Shaping Culture and Self at the Meta Level

Simone: [00:00:00] So we would also argue that when it comes to crafting culture or changing behavior on a very big meta scale, one of the things you can do that's very meaningful if you are someone in the media or you are a government is like literal, this is it is, it is propaganda. But create more archetypes for pro social behavior, for types of behaviors that you want to elevate.

Simone: And this is actually something that we saw back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. There were literal propaganda slash instructional videos by organizations like Coronet Films that were distributed throughout high schools and middle schools that showed ideal behavior through these little vignettes.

Malcolm: You can have a huge volume of media, all with the exact same model being shown to people and the exact same types of toxic behavior.

Simone: Like the trope of the wife. Or girlfriend who's always like rolling her eyes at and sort of like pulling her husband down a peg like, Oh, like my husband and very

Malcolm: few depictions of wives that aren't like secretly smarter than their husbands now [00:01:00] and they're

Simone: like snide toward them and dismissive.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hey Malcolm, one of the things that I really, I love about you and loved about you since the moment I met you, was it honestly, you more resemble like a superhero or like fictional character, like a caricature of a person than like a real human. And I love that that has evolved into something of a more nuanced life philosophy or even like psychological philosophy of yours.

Simone: And I think it'd be really fun to talk about

Malcolm: it. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to dive deep into this. And I think the, the point we're going to get to in this is that I, I hate to say this. I choke on these words, but I think representation actually does matter in media. And we'll get to why representation matters and it doesn't matter in the way that progressives think it matters.

Malcolm: And, and that the way they're optimizing on representation is probably not the best way to optimize around representation. But the representation actually has a huge effect on our emotional states and the way we construct our self narratives. [00:02:00] So, first, let's talk about how human emotional states work within this theory.

Malcolm: So, a theory of mind, when you use the term theory of mind, what you're talking about Is our ability as humans to mentally emulate the mind of somebody else or mentally model the mind of somebody else and predict what they are going to think or do next. This is very useful for, for all sorts of things.

Malcolm: Like when you are having an argument with someone in your head after you stopped talking to them and you are emulating their positions in that argument, this is what you're using. You're

Simone: using your brain. Or if you're hunting an elk and you're trying to... Imagine what the elk will do next so that you can properly track him.

Malcolm: Yes, yes. But it's something that we, I mean, with humans, it's where we do it more often is when we're like... Fake arguments you're having with someone in your head and then you come up with the right answer a while back and then you think, okay, how are they going to respond to that and everything like that?

Malcolm: We just do it very naturally. And one of my areas of research when I got to be a [00:03:00] neuroscientist was in schizophrenia research, specifically translational neuroscience as it relates to schizophrenia. And I did some fMRI studies on this, but I always had a weird idea of what was going on in schizophrenia.

Malcolm: So one of those common symptoms and skip different in schizophrenia across. Types is auditory hallucinations, right? Where you might hear whispers or somebody talking to you. What I hypothesize might be going on, and this would actually explain a number of other schizophrenia symptoms is that they have a hyperactive theory of mind running in the background all the time.

Malcolm: So, using transmagnetic stimulation, you can do something where you hyper activate a portion of a person's brain, so it can become activated with less of a threshold. So, an example here would be like, you hyper activate the part of their brain that's associated with like the letter A. And then you show them the letter A, and they'll say A.

Malcolm: And they won't mean to say A, but they'll just be forced to say it because the neurons around that area were firing, it was already hyperactivated, [00:04:00] and then it just forces a full saying of it. So in schizophrenia, what I think is it's this theory of mind system which is hyperactivated and activates accidentally all the time.

Malcolm: That's also what causes magical thinking. This is if you see an arrangement of items in a store window. And you assign agency to it, like it's trying to tell you a message, right? It's also what would describe paranoia, right? Okay. What really is paranoia? It's applying agency, like a theory of mind to some external force, like a government or something like that.

