaflit: Off,

Malcolm Collins: off camera. In what way is it, so you, you call it a radio. I guess what I’m trying to find out is like what makes it hostile feeling? Is it like unusual numbers of monsters, mana, sapping? Like what’s the thing that makes it dangerous?

Leaflit: So like this force is called asra and it’s a type of magic. So there’s like the different types of magic. Okay. Astro’s like the least understood one. And what it does is it tends to just make weird effects, but the, the biggest effect that it has that’s bad is that it will sometimes corrupt a thing and it doesn’t have, I mean this is the thing, it doesn’t have to be a biological thing.

Like it could be like, it could be, but it could also be like a house or like, and are you familiar with SCP? It’s kind of like that.

Malcolm Collins: The SEP foundation? Yes. Like. Yeah, we, we talked about, that was the thing I talked to you about where they make up all the monsters.

Leaflit: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: they have the entire lo and it’s so cool.

Leaflit: Oh,

yes.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: It’s actually most recently, I love watching SEP lore videos. Um,

Leaflit: [00:14:00] yeah. It’s similar to that. So like, things get corrupted, so like

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Leaflit: A, a house for instance, or like a, like one of the, the big dangerous ones is a mirror. Okay. And there’s like this mirror and like, it’s just a corrupted mirror and it’s the corrupted concept of a mirror.

So it’s like, rather than being like a creature that like stands up and attacks you. It. Like if you look into it, it like corrupts you basically.

Simone Collins: Our kids are gonna be, become obsessed with this as soon as they get like literate.

Malcolm Collins: I’m actually almost more interested in how, so it sounds like the way you developed your universe, if I’m if I’m wrong here, is you started, uh, just sort of building on it as you played session after session and then new things get added.

It reminds me of, um, in somebody as I described, like modern Judaism as a bit like this mm-hmm. That it’s just been around forever. And then people added new things, new things, new things. And now when you look at like Orthodox Jews, it’s like fashion trends from like two different centuries all implanted on top of each other.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Uh, not, not too, too [00:15:00] millennia, like, and we’re just gonna, uh, because when you’re like different types of magic.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. First of all, I wanna know about the different types of ma like

Leaflit: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: Let’s zoom into that. Yeah.

Leaflit: All right. Sure, sure. Of course. So like the, um, I love this by the way. Like I, I, I sometimes use this on stream.

I just, I just nerd out about Lauren. Like, like people ask because the people that play the game wanna know, and they’re like, oh, it’s time, it’s time for the leaflet lo session time to like, time to figure out stuff that she won’t tell us, right? Try time bait her into telling us stuff. But, uh, so there’s like arcane magic, and that’s like the, that’s like your typical understanding of like sort of science magic, where like they have an understanding that there’s like this energy force and then like they could take the energy force into themselves and then program it and then use that to like, use magical effects.

And the extension of that is called arteris, which is if you, you know, arteris, but basically mm-hmm. It’s taking that programming but making a circuit that goes into an item so that it can, you can put the manna into the item [00:16:00] and it like follows that exact circuit, which allows non-PE casters to cast. So like in the world, like everybody uses magic, like even like fighters.

Like they would like have a sword that has like that circuit in it and they would all use magic that way.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I, um,

Simone Collins: first off, no, I just have to say this is really annoying to me. Have you heard of Harry Potter in the methods of rationality?

Leaflit: No, I have not.

Simone Collins: Okay. It’s basically Harry Potter fan fiction. It was like, well, what if we took you, my guy?

Yeah. He’s, he’s an, he’s an AI dor now, but like, I mean, this is one of the things that made him famous and what was really fun was this premise of like, what if someone just really thoughtful took this wizard universe and was like, okay, well what if we like, apply some more like principles of basic physics to this and stuff like that.

But he doesn’t really follow through with it. Uh, and what I, well what I’m hearing here is you’re like, well, what have we like actually thought through how like this magic would work and how we could apply it to, to objects and like how in a real world non magical people would start to leverage it. And, and like,

Malcolm Collins: well, I [00:17:00] have, um, fans who don’t know this.

If you, if you have, if you’re on our like subscriber, I have a number of stories that I’ve played out with like mm-hmm. Uh, the, the site that we run reality fabricate where I try to go through like different magical universes. Um, but, okay, so now I’m immediately interested in if this can, so this system, where does magic come from and how can it be stored?

Leaflit: So there’s two ways. One, people natural, there’s like a biological magic container that people can have. Okay. And then the other form is as fuel. So like they can create like a distilled magical fuel. So these, like items I’m telling you about, they use like cartridges that, like, people put like a, like a bullet in it, but it’s like a ma it’s like just a fuel canister.

We’ll put it in. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I should, I should be more direct about what I’m trying to do. So what I love doing in these universes mm-hmm. Is try to figure out how their physics work to find out how I can exploit them to become extremely powerful. So what I’m asking here is, uh, if I wanted to fill up a canister of magic in your universe.

Mm-hmm. [00:18:00] Right? Yeah. Um, where, like, what’s the process for that?

Leaflit: Um, basically, so right now the main way to get it is to mine like, it’s like a fossil fuel is people will mine like a fossil fuel of magic.

Malcolm Collins: Clever way to not make it easily breakable. So it’s not something I could take from captives. It’s not something I can take from an environment.

I need to literally mine it.

Leaflit: So the funny thing is, is there was a way to do this. Um, so one system that we have is this thing called Divine Arms. Have you watched a Comic A Kill?

Malcolm Collins: Uh, which one is that? I, I I,

Leaflit: the one with assassins and like, they wanna take down the government and then they have these, these weapons that like nobody understands how they were made.

Malcolm Collins: Um, is, you’re not talking about Cleta, right? So No, no, I haven’t watched that one.

Leaflit: So basically there’s these ancient weapons that nobody knows how they’re made or what they’re made out of, [00:19:00] and the methods of their creation aren’t understood. And there was one that did this, that basically converted people’s lives into like bullets.

So they would like shoot all their countries with them like an artillery. But it got blown up recently, but someone’s trying to rebuild it. But that’s a little, that’s a, that’s another story.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, oh, hold on. So, okay. So is, is there any understanding in the universe of why this thing that they’re mining has this power?

Leaflit: Um, it’s basically like, like fossil fuels. It’s like as things die and they have like magic in them that like, kind of distills into like rocks and like different things that they can, they can mine up. And then like, liquefy

Malcolm Collins: clever. I like

Simone Collins: biological being, can produce magic that maybe like there’s something in them that when die, they die.

Like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leaflit: All of the types of magic Yeah. That, that exists.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s pretty, uh, you know, if I was making this universe, uh, the twist I would [00:20:00] use is that it turns out that this is actually their souls that people are burning through. Like, it’s

Leaflit: like, that’s a different magic.

Malcolm Collins: That is, okay, go over this

Leaflit: kind of, so like, that’s how divine magic works in a setting.

So divine magic is the idea that if you believe in something, a piece of you goes to that. So like, oh, fun. Oh, so like very

Simone Collins: like Neil Gaman American Gods.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Kind of like that. It doesn’t really matter what it is too, right? Like if it’s a concept you believe in, it would like send like some of that energy of your soul to that, whether that’s a god or even a hero, right?

Then that’s how like, heroes are so powerful. It’s like so many people like love them.

Malcolm Collins: Does it burn your life force to use this form of magic?

Leaflit: Um, it’s kind of like a finite amount, so it doesn’t like kill you. At least in the normal sense, like the typical sense.

Malcolm Collins: Did you ever see, I I, I don’t know. I know this is a deep, I think [00:21:00] it’s called Krono Trigger or something, the anime where the character like loses their life lifespan every time they use magic.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I kept expecting the entire thing. I was like, they’re not actually gonna have her die young. Like there’s gonna be some reversal before the end of the anime.

Leaflit: Wasn’t that ending amazing? It was like the

Malcolm Collins: best No. That ending was like what? The, you had her die as like a child. Like, what? I did not, there’s, there’s, there’s not consequences to this type of magic in most.

Leaflit: I loved it. I loved, I loved how they actually stuck that ending. ‘cause like most people with chickened out.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. Bring back

Leaflit: consequences.

Malcolm Collins: 100% believed they were going to chicken out. I didn’t have the slightest. There was no part of my brain that throughout the entire anime thought that she was just going to die after the big bad, like being held by her best friend.

Right. Like, I was like, what? You had set them up as like lovers and they’re still children.

Leaflit: This is the way it happened was so good too. Like, just [00:22:00] like the, the final scene of it, like, man, it was, it was good. It was a good one. Yeah. Oh, one thing you might like about the magic, like in like relation to the world is, so ad adventuring is like, think of a, the wor word.

Adventuring when they think of an adventure or someone who like, you know, the concept of like adventuring guild and you get like ranks and stuff like that. Yeah. The, the original concept of that was. Um, is a fighting style called that was built around that. Okay. And it’s people that are able to use their internal magic to like augment their muscles.

And that’s like the basics of that. Okay. And this is why like everyone in the setting, like e like even like the level one characters can like jump like three stories and they can like instantly teleport behind you and stuff like that using like their magic, right? And the original story, so this is like actually canon in the lore, is that there was a character who was a girl and she [00:23:00] had a dad who was like this expedition.

He was like going on grand adventures, right? And the daughter really wanted to go with him, but it got to a point where like her dad was like, okay, like. You stay at home, you, you can’t do any of this. Right. Yeah. And then like, he would take her brothers and she got so upset by this, that like, and her mom was like a maid.

So her mom would teach her like, oh, like, here’s like magic for like how to heat up water. Here’s magic, how to do this stuff. Right? And eventually she was the first person who founded the ability to like, augment your muscles, the magic. And that’s the explanation of why female player characters can actually fight men.