Malcolm: Oh, that helicopter, that's must mean that this other entity is thinking X or Y, right? And just so many weird and seemingly disparate schizophrenia symptoms can be seen from this. Hyperactive theory of mind. So this theory of mind is very important to how all humans work. Now what we hypothesize is that the primary way that we as humans process emotions is through having a theory of mind of ourselves, quietly running in the background of our brain, and then [00:05:00] correlating our environmental circumstances against that theory of mind

Simone: and determine

Malcolm: how emotionally we are supposed to react and then outputting that emotional state. This is why, for example, if you're a little mad about something, and then a friend comes to you and they're like, you should really be a lot more mad about this than you are.

Malcolm: Can't you see how bad what they did is and you begin to get really angry about it all of a sudden.

Simone: So, if I can recap, basically, most people, subconsciously, have a model of who I am, like their character sheet of I am this fancy woman, or I am this powerful man, or I am this, creative, quirky artist, and then when life circumstances happen when you are about to react, there's this internal question of, well, how would the quirky artist react?

Simone: And then that's how you react. And that's why Malcolm is saying that, sometimes people can even prime or prompt this of well, you should be outraged. And then suddenly you're like, I should be outraged. Cause we're not that

Malcolm: clever. We're not that conscious. We're not that kind of thing. We're not that [00:06:00] stable as, as, as sort of internal characters.

Malcolm: But this

Simone: is meaningful. And why this theory of Malcolm's is really meaningful and why I love it a lot If this is true, and based on like our anecdotal experience, we have, we find it to be compelling. It means that if you change the way that you view yourself, if you recontextualize yourself, if you change that character sheet.

Simone: You can also change the way you react to things. So for example, if you view yourself as a delicate person with severe trauma in their past and high anxiety issues and all this other baggage, obviously when bad things happen to you, you're going to react in a way of well, I can't get out of bed today.

Simone: Great. Like now everything's ruined. If you see yourself as a spoonie, it's well, I'll start my pain is too great. That's, that's it. I only have three spoons today and I just spent them getting out of breakfast and, or sorry, getting out of bed and eating breakfast.

Simone: So this means that if you rewrite that character sheet, I'm a resilient person. I react to things very optimistically. Whenever a problem comes up, I'm smart and resourceful. And I look on [00:07:00] the bright side and I solve it. We actually believe that you can react much more favorably and optimally to situations, be they positive or negative.

Malcolm: But it's very hard to rewrite this internal character sheet. You can really only do it during what we call quote unquote flux, flux periods. So these are periods in an individual's life where like they're moving or they're about to start college or they're about to start a new job and moving, where a lot of your environment is changing, a lot of your friend group is changing, just a lot is changing in your life, and during these moments, people can genuinely reinvent themselves. And, and keep in mind, what I'm saying here is it's not exactly like you have an internal character sheet, it's like you have a model of a person running off of an internal character sheet that you've created.

Malcolm: Now, what's important here, and this is where representation comes into all of this, these character sheets are not fully flexible. It's very hard to say I want to be this type of person or this type of person or this type of person like to fully build out the character sheet. What we really often do is stitch together a few [00:08:00] stereotypes or things that we have seen portrayed in media or.

Malcolm: Within our socially evoked set within our environment, and then stitch those things together into a character and utilize that character. If you do not have many things in media that are healthy, that you can use, or many things in media that, that are, that are like, You feel you can identify with so some people they can identify with an individual in media regardless of that individual's ethnicity Other people where their ethnicity is much more important to whoever they happen to be at the moment they will have a genuinely hard time identifying with different ethnic different ethnicities when they see as media.

Malcolm: And what's important to note here is character archetypes are often associated with a few ethnic groups. And this is true even in progressive media, they will, they will maybe color up the media, they'll add more, black and brown people, but [00:09:00] they will still give those people often.

Malcolm: Black and brown approved personalities because if they give them an overly quote unquote, white ish personality they they would be seen as... I don't know, not culturally authentic or something like that. And you even see this further group. So if you're like Irish, and you really identify with Irish, there are like four ways of being Irish for trade in media.

Malcolm: There are not that many, if you're romani or, or a gypsy, if you're using the, the more offensive term. But the term that most people know there, there are not that many Romani uh, stereotypes presented in media.

Malcolm: And if that's an important part of the way you see yourself, you're going to really struggle.