Malcolm Collins: I, that’s needed, that’s being needed in a setting. I’m, I’m actually sorry. I love this is, this is why first, I, I just can’t help but thinking in so many people’s minds, these are two like far right comments that are talking, you learning out about like old anime, but then two, it’s like you come up with explanations for stuff mm-hmm.

That the mainstream creators are not coming up with. You have like a d and d campaign or [00:24:00] whatever, and a female’s just as strong as a male and a female isn’t as strong as a male. I mean, it’s, it’s

Leaflit: not, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And so you’re like, no, we have an explanation of that. Yeah. But the other thing, um, so I wanna go deeper because I wanna find out how this system can be broken.

Okay. Explain to me the different types of magic.

Leaflit: Okay. So there’s like the divine magic, which is the one I talked about.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That’d be harder to explore. You could try to create a culture something. Mm-hmm. It wouldn’t really be, which they

Leaflit: have done, people have done that

Malcolm Collins: actually. Can you use divine magic to manipulate people’s minds?

Leaflit: To manipulate people’s minds? I mean, I guess you could use any magic to do that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, if you can use divine magic to do that, you can create a cascade, right? Mm-hmm. So if you can, uh, like use the divine magic that you have to get people to worship a certain concept and then draw power from the concept, you’re having them worship, you could create a cascade.

But, uh, that, that [00:25:00] seems hard. Like the mining one. What I, what I’m impressed about, about your world is I can’t think of many ways to exploit the magic. So I hear about,

Leaflit: well, because you have to work on it, because Yeah, like, as I was DMing this stuff, right? So like all of this, it wasn’t something I planned out.

I was like, I wrote, I, I sat down and I was like, okay, I’m gonna do this, this, this, this, this, this. And this is like how this system works. It was like me playing with players, right? And again, like this goes back to like a time when I was like really, really depressed. Yeah. So you have to imagine I would like run 18 hours.

I would sleep, eat, run 18 hours. That was like my schedule. Right. And, and so I didn’t even have time to prep for the games. Right. So a lot of it was reactive based on like, players trying to do some b******t and then like would have to like, okay, well how do I, how do I, how do I write myself out of this?

Right.

Malcolm Collins: I know what’s so funny is George RR Martin has been working on the last book for like, for however many years, and you’re forced to like, write new volumes every time you go in. Okay.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I wanna understand the, uh, [00:26:00] body manipulation magic. What is the source of that magic?

Leaflit: The body mini, you mean like

Malcolm Collins: the stuff that’s used to make people physically more powerful?

Like, is that the same with the artifice or magic, or is that something different?

Leaflit: It’s the regular arcane magic. So it’s like the, the ambient like force, I guess it’s like magic just exists in the world. It’s like ambient.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Leaflit: Of different levels. Not like the same level everywhere. Yeah. And people have a thing called a soul core, which stores all their magic.

Malcolm Collins: So you can store magic from the ambient magic level.

Leaflit: Yeah, but it’s, it’s, it’s capped as to like your, there’s like a search in like maximum. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You can’t, can, you can’t, can you store it in any external object?

Leaflit: Mm. Some people can, but it’s still reliant on magic to activate. It’s like the, the biggest loophole here would be like, probably umo.

Geez. Like they have, like, they can Yeah. Imbue their [00:27:00] magic into ink and then write like talismans that like have a spell effect. It’s like, but then they also have to use their magic to activate it still. So it’s not really that big Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Of a well set up world. I’m gonna be honest. Well set now. I’m, I’m impressed, uh, that it’s hard.

Yeah. Because what I would normally do, if you could do something like that, then what you need to do, like if you’re a Lord or something like that, is use any of this type of character you have captured or mm-hmm. Essentially industrially farm them to create magical scrolls, but if it’s their own magic that’s needed to activate the scroll mm-hmm.

Then you can’t use it in any sort of industrial capacity.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm. One thing it might be, what, what might be interesting, like if, if you wanna know this about divine magic, is that like, if it’s a God, like the concept of a God, that is, there’s a container for it, so you can actually kill the God and like take their container.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And what

Leaflit: [00:28:00] could you do with it? Nobody knows about, but I I, I they’ll find out now, but it’s whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s amazing. You’re dropping law here. No. Um, so there is, um, one of my favorite things about the war hammer universe. Are you, do you, do you like follow the war of like war hammer 40 K and stuff?

Leaflit: A little bit. Like, I’m not like super deep in it, but I, I know like a little bit of it

Malcolm Collins: is they took the concept, um, and this, this is why I like it. So they took the, I I, I actually have never read a single war hammer book in my entire life. I have only watched lore videos. Um, but they took the concept of.

Well, if you worship something similar to your universe, like if you worship a, a God or a concept or have a feeling mm-hmm. Um, that, that creates a divine entity of that type. Yes. And what what is funny is a lot of like hippies beliefs, this, they’re like, well, all gods and all religions are true in so far as like people believe in them, right?

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And then it takes this, and it’s like, and [00:29:00] if that was the case, it would actually be really horrible because what would happen is the most basal concepts like a fear of death would get feedback loops where like, the God that was manifested by that fear would want to create more of that fear to manifest himself further.

Uh, you get like the God of eroticism, the fear of death, like all of the most basic things. Um, but it doesn’t sound like that’s a problem in your universe because it sounds like these are not like active thinking entities that are, that would want to like empower themselves further.

Leaflit: Yes. Well, one thing I will say is that.

That ties in, that whole thing being bad ties, ties into what I told you about is like what caused the big irradiated zone.

Oh

yeah. So if you think about it, right, like I’m sure you can piece together.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. Okay. So what are the major political events in, in the world right now that like players are thinking about, that are changing, that are exciting people?

Leaflit: So, there’s, [00:30:00] there’s two right now. There’s the, there’s the novel, the Light Novel, which is a civil war in like one of the countries. But the big political one right now is Moran, like the, the campaign has all the people playing in it.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.

Leaflit: So there are a bunch of people that live in like this. This town called Mera.

Okay. And it is like a base that was set up kind of out in the middle of nowhere. And typically people can’t go there ‘cause there’s a big tundra before you get there. So it’s really hard to get there. Most people, like, there’s also, the other thing too is we had to, so there’s airships in the setting, but airships, they, they only really, they float on like magic lay lines.

So like, if there’s no lay line, you can’t put, you can’t just like put a ship there. It would be really, really hard to like fly a ship there. Yeah. So because of that, this tundra has no lay line. So like you can’t just fly it over it. So you’re talking like really, really hard caravans that are going through like, brutal conditions with [00:31:00] like no food or anything like that.

So

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So why, why do people go there? Like what’s the adva, is there some resource at this location?

Leaflit: It’s to explore the as line, because there’s all sorts of crazy stuff there. Like, there’s new, new resources, new materials, uh, items called, um, Astro Relics, which are like, if you’ve watched Made In Abyss, it’s kind of like similar to that.

Or you can find like these crazy, like items that do stuff and it’s like, how is this work? How does this work? And like there’s even a system where like people will will gather these things and submit them for research to like the big like, like academies, like magic academies.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Leaflit: And, uh, different monsters, like different parts, new things like that.

Um, they’re all looking for that. But the, the fun thing about is there’s a lot of drama because people have different reasons. Like some people wanna be like researchers, they wanna like understand what Astra is. Mm-hmm. Some people are like, I just want fame and fortune and like, I’m here to like, make tons of money.

And some people are like, well, I’m here for my country because I wanna find technology that’ll help my country. So they have all these like [00:32:00] different reasons. And because of that, the players clash a lot. They end up fighting, they end up making their own little factions. And there’s a character who’s like the expedition director.

And this character is like a kind of mysterious force. Like nobody knows who they are. No one’s ever seen them. And they actually, there was like a bunch of people thinking that the director was like, evil because the director doesn’t help them. So like they, they’d have like a case in which like there’d be this giant monster just walking around like killing people.

And it’s like the newbies would go out and get slaughtered by this monster. And so they have to set up like parties, like, oh, let’s go hunt this thing down. But they’re like, wait a minute. If the director ha is, is this powerful? Why are they not doing anything about it? They must be evil. Right?

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

And it’s like

Leaflit: from my point of, it’s like you just don’t understand like your idea of like the future and your idea of, of what is important. The, the director’s thinking about things on a completely different scale than like you even could [00:33:00] possibly imagine, because from the director’s point of view, if the director helps you all, then you’ll never grow and you’ll suck.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: So it’s like, it’s, it’s kind of fun like to have

Malcolm Collins: that. No, no, that’s also fun. Okay. Has this been established that they are wrong about the director in Universe yet? Or is this like being

Leaflit: a, the, there’s a song sang by the director. So like, okay, so here’s like a whole nother thing. So there was a fan song made.

Wait,

micro, explain, explain that.

Okay. So there’s a concept. So in the game, the way, first I have to explain a little bit about the game. So in the game you have four action points, and you can use this for action points for anything. It’s not like d and d where there’s like move action, like minor major, it’s four.

Okay. And the biggest balls thing you could do is called a double heavy attack, which means I’m not doing anything but just attacking. Right? Um, I’m doing two all in attacks that have, I don’t care if it misses, if it hits, I could do big damage, right? It, so it’s like the, the big balls thing to do. [00:34:00] And so a player made a song called Double Heavy Attacks.

It’s like a, like a, like a metal song and everyone loves this song, right? And it, it, it kind of became like this huge meme in like the community. Oh my

Simone Collins: gosh.

Leaflit: So the, I, the concept of double heavy attacks now means a person who. Understands what they want and they go for it all in. That’s what it means. So yeah, we’ve taken this song,

Simone Collins: you now have slang.

This is so good.

Malcolm Collins: You said there was a, the song. Okay. So by the way, for people who are confused as to why something like this is interesting, if you’re just watching this and you’re just like, this seems like weird nerd stuff. Like why is this interesting? Uh, what I consider how media and entertainment are changing the concept of a form of entertainment, of the type that is being described here was genuinely.

Impossible, uh, I wanna say two generations ago. [00:35:00] Mm-hmm. Uh, so I, I, it might’ve been possible in the early days of the internet, but it hadn’t been developed to this extent yet. Um, and what we are seeing right now is something that whatever our kids are doing for fun is likely going to be an extrapolation of ideas like this.

Mm-hmm. The iterative, interactive elements, um, uh, I, I think are genuinely like anthropologically. Culturally, we are looking at, uh, a, a. You can ignore it and you can say, well, none of this stuff matters because, um, you know, like this is all like urban monoculture, whatever. And it’s like, no, but this is like, this is like actually the, the like internet conservatives who are into this stuff, right?

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Um, and uh, people can be like, well then why would, why would they be into it? And the answer I would make is it’s because all of the media [00:36:00] that’s out there, people are like, why do so many conservative influencers watch a ton of anime is because it’s not woke yet. It’s like the one form of media I can watch where like, women are feminine and men are masculine and, uh, I’m not preached to 24 7.

It’ll have its own message, but it like, um, and th this is a form of media that because people create it. Communally. And what’s even more interesting than that, it is not created by like a localized friend group. Mm-hmm. It is created by an online friend group. Yeah. And online friend groups and local friend groups have very little in common if you think about the way they actually end up structured.

Yeah. Um, local friend groups, you know, the way you look ends up mattering, uh, your, your local social standing, how much money you have, et cetera. Uh, and this can matter in an online friend group if it’s in some like, pay to win scenario or something like that. That’s obviously not what this is. Um, and it’s one of the reasons that if you look at the culture of our era today, I [00:37:00] point out that a lot of, uh, just the culture that we live in, and I’d argue all the way down to Trump originally came from Fortune.

Um, brownies came from four chan, memes came from four Chan Trump originally in the primaries. I’m not saying that he won because of four chan, but he was recognized in the primaries because of what was happening there. And that was a totally new type of community where social status was determined in a totally new way.

Um, and the way it was determined, because there wasn’t up votes or anything like that, was based on how, uh. How, how much, whatever you said could grab attention. Um, and that meant to be sort of maximally shocking and everything like that, and that defined a generation of cultural output. When you look at what Leaflet is doing now, we might see the prototype of what the next generation of cultural output is going to look like.

There are going to be. Potentially, and I’m not saying it’ll happen within [00:38:00] leaflet setting, maybe in 10 years when this is metastasized and you have different groups doing this, um, groups that are potentially so large that ideas and memes that come up within these settings end up affecting, uh, not just like what, like first of all, the four chan could create something like a Brony movement or memes was insane back in the day, but then they could elect a president That changes politics in the United States permanently.

Um, so paying attention to these ways that culture is changing and the innovators within this space is not a, like a lark. It’s not like a a, a curious aside. It’s something that anyone who is interested in where society is going is treating as one of the main courses. But to go forward, you mentioned some sort of fanfic.

So somebody, people write fanfictions about this and you incorporate them

Leaflit: a song. It’s a song. So somebody made a song’s

Malcolm Collins: a song. Song is like a fan song. Yeah. Okay.

Leaflit: Yeah. The fan song. Double Heavy Attacks. And what we did was we took that. And we started making versions of that song from [00:39:00] all the characters that embodied that idea, but from their own point of view.

Yeah. So like the director has a version of the song, but it’s so completely different than the others. ‘cause others are like, I’m gonna go all in, like, you know, for my family and, you know, this is like, I wanna like go on adventures. And she’s like, I want the future to exist. It’s like so

completely

different.

So great.

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very, it’s, it’s very funny that, so play

the

ball.

Malcolm Collins: I’m actually, wait, are these sung by real people or are they done by ai?

Leaflit: Ai. Ai.

Malcolm Collins: Good, good. Well, no, this is the thing about AI and AI and creativity that people don’t get, right? Like, so people are like, oh, AI art, or AI music. So people are born with different capacities, right?

Mm-hmm. You know, I might be a smart person, but I was born without any genetic capacity for music or art. I, I try, I just don’t have it, right?

Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now. I can create these things and I, I regularly do it on shows. I make art, I make music, I make, uh, you know, [00:40:00] you created that great one for ASME gold, right?

The, uh, the animated song and like theb style. Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: I’ve watched that so many times. It was really well done. Thank you. It was the effort.

Malcolm Collins: Um, and a lot of people get surprised. This stuff is coming from content creators who people see as like, like the, we, one of the weirdest things that’s happened in our generation is that, um, ai, this, this, this incredible new technology that came outta nowhere, that for whatever reason, well, we will talk about why the left came out reflexively against it.

Um, and the rite has largely in our communities, embraced it. Like we all watch Sky Brown. We all liked, we, we liked these various songs. I liked yours, your Asthma Gold song. Um, and, uh, a lot of people are like, that doesn’t make any f*****g sense. Like, why has this happened? And, and I think the answer is, is because.

For so long, the dominant culture in our societies has been able to control us. Mm-hmm. By saying, you should be ashamed of saying things like that. You should be ashamed of [00:41:00] doing things like that. And eventually, uh, the way that people ended up responding was just like, well, if you tell me I should be ashamed, I’m gonna reflexively do the opposite and I’m gonna do the opposite.

The most, like in creamy manjaro, he’s talking about AI slop, like the cream of the lop and everything like that, right? Yeah. Like the whole song is joking and riffing on the idea of like, yeah, it’s AI slop, like whatever. Yeah. Um, and because of this, strangely, uh, the, the communities and culture that’s going to be generated of what, you know, the, the, the, the world our kids are going to live in mm-hmm.

Is predominantly happening in communities like the ones that you’re, you’re creating. I, I’d love to know like, where else are you using AI in the creation of this universe or, and how the universe is expanding.

Leaflit: Everything. So like, we use AI for a lot of our, our art, like when I do sessions myself mm-hmm. I usually make songs that are really [00:42:00] stupid.

So like, there’s, there was like one time, uh, the, the party I, I had the encounter where they mm-hmm. There’s this guy who’s just causing all this chaos in the area and they meet this tree, and the tree, the, the person cursed the tree to have a giant wooden, you know, like,

yeah, yeah.

Just, just, just to mess with him.

And I just made it a musical number just for fun. Like, they come out to like this tree and he comes out and he just. I play the song and it’s the tree complaining about everything that happened to him and like, please adventurous, help me with this problem. Like, but like, you couldn’t do that before, right?

Like that, there’s no way you could do something like that, right?

Malcolm Collins: No. What’s, what’s funny is you describe it as like cringey, but, um, one of the things I’ve pointed out when we talk about cultural anthropology and how the world is changing, if you, I point out that, you know, in the nineties and the eighties, um, [00:43:00] right wing, uh, you know, influencers, politics was sort of defined by this feeling of disgust and like, these are the things that discussed us and therefore they’re bad.

And then we learned basically societally, that’s a bad way to do things. Mm-hmm. Like, you know, um. What’s her fa mother? Oh, what is Mother Teresa? Right? Was it her? Yeah. She was like, well, leopards may cause disgust in you, but like they’re still people, right? Like you can’t trust disgust to be an objective measure of morality.

Um, and then, uh, you had this dominant culture that came out that was sort of leftist and it said, uh, well, we, we’ll police things through. Um. You know, cringe and things that embarrass you, right? Like this embarrasses you, that embarrasses you. And I think now we’re seeing this flip of that, um, where the new, the new right is sort of defined by vitalism.

Like, I don’t care how you wanna police me, I want to be maximally excited about life, excited and maximally having [00:44:00] fun with the life I have. And, uh, anybody who, and, and when you say like, this is cringe, but like I’m leaning into it, what you mean is you’ve created an environment where you’re not afraid of external judgment.

What you’re trying to create is whatever is a maximally chaotically fun.

Leaflit: I’m cringe, but I am free.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you, you must face the cringe and pass through a very dune, right? Like cringe is mind. That’s,

Leaflit: I live now, that’s how I live my life now. I’m cringe, but I’m free. I do whatever I want.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it.

Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: Great

Malcolm Collins: feelings. Uh, so by the way, what, what, what do you uses.

Leaflit: Uh, yeah, I use, I use suno and, uh, we, we, we use all sorts of AI for everything, like, everything like the art, on, like the, there’s no way that we could, like, we tried, by the way, we, we tried to like, uh, what’s the word? Commission people to do like art.

But the thing is our release cycle is like two to three weeks.

Simone Collins: [00:45:00] No. In our commissions, we know we ran an, our commission startup. They take forever

sometimes.

Simone Collins: I mean, we’ve gone through the process of trying to pay artists to do all sorts of things and like make it easier for them and facilitate it. And it still just takes forever.

Art takes a long time. It does, it does. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: By, by the way, Malcolm and Simone Lore, for people who don’t know, uh, our first company when we were first, uh, meeting and, and, and doing, when we, we raised VC money for this and everything mm-hmm. Was designed to make inexpensive art commissions of the type that people do on deviant art, like easy for ever average people to do as like a consumer thing.

Um, and it, it’s just, it’s interesting. I mean, obviously that it doesn’t exist anymore. Um, but, uh, yeah, there, there isn’t a way to do this with a lot of the ways that people are using ai. They’re like, well, you could be paying an artist. It’s like, I can’t pay an artist to do my daily title card. Like, what are you talking about?

Mm-hmm.

Leaflit: Exactly. And the funny thing is, is like I get, you know, I get complaints from people on like x like, oh, you hate artist lethal. I’m like. I pay more [00:46:00] on art than you could even possibly imagine. You know? Like I was like, you have no idea. And, and I’ll tell you a little something, uh, in regards to that.

Like, so we have for our game, for the, you know, the, uh, the one that has multiplayer a lot of people playing it, right? Yeah. We, I’ve, I’m in contact with like a friend who owns a studio in Tokyo. We had a song produced, we got like a mini orchestra to play it. Uh, we got hired like a really, really good singer to sing it.