Simone: You're going to, let's like, well, first I want to jump back to the concept of flux periods. We're not just pulling this out of our asses. This is also something that shows up in other, in other areas, like in when it comes to behavioral changes that even governments try to UK had this one sort of department for, for enacting behavioral changes that they call the nudge unit informally.[00:10:00]

Simone: They did a lot of research on when they were able to successfully change behavior to intervene and help people change their behavior for the better in a way that improved health outcomes or spending or whatever it might be. And they found that very similarly, they didn't call them these, but periods of flux were the key times when they were able to do this.

Simone: For example, one, one really common. Period like this is when someone becomes a first time parent. So this nudge unit, for example, found that. When it came to enacting interventions around parenting, helping people do better things for their children, really only first time parents changed their behavior, and once people had gone past that, they just already firmed up their identity as a parent.

Simone: So it became really hard to change it. So other examples of flux periods, because I think it's important to know, like, when you're even going to have the capacity to make changes like this, is graduating from college, graduating from high school, getting a new job, moving to a new state. date, getting married, the death of a very close loved one, like these very fundamental life changes where [00:11:00] either the, the stage dressing or the stage or the characters in your drama of life are changing.

Simone: And so that's, that's something that's really important. And it's not just like character archetypes that really help in helping you establish a new character. Cause again, we're just not really creative. Like we need to see. Almost like training data, like AI, like we need training data to understand what the common responses are of a certain archetype.

Simone: So, this is, this is why it's really helpful and it, it also is why what you expose yourself to in media and also what The broader media landscape exposes people to is going to shape culture and society. So we would argue that one thing that could really help, for example, with pronatalism, a cause that really matters to us, is more media that shows what it's like to be a functional, happy family, to be a parent that isn't miserable or stressed out

Malcolm: with a reasonable number of kids, like five kids, not like two kids.

Malcolm: You don't, you don't keep a population stable if every woman expects you kids,

Simone: because I mean, what, what does the media show now? [00:12:00] The Duggar family. Then, they're not ideal. And, there, there have been other small snippets. For example, in Stranger Things, there's this one side plot that shows a house with many children, but it's also the kind of environment that would seem very unpleasant to a parent.

Simone: I mean, we still think it looks awesome because

Malcolm: it looks exactly like our

Simone: house. Like it's like a chaotic house full of walking into our house, feral, feral children who are very passionate and, and colorful, which is great, but like also doesn't look very appealing to many people who want to have a non stressful life.

Simone: So we would also argue that when it comes to crafting culture or changing behavior on a very big meta scale, one of the things you can do that's very meaningful if you are someone in the media or you are a government is like literal, this is it is, it is propaganda. But create more archetypes for pro social behavior, for types of behaviors that you want to elevate.

Simone: And this is actually something that we saw back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. [00:13:00] There were literal propaganda slash instructional videos by organizations like Coronet Films that were distributed throughout high schools and middle schools that showed ideal behavior through these little vignettes. And...

Simone: Yeah, I mean, it's just something that that's incredibly helpful and incredibly underrated.

Malcolm: I'd say another area where this becomes really damaging for people is when, and this happens in media in all societies, they associate certain character archetypes with attractiveness in either males or females.

Malcolm: And so when a woman wants to see herself as attractive, she will begin to adopt these character archetypes, which can often be very intrinsically toxic. A great example of this that has really gotten popular recently is the crazy young girl. So we see this in Harley Quinn, we see this in Jinx, we see this, her, her, to, to be, like, if you are a, an attractive woman in, in modern media, There are just not that many character archetypes and that's a big one in terms of [00:14:00] the the social landscape right now, right?

Malcolm: And that is really toxic when when we are elevating the status of mental instability and Associating it with being hot Or or being a desirable female Which is, which is really toxic. What are some other ones that you've seen in media where you're like, wow, this is a really toxic character that people are having modeled for them?

Simone: Oh, well, I mean, pretty much every depiction of relationships is, is pretty toxic. I remember when House of Cards first came out, like the first few episodes, and we're oh my gosh, is this for real? Finally, like a dynamic couple that like broadly works together on things and coordinates and is aligned in their goals.