And, um, yeah, it’s being animated by that, by people that worked on a attack on Titan. So, I mean, like money

Malcolm Collins: people No, hold on when she told me this. So people who work on a tech on Titan are literally animating. It’s like a, a new intro thing for your world. Yeah. You have an old intro thing that I quite like.

Leaflit: Yeah, I can, I can send you the, the song later. The song is so good. Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: I got, uh,

Simone Collins: yes, please.

Malcolm Collins: Jelly. My is

Simone Collins: amazing. I think that such a good example though, is that people who condemn use of AI to make art, you know, are like, oh, how dare you. But really, and [00:47:00] the people who I’ve seen use it the most also are spending the most

Leaflit: Yep.

Simone Collins: On art and on music because they just, but they can’t, no one else can keep up the pace. And I think it’s very similar with stuff like, um. Just development or even just like phone calls or other stuff that AI is starting to take over. Yeah. It’s the people who need it and just can’t get humans to do it enough.

Like we just, no one else can keep up. Mm-hmm. People aren’t replacing humans, they’re just trying to force multiply.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I,

Leaflit: exactly.

Malcolm Collins: I’d also point out that, um, the industries that have been replaced, the first like a, a, a lot of like Hollywood and stuff like this that we’re seeing, they were already basically ais, they were creating the most average slop ever, and that’s why AI was so easily able to replace it.

Simone Collins: It’s true. What are, like when, when AI was just coming online, I asked various ais like, well, you know what, what domains will be the final ones left to humans? And they’re like, well for sure therapy and [00:48:00] art will remain the domain of humans. And this is like at the same time that like it was just popping up in those areas the most and it was, oh, I dunno.

The new thing in the news just, well, the one thing that AI will never be able to do is, is to have taste, but like, what is taste? I don’t even understand taste. So she makes

Malcolm Collins: my dinner with ai. By the way, if you don’t know, like the main

Simone Collins: perplexity makes the, I mean, because I know perplexity blends different models, but it’s the best at distilling recipes.

Um, ‘cause now you know, like the internet ruined recipes, you have to scroll for like 10 minutes to get to like the ingredients list if you go off Google.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Simone Collins: And so just, yeah, we ask perplexity and that is, that is all of Malcolm’s food now.

Leaflit: I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s really because you also tailor it to like your taste.

Right? You like, I don’t like this specific thing and then I’ll work around it. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s amazing. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Wonderful. It goes for you too.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. So you got through one thing that’s happening in this universe. What’s something else is happening in [00:49:00] this universe right now that people are, are paying attention to?

Leaflit: Uh, you mean like in the, in the game? Um, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: in the game. The game.

Leaflit: It’s like the anniversary right now is kind of cool, but, um, it, I, oh, right

Malcolm Collins: now, well, how does the game world recognize its own anniversary? What’s going on with that?

Leaflit: Oh, in the game world? Uh, well, in the game world, we just have like festivals.

So we just make a festival in the game. Like, oh, there’s like this caravan that’s coming into town and they have all this like, cool stuff and there’s games and, uh, but one of the big things, like one of the big political things that’s what you’re interested in is, um, yeah. So there’s these creatures, I told you already that the SAP is the fis.

So the thing about fiends is I have told the players straight up this, this is the hilarious thing. You’re gonna love this. I told them straight up, like I’m telling you right now, as like the head law writer, that all fiends are evil and they want to kill you. Okay. Is what I said. And you know what they’re doing now.

Oh, we have this fi shopkeeper and she’s our friend and we’re gonna take her into [00:50:00] the town. By the way, it’s

Malcolm Collins: so fry. Fry.

Leaflit: Yes. It’s literally fry.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Leaflit: But it’s like, imagine this like on a, like happening again, but with like players and like, I’m telling them as like the universal truth of the universe that can like tell them the the absolute truth that they all want to kill you and they’re still like.

Yeah, well this one, like, you know, she trades me stuff. She trades me food for things. So like, you know, she must be like, okay. And they’re like, yeah, we would like to take her into our town and she can set up a shop and then we can trade with her. And I’m just like,

Malcolm Collins: this is, this is great. Your building though.

No, no, no, it’s great. It’s great. I like it because, you know, if, if, uh, they’re acting like we had an episode recently. Um mm-hmm. Did you, did you play the mass effect series?

Leaflit: Uh, I. Is this the one that about the, the warrior people with the

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They made it and I, I, I had a crash out about the genophage. I, I dunno if you remember this plot line, but the Rogan and the Genophage, and I was like, you guys are f*****g idiot.

Anyone who cured this. [00:51:00] 96% of players cured the Genophage Rogan’s had a thousand children every year and lived a thousand years. The genophage reduced their birth rate to one in a thousand survive. I said, that means that every Rogan woman only has 800 children. Okay. You are insane if you cure this. They are a violent, belligerent species resistant to small arms fire.

Yeah. That destroyed their own planet.

Leaflit: Sorry. I I, I re I remember that,

Malcolm Collins: but No, but you’re, you’re showing the same thing we haven’t learned in the society.

Leaflit: Yeah. I, it’s like them straight up and they’re still doing it. And so what happened is there’s a player faction that is like. We are very anti fiend and we hate them because they are evil and they want to kill us.

And then the other guys are like, no, but like, see there’s like a good one here. And they’re like, no, you’re an idiot. And so I’m like, now they’re like fighting. There’s like a internal like battle between like these in character [00:52:00] player factions and it’s likeactually Amazing.

Malcolm Collins: That is so fun. So another fun thing for people who are watching this to give you contextualization, our kids or our grandkids, depending on how old you are, are going to be living in environments where, um, they will likely be able to, like when I look at what the future of video games and the internet is going to be, uh, the idea of AI is being able to create fully modeled realities around us.

Like putting on a headset and having the AI do that is likely going to be easy for a lot of people, which allows them to explore whatever world, whatever environment they want. And so when you ask yourself, well, how are people most going to want to explore these completely generated worlds? Right? Uh, some people will want to solo it, uh, but I think the vast majority will want to opt into something like what she’s creating here.

And I think what you’re seeing is a prototype of what entertainment may [00:53:00] look like 60 years from now, where it will be something like this where you will have one influencer game master, um, and then within that world you just put it on and, and you’re seeing this done in a piecemeal fashion already with sort of what you’re telling us.

People are creating songs with ai, people are creating visuals with ai, and in 60 years, the entire environment will be created with ai. Um, and I think that’s really cool.

Leaflit: They did a vigil recently.

Malcolm Collins: A video for somebody who died,

Leaflit: uh, because the, the game is Perma death. And I purposely told them that there’s no way to revive people from death.

Oh

Simone Collins: my gosh. So

Leaflit: someone’s

Simone Collins: lost.

Leaflit: Yeah. So it’s like, really, like, uh, like people get rid, like pe I’ve, I’ve people get so heated in this game because like, someone will screw up, like, like they’ll, they’ll be like, okay, we’re gonna fight that. Like, boss, someone will screw up and they’ll get someone killed and they’ll like yell at that person.

Like, like out of character. Like, you freaking, you know, you God so mad at them. [00:54:00] And it’s like they like. It’s, it’s such a big deal to them when somebody dies in the game. And then they did like a AI vigil where they like played a song and it had like clips of all the characters using ai.

Simone Collins: Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: So, okay.

I, I really hope the people who have no idea, like what we’re talking about or anything, when you hear something like this, you can begin to see why something like this gets teased in, in, in, in people and is special to people that there are hundreds of people that feel that they have an iteration of themselves because the iteration that you create of you, when you’re out there and you’re interacting with other humans, it is, uh, something that, that many people, I mean, not everyone, but many people sit down and they’re basically like, okay, who do I wanna be to the world?

How do I want the world to see me? Right? So you’re, you’re getting a fragment of themselves within this environment that can live a life. Uh, and it, and it’s a persona that they embody when they’re in the environment. [00:55:00] Can die, you know, you’re dealing with stakes and stakes on a large scale. You know, you’re talking, um, what was it, like, 130 people or something like that?

Yeah.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: This is, this is, uh, if, if you talk about most of human history, that’s more people than most humans met in their lives. Right? Like if, if, if you go to the distant past, yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, like it’s what our brains are meant to deal with is like a maximum community size.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think we also have to remember though, that this, this is so much older than the internet or even like.

In dungeon base games in, in the eighties or whatever your tabletop games it as well. When you look at like the Bronte sisters, they had their own fictional universes where like the Duke of Wellington would appear sometimes, but there were all these other characters. Um, and sometimes they, they, these didn’t show up in their books.

This was just the well why they explain who

Malcolm Collins: the Bronte sisters are.

Simone Collins: These are famous authors. Um,

Malcolm Collins: they wrote,

Simone Collins: oh God, I didn’t read any of the books because I didn’t like them. Um, and they like died young. They were like at, at the same time of, of Jane Austen. [00:56:00] Um, maybe, maybe Weathering Heights. ‘cause everyone’s talking about the new movie is one of them, but I can’t remember.

Um, but this is something that is very natural to people and like one of the first things that the internet was used was to have basically text-based versions of these games online. Um, and, and the fact that this is just a continuation of it, like it has. Now it’s super powered with ai and it, it is much more complex.

Um, but the, the question is never really, um, you know, what tech are we using? Like, is this, is this, um, a bunch of young ladies in a house? By the way,

Malcolm Collins: if you’re wondering what the Bronte sisters wrote, they wrote Jane Airy, they wrote Weathering Heights.

Simone Collins: Yeah, there you go.

Malcolm Collins: They wrote the tenet of Woodfield Hall.

Um,

Simone Collins: and, uh, they’re not, they’re, they’re very dark, like boring books, in my opinion. I, I love Jane Austen’s books. But anyway, um, this is just old stuff. Um, and, and like specifically fantasy worlds in which they are, they are involved. Um, and I think the really interesting [00:57:00] thing, and what I love most about the world you’ve built is that you don’t get caught up in the IP necessarily, or in like the, the.

The fact that you’re building it, like you don’t own it as much as like, it’s the way that people interact with it and crash into mm-hmm. Into it to create crazy things like vigils and songs and fan art and slang. Um, and that’s how, you know, it’s really working. And that’s why AI is not a threat to this.

It’s just a different way in which it’s gonna manifest. Mm-hmm. And it’s like the, the raindrops are just bouncing off a slightly different surface, but in this case, they’re gonna be bouncing off in a much more beautiful way. Um, whereas before they were like falling into paper and just getting soaked in, and now they’re falling into something and like making ripples.

And it’s just so much more potential. And I’m really excited about what, what’s gonna be possible as AI enables more going forward. ‘cause already Yeah. Like can you, I mean, and I, it wouldn’t surprise me actually if like the Bronte sisters or like, if they had a piano forte, like sitting down and like writing songs of others, like whatever their obscure characters were in their fantasy [00:58:00] worlds.

Mm-hmm. Um. But now you can just take that and like a thousand exit and of course make it, you know, now you have like 130 people. They had like four, you know, like the scale of it, the complexity, the fact that you have a world that updates, um, when different factions are doing different things out in the world.

Mm-hmm. By the way, what are, what are other weird things that have

Leaflit: Oh, I can tell you about the time the game almost ended.

Simone Collins: Oh really?

Leaflit: Yes. Yes. The game almost ended because, okay, so what happened was there was one party, right, okay. Who met this witch. And this witch, she’s like a tiny little necro man, girl.

And she has killed somebody before. Like she’s actually killed one of the players. Right. The early sessions

Simone Collins: too.

Leaflit: Yeah. And her whole thing is like, she’s like. Her concept of death is like, she doesn’t care. She thinks it’s like just fun, right? So she, what she does is she takes people, she kidnaps them, and she puts them to a death game.

And she like watches and she just like sits there and watches and she’s like, yeah, like, you know, like, I hope you [00:59:00] win, right? And if you win, you, you get a prize. But you know,

Simone Collins: oh,

Leaflit: whatever happens, happens. And she like watches and she does this. So anyway, they end up like fighting her at some point. And uh, they like, they were gonna die to her, but they convinced her to not kill them.

And then they were like, oh, we have an idea. Uh, why don’t you check out this town that we built? She’s like, town. And they’re like, yeah. And she’s like, okay. That’s my town now. And so like, they took her to like the town, which is like this new outpost that the players had built. And like they, they had built this over months, by the way.

So like, first they had to conquer the area and then people had to chop wood down and bring all the wood alchemy materials. And they had all the, all the crafter players had to go in and like actually build it like over weeks. Right. So they had like this fort and it was like their precious fort, like, okay, now we have a teleporter in the middle of this area so we can teleport instead of like having to walk down the valley.

Yeah. And so they had this beautiful town and she was like, yeah, I’m the leader now. [01:00:00] And like she came in and they were so mad because like the people that were building it were like, what the hell are you doing? Oh no. Right. And so there was a whole thing where, and they’re like, director, like, what do we do?

Like this, this crazy? And she’s like, I don’t care. Director’s. Like, I don’t care. Like, okay, sure. You know, if that’s what you guys won’t find, whatever. And they’re like, no, but we can’t have this. And they’re like, okay. Um, election. So they did an election article and like people got so mad. At this like entire election arc and like people were like, we’re gonna quit.

This is so, so dumb. If like, she takes over after we built all of this. Like this is, and I was like, well, I mean you guys did that. Like it’s not us. We didn’t plan on this. And that’s like kind of how we approach it is like we, we like to take what the players do and then like how does that affect the world if like, they do this, like

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah.

No, it’s a hundred percent downstream of, of player choices, which I like. Yeah. And then they wait, so she was okay with an election. She wasn’t just like, why, why are we doing an election? I’m queen. Like

Leaflit: they, they, they [01:01:00] convinced her that, that if she was so cool, she would do an election and she was like, yeah, you’re right, because she’s like the idiot, right?

Like the neer’s an idiot. So, but, but this Nema became such a beloved character. She like. Multiple songs and a plushie like thaty sale in the store right now. And a bunch of people bought it, one person bought three.

Simone Collins: I mean, just in case. Well,

Leaflit: that’s great.

Malcolm Collins: That’s, yeah. I, uh, I, I wanna know, uh, so by the way, this, this humorously reminds me of the joke.

I don’t know if you’ve seen through all of Adventure Time fantastic show, by the way, people, um, but there’s, one of the princess bubblegum gets deposed by somebody who holds an election, and she comes back in very anti-climax, is like, I’m a monarch. You can’t hold an election like, whatcha doing? They’re like, but you were unelected.

And she goes, I’m the monarch.

Leaflit: The, they basically convinced her that. Well, you don’t rule this place, but you can set up a, you can set up a base outside of [01:02:00] it. And so now she has a base and like she willingly lets people play death games. If they want. She’ll give ‘em like big prizes. Oh, but then you just die.

Right. So it’s like a lot of people are like, it’s scary because normally you can run, like if you go into like the woods and you encounter like this giant, I don’t know, like say giant boar monster, right? Boar boss monster. You can be like, okay, well we don’t really know what it does. You can test it a little bit and be like, okay, this is a little bit too scotch.

Like everybody retreat so you just like everyone throws down smokes. Yeah. And they all like retreat from the battle. And this is a common thing like retreating from, from combat. ‘cause your character’s life matters. Right. You, you die. Yeah. And so like, but with her you’re locked in her dungeon so you can’t escape.

So that’s pretty cool.

Simone Collins: No way.

Malcolm Collins: That’s amazing. Wait, what other plushy characters exist from this world?

Leaflit: A lot. We’ve got, um, it’s. I’ve got so many now. We’ve got the witch, we’ve got the, the merchant. The merchant has one, one of the cultus has one too. Wait, is

Malcolm Collins: this, is this the, the merchant who’s of the evil race?

Leaflit: No, it’s, uh, she’s like the good [01:03:00] merchant. So she’s, uh, she’s like the shopkeeper, like she reset the shop resets. So the other thing too is resources are finite. So it’s not like the, the shop is like, has this item you can always buy at this price. It fluctuates based on world events. So like, sometimes like a, like wood will cost more like a certain week because of a thing that happens and,

Malcolm Collins: oh, I want my kids playing in this.

So much like, this sounds like such a healthy thing for like young teens to get into continue, but

Leaflit: Yeah. But, but yeah, it’s, it’s like that’s that merchant and then there’s like a cultus that got a plushy. She’s not the, oh, it’s, uh, this genocidal squirrel got a, a plushie as well.

Simone Collins: Oh

Leaflit: yeah. That

Simone Collins: makes,

Leaflit: yeah, there’s a bunch of uh, a bunch of, uh, characters, uh, getting plushies who makes the

Simone Collins: plushies.

Leaflit: Uh, I, I do, I actually got into it because I wanted the plushies to exist. So I was like, how do I get that to go? And now I’ve become like a plushie, like mogul. I don’t know how that’s happened, but

Simone Collins: did, wait, did you like make Plushies before? Do you have a sewing machine? [01:04:00]

Leaflit: No, no, no. I’m, I’m, I I looked on like, the logistics of how to do it.

I found like a manufacturer to do ‘em.

Simone Collins: Okay, okay. Okay.

Leaflit: And it like all fits our standards and stuff, so we, but we all, we do it to how, how we wanna do it, you know. Wait,

Malcolm Collins: wait, wait. So like, other people come to you to make plushies for their shows and stuff now?

Leaflit: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I’ve, I’ve gotten a bunch of

you

Malcolm Collins: a plush, do you handle shipping?

Leaflit: Yes. So my mom does all of the, the, um, she’s like the shopkeeper. She does all the, all the merch and stuff like that. So

Malcolm Collins: if we made, uh, guys, let us know what Base Camp Plushies. Yeah. We

Leaflit: can do one. Yeah, of course.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I’ll see. I’ll see about that. Um, I think that’s a fun idea. That’s really cool. That is, um.

Okay. So what’s your future for all of this? Like when you think about where this evolves into, what it evolves into, I’m interested.

Leaflit: Well, well, I, what I would like, ‘cause I’d, I’d like to see more people playing the game, like on their own, like, as not a part of like this big hemming. ‘cause I wanna see like, [01:05:00] people playing like their own campaigns, kinda like Dungeons and Dragons.

Right. But yeah, as far as like the campaign right now, um, I don’t, I don’t know, it’s just kind of whatever happens and then we just go with the flow, right? It’s like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah,

Leaflit: I wanna do more character stuff. Like I started doing, oh, I got one that you’ll think is great. Um, there’s this character that is an NPC that everyone doesn’t really, they think she’s kind of, what’s the word?

She’s very, sorry, I’m blanking out. It’s like. She, she’s a killjoy. Like, she always, like, she has rules and she’s like, you have to follow these rules, and like, this is how it’s gonna be. And they’re like, she’s such a stickler, she’s so annoying. And then I released the other day a character image song of her.

Mm-hmm. And it explains why she’s like that, like her backstory. And so people are like, what do you feel like, do you feel like such a jerk now? Because now you, now you know what she’s like. [01:06:00] But more stuff like that, I’d love to do it. Stuff like that.

Malcolm Collins: Um, that is, I, I I, I, I, I don’t wanna be a killjoy, but I know you like the idea of people playing this independently, but it sounds like so much of the magic of what you’ve built is in the community.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That makes it feel. So when I talk about, you know, 60, a hundred years, when we can create any artificial environment we want. Mm-hmm. The only things that will imbue these worlds with reality is the shared experiences we have with other people. And in a way, uh, I think for, uh, my guess would be for your players, that’s what imbues the world with reality is the fact that, uh, like d and d can, like when you’re playing, I, I don’t know if like, if other people don’t feel this way, but when I’m playing like a random whatever game, right.