Simone: And they just love completely goes off the rails, gets toxic. It's semi abusive. Like it's just horrible. And there are so many other shows that. That supposedly depicts power couples and people have told us like, Oh yeah, I love this power couple on this show. [00:15:00] And like genuinely their behavior is toxic.

Simone: They don't communicate. They don't have aligned incentives. They're very selfish. They play big. Like mental games with each other, or they like s**t test each other, but in a really toxic, nonproductive way, it just blows my mind. Like where, where are the functional relationships online? So it's also no surprise to me that people don't have good relationships because no one is modeling them.

Malcolm: This is a great point where I think many people can be like, no, there's lots of stereotypes of what it's like to be a family. When I look at TV and then it's okay. The Simpsons, Family Guy the, the, the American Dad. What I'm saying is, is you look at these and the, the couple dynamics are so similar across shows.

Simone: They're very uncreative. The,

Malcolm: the rare show, but the point that we're making is because there's a lot of media out there, there could be a feeling that there are a lot of Ways of structuring yourself and ways of structuring an identity or a relationship being modeled. But that's not necessarily the [00:16:00] case.

Malcolm: You can have a huge volume of media, all with the exact same model being shown to people and the exact same types of toxic behavior.

Simone: Like the trope of the wife. Or girlfriend who's always like rolling her eyes at and sort of like pulling her husband down a peg like, Oh, like my husband and very

Malcolm: few depictions of wives that aren't like secretly smarter than their husbands now and they're

Simone: like snide toward them and dismissive.

Simone: I mean, we've had, I've personally had problems where like in public, I start acting like that merely because. One, like I'm, I'm way too autistic to know how to actually act in public. So of course I'm just taking my training data and acting how I understand wives to act in public. And so we've had especially earlier in our relationship, like I'm literally just like using training data to behave a certain way.

Simone: I'm not like, Simone, why do you keep throwing me under the bus? This is really bad. And I'm like, what do you mean? I'm not

Malcolm: doing anything. I'm doing what wives do, and I'm like, well, not my wife. But I, but it's also important [00:17:00] that like we challenged that and we were able to work on that.

Malcolm: And I'm able to, to point that out because it is, it is really important. If you're in a relationship with someone and you see them modeling these sorts of bad behavior patterns to immediately call them out and, and not like psychologist nonsense, right? People are like, oh, you need to go relationship counseling or go to a psychologist.

Malcolm: And that's how I changed myself. No, just like nut up, man. If you're doing something and it's not aligned with who you want to be. Because these models we build of ourselves, they're not who we want to be. It's just like short form. I guess this is who I am right now. And we, we can fall into them.

Malcolm: If it's not aligned with who you want to be or what you want to be like as a relationship, nip it in the bud as quickly as possible because the more one of these behavior patterns replicates over time, the harder and harder it's going to be to change without changing your environment.

Simone: But I would say, so another thing That this, this model of behavior, I think dovetails really well with is our general principle that when it comes [00:18:00] to encouraging behavior in our kids, it's really like show, don't tell like the best way to encourage certain behavior is by modeling it, not by telling you to do it.

Simone: And again, like kids, just like humans use training data to determine how to behave. So if you provide examples, you're more likely to see those examples be followed. I also feel like that's one reason why parents can feel like really. Self conscious around their kids in public because they feel like, your kids in public are like your drunk self, like what you look like behind the scenes and like without inhibitions.

Simone: So, people get really, really embarrassed because their kids start saying stuff that like. They

Malcolm: would say behind closed doors. No, and I, I actually think actually a really important thing about kids and drinking and stuff like that is I think that to a level we all have like underlying pre programmed behavior patterns.

Malcolm: And it's one of the reasons I like drinking with people is because I think you can begin to see those come out. And this is separate from these narrative building things. So, I mean, alcohol lowers inhibition. And through that, I think that speaking of [00:19:00] alcohol personality types, you see like one of four predominant personality types and an individual motivators when somebody gets drunk because we're stripping away the inhibition that they are using to suppress the way they actually just like biologically interact with the world.