Um, uh, I sometimes, like if I know it’s a game that everyone else is playing right now, it feels like it has some sort of cultural meaning. I see

Leaflit: what you mean.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. You know, hell [01:07:00] Divers two, I probably wouldn’t have played hell divers two normally, but everybody was playing it. Everyone was talking about it.

It felt like a cultural moment. Right. Or Pokemon Go, I see what you mean. Or something like that.

Leaflit: I understand the question now. So like, what I would want to do is I, I would like people. Like using like our stories, using our, our game and just like, you know, plushies music maybe, you know, maybe one day an anime or manga or something like that.

I would like people to see that there is the possibility of, of better because like what we have right now is so ass, you know? Yeah. So it’s like, I just want people to see like, you can do things that are crazy. Like this idea that there’s like this big campaign with all these people and it’s interconnected and like

Malcolm Collins: that’s insane

Leaflit: that people are invested.

Malcolm Collins: Did that, that’s actually crazy. It’s, it’s, it’s super cool that it’s working, but it’s crazy

Leaflit: and thank you.

Malcolm Collins: Uh, [01:08:00] and, and you weren’t doing this the last time we talked to you, right? Or was it just starting off? No, we’re

Simone Collins: working on it. It wasn’t, this is, I think it was.

Leaflit: First year anniversary was today? Today.

Simone Collins: Oh, happy anniversary.

Leaflit: Thank

Malcolm Collins: you. Well, we’ll run this tomorrow for first year anniversary. That, that’s

Simone Collins: amazing. But yeah, also just for the housekeeping, like where can people find this and get involved and opt in and

Leaflit: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Have fun.

Leaflit: It’s a rpg dot angel sword.com is like the game, the base game. And then in order to join the other game, it’s Patreon.

Simone Collins: Perfect.

Leaflit: You know what’s crazy too, is like people got so addicted because, um, it, it, it works off of a, you can’t always go out. It’s like a real time system. Mm-hmm. Where if your character goes out for this week, you can’t play anymore ‘cause they’re not here. So. Oh,

yeah.

What people started doing was, they’re like, can we have like another character?

I’m like, okay, fine. Like Patreon upgrade, you can like get another character. Can we get another character? Uh, okay, fine. And like, it got to the point where people were like, can I make like another Patreon account? And we’re [01:09:00] like, no. Okay. It’s over. Like, no more. Why you more money? ‘cause I want people, so the, the downside of people making too many characters because like they, they become less invested to each individual character.

Yeah. So it’s like, we want, like those relationships, right? Oh my God. The best is when like, two characters have a relationship and it’s like, well what if you go, one of you goes down, you die. You know? It’s like,

Malcolm Collins: wait until you get your first marriage from this world. Right? What’s already

Leaflit: happened?

Malcolm Collins: What, what?

Leaflit: Yeah. People have gotten married and had kids.

Malcolm Collins: Well in world. In world, yes.

Leaflit: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: people marry, like, remember this? So I need to like bring up two different worlds that were like really big in my childhood. Mm-hmm. Do you remember there was this game and I watched it, like things on, I never played it myself. It took place in Egypt and everybody could do like whatever they want.

And there was like one cast where you would like level up by getting people to like vote for you or be in like one place at a time. Um. W it was, it was weird. It was, it [01:10:00] was an MMO where the only way you could level up was through community based events. Um, and it, it became this giant thing. But the other one, obviously Second Life, and today people don’t know Second Life, right?

Like they, they don’t understand what a cultural phenomenon this was when we were, there was like a big real estate craze in it where people would be paying like half a million dollars for like a house or something. Um, and people would get married in it all the time. You can go to YouTube, you can watch these videos if people get married in Second Life.

Um, and uh, I like, I always thought it was so cool. I like, I felt like a bit of an outsider in the second life craze because I was like, I don’t have the social confidence to go into an environment with this many people. Um mm-hmm. And, uh. It’s, I, I don’t know, it feels like a cooler version of that because it’s more abstracted.

See, the, the problem with environments like Second Lives and Roblox and Minecraft, and a lot of stuff that comes outta this is, it’s not abstracted in the way that your world is abstracted. That allows for [01:11:00] denser lore, that allows for deeper world building, and that interacts with AI more. Yeah. And I think it’s cool how the way you’re building all of this up is more conducive to AI world than the way that directionality like Roblox and Minecraft, which I think a lot of people think the future is gonna look like, and I don’t.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s, uh, it, it’s really the, the coolest thing about it for me is just like, like you said, the interconnectedness where each individual person has the agency to do like whatever, but then they eat the consequences of it, right? So you can do like whatever you want, but then. You go jail or something if he screw up.

Malcolm Collins: How do you do kids? Sorry, I, before I say off

Leaflit: early ones the MPCs. So there, there are two cases, well, well, sorry. There, there have been multiple cases. I think in the, the only reason I know this is because people keep asking me for the, the, what happens if this race has a kid with this race, they keep doing this, right?

So I had to like come up with all these rules for it. But, um, anyway, [01:12:00] uh, some players have done that and then they retired their characters and that’s it. And like how

Malcolm Collins: did they play as the kids?

Leaflit: Uh, that happened one time. So like in one of my older campaigns was a time skip, like the original Angel Sword campaign had a time Skip and the character wanted to play as his kid.

So like that happened, but Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. That’s fine.

Leaflit: Alright. Well, I mean to play as his first character later, because then, then at the end of that campaign there was a thing where their kid was in trouble and they had to like save their kid with their old, old character.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. They had to come back and save themselves.

Mm-hmm. It’s so, there’s so many things that you’ve described here where I’m like, no, that’s just how real life works. Um, you’re just describing the real world. Um, I mean, like we see ourselves as our kids, uh, and so many parents, I think like they just watch themselves playing life through their children.

But also like this idea that figures get, um, either things or figures can get power through, [01:13:00] you know, attention and belief and like, here’s everyone, like asking for like, oh, like, can like, and subscribe. We’re like literally our son Octavian. I guess misheard the concept and was like life and describe and I’m like, yeah, I mean you wanna get the power.

Like that is what they’re getting. It is their life. Um, and he was actually shocked the other day to discover that YouTubers also make money. He was like, wait, they make money. I thought they just got likes. And that was like a doubt. He wanted that his car, his career, like the whole money thing was just like icing on the cake.

Um mm-hmm. There’s this new currency. Awesome. So yeah. I mean we

Malcolm Collins: learned we didn’t respon.

Simone Collins: Yeah. He’s like, wait,

Malcolm Collins: you don’t respond? And we’re like, no, you’re gonna

Simone Collins: die. The number of times we’ve had to have like tell our children that Yeah. In our world you don’t respond. Oh my God. Yeah. It’s so well a conversation.

Yeah. The lines have really become blurred, um, between. I mean, yeah. Yeah. We don’t wanna hold you forever. This has been longer than me. Much take’s. So

Leaflit: I had so [01:14:00] much fun. Like, I, I mean, God, you, you had me on here just to nerd outta the bound, like stuff I wanna nerd out about,

Simone Collins: alluded to this in our last conversation, and it was like one of those like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, no, I,

Simone Collins: I asked you by the tip of the iceberg and being like, wait, we could have sunk, we could have gone deep.

Like, why?

Malcolm Collins: No. I like asked you last time and you seemed like embarrassed to go deeper into it. And I think it’s because, you know, you’re new, you, you know, this is your first time doing something on somebody else. Yeah. Um, you, you may be underestimated how much of a nerd I am about stuff like this. Well,

Leaflit: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I used to, and I might do it next time we talk. I could do one. I,

Leaflit: I’d love

Malcolm Collins: created multiple worlds, like as deep as the one deer creating one. We were gonna turn into a video game, but it turned out to be R fab.ai. And so we ended up creating like AI play if people wanna try that. Um, and then the other one, uh, was just like, anytime I’d walk somewhere I’d try to build on the world, like, um, and so I love doing stuff like this.

I’d love to have you back on sometime. You’re love a very, very enjoyable person to talk to. I love to come on [01:15:00] your stream sometime. Um,

Leaflit: yeah, we should talk about that. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Love. I’ve never done a live stream before and I’m terrified. Um. Uh, actually, I don’t even think I’m gonna edit anything out. You might not know.

Like the last time we did a thing together, I asked you a few like awkward questions and I ended up editing them all out. It’s like, um, uh, but this time no awkward que because I’ve watched more of your stuff. Oh, one of my favorite things you talked about recently, just for like, people, you were talking about this moment where like you were living in an apartment and it was just a mattress on the ground of an empty room.

And I was like, oh my God, I have lived that exact experience and so many people have. And I was like, I kind of wanna go back to that in a way, like the, the world.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You literally burst into my room last night and was like, I missed that.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I thought

Simone Collins: this was, was, that was for a long time. We like preferred it.

It was kind of, it’s nice, you know, it’s less cluttered. You know, it’s

Malcolm Collins: my, my favorite leaflet, Easter egg. Um, you dropped in the middle of a video, um, and I’m only dropping it [01:16:00] here at the end because you said you were only okay with dropping in the middle, but the collection of World War II memorabilia, um,

Leaflit: I don’t, no, I don’t have any yet, but I was like very interested in it because I went, I, I went to a gun show and then they had, so I was like, that’s cool. There’s like so much lore behind it, you know, like,

Malcolm Collins: yes,

Leaflit: shovel, that shovel was like used somewhere like crazy, you know, like

things like that.

Malcolm Collins: No. At a time where things actually mattered, where like, yeah.

Actions, you know, the world, but we’re back there. The world is on a, uh, uh, whatever you call it right now with AI and everything, like the future of the economy is gonna be totally different depending on who wins what. Like, we’re trying to build, like autonomous agents to replace employees. Mm-hmm. And people are like, why do you, the other day I, I almost passed out on screen.

And they’re like, why are you working this long? Right. And I was like. Somebody is going to create the employee replacement. Um, and then everyone else is not gonna have a job. Like, I’m not trying to do [01:17:00] this to have, I’m so excited

Simone Collins: to do this. This is the thing people are

Malcolm Collins: mad about, about that. I’m to have all the money and then all decide how to create a good society after that.

Um,

Leaflit: I you win,

Malcolm Collins: right? Uh, anyway. Anyway, so fun to have you here. Thank you so much. I wanna, I wanna, uh, do stuff together in the future and I hope that things continue to go well for you. You know, your channel’s been popping off. Thank you so much as I’ve seen, um, and not just your channel, but you as a caricature.

When you look at the central place you have in Sky Brow videos regularly, right? Like you’re in almost every video, multiple times. Um, and, uh.

Simone Collins: Good character.

Malcolm Collins: I think it, I, I, I think it’s because you are capturing the main character, and I don’t know if you ever feel like this, but you’re like, damn, am I like a playable character of our generation?

Mm-hmm.

Leaflit: Like, like the funny thing is, I, I actually had such a dilemma about this, so like, okay, I’ll, I’ll go into it. So I actually [01:18:00] was like, you know, I was, I was talking about how I was like super depressed for a long time.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Leaflit: That was my entire life until this month, like this month it went away. And it was so weird.

Well,

Simone Collins: congratulations.

Leaflit: Congratulations. It was so weird. Like everything is just so different now for me. But yeah. Uh,

Malcolm Collins: did, did stuff like Sky Brows play a role in that? Or is that not as relevant

Leaflit: to you? Actually, you guys had more to do with it.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s really

Leaflit: software. Yeah. I could tell you about it later.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, well, yeah, like our content and stuff, but yeah, I don’t want to like, uh, but the Sky Brow thing, um, for me has been very interesting because. We don’t hang out with people anymore, Simone and I, like, I don’t, I don’t leave my house. We’re completely hicky. Um, and yet I watch video. I watch your videos, right?

And I watch your videos and I’ve had interactions with you. Um, and so it makes me feel like, oh, that’s one of my friends. Um, and so I

Simone Collins: watch this guy listen again, just not to be a history bummer [01:19:00] here, but like asynchronous friendships have been the deepest friendships for a huge portion of human history.

Letter writing used to be a big, big part of how people had deep friendships, and that was, those were just asynchronous relationships. They were just watching each other’s dreams. I don’t know what to tell you. This is not like a new point in human history and it’s honestly so much better for most people like it.

It’s great. But you know,

Malcolm Collins: it did, and you’re right about this. A lot of famous people in history, they like, knew each other and they corresponded

Simone Collins: Yale. Well, they read, they read people’s books. Like that is how you had a relationship with people, even if you existed at the same time in history. ‘cause I mean, that’s just how people live.

Malcolm Collins: But the, the, the Sky Brow videos, to me, the interesting it’s felt like. There’s a party of cool kids and like all the cool kids are at the party and, uh, I get to be at the party with the cool kids without having, it’s

Simone Collins: when your asynchronous proxy representation gets to have a, that gets to go to the party with the other a right?

Malcolm Collins: No, because like, I don’t get to decide if I’m in one of these, like somebody who’s like, tastemaker gets to decide. And then, um, the,

Simone Collins: and the best part is you don’t [01:20:00] physically have to be there. Yeah. I physically don’t have

Malcolm Collins: to be there. I just get

Simone Collins: the pictures

Malcolm Collins: afterwards.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty great.

Leaflit: But, uh, I just remembered, sorry, I totally like tangent into like in the middle of me answering your thing, but, but basically I’ve always like wanted to be like a support.

I never wanted to be the main character. So it’s like every time like I, I get put, like I get sort of. A feeling of that. It makes me uncomfortable.

Simone Collins: It’s so furious during bell. You, you’re, you’re reluctantly taking upon, you know yourself though.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s actually really interesting that you mention this, and I don’t wanna go on too long a tangent at this point in the video.

Leaflit: No,

Malcolm Collins: take your time.

Leaflit: I’m good.

Malcolm Collins: I actually talk about this in terms of modern right wing influencers, where one of the things that, that has defined the people who have risen in influence within our like intellectual circle, like an asthma gold or something like that mm-hmm. Is, is, uh, the, the lack of wanting to exploit this or open thirst like asthma gold [01:21:00] could live in a mansion if he wanted to.

Like Asma Gold could have the hottest girlfriend and live in a mansion and shock his dog every day. Right. Like he could, he could do whatever the f he wanted to at this level of fame. Mm-hmm. And yet he. Does it right? Like he, um, the, the, the moment I always talk about, it’s the contrast of like, Hassan Piper’s shocking, like the most expensive dog breed you could have.

And the moment where like a cockroach is crawling on Asma gold and he picks it up, I’m like, I’ve never seen anyone be this ginger with a cockroach. And it’s like, I’m gonna release it downstairs. He’s like, I mean outside. Um, like after a long while and, you know, he released it downstairs. But the, the point I’m making here is, uh, you and him, you, I, I think the reason why people build this with you is it’s so clear that.

You don’t even have the capability to look down on your fans. [01:22:00] Um, and I think that this is like the, the main thing that people are looking for. They’re just so tired of an elite world that thinks that they’re better than them and that they’re other, and that they’re, um, you know, they’re separated behind some fence.

Right. Um, and, uh, I, I think that you represent that very well on, on stream. And it comes from this emotion where you say, I never want, like, the only reason people look to you the way they do. It’s, it is it, it, it it’s clear that this is never about being the lead character for you?

Leaflit: Well, it’s,

Malcolm Collins: you get what I mean by this.

Leaflit: The way I see it is like everyone has a role to play regardless of like how, what their capability is. It’s, it’s if they’re gonna play it or not. Right.

That’s so

Malcolm Collins: nice. Well, well, I mean, our roles can change and our roles can change based on our contextualization of them, right? Mm-hmm. Like, we can decide and, [01:23:00] and everyone gets to decide what their purpose is.

Right? And I, in any, in any moment, in any, you can just decide, my, my purpose is X. Like, I, I look at the world and I’ve decided to, that’s the coolest thing about life. We get to judge the measuring stick that we judge our value in existing off of. Mm-hmm. Um, and if you, if you default to somebody else’s value stick, whether that is hedonism, like how much pleasure you feel, or how much status you have, and I think status is the, the primary measuring stick that most people default off of.

Mm-hmm. Um, and I, and, and, and it, and, uh, I think that you, you can through, you know, the, the way that you show yourself to people, show your other people, they don’t need to judge themselves off of that anymore.

Leaflit: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And that, that’s hard. I mean, I, I did that for myself for the longest time I thought.

How many people I slept with, who, who I was hooking up with. That was what a man’s worth was judged on.

Leaflit: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And if, if you just [01:24:00] default to these societal standards that f’s up your life.

Leaflit: I, I think the important thing is like, I think people, people like us, we have, we’re in the position where we can give people like a reason, I guess, to do anything.

And it’s, it’s what I, I’m trying to like formulate it. Sorry. We, we can give, we can give people like a, it’s like, you know, if you don’t think you have a purpose, then shut up and listen to my purpose and take it upon yourself and like, be infected by me.

Malcolm Collins: Be part of this. I, I, when we, when we wrote our first book, we were literally taking the opposite perspective.

So if anyone who’s like followed us for a long time and they’ve read our books, our first book is like. Okay. I’m gonna give you every purpose you could possibly have and you’re like, gonna go through it. I’m gonna try to be as unbiased as possible. Mm-hmm. And then me, like 10 years later, no. Like, just

Simone Collins: do this thing.

Malcolm Collins: This is what, this is what you should do. Like,

Simone Collins: whatcha this is wrong. This is right. This is stupid. This is smart. Yeah. We’ve, [01:25:00] God, okay. Yeah,

Leaflit: I was reading that book actually like just yesterday.

Simone Collins: No,

Malcolm Collins: I, I like that book. I think it’s helped a lot of people. Um,

Leaflit: it’s a good one. It’s a good one. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We get, we get emails from people pretty frequently about it.

Um,

Simone Collins: we wrote it for ourselves and for our kids ‘cause we wanted to work it out. And honestly, ever since we did, um, I’ve, I’ve never felt fomo. I’ve never felt cognitive dissonance because I know. What it is that I’m about, that I wanna optimize. So like, there’s never any ambiguity unless it’s tactical, um, about like, should I be doing this thing or not?

It’s like, well, does this maximize something? I like the thing or things I think have in here value yes or no. Like, okay, then I’m not gonna worry about it. Like

Leaflit: it’s, that’s where all the bad feelings like live. Yeah. Isn’t that ambiguity? That’s when it starts. Mm-hmm. You get that like kind of bubbling, like nasty feeling, you know?

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, I should be at that party ‘cause everyone’s at the party. I’m like, no,

Malcolm Collins: I didn’t realize this, but you’re right. It was after writing that book when I began. Yeah. Because I didn’t [01:26:00] like, this isn’t like idea. I just like sat down was like, okay, like I need to figure out a reason to be alive.

I should, I should probably we’ll have those

Simone Collins: moments. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I exist. Uh, so I’ll just go over every argument and count. It wasn’t even like, it’s like people think, like somebody sits down and, uh, you know, like Joseph Smith or something and they’re like, oh, I’m gonna go ask God or something, why I should be alive.

Uh, no. I was like, that girl who did like the, the, uh, which guy should I date? All the positives and negatives of each one. Oh God. And I like did that for every reason why I shouldn’t kill myself. Like, okay, oh my gosh, let’s go through every one of them and, uh, maybe one of these will be hot to me. I’m like, okay, I’ll marry that one.