Malcolm: And you see this with kids as well, right? Some people when they get drunk, they just get really happy all the time. It's just happy about everything. Some people just sad about everything, right? Some people just angry about everything. Simone, when she gets drunk, she just gets incredibly loving of me.

Malcolm: She just wants to hug me all the time. Tell me how much she cares for me. I want

Simone: to do a lot more of

Malcolm: that. Shows me what I like about it. It shows me that underneath this controlled Who you really are as somebody who's just constantly suppressing

Simone: who just wants to ravage you. Plays of

Malcolm: affection because you wouldn't be productive.

Malcolm: We wouldn't be able to move towards our actual objectives if you acted like that all the time, but it's sweet to know, what's under the hood.[00:20:00] And it's, it's, it's definitely something I see in our kids, which, one of our sons, Torsten, he'll just do this thing where he'll start getting really excited.

Malcolm: You can see him start, start jingling to himself and he'll run up and give me a hug. And, and, and what clearly happened there is he got in his mind this idea, Oh, I'm gonna give dad a hug. And then he's just getting so excited give someone a hug. And then he goes and gives me a hug, and it's, it's, it's sweet that I, that I can see that in you.

Malcolm: I don't know. What do I come off as as drunk? What's my actual personality?

Simone: It varies. Mostly, mostly just happy. I mean, but also you show that like in reality too. I think you're one of those people whose, whose filter, like inhibitory filter is very low. Like you just show what you are. Yeah, you're right.

Simone: But also so rarely have you actually gotten sloshed. Just pretty much that one time. When my mom did a Wiccan prayer circle around you. That's like the only time I've seen

Malcolm: destroy yourself. We did it. We did like a normal [00:21:00] wedding, Simone and I, but Simone's mom, she was very hippie dippy training to be a shaman and everything like that.

Malcolm: So she asked us to come back to, to her hometown. Cause she was like, Mike, the people in my hometown didn't get to experience your wedding. I love it. If they could, go to some ceremony we put together, not like a wedding, obviously, but like a after ceremony. And then, leading up to it, she dropped, she goes, could you guys wear your wedding outfits?

Malcolm: I really liked those, you still have them. So could you put those on? And then she's I love your vows. Would you mind doing your vows again? And then it's She freaking ambushes me with two concentric rings of people, like moving in opposite directions doing and she did like this.

Malcolm: She goes, I want to read something. And it's like this shamanistic thing about trees and roots and nature. And Simone is looking in my eye, and what, I remember the way you described this.

Simone: Don't move, Malcolm, just don't, don't do a goddamn thing. Don't,

Malcolm: don't, I didn't do anything, I didn't do

Simone: anything. You didn't, no, your face is like [00:22:00] bright

Malcolm: red, just bubbling up.

Simone: And then after that you just got hammered. I have never seen you so freaking drunk in my life. And I think at that

Malcolm: point you just I am so anti All of that nonsense and, and, and, and, but I respect your family. And so I'm being very courteous, but it was such a,

Simone: That was very hard on you.

Malcolm: It was actually, it was very sweet.

Malcolm: It was very sweet that she wanted me to get married in, in her cultural way and her culture. Or the culture that she had adapted was a very, Wiccan, pagan culture. Which is very different from my cultural value set. And, and I would have gone along with it had she told me going into it.

Malcolm: Anyway, it's, it's, you gotta keep family happy, right? But anyways, that, that was the one time you saw me get really drunk.

Simone: Yeah. But again, I just, I just think that, you broadly sober is pretty much the same as you drunk. You're just one of those really genuine people, [00:23:00] which is one of the reasons why I really like you.

Simone: I think it's

Malcolm: great, Simone. I really appreciate it.

Simone: your advice be for someone who's like, All right. I don't like the way that I react to things. I react too angrily to things. Or, I, I don't like the anxiety that I have. Or, I just feel like I could respond in a more opportunistic and and optimal way when life throws me curveballs.

Simone: What would your advice be to them? On one, creating a flux period, like manufacturing one, because, you can't necessarily make someone in your life die or leave your job and move to a new place easily. That's not something you can do all the time. So what advice would you give on that front?

Simone: And what advice would you give on designing a more optimal person?

Malcolm: For first, look for an upcoming flux period. Those are easy. It's if you're going to go to college in a year, like best just to use that one for you. But also, if you're broadly not satisfied with who you are in your life, it may be worth creating a flux period through leaving your job, where you live, starting something new.

Malcolm: This is only something you do if you feel like you have like real [00:24:00] major self work to do, right? But then in addition to that, how do you create it? I think the most important thing is getting excited about who you're going to become and beginning to build a picture of that. And this is something that I think most people can model or remember having done when they were going to start high school or college or their first job.

Malcolm: We all have some period in our life where everything was going to change. And you began to think about, Oh, I could be a different person. What does that person do? Who are they? How do they do their house? What do they, and as you get excited about becoming that person and you begin to put a lot of effort into modeling, this is what that person does.

Malcolm: This is the hangout with. That's what they do every day. It makes it a lot easier to slip into that role. If you don't have A good social archetype for what that character looks like, right? Which can be really hard for people. Then, especially people, who don't have a lot of experience with this sort of like creativity or whatever, right?

Malcolm: Try to create your own. This is where things like role playing games and stuff like that can have active utility [00:25:00] in your life. Is that you can learn how to act like and, and, and pick up and think like another character. And, and, and test different archetypes that you can then build into yourself during your next flex period, because who we are, like, people are like, no, I am who I really am.

Malcolm: What do you mean who you really are? Like, the serendipitous things that happened to you throughout your life that you had no control over. So you're just like a sticky ball. It's been rolling down a dirty street. That's who you really are? Or are you someone who has intentionally constructed their internal character?

Malcolm: That seems like much more you than a you that was chosen serendipitously for you. Any, any conscious decision on your part? I mean, would you have any additional advice?

Simone: Yeah, I think I'd add that also to our earlier points, the media that you choose to consume really does matter, and that you will probably start to passively model behaviors that you see.

Simone: So if you're watching or consuming a lot of media, and this isn't just like TV shows and movies, it's also [00:26:00] music that just models behavior. Bad behavior that isn't going to help you. If you're depressed and you're listening to a bunch of sad songs and watching like shows that are like really depressing with like people who are dysfunctional and mentally ill.

Simone: Okay, that's gonna, that's gonna prime you to do all that bad stuff. I know the research on priming is now going through replication crisis, but it's, it's going to give you bad training data. I would also say that, and this is, I think a lot harder to deal with. The people that you surround yourself with may need to change.

Simone: Because they very much reinforce who you are. And many of them will not want you to change. And I I've changed myself pretty significantly since I've met you, Malcolm. And a lot of that. It was notable to see how some people were very openly against the new me. And they, they, they did all sorts of things to both shame me for changing and try to change me back.

Simone: So you may have to break up with friends and family or move away from them [00:27:00] or stop spending time with them. Or just set really clear boundaries. Like this

is

Malcolm: the new you. I mean, of course they built a relationship with the previous person that was valuable to them. When you become somebody new, somebody more aligned with your actual value system.

Malcolm: You become less useful to them as a friend. You're no longer who their friend was. Like, why wouldn't they? Yeah,

Simone: but I mean, I think it's, it's important to acknowledge that this stuff is really hard and I think it's one of those things where unfortunately the vast majority of people are going to hear this and they're going to say.

Simone: Well, nope. Like I, I've had people, people be like, Oh, you've, you've had three kids. Like, how are you so thin? And I'm like, Oh, it's easy. I just weigh and measure everything I eat and make sure that I eat the same number of calories that I burn every day. How many hours a day? I don't know. Yeah, I like, I work from a treadmill desk, but I think the more important thing is just the calories, but they're like, Oh yeah, I'm never going to.

Malcolm: Sorry. You are underselling four.

Simone: I mean, I'm probably walking two miles an hour, [00:28:00] four

Malcolm: hours a day. Okay. Four to five hours a day. She's exercising every That's not

Simone: walking two miles an hour is not exercising. It's like slowly moving while typing. But my point is like most people are

Malcolm: like You start at a exercise desk, an elliptical, you are hugely underselling how much you exercise.