Um, and then, and then I ended up, uh, you know, changing over time and every, every ev everything like that. But it was a lot of, it was a lot of, um, uh, yeah, yeah. Anyway, it’s the

Leaflit: biggest problem in society right now is purpose. I not really not. [01:27:00] As you guys put it, objective function.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, we don’t have a framework for it anymore.

Like we, this is how the way purpose dissolved. I’m, I’m gonna go on a separate, I’m so sorry.

Leaflit: No,

Malcolm Collins: no, no. I, I

Leaflit: love this

Malcolm Collins: one. As a society used to have frameworks for purpose and for most people they were their religious system.

Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Um, and the school system, ironically, I think we lost our purpose, not because of the secular world, but because of the way the religious world acted to the school system.

So the school system would try to give people alternate purposes. They try to be like, okay, um. Yes, you may have a purpose in this respect, but here’s some other philosophical concept of why life matters. What matters in life. And you go to the eighties or whatever, and the religious people are like, you can’t tell our kids there’s some alternate reason that life may have meaning, right?

Like, we need to go is this reason. But then the religious people weren’t passing on the full structure of their religion to their kids. They [01:28:00] were passing on a number of superficial tales. And then like urban monocultural beliefs as I often talk about it, like, oh, uh, well, like. Uh, you know, perfect, uh, you know, ev everyone’s exactly the same and that our entire world purpose is maintaining this, uh, this, this, this sameness.

But it, but it, it didn’t continue on to the next generation. And so when I grew up, it was a world where everyone was terrified to give me scaffolding to build purpose around. Mm-hmm. Um, and I made terrible decisions in my life because I didn’t know I, I looked to society and I often talk about this, and I, uh, saw everyone and I literally thought, I was like, okay.

I know this sounds so f*****g stupid like now, but I literally followed this until like, you know, into college, right? Like I, it sounds almost non sentient that someone could have this perspective, but I was like, my purpose is to, uh, have [01:29:00] status among males and to sleep around, right? And, uh, if you look at like the online manosphere content, I think a lot of young men are picking this up.

They’re, they’re like, oh, that’s, that’s what men do in this world, right? Like that’s

Leaflit: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: What makes a man cool? Uh, I watched that. Have you ever heard of Hanza?

Leaflit: Han Han Hanza

Malcolm Collins: Hanza. He’s a male influencer. You should watch her Hanza video. It’s very funny because we go into how this basically destroyed his life.

Um, and, uh, he had this really perfect fiance. Mm-hmm. Um, and he ends up breaking up with her basically because he doesn’t feel as masculine anymore. Right. Like, yeah. And it’s like, well, you know, you, you, you, the, all of this stuff that you have taken to be like, this is masculine, this is manosphere, et cetera, was to get the wife and then move to the stage where it’s about making her happy and your family happy.

And that will, that will give you more purpose than anything you could have done in this hotness, maxing stage.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But you accidentally [01:30:00] adopted this hotness, maxing stage. And it, there was a moment where he was trying to make a major life decision, uh, live in a country or live in a town. And he said the, the, the metric he used to make the decision is, which was more manly.

And I was like, well, that’s a really bad metric to use about a major life decision.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But it’s not dissimilar to a metric I may have used at his age. Right. Um, and I think that like all of us can just like disseminate to people, like, you don’t need to do what I’m doing in life. Right. Or believe what I believe in life.

But if you can, for the love of God, just think through things yourself. Like don’t

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like, like, like an anti influencer. Like just don’t listen to the influencer. It’s like, just think through for yourself what has value. Um, so

Leaflit: I think that’s a problem though. I don’t think, I don’t think people are as equipped to actually think for themselves.

‘cause like I remember when I was school, like in school they would have like Socratic [01:31:00] seminars. Like you would like have to think through like these individual problems. Yeah. But now it’s like, here’s like the answer to the thing. Like, that’s it. Like write that down.

Simone Collins: So there are literally d influencer influencers.

So, yeah. Okay. Now it’s, no, literally if you like search de influencing on YouTube.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Exactly what I mean. Oh

Leaflit: wow.

Simone Collins: There are a lot of them. Um, yeah. It, it’s bad. No idea how bad school is these days. We send our kids to school. It’s not just school though. The, the big thing you’re missing Malcolm, is that like for a very long period of time, there, there haven’t necessarily been very good networks for giving someone an ejective function.

Basically. It was just serve God if you got to that point. But the vast, vast, vast majority of humans were just super stoked to like, maybe not be dying right now, to not be hungry, to like, not watch like their children or their parents or their relatives or loved ones to be dying and starving. So like that was kind of it.

Um, and even like we, we’ve talked about this on other podcasts, like reading my grandmother’s. [01:32:00] Biography and stuff, and just her experience is just trying not to die. Um, and she was just so excited to like not be dead and then like, oh my gosh, you know, washing machines were invented and how great is this?

Mm-hmm. Um, like just people have been so there hasn’t been room for it. Now that there is room for it, we need better frameworks. But then, like the one thing that was left, which was the church, um, is just not there to help people. ‘cause they gave a, a, a decent, but here’s the problem is that many religions, especially like post-enlightenment, weren’t really good at holding up to science and physics.

And so for a lot of people, even if churches were strong and church communities were strong, they weren’t gonna cut it for people. And that’s where you see, even in the past, a lot of, um, a lot of nihilistic struggling among the wealthy, the wealthy elite, like land gentry, et cetera. Because like for the people for whom.

Church just didn’t do it. They [01:33:00] were like, I’m not buying this or this, this explanation doesn’t make sense for me. They would lose their faith and then just play status or sex games. That was it. Um, or some, some kind of stupid optimization game, and usually it had to do with power or money. Um,

Malcolm Collins: and then, and this goes back to like the founding Fathers of America, you can

Simone Collins: see.

So them

Malcolm Collins: doing this,

Simone Collins: oh, this goes way back before then. Um, it was either, you know, God worked for you, um, or it didn’t, if, if you reached that level in life and like 1% ever did. So yeah, we just, I’m glad that we. Found a framework that worked, but I, I like people do it.

Malcolm Collins: One of the things that Simone is mentioning here that I think leaflet will find a funny idea mm-hmm.

Is we talk about how like women crave a dystopia. Like the, the, the, the, the reason like young girls read all these dystopian fictions is because most women throughout history lived in a dystopia. Like if you go back, you know, great depression, dystopia, world War I, dystopia, world War II dystopia, and you, you go pre great, great depression, I mean, for women, truly a dystopian

Simone Collins: world.

Yeah. Pre, pre feminism was just always a [01:34:00] dystopia because you don’t have property rights and stuff. So like yeah, we’ve evolved to live, I was born in the dystopia, you know, I was made in this dystopia. So it just, well,

Malcolm Collins: no, but the, the challenge this causes is we argue is that especially for young women, and this is why I think young women go woke so hard, is they need to believe that there’s this giant oppressive force out there.

And so if they don’t grow up with a genuine existential threat, they create one and they believe this existential threat, the patriarchy or whatever. Is as real as, you know, living in a communist state or something like that.

Simone Collins: Hmm. You could say they were born renegades that need like a force to navigate and fight against.

And when that structure is gone,

Malcolm Collins: and, and we,

Simone Collins: we solve this for our

Malcolm Collins: daughters by torturing them. This is a,

Simone Collins: they deal with enough constraints as it is. Um, but they also like the, I think the one that Malcolm was referring to earlier, Titan literally thinks she’s gonna become someone who she [01:35:00] saw as a, another V YouTuber.

Uh, who’s a shark princess. Um, she, she, girl, girl, girl.

Leaflit: A v you know, girl. Girl. Yeah, I know girl. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Like. I’ll be like, yes ma’am. And she’d be like, I am not a ma’am. I am a girl and a shark princess. And she takes it extremely seriously. I I don’t, she’s, she doesn’t need dystopia. She’s gonna be tell her all the time where she says she’s

Malcolm Collins: gonna eat you when she grows up.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Yeah. She’s like, sorry, mommy, I’m gonna grow big and Yeah. Like, I’m going to eat you. Um,

Malcolm Collins: I may eat you. She said, and I’m

Simone Collins: sorry. Yeah, yeah. We’ve negotiated down to like. Might bite, but probably not many. So I think we’re making progress. Oh my God. Nice. Yeah. This is great. We we play

Malcolm Collins: into our kids’ fantasies maybe too hard.

Simone Collins: No, it’s all yes. And it has to always be Yes. And so cute though. It’s 100% necessary. It is, it is fantastic. They’re the very behemoth about it, but oh [01:36:00] gosh. Okay. We will let you get on with your day.

Leaflit: I had fun. Thank

Simone Collins: you so much. Thank you. You were, yeah, just yeah, keep doing, keep doing the things you guys

Leaflit: do.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I genuinely laughed a lot. I laughed till I cried at the beginning. I was actually like crying at the beginning when we were talking about. The f*****g concepts that we’re talking about and people thinking that we’re far right. Extremists like that, that far right. Extremism is just like the nerdiest, effing nerds you have ever seen in your life for hanging out and talking about like philosophy and like made up game worlds.

Leaflit: I, it’s, it’s so crazy.

Simone Collins: Yeah, definitely. You,

Leaflit: some time

Simone Collins: ago, all my left friends from high school probably think we’re like, you know, just sharpening our tiki torches and putting on KY pants and whatnot and like, you were like, well actually there are two different types of this. And like, uh, you know, we, we have to like, talk about the lore and like, you know, blah and like that funny

Malcolm Collins: sharpening or, or cheeky torches.

I mean, I need to use that sharpening. [01:37:00] Alright. I love

Leaflit: that so much.

Simone Collins: Thank

Malcolm Collins: you. Check out her stuff. By the way, guys, uh, join this community, it is called.

Leaflit: Angel Sword com. Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Enjoy Pat. It’s gonna be worth it. Oh my gosh. Thank you. Thank

Leaflit: bye.

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