Malcolm: Yeah, because

Simone: I'm autistic and that's my stimming. But this

Malcolm: is also, I think, really important. We sometimes talk about the sinfulness of exercising for vanity. And what we're talking about with this type of exercise is exercise that's not useful for health reasons and that distracts you so you can't work, right?

Malcolm: That you can't do other productive things. The type of exercise you're doing is totally efficacious because it is in no way interfering with your ability to get productive work done. So you're just doing two hard things at the same time. And I deeply admire that you're somebody who works to combine those

Simone: things.

Simone: Well, it's not, it's not admirable because I can't focus while sitting down. I hate sitting like I can barely cope with sitting down for, you know what I mean? But anyway I [00:29:00] think this is one of those interventions where it does involve a lot of genuine sacrifices and a lot of hard work. And typically when we talk with people about this and we're like, yeah, you could have the life you want, you could have the body you want, you can have all these things.

Simone: Here's what needs to happen if that's what you want. And people are just like, Nope. Nope. Not happening. Not doing it. Which is so funny to us. Like, how can you complain about not having what you want if you're not willing to sacrifice stuff? I mean, I guess ultimately it means that they don't want the thing that much.

Simone: And they want immediate satisfaction and comfort. They

Malcolm: want it less than the things they have now.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Or

Malcolm: I think a lot of people may actually want it more than the things they have now, but they they're not sure they're going to get it. So keep in mind, you're always applying like a variable.

Malcolm: Does this actually work to any big thing you're trying? Yeah. And two you also like. There's some people who just are psychologically not structured for action, and there's some people that are psychologically structured for action, and both of us come from environments that [00:30:00] sorted for people psychologically structured for action intergenerationally.

Malcolm: By the way, what I mean is like you're in, you grew up in the San Francisco area, right? Like family moving to the San Francisco area are people who at least Immigrated twice, likely three times in their history. So you've already selected for people willing to immigrate, right? And to a high risk, high reward environment, either the gold rush or Silicon Valley or any of the other various things that was going on in San Francisco.

Malcolm: My family's from, Dallas, Texas, right? Again. And almost everyone who's living there immigrated at least twice in their family history and likely three times and they were immigrating because they just didn't want to be where, wherever, like the, the, wherever things had become too civilized.

Malcolm: So they just kept moving to the edge of civilization, to the edge of civilization. And I think that that's really apparent in my personality and worldviews that I am to an extent shaped by that.

Simone: Well, and so for that reason, for us to be like, no, all you have to do is this is like it's not perfect and no, not everyone's going to be able to do it, [00:31:00] but still, I mean, at least we anecdotally have found that this model is really effective and we think, we think it's worth considering if right now you don't react to life in a way that makes you happy.

Simone: If you're not happy with your, your, your outcome when, when you respond to various, various developments.

Malcolm: Well, I love you so much, Simone. I am so lucky to be with a woman who Worked so hard to change herself in, into, into this amazing person you are today. I, I really admire and I'm humbled by who you've become.

Simone: I appreciate that, Malcolm. I only really was able to make those changes cause you allowed me to, like you, you, you showed me that I could become who I wanted to be instead of who society like, bleh, left me as, and I

Malcolm: really appreciate that. I separated you from your friends and brainwashed you.

Simone: How many people have met us and at first thought like this was a, are you okay, Simone situation?

Simone: And then they get to know me and they're like, Oh, [00:32:00]

Malcolm: yeah, we've had a lot of people do that. They'll try to get Simone alone. They're like, Hey what's, what's going on here. You seem

Simone: No, no. By the time they even get me alone, they're like, Oh, at first I thought this was one of those brainwash situations.

Simone: And now I see Nope. Anyway. Yeah. Love you a lot. I love

Malcolm: you a lot. And I, I'm glad I did such a good job brainwashing you, but they can't even tell that you're, you're unsavable to them. They get to you and they're like, ah, this one's already

Simone: gone. He's lost. Yeah. Good job, Malcolm.

Simone: All right. Kids.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe